Journalists live in a world of here and now. Under pressure, we constantly churn out stories, providing both instant analysis of events and descriptive narratives. But while covering war, treaties, conflicts and other aspects of international relations (IR), they often miss looking at patterns in a systematic manner, and rely little on theory, something done significantly in academia.
IR is not rocket science. Anyone who is interested in current affairs, politics, and history can acquaint herself with IR theory and the ways and means of studying the present. The most dominant stream of explaining IR is ‘Realism’, which attributes the conduct of IR to raw human nature. According to Realism, politics is defined by the need for conflict among various international actors or nation-states. Much of the strategic discourse that we read on the opinion pages of newspapers draws from this paradigmatic approach. l
l Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace is considered the most definitive work on Realism while Kautilya’s Arthashastra and Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince are also firmly Realist. Modern Realism was pretty much codified by Morgenthau. But Morgenthau’s work has since been critiqued for the lack of an analysis of the structure of international order.
l The most defining critique of it was provided by Kenneth N. Waltz in Theory of International Politics. Waltzcharacterises the world as being organised on the basis of anarchy, and the behaviour of nation-states predicated by the need to maximise power. His intellectual descendants (“neorealists”) have dominated Western IR, with structural explanations seeking to appropriate concepts of economics, even econometrics, to explain international affairs.
In the last 30 years or so, robust critiques of the narrow structure-based IR approaches have emerged. The field of ‘social constructivism’, which looks at international actors as being ‘socially constituted’ and having anthropomorphic identities and intentions, has sought to explain IR more as a social science. John Ruggie’s essay, “What makes the world hang together” is an excellent primer to social constructivism.
l Alexander Wendt’s Social Theory of International Politics is another good book.
The most impressive critique of Realism and the strongest theoretical paradigm is the field of political Marxism pioneered by theorists such as Benno Teschke who use historical sociology and a structured analysis of international politics to explain IR.
srinivasan.vr@thehindu.co.in
