The Dinner Table Is Where Identity Gets Made

A Constructivist Case for International Dinner Parties

Angela Ipock

International Relations spends a lot of energy debating what states want and why they fight. But one of the field's more interesting insights—one that constructivist theory puts at its center—is that neither wants nor identities are fixed. They are built. States, like people, come to understand who they are and what matters to them through interaction with others. Identities and interests are not given in advance; they are constructed through repeated social contact, shared norms, and mutual recognition. 

I think about that more at my dinner table than I ever expected to.

I'm a first-generation Mexican American studying International Relations here in New Zealand. For the past six months, I've been hosting dinner parties with a rotating group of fellow international students: friends from China, Russia, and elsewhere, all of us far from home and studying at the same university. 

What began as homesickness cooking—Taco Tuesdays, dumplings and noodles, hokey pokey ice cream, and vegetarian/pescatarian meals—became a way of introducing each other to the cuisines, languages, and cultural norms we grew up with. In the process, these dinners have made it harder to sustain the idea that our national loyalties somehow prevent us from getting along. 

They have turned into something resembling an ongoing seminar in constructivist theory, except none of us call it that. Applied constructivism is not part of our discussions. The many ways to cook rice are.

Constructivism argues that actors—states, but also people— do not walk into a room with completely fixed identities. They develop them through the room: through repeated interaction, through norms that get negotiated in real time, and through the process of being seen and understood by people different to themselves. 

For us, this is not a TED talk on abstract IR theory. It is just Tuesday night’s dinner with friends. 

Every time we sit down, something gets negotiated that none of us planned: whose food gets served first, which jokes land and which need explaining, how directly we're allowed to disagree with each other. None of that is written down anywhere. It's built, dinner by dinner, the same way constructivists argue that international norms are built—not because anyone imposed them, but because a group of actors kept interacting until something durable took shape.

Conversations around the table 

I sat down with Kang, one of the steadiest voices at our table and a fellow international student originally from Hong Kong, to talk about what these dinners have meant to him. 

I asked him what he thought dinner parties with people outside his own culture do. 

"It's a very important activity," he told me. "It helps me make new friends, and it makes my English more natural—more friendly. And I find new things to think about." 

I asked whether this kind of friendship has real depth, or whether it fades once people scatter after graduation. Would he keep in touch? 

"I like to keep in touch with you guys," he said, "because I want to build a global friendship." 

When I asked if he'd host any of us in China one day, he did not hesitate: 

"Yes—I think I'll make friends all over the world when I travel to other countries. We can go places together." 

I asked him directly: is this the family he would choose? 

He paused. "I want to choose this, because I think it's important to build friendship.” 

When I asked what he would say to people back home who might criticize him for spending so much time with foreigners, his answer was the most unguarded of the conversation.

"Every person has their own thinking. It's none of your business." 

Then, simply: "It's my life." 

I also asked what he thought immigration policy should look like, given his own experience moving across the world to study. His answer was less about paperwork than about people: he thought immigration should be open, with reasonable rules, because so much of what gets debated as policy ultimately becomes a question of whether someone belongs somewhere they weren't born. 

There is something quietly constructivist in all of that. Kang is not describing a fixed Chinese identity meeting a fixed New Zealand identity and remaining separate. He's describing an identity in motion—one being shaped into something that did not exist before any of us sat down together. 

I also talked with Nina, a friend from St. Petersburg, Russia, and another regular at our table. From the start, she framed the dinners as something bigger than socialising. 

"It's a great opportunity to familiarize yourself with a culture and a language," she told me. "You unite people—you're getting closer with everybody, because you exchange jokes, you exchange insights. It broadens your horizons, because people share the traditions and habits from their own countries. You should organize dinner parties as often as you can." 

I asked her the same question I'd asked Kang: would she keep in touch once all of us finished our studies and scattered? 

"Of course I will keep in touch," she said, "because after all these dinners, all this time we spend together, sharing memories and emotions—it creates very close bonds. You have to appreciate and cherish those bonds." 

She credited modern technology and social media—video calls, group chats, shared photos—with making that possible across distance: a way "to be in the know about their lives" even after everyone's gone home. 

When I asked whether she'd choose this group as her own kind of family—two Chinese friends, her as the Russian, me as the Mexican American, a Kiwi, and a Japanese Korean friend rounding out our table—her answer was immediate. 

"Definitely I would choose it as a family," she said, "because family isn't about who brought you into this world. It's about taking care of each other, about showing all your feelings—negative and otherwise—without masks, without prejudice." 

She was honest that it is not always easy. Different upbringings and traditions create real friction sometimes. But to her, that friction is part of what proves the bond is real. 

"These are precious people in your life," she said. "A second family." 

On criticism—what she would say to people back home who were sceptical of foreigners abroad, or of her being one herself—Nina was candid about her own early fears. Before arriving, she worried about discrimination: that people would not treat her impartially, or that they would read her directness as rudeness. Those fears did not disappear entirely, but they were not borne out either. She was quick to push back on the idea that cultural difference and rudeness are the same thing.

Her thoughts on immigration policy were the most detailed of the conversations. She argued for simplifying the path to citizenship, improving visa access, and providing practical support for international students, migrants, and refugees navigating unfamiliar systems, from housing regulations to financial guidance.

Her point was narrower—and, in a way, more constructivist—than a purely security-driven argument: a nation’s relationship with immigrants does not end at the border.

