Explanation and Progress in Security Studies

Bridging Theoretical Divides in International Relations

Fred Chernoff

• Publisher: Stanford Security Studies
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780804792264, 9780804790956
• eBook ISBN: 9780804792295
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Explanation and Progress in Security Studies asks why Security Studies, as a central area of International Relations, has not experienced scientific progress in the way natural sciences have—and answers by arguing that the underlying reason is that scholars in Security Studies have advanced a range of different notions of "explanation" or different criteria of "explanatory superiority" to show that their positions are better than rival positions.

To demonstrate this, the author engages in in-depth content analysis of the generally recognized exemplars of explanation and explanatory superiority in three of the core debates in the disciplines: Why do states pursue policies of nuclear proliferation? Why do states choose to form the alliances they do? And why do liberal democratic states behave the way they do toward other liberal democracies?

The book reveals that authors in the debates that have shown the most progress use similar criteria in arguing for and against the key explanations. In the nuclear proliferation debate, there is wide divergence in the criteria the most visible authors use, and there is wide divergence in the explanations offered. In the alliance formation/balance-of-power debate, there is some overlap of criteria the most important authors use, and there has been some limited movement toward consensus. In the democratic peace debate there has been much more overlap of criteria the most prominent authors use, and there is agreement on both some positive and negative conclusions.

1

TRADITIONS OF EXPLANATION AND THE IDEA OF SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS

THIS BOOK SEEKS to determine whether divergent uses of criteria have slowed movement toward consensus explanations in security studies. The central question of this study is whether to accept the hypothesis H₁, that progress in security studies has been slowed because different scholars use of different notions of explanation or different criteria of explanatory superiority. The study also considers a directly related second hypothesis, H₂, that if progress occurs, then contending explanatory schools use similar criteria.

In the course of finding answers, it will be necessary to see what exactly security studies authors are in fact trying to do when they offer explanations that are better than their rivals, and thus constitute “progress” over them. To succeed in these tasks, it is necessary to understand what international relations (IR) authors mean by the terms progress and explanation. This chapter offers a brief sketch of some of the important ideas about how progress is understood by some of the major philosophers of science in the past century, and explanation is the subject of the next chapter. This chapter begins the effort of answering the central question of why progress has been so slow by considering arguments for, and criticisms of, the effort to turn IR into a science. To understand the explanatory goals of these efforts, we must consider the overall goals and methods advocated by proponents and critics of the behavioral-quantitative approach to IR.

1. DEVELOPMENT OF IR THEORY AND APPROPRIATE METHODS

People in many cultures have been studying IR for centuries. Some claim to have discovered persistent patterns and even social science laws. Around 430 BCE Sun Tzu developed a set of principles based on observations of multiple cases, from which he derived regularities in the decisions of military leaders. He identified which politico-military methods were successful and which were not, and he then concluded which among them should be adopted. He confidently announced that whoever followed his strategic principles would be victorious, and whoever failed to heed them would be vanquished. Over the centuries, studies of IR have come to include many different topics and questions—examples include the relationship between trade and national wealth; the nature, effectiveness, and possibilities of international law; and the effects of different forms and structures of international institutions. But throughout the centuries, center stage has gone to concerns about the causes and consequences of war, and to identifying the factors that lead to victory once war has begun.

As the behavioral movement in the social sciences gained momentum in the 1950s and 1960s, IR scholars collaborated to construct what has become an enormous database, the well-known Correlates of War. As its name indicates, the project focuses on factors that theorists have associated, rightly or wrongly, with the onset of war. The core mission of the project has been to gain a greater understanding of war. While some expected that the quantitative study of IR would eventually dominate the entire field, many other approaches have persisted, including philosophical and legal studies. More recently, IR scholars have applied rational choice and game theory as they try to explain the actions of states.

