Bridging the theory/meta-theory gap in international relations

1991 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 383-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Wendt
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International System ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Second Order ◽  
Ir Theory ◽  
First Order ◽  
Structure And Dynamics ◽  
Questions And Answers ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Meta Theory

The field of international relations (IR) theory is something of a misnomer; since it is constituted by two distinct, though not unrelated, scholarly enterprises. Its core consists of first order theorizing about the structure and dynamics of the international system, and as such it attempts to contribute directly to our understanding of world politics in the form of substantive theories like realism, liberalism, and so on. The proliferation of such theories in recent years, however, has been a cause for some disciplinary concern (or celebration as the case may be), not least because the substantive disagreements between them are as often over what kinds of questions and answers are important or legitimate as they are over the 'facts of the matter'. This has helped open the door since the mid-1980s to a wave of second order or meta-theorizing in the field. The objective of this type of theorizing is also to increase our understanding of world politics, but it does so indirectly by focusing on the ontological and epistemological issues of what constitute important or legitimate questions and answers for IR scholarship, rather than on the structure and dynamics of the international system per se.

Harold Innis and the Empire of Speed

1999 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
RONALD J. DEIBERT
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Ir Theory ◽  
Jürgen Habermas ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Anthony Giddens ◽  
The Face ◽  
Robert Cox ◽  
Per Se

Increasingly, International Relations (IR) theorists are drawing inspiration from a broad range of theorists outside the discipline. One thinks of the introduction of Antonio Gramsci's writings to IR theorists by Robert Cox, for example, and the ‘school’ that has developed in its wake. Similarly, the works of Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault, and Jurgen Habermas are all relatively familiar to most IR theorists not because of their writings on world politics per se, but because they were imported into the field by roving theorists. Many others of varying success could be cited as well. Such cross-disciplinary excursions are important because they inject vitality into a field that – in the opinion of some at least—is in need of rejuvenation in the face of contemporary changes. In this paper, I elaborate on the work of the Canadian communications theorist Harold Innis, situating his work within contemporary IR theory while underlining his historicism, holism, and attention to time-space biases.

scholarly journals The hierarchical society: the politics of self-determination and the constitution of new states after 1919

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 372-396
Author(s):  
Maja Spanu
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Society ◽  
International System ◽  
World Politics ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
World War ◽  
New States ◽  
History Of

International Relations scholarship disconnects the history of the so-called expansion of international society from the presence of hierarchies within it. In contrast, this article argues that these developments may in fact be premised on hierarchical arrangements whereby new states are subject to international tutelage as the price of acceptance to international society. It shows that hierarchies within international society are deeply entrenched with the politics of self-determination as international society expands. I substantiate this argument with primary and secondary material on the Minority Treaty provisions imposed on the new states in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe admitted to the League of Nations after World War I. The implications of this claim for International Relations scholarship are twofold. First, my argument contributes to debates on the making of the international system of states by showing that the process of expansion of international society is premised on hierarchy, among and within states. Second, it speaks to the growing body of scholarship on hierarchy in world politics by historicising where hierarchies come from, examining how diverse hierarchies are nested and intersect, and revealing how different actors navigate these hierarchies.

Another Geopolitics? International Relations and the Boundaries of World Order

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Regan Burles
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
International System ◽  
World Order ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Ecological Change ◽  
Ecological Theories ◽  
Problems And Solutions ◽  
Shed Light

Abstract Geopolitics has become a key site for articulating the limits of existing theories of international relations and exploring possibilities for alternative political formations that respond to the challenges posed by massive ecological change and global patterns of violence and inequality. This essay addresses three recent books on geopolitics in the age of the Anthropocene: Simon Dalby's Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability (2020), Jairus Victor Grove's Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World (2019), and Bruno Latour's Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climactic Regime (2018). The review outlines and compares how these authors pose contemporary geopolitics as a problem and offer political ecology as the ground for an alternative geopolitics. The essay considers these books in the context of critiques of world politics in international relations to shed light on both the contributions and the limits of political ecological theories of global politics. I argue that the books under review encounter problems and solutions posed in Kant's critical and political writings in relation to the concepts of epigenesis and teleology. These provoke questions about the ontological conceptions of order that enable claims to world political authority in the form of a global international system coextensive with the earth's surface.

