International Relations Theory for the Twenty-First Century

An Introduction

Martin Griffiths

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134178957
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

International relations theory has been the site of intense debate in recent years. A decade ago it was still possible to divide the field between three main perspectives – Realism, Liberalism, and Marxism. Not only have these approaches evolved in new directions, they have been joined by a number of new 'isms' vying for attention, including feminism and constructivism.

International Relations Theory for the Twenty-First Century is the first comprehensive textbook to provide an overview of all the most important theories within international relations. Written by an international team of experts in the field, the book covers both traditional approaches, such as realism and liberal internationalism, as well as new developments such as constructivism, poststructuralism and postcolonialism.

The book's comprehensive coverage of IR theory makes it the ideal textbook for teachers and students who want an up-to-date survey of the rich variety of theoretical work and for readers with no prior exposure to the subject.

1
Worldviews and IR theory: Conquest or coexistence?

Martin Griffiths

Introduction

This book is an introduction to the diverse worldviews that underpin contemporary International Relations (IR) theory. In this chapter, I explore both the reasons for such diversity and two responses to it. The first response, conquest, opposes diversity and seeks to privilege one particular worldview. The second response, coexistence, is one that finds no good reason to privilege a particular worldview, and attributes a positive value to diversity and pluralism. The chapter proceeds as follows. First, I distinguish between two dimensions of a worldview and between worldviews and theories. Second, I provide a brief historical overview to account for the proliferation of worldviews in the field and the lack of consensus regarding the appropriate criteria for comparing and evaluating the merits of competing worldviews. Finally, I set out the main arguments associated with conquest and coexistence between competing worldviews.

Worldviews and theories in IR

A worldview is a broad interpretation of the world and an application of this view to the way in which we judge and evaluate activities and structures that shape the world. ‘In simpler terms, our worldview is a view of the world and a view for the world’ (Phillips and Brown 1991:29). Worldviews have two interdependent dimensions. The first dimension is ontological. Worldviews contain fundamental assumptions and presuppositions about the constitutive nature of IR. Such assumptions or beliefs are our most fundamental thoughts about the nature of ‘reality’ in this particular domain or field of activity. As Dessler (1989:445) points out, ‘an ontology is a structured set of entities. It consists not only of certain designated kinds of things but also of connections or relations between them.’ Worldviews do not reflect the world. Rather, they re-present it, not only constraining our vision but also enabling us to develop a language of concepts and terms that in turn make it possible to talk intelligibly about IR. As Gunnell (1987:34) argues, worldviews ‘are not instruments for understanding given objects. To describe, explain, or evaluate something is to appeal, at least implicitly, to an articulation of what kind of thing it is’. The second dimension of worldviews is evaluative, providing the basis for judging and prescribing institutional arrangements and principles of conduct with regard to or within the parameters of IR. The importance of the distinction, and the relationship between ontology and advocacy, has been noted by the philosopher Taylor (1971:160) in the context of political theory.

On the one hand, they are distinct, in that taking a position on one does not force your hand on the other. On the other hand, they are not completely independent, in that the stand one takes on the ontological level can be part of the essential background of the view one advocates…taking an ontological position does not amount to advocating something; but at the same time, the ontological does help to define the options which it is meaningful to support by advocacy. This latter connection explains how ontological theses can be far from innocent.

Thus if one believes that IR take place in an environment that requires states to maximize their power relative to other states, it makes little sense to advocate cooperation among states if this requires them to act against their core interests. Similarly, if one believes that IR are structured in ways that systematically impede any attempt to moderate the inequities of global capitalism, then ‘free trade’ will be seen simply as a way to avoid focusing on the real problem.

‘Worldviews’ are not ‘theories’, although these terms are often conflated in the field of IR. For example, an empirical theory is an explanation of an event, or–more usually–of a pattern of events. Why did the United States invade Iraq in 2003? Why do wars take place? Why are some countries rich and others poor? To engage with such questions is to enter the world of IR theory. Worldviews shape the questions we ask, and provide some of the key interpretive concepts that are employed to build theories. But they are not identical. A worldview is a distinctive set of ideas and arguments about IR. Each worldview examined in this book embodies a set of concerns – for example, security, wealth, liberty, or social justice. It also includes a body of causal reasoning about how IR work, particularly in ways deemed relevant to explaining the identified concerns. Each worldview thus highlights certain types of issues, actors, goals, and types of relationships while ignoring or deemphasizing others. The first ten chapters of this book examine nine worldviews. Each chapter elaborates the fundamental assumptions of a particular worldview, as well as the main theoretical arguments that emerge from, and are consistent with, those assumptions and beliefs. There is nothing particularly significant about the number of worldviews discussed in this book, which aims simply to introduce readers to the diversity of approaches and perspectives in the field. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that the explicit recognition of such diversity has only emerged over the past decade or so ( Dunne et al. 2007; Steans and Pettiford 2005). For much of the twentieth century, what Smith (1995:7) calls a ‘typology of the discipline…a way of pronouncing on what are the “key” debates and positions within it’ not only silenced or marginalized particular worldviews, but also distorted those worldviews that were accepted as legitimate members of whatever typology was popular at a particular point in time. A good example of the distorting impact of typologies on the worldviews contained within them is the complex history of political realism, arguably the dominant worldview in IR theory, and the subject of the next chapter. Realism, like every worldview covered in this book, contains an identifiable set of core principles, but the realist worldview is itself an ideal-type, and it is important to recognize the limitations of trying to ‘fix’ the status of realism within a discipline whose very identity as a social science is constantly debated. An ideal-type is an abstract construct that extracts and reproduces the main elements in a diverse body of literature. As such, it is not a mirror image of that literature, and it is not obvious how best to engage in the process of extraction and reproduction. It depends on the kinds of problems being investigated, the research interests of those who engage in the process, and the context within which realism is contrasted to other competing approaches to the study of IR. That context is not itself static, nor is it uncontested.