No single method or methodology has come to dominate the field. Today there are frequent pleas for “methodological pluralism.” Many who write on the subject of methods and make explicit recommendations are almost universally in favor of pluralism; they oppose the goal of finding the one ideal, all-purpose approach that alone has the potential to add to our knowledge and understanding of IR. The present study seeks to identify what sort of concept of explanation is used in security studies by examining the efforts to explain nuclear proliferation, alliance formation, and the relationship between democracy and peace.

2. THREE CENTRAL ISSUES IN SECURITY STUDIES

The study of IR has historically focused on questions of war, peace, and security. The contemporary field of security studies has a number of “most studied” issues, one of which is the presence of nuclear weapons. Two specific questions about nuclear arms have gained the most attention. The first concerns causes—why do states become nuclear weapons states?—and is primarily explanatory. The second concerns consequences—how will stability and warfare be affected if more states acquire nuclear weapons?—and is principally about predictions. The emphasis of this book on questions of explanation leads us to focus on the first. The earliest states to acquire nuclear weapons, the United States and Soviet Union in the 1940s, and the United Kingdom, France, and China in the 1950s and early 1960s, were largely seen as doing so for security reasons, which realist theories were able to explain. However, as more states pursued nuclear weapons and a new factor entered the calculations of states, namely the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), a wider-ranging debate emerged on why various additional states would want to build nuclear weapons and why various others would resist. Even some of the reasons that the first five nuclear weapons states chose to “go nuclear” came to be reexamined. Chapter 3 outlines the theoretical background of the contemporary debate and surveys the most influential works of the past several decades.

Another major issue that has been studied for centuries, and is still a major focus of debate, is how and why alliances form as they do. The most common explanations over the centuries have been tied to the realist concept of the balance of power. There are several versions of so-called balance-of-power theory. However, realist views have been challenged by liberals and constructivists, who deny that states, intentionally or unintentionally, seek power balances. In recent decades traditional balance-of-power explanations have also been challenged by arguments that states seek to balance in other ways that do not directly involve the balancing of power or capabilities. Chapter 4 examines the history of the debate and the current state of movement toward consensus on at least certain empirical claims.

A third important area that has risen in prominence in the past quarter century is sometimes called democratic peace (DP) studies. The key claim at issue here is that democracies are somehow different from other sorts of states, and they are most especially different in the way they deal with one another. Realists of course claim that power arrangements determine the stability or instability of international systems and that the maximization of power drives the behavior of states, no matter what sort of internal regimes they have. This fundamental realist claim would be undercut if it were shown that the behavior of democratic states is better explained by reference to the democratic nature of their governance structures. At the end of the eighteenth century Kant argued on theoretical grounds that a world of liberal democracies—specifically “republics”—would be a world at peace, given certain other conditions. Nearly two centuries later a vigorous debate emerged, with realists energetically attacking those who argued that the liberal democratic nature of some states affected their behavior, especially their behavior toward other liberal democracies. Chapter 5 examines the most influential works on both sides of this question from the 1970s onward.

3. NORMATIVE AND DESCRIPTIVE INQUIRY

Philosophers of science develop accounts of science by taking some cases of theory change as clear-cut instances of progress or advancement: oxidation over phlogiston, Newton over Ptolemy, Harvey over Galen. Anyone who sought to argue that Newton’s theory was not an advance over Ptolemy would have to make a spectacularly original and persuasive argument (see Feyerabend 1975). These universally acknowledged cases of scientific progress may be so widely accepted as such because there are in fact many respects, not just one, in which the new theory was superior to the old. In other instances in the history of science, some newly proposed changes (e.g., when a theory’s entia moved away from “observability”) have sparked major debates as to whether they truly constituted progress. This leads to the question of which respects are more important than which other respects to produce genuine progress.

