Overview Of Constructivism In Venezuela

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Constructivism Explained in Venezuela Protests 2014

Young people covering their faces from tear gas bombs, being transported by the national police covered in blood, and holding SOS signs are only a few of the images that have been flooding social media for what is now being called the “Venezuela Spring”. The series of protests, political demonstrations and civil unrest are today entering its second week, and as the death count keeps rising, so does the tremendous international media campaign. These young Venezuelans students, with the help of the opposition political party are fighting for their right to food and civilian security. Since their government is not providing them with the latter, they want a regime change. The current government is not threatened by any of these actions, and instead is warning the Venezuelan people that these protests neither will nor resolve the economic, social, and political problems and instead will prolong the crisis. If we used typical international relation theories, for example realism, that claims that states cannot assume any changes unless there is a self-centered motive involved, this cannot accurately explain the behavior that is happening in Venezuela. Using the two actors of right and left Venezuelans, in this paper I aim to argue what ways the international relations theory of constructivism explains the outbreak of the Venezuelan protest.
Constructivism is the claim that the world is not given to us in facts, but socially constructed (Barnett, 2009). Meaning that values and ideals didn’t just come from nature, therefore it can be torn apart so we find the origin of how it came about (Wendt, 1992).
Another important aspect of constructivism is that it examines the different identit...

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.... There have been protests in Latin America that started out this small and succeeded in deteriorating the regimes.
The real question is how will this work out in the long term. While I do not believe that left-winged (Chavistas) will tire out and change sides, since they are the majority. It seems unlikely that the far right, violent sector of opposition will achieve its goal of forcing Maduro to resign, yet its also hard for the current government to move forward. The level of organization of the protesters here is something to admire. The protestors that are educated connected and inspired by new norms and ideas have inspired and constructed new values to other Venezuelans. Therefore, despite if the protestors get to accomplish the main idea behind the coup or not, constructivism is an important theory that can explain the outbreaks of the protests in Venezuela.

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