Reviewing Theories and Perspectives Flashcards
Reviewing Theories and Perspectives : Realism
Describes a foreign policy that’s determined by a country’s security and economic interest.
Reviewing Theories and Perspectives : Idealism
Describes a foreign policy that is determined by a country’s ideals, moral values, and principals.
Realism vs Idealism
What do nations want?
Realism - Power
Idealism -Peace in the world according to principles defined by nation.
Realism vs Idealism
What are nations motivated by?
Realism - Self-Interest
Idealism - Values, principles
Realism vs Idealism
What is the source of conflict in the world?
Realism - Competing Interests (territory, resources)
Idealism - Competing “isms” (democracy vs monarchy, totalitarianism or communism).
Realism vs Idealism
What is the Source of security?
Realism - Faith in power to protect the nation.
Idealism - Faith in law or morality to protect the nation.
First Great Debate
- Also known as the “realist idealist great debate
- Was a dispute between idealists and realist
- Took place in the 1930’s and 1940’s
- Was fundamentally about how to deal with Nazi Germany
- Idealist emphasized the possitibility of international institutions such as the League of Nations.
- Realist scholars emphasized anarchical nature of international politics and the need for state survival.
Second Great Debate
- Dispute between “scientific IR”
- scholars who sought to refine scientific methods of inquiry in international relations theory who insisted on a more historicist/interpretative approach to international relations theory.
- Debate is termed “realists vs behaviorist” or “traditionalism vs scientism”.
Inter-Paradigm Debate
- Sometimes is considered to be a great debate and therefore called the “third great debate”.
- Debate between Liberalism, realism and radical international relations theories.
- Also has been described as being between realism, institutionalism and structuralism.
Fifth Great Debate
- Could concern critical realism but goes on to say that better not because the first four debates were pointless affairs.
- Steve smith argues that it is difficult to find any notion of a fifth debate in literature
Great Debates : criticism
- Steve Smith has argued that the differing positions have largely ignored each other meaning that it makes little sense to talk of debates between rival theoretical frameworks.
Great debates : times
First Debate - 1920’s-1930’s
Second Debate- 1950’s-1960’s
Third Debate- 1980’s
Fourth Debate-1990’s
Classical Realism
HUMAN NATURE
Thucydides (The Peloponnesian War) – International politics is driven by an endless struggle for power, which has its roots in human nature.
Structural Realism
INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM
Rousseau (The state of War) – It is not Human nature but the anarchical system that fosters fear, jealousy, suspicion and insecurity.
Neoclassical Realism
Zakaira (From Wealth To Power) – Systemic account of world politics provided by structural realism is incomplete. It needs to be supplemented with better accounts of unit-level variables such as how power is perceived, and how leadership is exercised.
Liberalism
- Historic alternative to realism
- After the cold war was dominant till 9/11
- Values and institutions embedded in Europe and North America
- Power politics is the product of ideas
• Four-dimension definition: Juridically equal,
legislative, Liberty of the individual, economic.
- Interventionist foreign policies and stronger internationa institutions x pragmatic conception: toleration and no intervention
- Critics: they do not see non-western cultures
Neo- realism Structure
anarchy and the distribution of capabilities across units (Waltz)
• “the structure of the international system shapes all foreign policy choices” (Lamy, 2014 in Baylies et al.)
Neo- realism: Power
combination of the capabilities of the State
Neo- realism: security studies
Offensive: relative power
Define Commercial Liberalism
Free trade and market
Define Republican Liberalism
Democratic states are more respectful with citizens and less prone to war
Define Sociological Liberalism
notion of Community and process of independence
Define Liberal or neo-liberal institutionalism:
integrated communities to promote economic growth and respond to regional problems.
Define 3rd generations of scholars
more dependence between the actors.
some Key points…
- The neo-neo debate is not between two polar opposite worldviews. They share an epistemology, focus on similar questions, and agree on a number of assumptions about international politics.