If the social sciences can be improved, then the process will most likely proceed in a way similar to that in the natural sciences, that is, only in a piecemeal way that combines interaction between descriptive and prescriptive (or epistemic-normative) elements. Some think that the sciences, whether natural or social, can be improved by a purely normative approach, in which ideas about legitimate knowledge guide the argument. Others hold that the success of science is itself the normative justification of its character and thus argue that the methods and progress of the sciences must be purely descriptive, aiming to identify key or essential practices, which, because they are scientific practices, are justifiable. But there are flaws with arguments for either of the pure approaches (Bohman 1993).

The social sciences are different from the natural sciences in many significant ways. Hashing out the exact relationship between them is one of the most important areas of the philosophy of the social sciences. Theorists in IR and elsewhere hold divergent views on the character and methods of the social sciences and their relation to those of the natural sciences. But there are some parallels, and there are some areas in which there is a good deal of agreement about how theories are developed and debated within specific disciplines. One philosophical strategy is to identify practices that are both historically represented and normatively justifiable.

Many philosophers of science make clear that description plays an important role in their normative analyses. Kuhn (1970, 207) notes that his efforts to understand science “repeatedly pass back and forth between the descriptive and the normative modes.” He acknowledges that the reasoning he uses is circular, but he defends it by arguing that it does not produce a vicious circle. The present study allows for a dialogue between normative arguments about the nature of knowledge and practical arguments about how those norms are pursued by social scientists; it proceeds by examining specific works in the three security studies questions of nuclear proliferation, alliance formation, and democratic peace. It looks descriptively at how security studies scholars offer explanations and, on the basis of the observations it offers in Chapter 6, proposes some simple prescriptions for improving social scientific practice.

4. KUHN AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Most social sciences, according to Kuhn, lack a single paradigm that dominates any particular generation of scholarship. Kuhn (1970, 21) views all sciences as maturing slowly and does not see them as having any clear threshold at which they move from immature to mature. Kuhn does not regard any of the social sciences as having reached maturity, although in his view economics has come the farthest. In social sciences like political science, sociology, and IR there are distinct and competing research traditions; there is no single, dominant paradigm. These disciplines have some parallels to the pre-Newtonian study of optics, which had no single, dominant paradigm about the nature of light. There were competing views. Some held light to consist in particles; some, a modification of the illuminated body; and some, an emanation from the eye. While there have been different theories since then—from corpuscular to wave to photon—one or another paradigm has dominated each generation. Each group emphasized tests that lent weight to its own particular theory.

International relations has long had competing theoretical traditions that seek to explain international behavior, and each has its preferred supporting case studies. Each of the approaches or research traditions in IR has its exemplar works, published in major journals or by major academic presses, which indicate what peer reviewers in that tradition regard as good social science that offers proper explanations. There are also specific works that have such a high profile that they are cited widely by other authors and find their way onto graduate school course syllabi, where they serve as models for the next generation of scholars. Kuhn argues that the exemplar works in physics are exemplars not for the entire field but rather for specific problem traditions, such as optics, mechanics, hydraulics, and the like. Thus, in international security studies, it seems reasonable to start with the belief that there are exemplar works in areas like those examined here: nuclear proliferation, alliance formation, and democratic peace studies.

According to Kuhn, in mature sciences revolutions occur from time to time. But in between the revolutions there are long periods of stability, or “normal science,” during which each scientific field is unified by a universally (or nearly universally) accepted dominant paradigm. One of the advantages of debates in mature sciences under a unifying paradigm is that each researcher does not have the burden of having to explain every important methodological or theoretical concept that he or she uses. Kuhn (1970, 19–20) says, “When the individual scientist can take a paradigm for granted, he need no longer, in his major works, attempt to build his field anew, starting from first principles and justifying the use of each concept introduced. That can be left to the writers of textbooks.” Natural scientists’ ability to take these notions of method for granted allows them to put more energy into building on what is thus far accepted in their fields and to add to the accumulated experimental evidence that allows for scientific progress. In specific substantive works in IR, security scholars rarely define any of the key methodological concepts, including explanation. While this appears to parallel what we find in the natural sciences, most IR scholars nevertheless see themselves as operating within one or another of competing research traditions; at least they seem to have no trouble self-identifying when asked to do so (see Jordan et al. 2009).

