International Relations Theory Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

International relations theory is an umbrella term for perspectives used within the field of international relations (IR) for understanding and analyzing political, economic, and social activity on a global scale. These perspectives are prepackaged analytical templates or structures for categorizing, explaining, and understanding IR. Because IR theories adopt different substantive, epistemological, and normative assumptions, collectively these theories constitute competing ways to understand global affairs. Their scope is systemic in that they are meant to have broad applicability to human global activity across both time and space. As such, IR theory constitutes a grand theory within the study of IR, as opposed to middle range or foreign policy theories that are narrower in focus, scope, and applicability.

IR theories are typically described as if they were competing camps, paradigms, or isms vying for analytical dominance within the subfield. Examples of IR theories include, but are not limited to, realism, liberalism, constructivism, world system theory, historical materialism, and feminism. The content and parameters of IR theories are usually described in contrast to one another, yet each perspective consists of multiple variants, some of which are in disagreement and competition with one another. There are also cross-cutting substantive and epistemological commitments, so that depending on the specific variant and subject at hand, opposing IR theories may share common assumptions and other characteristics. Still, the juxtaposition of the larger, umbrella categories or isms to one another usefully illustrates the differing commitments made by IR scholars with regard to domains of research, units of analysis, and methodological choices as they attempt to explain world politics and global affairs.

Disciplinary History

The history of IR theory is typically described within the discipline as a series of “great debates,” the first occurring in the interwar years of 1919 to 1939 between realism and idealism. Idealism emphasized the efficacy of international institutions, law, and cooperation. Realism, with its pessimistic emphasis on anarchy, states, security, and balance-of-power politics, is said to have won this debate following World War II (1939–1945).While there was considerable analytical coalescence within the discipline around realism thereafter, interest in international institutions and cooperation remained and led to the development of liberalism as a broad category of theories collectively interested in exploring the role of nonstate actors, international institutions, cooperation, and democracy in international affairs.

Realist and liberal perspectives, and the ongoing analytical disagreements between them, tended to dominate the IR theory subfield for much of the cold war. The cold war period also saw the development of neo-Marxist approaches, such as world system theory, which was influenced by theories of development and imperialism and conceived of global activity in terms of a world capitalist system. Marxist approaches were often described as the third leg of an analytical triad in the discipline (along with realism and liberalism), but since the cold war this position has often been assigned in most disciplinary accounts to constructivism, which focuses on the social construction of norms, identity, and interests.

Two other great debates within the discipline occurred during the cold war, and both involved disagreement over the discipline’s preference for examining global phenomena with methods drawn loosely from the hard sciences. Such methods include an emphasis on empirical data collection, testing, and falsification, and they underscore a preference for research subjects that appear to be objectively quantifiable. Disagreement between the behaviorists as proponents of these methods and the traditionalists (or classicists) as critics of them constituted the second debate in the 1960s, with the behavioralists generally seen as the victors. Yet as with the realist-idealist debate, concerns about the scientific method, or positivism, did not entirely disappear. Many traditionalists found refuge in English school theory, which examines IR as a society of states, thereby combining within the same analytical rubric elements of realism, liberalism, and constructivism and an interest in historical sociology.

Positivism And Postpositivism

Concerns with positivism resurfaced in the late 1980s in the third debate, which sought to reveal how positivism’s epistemological and normative foundations excluded and marginalized particular subjects that were relevant to understanding global affairs. A number of postpositivist theories gained prominence at this time and collectively represented an analytical assault on the positivist preferences of established IR theories such as realism, liberalism, and world system theory. Individually, these postpositivist perspectives focused on exploring different aspects of what established theories missed or marginalized.

Postmodernism, for example, concentrates on mapping out the hegemonic discourses of IR and of the discipline itself. Feminism explores how these same discourses reify and subordinate gender difference. Historical materialism draws on the work of Antonio Gramsci to examine the coconstitution of state and society within the capitalist world economy. And contemporary adherents of the Frankfurt school of critical theory rely on the ideas of Jurgen Habermas to argue that dialogue and particular forms of communication can have emancipatory effects in world affairs.

The debate between positivists and postpositivists also opened analytical space for a renewed interest in ethics and normative theory and for exploring topics such as postcolonialism and the effects of U.S. political and economic dominance on IR theorizing itself. Yet postpositivist theories did not displace positivism and the theories that subscribe to it within the discipline. Rather, postpositivist approaches exist alongside established IR theories, in which analytical innovation and variation has continued. As a result, the variations among and within IR grand theories, and the subjects they seek to address or explore, have multiplied considerably since the end of the cold war.

Taken as a whole, IR theory is an analytical domain in which there is considerable disagreement about theoretical fundamentals. IR theorists disagree about what the appropriate unit of analysis is, how to conduct analysis itself, whether particular normative commitments underwrite particular methods, and what or whether there are theoretical and empirical boundaries to appropriate disciplinary theorizing. Even whether IR theory should be described as a series of great debates or in terms of competing camps and isms is a subject of debate. Still, these IR theoretical categories remain a useful heuristic for cutting into and understanding both the disciplinary history of theorizing in IR and the ongoing analytical disagreements that continue to animate the subfield.

Bibliography:

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