- Neo-liberal institutions and neo-realist study different worlds of International politics. Neo realist focus on security and military issues. Neo-liberal institutionalist focus on political economy, environmental issues, and human rights issues.
- Neo-realists explain that all states must be concerned with the absolute and relative gains that result from international agreements and cooperative efforts. Neo-Liberal institutionalists are less concerned about relative gains and consider that all will benefit from absolute gains.
- Neo-realist are more cautious about cooperation and remind us that the world is still a competitive place where self-interest rules.
- Neo-liberal institutionalist believe that states and other actors can be persuaded to cooperate if they are convinced that all states will comply with rules, and that cooperation will result in absolute gains.
Liberalism
• Historic alternative to realism
• After the cold war was dominant till 9/11
• Values and institutions embedded in Europe and North America
• Power politics is the product of ideas
• Four-dimension definition: Juridically equal,
legislative, Liberty of the individual, economic.
• Interventionist foreign policies and stronger internationa institutions x pragmatic conception: toleration and no intervention
• Critics: they do not see non-western cultures
Marxist Theory of Internatonal Relations
- Capitalist global system
- Powerful in expense of powerless and por
- Context in wich international events occurs
- Society is sistematically pronte to class conflict
- World-system theory (Immanuel Wallertein): Core, semi- periphery, periphery
- Feminist marxist: role of women
- Critical theory: Frankfurt School
characteristics of a core nation
- Democratic government
- High wages
- Import raw materials
- Export manufactures
- High investment
- Welfare services
characteristics of a Semi-Periphery
- Authoritarian governments
- Export: mature manufactures and raw materials
- Low wages
- Low welfare services
characteristics of a Periphery
- Non-democratic governments
- Export raw materials
- Import manufacture’s
- Below substance wages
- No welfare services
Social- Construtivism
- Social theory
- How actors interpretate their material reality
- Denaturalize what is taken for granted
- Power also as production identities, interest and meanings
- Rational choice in a social theory
- Knowledge shapes how individuals see the world
Poststructuralism
- Influenced by social and philosophical theory
- Key of the cold war: enemy construccions of East x western
- Cristical statism
- Discourse, deconstruction, genealogy and intertextuality.
PostColonial Theory on IR : Epistemological criticism
- place of speech and production of knowledge
- Questioning the links between knowledge and power (universalist narratives and cartographic imagination)
- Critical geopolitics, production of subjectivities and genealogy
PostColonial Theory on IR : Criticism-Other:
the decolonization of knowledge from post- colonial theory:
• Assumption of Western precepts and extension to other areas of analysis
• Critique of Orientalism and Occidentalism (Said, Boatcã)
• The Movement of Non-Aligned Countries
Postcolonialism
- Bottom-up approach
- Fiction and personal testimonials as sources
- Colonial and post-colonial relations
- Some post-colonial states formed the non- aligned movement
- Fictions: proeminent in feminist IR
- Subaltern can speak or Western researchers will put them on their frameworks: must find a meeting point
- Post-colonial era: continuities and discontinuities with colonialism
Critical Theory
Critical analysis and renewal of social theory:
• The Frankfurt School: critical rationalism, hermeneutics and analysis of cultural production
• Emancipation and potentiality of democratic rationality: Habermas’s theory of communicative action
• The inheritance in International Relations: moral borders of the international community (Linklater) and hegemony and interstate system (Robert Cox and critical theory in IR).
Feminism in International Relations:
looking towards less traditional spaces, repositioning world politics and highlighting everyday places and scales from different lenses or currents
Liberal feminism
institutional, positivist and universalist approach
Critical feminism
material-symbolic confluences in the analysis of power
Constructivist feminism
mechanisms and processes of ideas and representations about gender and its influence on global politics and vice versa
Poststructural feminism
analysis of language and knowledge production
Postcolonial feminism
criticism of western universalism and the homogenization of western feminism (situated knowledge and place of speech)
