Introduction to Traditional and Dissident Approaches in International Relations

One World, Rival Theories - Jack Synder (2009)

→ Key Question From Synder = ‘Do theories in International Relations still have something to tell policymakers?’

→ Waltz (One World, Many Theories, Spring 1998):

• Realism focuses on the shifting distribution of power among states.

• Liberalism highlights the rising number of democracies and the turbulence of democratic transitions.

• Constructivism (Idealism) illuminates the changing norms of sovereignty, human rights, and international justice, as well as the increased potency of religious ideas in politics.

→ ‘When realism, liberalism, and idealism enter the policymaking arena and public debate, they can sometimes become intellectual window dressing for simplistic world views.’ → Approaches can simplify real world issues when they are far more complex and difficult to understand.

→ Theories and the impact on policy (predominantly foreign policy):

1. Realism instills a pragmatic appreciation of the role of power but also warns that states will suffer if they overreach. → International affairs are a struggle for power among self-interested states.

2. Liberalism highlights the cooperative potential of mature democracies, especially when working together through effective institutions, but it also notes democracies’ tendency to crusade against tyrannies and the propensity of emerging democracies to collapse into violent ethnic turmoil. → Realism cannot account for progress in relations between nations.

3. Constructivism (Idealism) stresses that a consensus on values must underpin any stable political order, yet it also recognises that forging such a consensus often requires an ideological struggle with the potential for conflict.

→ Key Example: Modernisation of China = Enters traditional organisation and develops its military slowly as its economic power grows, and avoids confrontation with superior US forces.

• Realists → As a state becomes more powerful than the opposing ones, that power translates into influence, security etc.

“In liberal democracies, realism is the theory that everyone loves to hate. It claims to be an antidote to the naive belief that international institutions and law alone can preserve peace.”

• Standard realist doctrine predicts that weaker states will ally to protect themselves from stronger ones and thereby form and reform a balance of power.

• Realists remain steadfast in stressing that policy must be based on positions of real strength, notion either empty bravado or hopeful illusions about a world without conflict.

• Liberals expect that democracies will not attack each other and will regard each other’s regimes as legitimate and non threatening. → USA in the year 2026 could go against this.

‘If the Liberal view that only elected governments are legitimate and politically reliable has taken hold, what about elected guts that has potentially been rigged?’

• Michael W. Doyle and Democratic Peace → “Democracies never fight each other, they are prone to launch messianic struggles against warlike authoritarian regimes to ‘make the world safe for democracy.’” (Russia, NK, China, etc.)

• Democratic regimes make attractive targets for terrorist violence by national liberation movements precisely because they are accountable to a cost-conscious electorate. (C.F. USA, UK, France and Germany.)

• Idealism (the older version of constructivism), the belief that foreign policy is and should be guided by ethical and legal standards, also has a long pedigree.

→ Constructivism emphasises the role of ideologies, identities, persuasion, and transnational networks (HK + Justice/Activism).

• Constructivists believe that debates about ideas are the fundamental building blocks of international life. Individuals and groups become powerful if they can convince others to adopt their ideas. People’s understanding of their interests depends on the ideas they hold. Political Order = Cultural Dialogue.

Why is Mainstream International Relations Blind to Racism? - Bhambra et al. (2020)

• IR → Erased non-western history and thought from its canon and has failed to address the central role of colonialism and decolonisation in creating the contemporary international order. (IR written from a white male standpoint and colonial mindset.)

• Creation of the nation-state and colonialism have ties, even after decolonisation the inequalities of different levels of citizenship still exists. (Britain and the Windrush Scandal).

• Race isn’t a factor that enters so-called nation-states from the outside but they are racialised from the very moment of the IR emergence as imperial polities and continue to reproduce racialised hierarchies to this day. → The political systems that exist in the West are the expense of others.

“IR must come to terms with the erasure of the roles non-Western political actors and societies have played in shaping global affairs.”

• Many pre-colonial African polities’ activities have had important international implications. → Mansa Musa - 1764 battlewear Atakpame (Togo), Ashantioya Empire → Economic and diplomatic exchanges between China and various African nations.

• State-centric approaches tend to focus on state capacities and failures and ordinary Africans merely as bodies to be acted on and moved like pawns on a global chessboard, which obscures how their strategies, engagement, and resistance shape flows of power in the international system. (Dehumanisation).

“New Scramble For Africa” → USA, China and Russia → Compete for market share, resources and influence on the continent - divorced from a proper examination of local, national, and regional interests, power dynamics, norms, and practices will yield poor academic and foreign-policy analysis.

‘Liberalism didn’t create modern democracy. Item merged from the activism of the oppressed.’

• Euroliberalism → “Right to life”, “Liberty”, and “Property”, equality before the law regardless of any attribute or marker of identity; and toleration based on reason.

“Historically marginalised peoples are the ones who have pushed the international system to adopt whatever level of democratic governance exists.”

• Numerous wars of liberation and anti-colonial/anti-racist struggles produced political independence and national sovereignty - the key foundations on which democracies are built. The subalterns have had to rectify the contradictions of global liberalism by transforming the idea of freedom for some into the practices of freedom for all.

“I could not make sense of the fact that U.N — which, according to my IR textbooks, was a Western led beacon of hope and salvation and the cradle of human rights — left a million people to die in 1994).”

“Ethical foreign policy” → International (i.e., Western-led) actors showing up for the other peoples of the world with the Well-being of the supposedly recieving others proclaimed as the driving force behind their presence.

!!There is no historical evidence that Western presence has ever enhanced the well-being of the previously colonised world!!

• The scholarly imperative is to study and question the current international system built on racial capitalism, and to imagine alternatives.

Boer War 1899-1902 → Reason for IR instead of WW1, the RoundTable, perhaps the singularly most important network responsible for the creation of several early chairs, institutes, and journals in the IR field, drew almost entirely on the work of its core members in South Africa.

“Racial utopianism” → The fantasy that the “Anglo Saxons” (or) “English speaking peoples”), if unified politically, could bring peace and justice to the Earth. → Intellectual Racism.

Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy → Drew attention to the implications of discrimination based on gender and the absence of women in the field of international relations, including foreign-policy practice. → Focus on white women rather than all women.

The dominant brand of feminist foreign policy fails to consider seriously the racialised legacies of colonialism that bad to the conditions of gender discrimination in developing economies.

People led IR over state led.

“The West’s Triumph led to Racial Catastrophe. Its decline could lead to Racial Justice.

• The third phase of cultural encounters = The pretention of Western culture to universal validity is being challenged from the angles of cultural relativism, historical relativism and empirical relativism.

“For many around the world, the moral disease of racism needs to be confronted as vehemently as the physical disease now sweeping around the globe.”

Cultural Ecumenicalism → A combination of a global pool of achievements with local pools of distinctive innovation and tradition.