International Relations Theory

Oliver Daddow

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526413963
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

With chapters on all the major theories of international relations, accompanied by contemporary examples from popular culture, film and literature, this Third Edition is the ideal introduction to the key perspectives in the field.

Key features:

• 30% new content, with all chapters revised and updated
• Useful learning features including further reading, ?questions to ponder?, ?common pitfalls? and ?taking it further? boxes, to help you extend your thinking beyond the classroom
• Invaluable chapters on getting the best out of your knowledge of International Relations Theory in essays and exams, including real life examples of best practice.

Part I Introduction to Your Course in IR Theory

It is sheer craziness to dare to understand world affairs. (Rosenau and Durfee 1995: 1)

This book guides you through the general field of IRT in whatever form you encounter it at university. It aims to explain the big questions that have animated so many writers over the years to try to make sense of the ‘craziness’ of international relations. It is useful to try and think about the key points of dispute and debate between scholars working in the same discipline, and that is in effect what I am trying to do in this book. First, because it helps you appreciate the debates that have driven forward the discipline over the years. Second, it equips you with the weaponry to critique scholarly ideas and opinions on their own terms rather than with the benefit of hindsight. Reading this book will encourage you to develop both these skills: understanding academic theories and critiquing them.

This part of the book is organized around underlying disciplinary debates about IRT. In Chapter 1 we survey the field of IR as an academic pursuit: what is that we are studying when we say we are studying IR? In Chapter 2 we add in the contested issue of theory: what is a theoretical approach to IR and why is it beneficial? Chapter 3 prioritises theoretical debates in IR, in particular those stemming from the foundational problem of ‘anarchy’ in the international system. We then cover the ‘story’ of the discipline and especially how we map theories, how we evaluate theories and the possibility of building an IR ‘super theory’. The chapter draws to a close with a few tips on how to think like an IR theorist. By the end of the chapter we have raised a whole host of uncertainties and questions about IRT. This is a field of study in which no one can really agree either on the appropriate subject matter, or on how best to study it. If you can grasp the reasons for these disputes and offer up convincing evidence that you have taken a position on them, you are likely to succeed at your course because you will have been engaging actively with each theory at quite a sophisticated level. As Chapter 3 suggests, learning to think like an IR theorist is the surest route to success.

Core Areas

• 1 What is International Relations? 15
• 2 International Relations Theory 29
• 3 Theoretical Debates 43

1 What is International Relations?

Even by those who have authored them, the emergence of theories cannot be described in other than uncertain and impressionistic ways. Elements of theories can, however, be identified. (Waltz 2010: 10)

It is demanding to build a theory in any field of academic endeavour. Whether it be a social science like IR or a natural science like physics, biology or chemistry, theories by their nature are simplified versions of a deeply complex reality. As Kenneth Waltz goes on to argue in the passage quoted above from his path-breaking Theory of International Politics (originally published in 1979), it is a giant leap to go from causal speculation based on empirical testing to the construction of theoretical formulations that enable one to arrange newly observed facts through a theoretical lens. ‘To cope with the difficulty, simplification is required’ (Waltz 2010: 10).

In the process of theory development, we are trying to comprehend the complexity of relations between, say, State X and State Y by breaking down into manageable chunks the elements of their interrelationships that most intrigue us. Necessarily, theories fall prey to criticisms about their coverage, their depth and their relevance to the ‘real world’ they are trying to explain. It is worth remembering, therefore, that all theories come with a health warning: no theory can explain everything about the world and nor should we expect it to. Even the most ardent supporter of theory has to admit the limitations of theory: ‘in order to have a theory, you’ll have to have a subject matter, because you can’t have a theory about everything. There’s no such thing as a theory about everything’ (Waltz, quoted in Kreisler 2003). In other words, a theory about everything is a theory about nothing – a futile exercise from which nothing useful can be gleaned.

Theoretical disputes are common even in disciplines where scholars are trying to theorize the same event or set of events which they agree are happening, or have happened, in the ‘real world’. What, then, if scholars disagree on the essence of the ‘reality’ they are trying to explain? What if they can’t come to a basic consensus on what makes the world go around, or why humans behave the way they do, or why states might choose war over peace? What then for supposedly comprehensive theories that enable us to make predictions about what might happen in the future on the basis of our existing theoretical knowledge about the world?

Engaging with underlying concerns about the construction, function and value of theory will help you appreciate the nature of the scholarly enterprise in IRT because:

• It helps you see the problem through the eyes of the authors you study.
• It enhances your ability to critique each theory.
• It helps you ‘think’ like an IR theorist.