To illustrate the problem, consider how realism manifests itself within three such contexts that have shaped ‘great debates’ in the study of IR. The first (popular in the interwar period) frames the study of IR in terms of a debate between realists and idealists. Not only did the realists themselves construct this debate in order to defeat their opponents, their use of the label ‘idealism’ as a black box concealed and marginalized important distinctions between scholars whose contribution to the study of IR has only been recovered years after the decline of ‘realism/idealism’ as a particular framing context in the study of IR (Schmidt 2002).

An equally problematic way to frame realism is to describe it as a ‘paradigm’, a term that became popular during the so-called ‘third debate’ in the study of IR in the 1970s and 1980s. The term ‘paradigm’ came to prominence in the philosophy of science in the late 1960s, mainly through the work of Kuhn (1970). Briefly, he argued that a paradigm consists of a set of fundamental assumptions about the subject matter of science. A paradigm, like a worldview, is both enabling and constraining. On the one hand, it helps to define what is important to study and so a paradigm is indispensable in simplifying reality by isolating certain factors and forces from a multitude of innumerable possibilities. On the other hand, a paradigm is constraining since it limits our perceptual field (what we ‘see’ as the most important actors and relationships in a particular field of study). In examining the history of science Kuhn argued that what he called normal science proceeded on the basis of particular paradigms, the truth of whose assumptions were taken for granted. A paradigm is therefore a mode of thinking within a field of inquiry that regulates scientific activity and sets the standards for research. A paradigm generates consensus, coherence, and unity among scholars. However, periods of normal science are punctuated by periods of crisis and revolutionary science as scientists confront problems (or anomalies) that cannot be solved within the terms of the dominant paradigm. A new period of normal science can only resume on the basis of a ‘paradigm-shift’ and the establishment of a new set of assumptions to account for anomalies that could not be accommodated within the assumptions of the old paradigm.

Although Kuhn had little to say about the social sciences, many scholars quickly seized upon his arguments in order to strengthen and clarify the historical, organizational, and sociological foundations of their own disciplines in the social sciences. Students of IR were no different in this regard. Lijphart (1974) was among the first to import the Kuhnian notion of a paradigm into IR. Writing in the early 1970s, he argued that the general pattern of development in IR theory paralleled Kuhn’s version of theoretical progress in the natural sciences. He described the traditional paradigm in terms of state sovereignty and international anarchy. For Lijphart, realism had such a ubiquitous presence in the field that it qualified as a paradigm. It set out the key questions, determined the core concepts, methods, and issues, and shaped the direction of research.

There are, however, a number of problems in treating realism as a ‘Kuhnian paradigm’. First, the term implies a greater homogeneity of thought within realism than is justified by a close reading of realist texts and authors. Second, as Waever (1996) has shown, the growth of knowledge in the study of IR has never followed the path that Kuhn elaborated in his historical reconstruction of the natural sciences. The term ‘paradigm’ is useful as a metaphor, but one should not exaggerate the degree to which paradigms in the study of IR develop in isolation from rival approaches to IR. Finally, as already noted, worldviews in IR do not stand in relation to practice as mere instruments to understand a given and unproblematic ‘reality’ whose anomalies can threaten to undermine theories and set us off in completely novel avenues of inquiry. In this field, the relationship between theory and practice in not contingent and instrumental. Instead, it is a conceptual and constitutive relation between belief and action. To put it bluntly, realism is true to the extent that it is believed to be true, particularly by policy-makers. Despite Waltz’ protestation that ‘the problem is not to say how to manage the world, including its great powers, but to say how the possibility that great powers will constructively manage international affairs varies as systems change’ (Waltz 1979:210), few realists have ever hidden their desire to influence the conduct of political leaders.

