Adam Bell
Adam Bell
Aug 31, 2018 · 5 min read

International Relations and its progress as a discipline

International Relations absolutely should be better today than it ever has been in the past. Naturally, the discipline right now stands at its most mature level. We have more theories, capable of explaining more things, than ever before. The question is, however, whether this maturity actually results in the discipline having superior explanatory power compared to what has been possible in the past. In other words, does comprehensiveness increase the utility of the discipline? I contend that it does, but only as long as theories are used in their appropriate context. That the profoundly different theoretical perspectives of constructivism and neorealism are currently the mainstream approaches of the discipline reveals that those within it are well aware of this fact. Nevertheless, it is in important we reflexively reflect on the validity of mainstream theories as International Relations continues to evolve.

To understand how best to evaluate the current state of International Relations, consider why it was developed as a distinct academic field to begin with. It aimed to explain international politics in a scientific way. That it aspired to the status of a science is crucial; rather than being an endeavour based in historical analysis that documents a narrative to prove a point, it wanted to establish an objective explanatory framework fundamentally concerned with having predictive power.

By returning to this original disciplinary conceit, it would appear that the maturation of International Relations has seen the discipline stray from its scientific aspirations. Today, the constructivist approach is arguably as dominant as any other theoretical approach in the discipline. It is not concerned with predicting outcomes in the international political system. Instead, it aims to explain why a change in this system has occurred. In this sense it is scientific, as it seeks to present an account of change that is detached from any value-based normative vision. However, it is absolutely not scientific from the perspective that it does not make predictions about the future of international politics.

How could International Relations have come to be dominated by a theory that is fundamentally at odds with its core mission? Within the context of the disciplines growth, this shift does actually make sense. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the foremost theory of the time, Neorealism, did not provide any convincing insights as to why a superpower had imploded based on internal changes that saw it decide it did not want to compete with the other global superpower. Constructivism sought to remedy this by breaking down the changes in beliefs within the Soviet Union that had led to its breakup and retreat from superpower competition. In doing so, it developed a theoretical approach that excelled at explaining moments of radical change and discontinuity in the international sphere.

The problem with the emergence of such a theory as the result of the perceived failure of neorealism is that neorealism embodied a culmination of International Relations’ scientific ambition. Its creator, Kenneth Waltz, structured it around the seminal insights of Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos into scientific theory. Their combined perspectives deemed good scientific theory to be falsifiable and able to explain the most things with the fewest assumptions using a clear account of cause and effect. Consequently, neorealism established only the organising principle of anarchy, the lack of a functional differentiation between units and the varying distribution of capabilities as being necessary to explain the nature of the international system across all time. By doing this, it predicted three potential outcomes evolving via internal and external balancing: unipolarity, bipolarity (optimal) and multipolarity. However, in developing such predictive power that would be functionally useful across all time, the parsimonious nature of the theory meant it had little to say about the internal change of political units.

The contrast between constructivism and neorealism revealed the profound problem resulting from the scientific aspirations of International Relations. Neorealism, in its attempt to provide a purely scientific approach to evaluations of international politics, could establish a predictive power that works continuously across time, but jettisons any prospect of being able to provide a detailed, thorough explanation of change. Constructivism can explain change in detail, but offers none of the predictive power necessary for the establishment of International Relations as a scientific discipline. Is there any hope for a theory to provide comprehensive explanatory power when changes occur in international politics on top of the ability to say what will happen next at any point in time?

I do not think so. The theoretical parameters required for explaining change must be able to discern the particular political formations of any given period. Doing this requires the inclusion of ideational structures (as constructivism does) beyond material conceptions that are immensely sophisticated, subjective and time-specific. Given this, including them in a theory of continuity appears an impossible project. Furthermore, a theory must be based on continuity to have legitimate predictive power. The past cannot predict the future, making it impossible to include any assumptions about how international politics are likely to operate in the future in a theory of continuity. As such, the barebones unit-level analysis of neorealism is unfortunately an inherent aspect that will be present in any potential predictive theory of international politics.

In assessing if International Relations is better than it ever has been, the irreconcilability between predictive models and explanatory models show that this is the case. Neorealism had become the preeminent theory in a discipline aspiring to be a science. That aspiration, however, was shown to be flawed when the theory that embodied it proved to be lacking in the wake of an event the entire discipline was geared towards evaluating. While the resulting theory that was developed to ameliorate this issue is fundamentally at odds with the disciplines original goal, it shows that the discipline has matured to the point where it has re-evaluated what it should do in order to provide comprehensive insights into the field of international politics.

In light of this, it is vital that the right theory is chosen for any given evaluation conducted in the field of International Relations. While eclectic approaches, such as the ‘Spiral’ model, are capable of combining different theoretical frameworks into one in a specific approach, no such approach has been articulated for explaining international politics as a whole. Consequently, theories that explain change versus those that predict it must always be used appropriately for the benefits of the wide-range of theories present in contemporary International Relations to be realised.

As a final point, it is important to note the observations of Robert Cox. In advocating a transformative approach to International Relations via critical theory, he rejected the idea that someone like Waltz could establish a universal theory. He saw all theories as being skewed by their creators and time of creation, making any claim to universalism impossible, while the interaction between theory and reality had the potential to be self-fulfilling. Evidence of this was apparent in neorealism’s framework perpetuating the international structure of the Cold War era. Such a perspective must always be kept in mind if we are to continue to improve theories of International Relations so as to make the discipline better than it ever has been.

    Adam Bell

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    Adam Bell

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