Social Constructs, Material Realities and the Opportunity of Legal Solutions in the South China Sea

In East Asia, two approaches for maintaining stability have been especially fruitful: developmentalism and non-interference. This article investigates the possibility of supplementing non-interference and developmentalism by building a legal order. It will explore ways that take the social construction of social structures seriously and applies them in a constructivist manner to the analysis of interaction of social realities with material realities and purposive agency. The intention is to show that the social construction of realities is also a realistic perspective, and that the perceived material realities, too, are largely dependent on social construction for their causal power in the creation of the situation of the South China Sea conflicts