A third context in which to frame evaluations of realism is to identify its core beliefs not in terms of statements about anarchy, competition, and the ubiquity of violence, but in terms of political theory. Fundamentally, realism is ‘a conservative approach to international relations…that places a primacy on the maintenance of order and the preservation of tradition, and is sceptical about universalist claims or the possibilities for progress in the international system’ (Welsh 2003:174). In this context, realism is not to be understood (and thereby rendered potentially obsolescent) solely on its ability to generate testable empirical theories of IR, but as a manifestation of a venerable tradition of conservative thought. This way of framing realism has reemerged in recent years as the disciplinary borders (built in part by realists, one might add) between political theory and the study of IR have begun to collapse. If realism is understood in minimal terms as an approach that reminds us of the enduring patterns of power politics based on a historically contingent association of sovereignty, territory, and statehood in differentiating humanity politically, it can be argued that despite its deficiencies as a basis for testable theory, it is difficult to dismiss.

If, therefore, one should be wary of the ways in which IR has framed its debates in the past, and if the proliferation of worldviews in recent years is partly a consequence of the failure of any single disciplinary ‘self-image’ to generate sufficient consensus in the field about the relevant criteria for adjudicating between worldviews, are we left with a mere Babel of global voices? When the reader of this book comes to the end of Chapter 10, what then? On what basis is one worldview superior to the others? Must we even choose? And, if we must choose, is the conversation over? These questions dominate discussions of contemporary IR theory. Two broad responses are available, conquest or coexistence.

Conquest or coexistence?

The first response is self-evident. One worldview is right and the others are wrong. Or we could express it in more subtle terms: each of the worldviews discussed in this book may generate interesting insights, but one of them is far superior to the others. The reader could surely be forgiven for thinking that this response is intended by each of the contributors to the following nine chapters. Whatever problems they acknowledge with the particular worldview under discussion, it is the worldview that the contributor most identifies with and most deeply understands. And, indeed, it is not difficult to find numerous attempts to defend a particular worldview by attempting to demolish its competitors. Often, such ‘demolition derbies’ make for entertaining reading, but they usually generate more heat than light. As Holsti remarks (2001:86), ‘uncivil wars among scholars, like those within states, tend to be long, nasty and brutish’. A plurality of worldviews is simply a fact in the study of IR. There are three main reasons for this.

First, the subject matter of IR is simply vast. War, demographic change, state-making, global warming, unequal development, nationalism, the ‘war on terror’, international organization, shifts in power between the United States and China – the central issue or problem that should dominate the research agenda in this field is by no means clear. It is worth recalling that IR – as an autonomous field of study in political science – is a twentieth-century invention that began on the margins of the broader study of politics. As Armstrong (1995:362) observes, it developed as a distinct discipline both as a response to events like the two World Wars and the Cold War and because there were certain phenomena – war, diplomacy, strategy, international law, the balance of power, the numerous ramifications of sovereignty – that were inadequately, or not at all, treated elsewhere in the social sciences.

If the problem of war was the chief justification for a separate discipline of IR, generating a hierarchy of issues for the discipline to study, that is no longer the case in the twenty-first century. Today, a whole host of issues compete for our attention, and it could be argued that one reason for the proliferation of worldviews is the proliferation of issues that each worldview seeks to privilege. Thus for realists, war between states remains the central problem. For liberal internationalists, the unequal distribution of political freedom for individuals is the problem. For Marxists, the central issue is the injustice of global capitalism and the stratification of class on a global scale. For critical theorists, it is the needless suffering caused not just by capitalism but also by other dynamics of modernity at the global level. Constructivists focus less on substantive issues than the broader problem of how changes in states’ identities and interests can shift the culture of IR from one of conflict to one of cooperation. Members of the ‘English School’ broadly united by a shared concern with the history, dynamics, and future of something called ‘international society’. Feminists are inspired by the ideal of gender equality, and outraged by the global consequences of what they regard as the gendered character of the modern sovereign state. Poststructuralists are interested in the processes and practices that make it possible to even conceive of the domain of ‘international relations’ as a distinct field of political practice. Finally, postcolonial theorists are interested in the stories, identities, and forms of political emancipation available to the marginalized members of the global South. What single worldview could possibly encompass all of the above?

If the profusion of different foci is part of the explanation for a diversity of perspectives, just as important is the absence of an epistemological consensus to adjudicate between rival worldviews. The first explanation is only partly true. Whilst different worldviews certainly can be differentiated on the basis of the political issues that preoccupy their adherents, this does not imply that they can happily coexist. For example, one simply cannot be a feminist as well as a realist, which is one reason why feminist literature is particularly concerned to critique realist literature and, although less in evidence since realists have rarely bothered to respond to feminist provocations, vice versa. An equally important part of the explanation lies in the decline of ‘positivism’ in IR theory, and the rise of ‘post-positivism’. What is positivism, and what is its relationship to competing worldview...

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Worldviews and IR theory: Conquest or coexistence?
• 2 Realism
• 3 Liberal internationalism
• 4 Marxism
• 5 Critical theory
• 6 Constructivism
• 7 The English School
• 8 Poststructuralism
• 9 Feminism
• 10 Postcolonialism
• 11 Theories of state formation
• 12 International political economy
• 13 Worldviews and international political theory
• Bibliography
• Index