On your IRT course you may well have the chance to study these kinds of metatheoretical issues in some detail. I hear you ask, What is metatheory? ‘Metatheories take other theories as their subject’ (Reus-Smit 2012: 530). Metatheory is theory about theory. IR metatheory, therefore, is theory about IRT. For example, you may have lectures and seminars on the constituent elements of theoretical work at the start and end of your course. To back that up, seminars will doubtless incorporate discussion not only about the substance of each theory that has been developed about IR, but also the assumptions theorists make about how the world works. You might also delve into why theorists in one tradition end up disagreeing with other groups of theorists from other traditions, especially if they put forward competing visions of what it is important to explain in international affairs.

Certainly many of the textbooks you read will, usually in the introductory and concluding chapters, engage with metatheoretical issues in some detail (for instance, Dunne et al. 2016; Jackson and Sørensen 2015). Hence, being aware of metatheory – what it is and how it helps you understand IRT – will help you begin to think like an IR theorist.

Metatheory ‘quite simply means theoretical reflections on theory’ (Jørgensen 2010: 15, original emphasis). Metatheory considers the nature, role and practice of theorizing. Metatheorists look upon all the competing theories about a certain topic and try to understand how all the theorists they study are making sense of their subject. This then helps them come to a considered assessment on the nature and significance of theoretical contributions in a given field. Benno Teschke explains it perfectly – metatheoryis a reflexive enterprise, ‘not simply thinking with a theory, but rather thinking about the nature of theory’ (Teschke and Cemgil 2014: 606).

In this chapter I try and answer three big questions that have motivated scholars to theorize IR over the years. First, what is ‘the world’ of international relations that we are studying? Second, what is International Relations as a structured discipline of academic study? Third, who or what are the major actors we need to study in IR? Answering these questions helps us understand more about the role of theory in studying a subject like IR, and we cover that in the next chapter after this disciplinary scene setter.

What is the World of International Relations?

Accurate and reliable measurements are of little value unless they measure the proper variables; and, unfortunately, our speculations about changing global structures involve variables that are not readily observed. (Rosenau 1976: 8)

Every academic discipline requires a subject that practitioners agree will be the focus for study: no subject matter means no discipline. This statement might seem obvious or trite. Yet it has many intriguing ramifications for social or ‘soft’ science subjects, such as Politics, International Relations, History, Media and Communications and Sociology, because looking across these endeavours we do not find much agreement on what the ‘core’ of each discipline is, or should be. So when I ask ‘what is the world of international relations?’, I am trying to alert you to what I call the problem of the subject matter of IR: what are we actually looking at and attempting to theorize in this discipline? As A.K. Ramakrishnan rightly points out, ‘Generating knowledge requires the knower to identify and speak about an object’ (1999: 132). In IR this proves contentious because, as R.B.J. Walker (1995: 314) has astutely observed, most of the debates we engage in ‘arise far more from disagreements about what it is that scholars think they are studying than from disagreements about how to study it’.

To explore this further, we can take a cue from literature on the philosophy of social science by comparing the study of the social (or behavioural) sciences on the one hand with the study of the natural (or physical) sciences on the other (see Scriven 1994). This will enable us, first, to draw some preliminary conclusions about the problematic nature of the subject matter of IR and, second, to gain insights into the reasons why theoretical disputes recur in the discipline, helping to drive forward the search for knowledge about contemporary global politics.

If you have friends at university studying in different departments (social or natural sciences) try asking them about their respective disciplines: what do they study and how? Is the subject matter of their discipline and how to study it generally well recognized, or is it contested? Who decides these things? Compare their experiences to your experience of studying International Relations.

Let us start with simple, dictionary-style definitions of the principal natural sciences:

• Biology – the study of living organisms.
• Chemistry – the study of the composition, properties and reactions of substances.
• Physics – the study of the properties of matter and energy.

These disciplines are clearly not monolithic. That is to say, they are divided into communities of scholars working in component sub-disciplines, each with their own scope for inquiry. For instance, physics breaks down into astrophysics, nuclear physics, quantum physics and others. Chemistry is divided between organic and inorganic, physical, analytical and biochemistry; biologists can do genetics, anatomy, physiology, biotechnology and others. Nor are the natural sciences immune from some pretty fevered debates about disciplinary development and cohesion. These are especially marked around novel findings or approaches that challenge existing paradigms and claim the status of ‘mature’ research to sit alongside more established ways of tackling a subject. For example, in a different major discipline, engineering, Allen Cheng and Timothy Lu (2012) have studied the emergence of ‘synthetic biology’, which challenges entrenched disciplinary boundaries by reaching out to biology, offering a quite different perspective on what it means to ‘do’ both biology and engineering.

So, we have established the argument that the natural sciences are fragmented and have different ‘wings’ to them, representing their subdisciplinary specialisms. Nevertheless, there is usually quite a robust consensus among biologists, chemists, physicists and engineers on essenti...