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I also talked with Oren, a friend from Shenzhen, China—and another regular at our table—about what these dinners have given him. 

"Dinner parties are good," he said, "because you get to know people from the other side—not from your own country. You learn about other cultures, make friends." 

When I pushed him on what, specifically, he had picked up from our table, he struggled to put it into words at first.

"It's hard to describe," he admitted. "There's just something I don't know how to explain—but I feel grateful." 

He was confident these friendships would outlast our time here. "We'll definitely keep in touch," he said, crediting technology as a genuine assist rather than a substitute—a tool that makes staying close across distance easier, not a replacement for the dinners themselves. 

I asked him whether he thought AI might eventually surpass this kind of in-person connection. He did not.  

"You still need real human interaction," he said. "It could never fully replace it." 

On whether he'd count our group as family, he pointed to something specific: the presence of people slightly older or more experienced who will tell you honestly when you're off track—what he called, half-jokingly, "auntie level" guidance. 

"That's a good thing," he said. "Helping you navigate, get back on the right path." 

Asked what he'd say to critics of foreigners living abroad, he shrugged the question as beside the point and turned instead toward what he had gained. He hopes, one day, to go backpacking through China with friends from our table,  teaching us the cultural and historical significance of the places we’d visit. 

"I think there's a symbiotic relationship there," he said. "I feel far more fortunate to have foreign friends now."

His thoughts on immigration policy were shaped by what he saw as gaps in enforcement back home—cases where visa rules exist on paper but are not consistently applied, and where "expat" carries a different, more loaded connotation in a Chinese context than it does in English, implying privileges locals do not have. His core argument was about fairness: whatever the policy, foreigners and citizens should be held to genuinely equal standards, backed by consistent background checks, so that the system is not merely simple in theory but reliable in practice. 

He eventually circled back to language—and how learning to think in more than one language at once has changed the way he thinks. Him and I frequently speak Spanish to one another, just as I speak Russian with Nina.  

"There's a kind of training for the brain," he said, describing the shift as something close to becoming a polyglot. "That's a good thing for me."

Last, I talked with Jacqui, our Kiwi friend from Invercargill—the one member of the group who did not have to cross an ocean to reach the table, but who has ended up on her own kind of journey anyway.

She loves what these dinners do precisely because New Zealand's multiculturalism, in her experience, doesn't always show up on restaurant menus. 

"We can have authentic food, made from the soul," she said, "and we get to participate in making it. It's a whole learning experience—learning about the customs, the things people do that we might call normal, that other people don't." 

For her, the value is not abstract: it's cheese rolls, homemade pumpkin soup, and hokey pokey on one side of the table, foreign dishes on the other—all of it teaching her things about her own country as much as everyone else's. 

She was just as certain as the others that these friendships would last.

"I'd love to stay in contact," she said, pointing out that the internet only goes so far. A headline about a country tells you far less than an actual friend from that country reacting to the same news. 

"There's a whole other side of the story we don't always know about," she said. "It's an opportunity to see how everyone is handling the same news, differently." 

On the family question, her answer leaned into the group's chaos rather than away from it. 

"Everyone is unique, and that's half the fun," she said. "The same life would be boring." She described their group chat—the running joke pile of nonsense from every culture at the table, some of it needing explanation, all of it, in her words, building camaraderie. 

"It's nice having a spiritually connected family," she said, "not just your blood family—because we all have things in common. We're all being idiots together, within reason." 

She was the most visibly affected by the question about criticism of foreigners. 

"I feel really heartbroken," she said, "that people are insulting other people. Why can't we all just be friendly to each other?" 

Her instinct is not confrontation—she said she'd rather pull someone aside quietly than make a scene—but she was unambiguous about her belief that everyone deserves a safe place to call home. Her view on immigration policy was shaped less by problems than by a sense of opportunity. She sees New Zealand as welcoming, but argued that welcome has to work both ways: locals learning from newcomers, and newcomers learning things about New Zealand that locals themselves take for granted. That exchange, to her, is what makes the "global infrastructure" of friendship work. 

She finished by half-joking about the group's long-running plan to backpack through China together one day, with Kang and Oren as our built-in guides. 

"You wouldn't have to pay for an expensive tour guide," she said. "They'll know the hidden gems—the places the standard tours miss." 

If Kang, Nina, and Oren each showed a different part of what it means to build identity through contact with difference, Jacqui's answers showed something else: this process does not require crossing a border. Even someone who never had to leave her own country can be changed by the table, simply by paying attention to who is sitting at it.

The table as a blueprint

None of this is groundbreaking political theory, and I am not claiming our dinner table is a stand-in for the international system. But constructivism's basic wager—that identity, interest, and even norms are made through interaction rather than handed down in advance—plays out in miniature every time we sit down together. 

At times, we joke we are a mini-UN: a collection of different backgrounds and points of view, working out who we are and how to get along. Kang, Nina, Oren, and Jacqui's answers are personal anecdotes, but they also give ordinary, lived form to a theory that can otherwise remain trapped in the abstract. 

For now, I know this table—plates passed hand to hand, English and Spanish practiced over various renditions of rice, identities quietly renegotiated over second helpings and Jacqui’s desserts—is doing something that matters. It is building the kind of understanding that policy papers can gesture towards but never fully capture. 

Maybe that is the real, unglamorous argument for the dinner party: in International Relations, as in life, you do not just study how understanding between people is built. 

Sometimes you must cook it.