Summary of International relations theories:
Discipline and diversity
Intro & chapter 1
Introduction: Diversity and Discipinarity in International Relations theory
The study of IR has classically focused on the analysis of the causes of war and the conditions of
peace. Such an agenda seemed logical and relevant in the 20 th century in the aftermath of two
worldwars.
Now, the use of force is still a motivation of students of IR.
In IR we ask questions about the causes of war and the justification of intervention.
Also questions as:
Are there cooperative relations between hegemonic states, such as USA and China?
What role can international institutions play today in altering the preferences of powerful
international actors?
How are global power relations to be identified and where, and with whom, does power lie in world
politics?
What are the limits and possibilities of progress in tackling urgent world political prpblems, fro
poverty to the threat or experience of chronic insecurity, and from terrorism to climate change?
Why don’t we just ask world leaders what they do, how they do it and why?
- They could lie
- They are not aware of their behaviour and reasons of why they behave like that. For
example; their ideas and thoughts are shaped through their life.
It ‘s easy to say what someone did (for example that Tony Blair supported the action of the US
president in going to war) but it is more difficult to explain it.
And that is where we are in the realm of theory.
Theories offer accounts of why things happened, and the fact that they offer a wide range of reasons
for action reflects the fact that they have very different assumptions. Hence, we will get different
answers on to world political puzzles and problems from the different theories.
In the 1980s and 90s it was common to speak of three different approaches in IR: realism, liberalism
and Marxism. From the point of today, we know there were a number of problems with this way of
thinking about IR theory.
First, they all covered a different kind of topic, and a intellectual pluralism existed.
Assumptions in a realism way were made often about topics of political content.
This all led to the fourth great debate in IR, between what can called rationalist and reflectivist
theories. 1988 robert Keohane. This debate referred to the tension emerging between rationalist
approaches such as neorealism and neoliberalism on one hand, and on the other the reflectivist, such
as feminism, constructivism, normative theory, English school,.
, Difference:
Rationalist accounts are positivist
Reflectivis approaches oppose of positivism.
The differences between rationalism and reflectivism are epistemological and methodological and
secondarily about what the world is like (ontology).
The fourth debate is about how we know what we claim to know.
The main dividing line is between the significant theories of IR for the past two decades is their
attitude towards positivist accounts of knowledge
Rationalist theories accept a notion of foundationalism, whereby there are secure grounds for
making knowledge claims about a world that is separate from the world theories commenting on.
Rationalist theories sometimes claim that their accounts are more accurate then others, because,
due to their systematic scientific approach, they can capture the world as it is in an empirically
justifiable way. In contrast, reflectivist approaches do not share a commitment to the form of
foundational positivism that are found in rationalist approaches.
Bc of this, reflectivist often have been dismissed by leading rationalist scholars, for not being
legitimate social science.
Even though all the differences between theories, they have also things in common:
1. Their shared commitment to the importance of theory in understanding the world
2. All theories have a history, though not always in IR. This results in that comparing theories is
not easy
3. Each chapter makes claims about the linkage between theory and practise, though they do
that in various ways.
Chapter 1 International Relations and social science
Social science played an important role in the development, formation and practice of IR as an
academic discipline.
In social science, issues are often described as meta theoretical debates. A metatheory or meta-
theory is a theory whose subject matter is itself a theory.
All theoretical positions are dependent on assumptions of:
Ontology: the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.
Epistemology: theory of knowledge: how do we know what we know
Methodology: what methods do we use to unerearth data and evidence?
On the basis of these assumptions, researchers may literally come to ‘see’ the world in different
ways: ontologically in terms of seeing different object domains, epistemologically in terms of
accepting or rejecting particular knowledge claims, and methodologically in terms of choosing
particular methods of study.
Discipline and diversity
Intro & chapter 1
Introduction: Diversity and Discipinarity in International Relations theory
The study of IR has classically focused on the analysis of the causes of war and the conditions of
peace. Such an agenda seemed logical and relevant in the 20 th century in the aftermath of two
worldwars.
Now, the use of force is still a motivation of students of IR.
In IR we ask questions about the causes of war and the justification of intervention.
Also questions as:
Are there cooperative relations between hegemonic states, such as USA and China?
What role can international institutions play today in altering the preferences of powerful
international actors?
How are global power relations to be identified and where, and with whom, does power lie in world
politics?
What are the limits and possibilities of progress in tackling urgent world political prpblems, fro
poverty to the threat or experience of chronic insecurity, and from terrorism to climate change?
Why don’t we just ask world leaders what they do, how they do it and why?
- They could lie
- They are not aware of their behaviour and reasons of why they behave like that. For
example; their ideas and thoughts are shaped through their life.
It ‘s easy to say what someone did (for example that Tony Blair supported the action of the US
president in going to war) but it is more difficult to explain it.
And that is where we are in the realm of theory.
Theories offer accounts of why things happened, and the fact that they offer a wide range of reasons
for action reflects the fact that they have very different assumptions. Hence, we will get different
answers on to world political puzzles and problems from the different theories.
In the 1980s and 90s it was common to speak of three different approaches in IR: realism, liberalism
and Marxism. From the point of today, we know there were a number of problems with this way of
thinking about IR theory.
First, they all covered a different kind of topic, and a intellectual pluralism existed.
Assumptions in a realism way were made often about topics of political content.
This all led to the fourth great debate in IR, between what can called rationalist and reflectivist
theories. 1988 robert Keohane. This debate referred to the tension emerging between rationalist
approaches such as neorealism and neoliberalism on one hand, and on the other the reflectivist, such
as feminism, constructivism, normative theory, English school,.
, Difference:
Rationalist accounts are positivist
Reflectivis approaches oppose of positivism.
The differences between rationalism and reflectivism are epistemological and methodological and
secondarily about what the world is like (ontology).
The fourth debate is about how we know what we claim to know.
The main dividing line is between the significant theories of IR for the past two decades is their
attitude towards positivist accounts of knowledge
Rationalist theories accept a notion of foundationalism, whereby there are secure grounds for
making knowledge claims about a world that is separate from the world theories commenting on.
Rationalist theories sometimes claim that their accounts are more accurate then others, because,
due to their systematic scientific approach, they can capture the world as it is in an empirically
justifiable way. In contrast, reflectivist approaches do not share a commitment to the form of
foundational positivism that are found in rationalist approaches.
Bc of this, reflectivist often have been dismissed by leading rationalist scholars, for not being
legitimate social science.
Even though all the differences between theories, they have also things in common:
1. Their shared commitment to the importance of theory in understanding the world
2. All theories have a history, though not always in IR. This results in that comparing theories is
not easy
3. Each chapter makes claims about the linkage between theory and practise, though they do
that in various ways.
Chapter 1 International Relations and social science
Social science played an important role in the development, formation and practice of IR as an
academic discipline.
In social science, issues are often described as meta theoretical debates. A metatheory or meta-
theory is a theory whose subject matter is itself a theory.
All theoretical positions are dependent on assumptions of:
Ontology: the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.
Epistemology: theory of knowledge: how do we know what we know
Methodology: what methods do we use to unerearth data and evidence?
On the basis of these assumptions, researchers may literally come to ‘see’ the world in different
ways: ontologically in terms of seeing different object domains, epistemologically in terms of
accepting or rejecting particular knowledge claims, and methodologically in terms of choosing
particular methods of study.