International Relations Theory and the Future of European Integration

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Maher
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
European Integration ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Ir Theory ◽  
Future Prospects ◽  
Eu Member States ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Direction ◽  
Theoretical Paradigms ◽  
The Eu

Abstract What are the prospects and likely future direction of European integration? Will it be marked by resilience and perhaps even deepening integration among European Union (EU) member states, or will it encounter further instability that could lead to fragmentation and disintegration? The answers to these questions are currently unknown but are important not just for the citizens and countries of the EU but for world politics more broadly. Scholars and other observers have advanced a range of arguments to answer these questions, many of which are derived from the three mainstream theoretical paradigms of contemporary International Relations (IR): realism, liberalism, and constructivism. These arguments reveal disagreement both within and across paradigms over the question of the EU's future. While it is commonly thought that realists are generally pessimistic and liberals and constructivists broadly optimistic regarding the EU's future prospects, it is possible to identify arguments derived from liberal IR theory that the EU faces possibly fatal challenges and realists who see powerful reasons for the EU to stick together, while there are constructivists who think it can go either way. There are thus six basic positions on the future of the EU derived from IR theory. This paper identifies and evaluates a broad range of causal forces that will affect the future of European integration. The paper concludes by discussing the enduring role and value of theory in the study of international relations.

Rationalizing Politics: The Emerging Synthesis of International, American, and Comparative Politics

1998 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 759-786 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen V. Milner
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
International System ◽  
Ir Theory ◽  
Strategic Interactions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cross Fertilization ◽  
Separate Discipline

International relations has often been treated as a separate discipline distinct from the other major fields in political science, namely American and comparative politics. A main reason for this distinction has been the claim that politics in the international system is radically different from politics domestically. The degree of divergence between international relations (IR) and the rest of political science has waxed and waned over the years; however, in the past decade it seems to have lessened. This process has occurred mainly in the “rationalist research paradigm,” and there it has both substantive and methodological components. Scholars in this paradigm have increasingly appreciated that politics in the international realm is not so different from that internal to states, and vice versa. This rationalist institutionalist research agenda thus challenges two of the main assumptions in IR theory. Moreover, scholars across the three fields now tend to employ the same methods. The last decade has seen increasing cross-fertilization of the fields around the importance of institutional analysis. Such analysis implies a particular concern with the mechanisms of collective choice in situations of strategic interaction. Some of the new tools in American and comparative politics allow the complex, strategic interactions among domestic and international agents to be understood in a more systematic and cumulative way.

Communism, fascism and counter-revolution in world politics

2001 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 683-686
Author(s):  
Michael Mann
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
International System ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Wars ◽  
The Social ◽  
Effects Of War

This is a rich, impressive and timely book. At a time when American and neoliberal triumphalism deny the significance of any revolution later than 1776, and when almost no-one in the social sciences is still studying either revolution or class, Fred Halliday has demonstrated that we have been living in a revolutionary age, dominated by the conjoined effects of war and class revolution. In case you find his sub-title mysterious, Karl Marx noted that the Europe of his time was dominated by five Great Powers, but Revolution, ‘the sixth Great Power’, would soon overcome them all. Halliday would suggest that Marx was only half-right. Revolution did not overcome all five Powers, but it did transform them all—and their successors. Hannah Arendt and Martin Wight also emphasized that couplings of war and revolution have dominated much of modernity. But Halliday adds that these are not to be seen as ‘disruptions’ of International Relations, they are International Relations, since they have set the overall parameters of the modern international system. They did so, he says, in three distinct revolutionary phases from the sixteenth century to the present-day: sixteenth-seventeenth century religious wars/revolutions, late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Atlanticist wars/revolutions, and twentieth century wars/revolutions which became increasingly dominated by communism.