One of Kuhn’s contributions is an account of how scientists come to learn what science is and, in particular, what good science is. He says that scientists undergo education and “professional initiation” that is “unparalleled in most other fields” (Kuhn 1970, 177). In Kuhn’s view, “some examples of actual scientific practice—examples which include law, theory, application, and instrumentation together—provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research” (1970, 10). As just noted, prior to the relatively recent advent of textbooks, scientists were given important works to read that were regarded as examples of high-quality work in their fields. Kuhn says, “Many of the classics of science . . . did what textbooks do today. In physics, classics, such as Aristotle’s Physica, Ptolemy’s Almagest, Newton’s Principia and Optiks . . . and many other works served for a time implicitly to define the legitimate problems and methods of a research field for succeeding generations of practitioners” (1970, 10).

The most respected works in each problem area instructed students explicitly about the solutions to specific scientific problems, but also implicitly about the proper way to carry out scientific research. Such classic works provide the sort of “concrete achievement” that Kuhn argues is “a locus of professional commitment, prior to the various concepts, laws, theories, and points of view that may be abstracted from it” (1970, 11). The parallel with IR is a strong one, as graduate courses in security studies similarly avoid textbooks to introduce students to core debates and rely instead on the works of major contemporary authors. Kuhn notes that the classic works in a field contain rules of method, but such rules are typically implicit. Hence, it is not always easy to state precisely what those rules are. He says, “The determination of shared paradigms is not, however, the determination of shared rules. That demands a second step” (1970, 43). The search for rules “is more difficult than the search for paradigms” when the latter is conceived simply as examples (1970, 43).

The research design of the present study is structured in part by drawing on Kuhn’s view of how classic scientific publications implicitly define methods and key concepts, including what is to count as a compelling scientific argument or good explanation. One may object to the use of Kuhn here on at least three grounds. First, Kuhn was talking about the natural and not social sciences, the social sciences do not exhibit the same patterns of inquiry and the transmission of proper methods of inquiry, and Kuhn’s account even of the natural sciences is highly contested. But the controversial philosophical elements of Kuhn’s view, especially his “incommensurability thesis” (see Section 9 in this chapter), need not be addressed to make use of the insights of his well-founded and much less contested view of how scientists are educated and socialized.

Second, one might object that the social sciences are divided by theoretical, methodological, and ideological tradition in a way that the natural sciences are not. But cleavages can occur in the natural sciences, at least for a time. Kuhn says, “There are schools in the sciences, communities, that is, which approach the same subject matter from incompatible viewpoints” (1970, 177). He immediately adds, “But . . . their competition is usually quickly ended” (1970, 177). The difference between the social and natural sciences in this regard is one of degree rather than kind. Natural scientists usually come to agreement on these disputes, whereas the same cannot be said for social scientists.

And third, one might object that since Kuhn is talking about the natural sciences, where each problem area is typically dominated by a paradigm, at least in all normal or “nonrevolutionary” periods, his views cannot be exported to social sciences like IR in which there is no single, dominant paradigm most, or even much, of the time. This objection disappears, however, when we remember that Kuhn believes that the natural sciences, including physical sciences like astronomy, mechanics, optics, and so on, operated before there was any single dominant paradigm—indeed through their entire histories prior to Newton—yet they wer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Traditions of Explanation and the Idea of Scientific Progress
• 2. Explanation in the Natural and Social Sciences
• 3. The Nuclear Proliferation Debate: Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons?
• 4. The Balance-of-Power Debate: Why Do States Form Alliances?
• 5. The Democratic Peace Debate: Why Do Democracies Act the Way They Do?
• 6. Analysis, Alternatives, Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index