Martha Finnemore (born 1959) is an American constructivist scholar of international relations, and University Professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. She is considered among the most influential international relations scholars. Her scholarship has highlighted the role of norms and culture in international politics, as well as shown that international organizations are consequential and purposive social agents in world politics that can shape state interests.

Biography

She is best known for her books National Interests in International Society, The Purpose of Intervention, and Rules for the World (with Michael Barnett) which helped to pioneer constructivism. According to a review of her 1996 book National Interests in International Society, Finnemore became "the first scholar of international relations to offer a sustained, systematic empirical argument in support of the constructivist claim that international normative structures matter in world politics." In The Purpose of Intervention (2003), she finds that the types of military interventions that states engage in have changed over time. For example, it was accepted practice for states to intervene militarily to collect debts during the 19th century, but it became widely rejected in the 20th century. Similarly, she shows that the type and frequency of humanitarian interventions have changed drastically since the 19th century, with a massive increase in humanitarian interventions since the end of the Cold War. According to Finnemore, existing realist and liberal theories of international relations cannot account for these changes. Using a constructivist approach, she finds that changing normative contexts led states to conceive of their interests differently. International norms altered common understandings of the appropriate ends and means of military intervention, as well as which humans were deserving of military protection by outsiders. In Rules for the World (2004), Finnemore and Barnett argue that international organizations derive power and autonomy from their rational-legal authority and control of information. International organizations are therefore purposive social agents that can act inconsistently with the intentions of the founders of the organizations (which are often states). In contrast to some realist and liberal theories of international relations, Barnett and Finnemore show that international organizations are not just a reflection of state interests and that they do not necessarily act efficiently. International organizations can develop bureaucratic cultures that result in adverse outcomes (what they call "pathologies"). They list five mechanisms that breed organizational pathologies: Her 1998 study, co-authored with Kathryn Sikkink, on the life cycle of norms is among the most cited articles published in International Organization, the leading International Relations journal. Finnemore and Sikkink identify three stages in the life cycle of a norm: In 2009, a survey of over 2700 international relations faculty in ten countries named her one of the twenty five most influential scholars in the discipline, and one of the five scholars whose work in the last five years has been the most interesting; an earlier survey of over 1000 American international relations faculty also ranked her similarly in both categories. In 2011, she was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Finnemore completed her B.A. at Harvard, followed by an M.A. from the University of Sydney and a Ph.D. in 1991 from Stanford.

Books