Causes of a divided discipline: rethinking the concept of cause in International Relations theory

2006 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
MILJA KURKI
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Causal Explanation ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
Causal Analysis ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Constitutive Theory ◽  
Ir Theory

During the last decades ‘causation’ has been a deeply divisive concept in International Relations (IR) theory. While the positivist mainstream has extolled the virtues of causal analysis, many post-positivist theorists have rejected the aims and methods of causal explanation in favour of ‘constitutive’ theorising. It is argued here that the debates on causation in IR have been misleading in that they have been premised on, and have helped to reify, a rather narrow empiricist understanding of causal analysis. It is suggested that in order to move IR theorising forward we need to deepen and broaden our understandings of the concept of cause. Thereby, we can radically reinterpret the causal-constitutive theory divide in IR, as well as redirect the study of world politics towards more constructive multi-causal and complexity-sensitive analyses.

scholarly journals Multipolar model of international system: stability and conflict

2016 ◽  
pp. 234-248
Author(s):  
Volodymyr Rozumyuk
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Model ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International System ◽  
World Politics ◽  
System Stability ◽  
Berlin Crisis ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Basic Approaches ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The Cold War

It is researched a theoretical model of a multipolar system of international relations at the article. Interest to this themes is caused by needs of Ukrainian political science and diplomacy in schemes of understanding and mechanisms of an adaptation to demands of the modern system of international relations. The aim of the article is to determine factors of a stability and conflicts of a multipolar model of a system of international relations. It is studied basic approaches of designing multipolar model, defined the main factors of its stability and conflicts, highlighted an interdependence of the world politics and knowledge about it. Because of an availability of opposing viewpoints from leading scholars about the stability and conflicts in unipolar, bipolar and multipolar systems, the author concludes that these indicators are important parameters of the real historical system of international relations, but not its abstract model. It is alleged that researchers, which emphasized at more stability of a multipolar system, their theoretical arguments had selected under the direct influence of acute bipolar confrontation during the “Cold War” from the mid-40s to mid-60s of the twentieth century (the Berlin Crisis, the Korean War, the Caribbean Crisis), opposing the “nuclear madness” of a constraint an idealized picture of European “concert of nations” at the first half of the nineteenth century. Instead, cooperation between East and West during the Brezhnev’s «discharging» and Gorbachev’s «new 248 thinking» gave serious reasons for a perception and appraisal by politologists of a bipolar system as stable and without conflicts. Accordingly, the number of poles of a theoretical model of the international system says about its stability not more than a form a glass about a quality of a poured wine.

scholarly journals Accounting for Change in IR

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 33-52
Author(s):  
Esther Ng K.H.
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Ir Theory ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
The West

Most theories of International Relations (IR) are cautious, if not pessimistic, about the potential for change in IR. In this regard, the concept of ontological security holds promising yet oft-overlooked prospects. This article argues that applications of ontological security to IR theory thus far have been limited due to the narrow conceptualisations of practices and how they contribute to one’s attempts to preserve their ontological security. As such, this paper seeks to expand the theoretical framework through which ontological security is applied to IR, which involves a more comprehensive conceptualisation of practice that considers reflexivity as key. Accordingly, the theory demonstrates that a state, faced with threats to their sense of Self, can respond either by rigidising or changing their practices rather than being limited to the former. This allows one to account for change—especially big change—in world politics such as the increasingly inward-looking turn of the West.

International Theory Book Symposium on Peter J. Katzenstein and Lucia A. Seybert, eds, Protean Power: Exploring the Uncertain and Unexpected in World Politics

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 408-409
Author(s):  
Jacques E. C. Hymans
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Ir Theory ◽  
Control Power ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
International Theory ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
Book Symposium

AbstractKatzenstein and Seybert's Protean Power offers a fresh perspective on the concept of power in international relations (IR) theory. Standard IR theory defines power as control power, which exists in the world of calculable risk. But IR must also grapple with protean power, which exists in the world of incalculable uncertainty. In this symposium, scholars representing a variety of theoretical perspectives evaluate the concept of protean power as it stands now and as it should develop in the future.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document