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Summary Summaries of all Intro to International Relations Readings
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This document contains summaries of all introduction to international relations readings from 2020.
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Test Bank For Globalization of World Politics Introduction to International Relations 8th Edition By John Baylis , Steve Smith , Patricia Owens 9780198825548 / Chapter 1-32 / Complete Questions and An...
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Key elements from the IR Book
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Introduction to International Relations (IIR) all Lecture + Reading Notes - GRADE 8,5
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Reading notes for Introduction to International RelationsYear I Block I 2020
Introduction to International Relations
1) From International Politics to World Politics
a) world politics vs international politics?
i) Baylis,, Smith, and Owens (textbook authors) believe world politics to be more
inclusive than the alternative terms of “international relations” or international
politics”
(1) the term world politics serves to indicate that the book is interested in a wide
set of actors and political relations in the world and not just those among
nation-states.
2) The Study of IR
a) IR is relatively recent
i) The academic discipline was formed in 1919 when the Department of
International Politics was established at the University of Wales.
(1) This department was founded after WWI to prevent a future war with the
argument that if scholars could find the causes of war, then solutions could be
found to help politicians prevent war.
(a) According to this view of the origin of IR, IR was created with the
goal/commitment to change the world.
ii) Others have challenged this view, calling it a foundation myth for a field with a
much darker history: with the emergence of IR beginning earlier in the history of
colonial administration and the study of imperialism
(1) The first journal in the field was called Journal of Race development,
published in 1910, and which is Foreign Affairs
(2) In the US, AA scholars interested in studying race and world politics were
systematically marginalized from the emerging discipline of IR.
3) Theories of world politics
a) Liberal Internationalism
i) developed after WWI, in a period defined by competing but unstable empires,
class conflict, women’s suffrage, and experiments in IO
ii) Main themes:
(1) that human beings and societies can be improved, that representative
democracy is necessary for liberal improvement, and that ideas matter
(2) the belief in progress, modeled on the achievements of liberal capitalist
societies in the west
(3) Liberalists reject the realist notion that war is the natural condition of world
politics
iii) They also question the idea that the state is the main actor on the world political
stage, although they don’t deny that its important
, iv) Individuals, MNCs, transnational actors, and international organizations as central
actors in some issue-areas of world politics
v) States are not seen as unitary or a united actor, but as made up of individuals and
their collective, societal preferences and interests.
vi) They think of the state as comprised of a set of bureaucracies, each with its own
interests.
(1) Therefore, there can’t be one “national interest”
(a) Since it merely represents the result of whatever societal preferences or
bureaucratic organizations dominate the domestic decision-making
process.
vii) Liberals stress for the importance of cooperation; their key issue then becomes
devision international institutions in which economic and political cooperation can
be best achieved.
viii) The liberal agenda is not as restricted as the realist one
ix) National interests are viewed as more than just military terms, and the importance
of economic, environmental, and technological issues are stressed
x) Liberals don’t think that sovereignty is as important in practice as realists believe.
b) Realism
i) The main actors on the world stage are states, which are legally sovereign actors
(1) Sovereignty means: there is no actor above the state that can compel it to act
in specific ways.
(2) According to this view, other actors such as MNCs or IOs have to work within
the framework of inter-state relations.
ii) Realists see human nature as centrally important and human nature is viewed as
selfish.
(1) As a result, international politics represents a struggle for power among states,
with each trying to maximize its national interest.
iii) Order that exists in world politics is the result of the workings of a mechanism aka
balance of power
(1) whereby states act in order to prevent any one state from dominating
(a) World politics is all about bargaining and alliances
(i) Diplomacy is the key mechanism for balancing various national
interests
(2) the most important tool available for implementing states’ foreign policies is
military force.
(a) Due to the belief that there is no sovereign body above states, world
politics is a self-help system in which states have to rely on their own
military resources to achieve their ends.
iv) A variance to realism has emerged in the 70s and 80s —> neorealism
(1) This approach stresses the importance of the structure of the international
system in affecting the behavior of all states
(a) During the cold war, 2 powers dominated the international system, and this
gave rise to certain rules of behavior
, (i) Now that the cold war is over, the structure of world politics is said to
be moving towards multipolarity which neorealist believe involves
different rules of the game
c) Social Constructivism
i) relatively new approach in IR
(1) Developed in the US in the late 80s and since the mid 1990s has become much
more influential
(2) This approach arose out of fall of the Soviet empire
(a) These events indicated that human agency had a much greater potential
role in world politics than implied by realism or liberalism
(3) The theoretical underpinnings of social constructivism are much older
(a) They relate to a series of social scientific and philosophical works dispute
the notion that the social world is external to the people who live in it, and
is not easily changed.
ii) Argues that we make and remake the social world and so there is much more of a
role for human agency than realism and liberalism allow
iii) Those who set the world as fixed underestimate the possibilities for human
progress and for the betterment of people’s lives.
(1) In this way, social constructivism strongly overlaps with liberalism and can be
seen as providing the social theory underpinnings of liberal political theories
of world politics.
(2) Alexander Wendt (one of the most influential constructivist theorists): even
the self-help international system portrayed by realists is something that we
make and remake—anarchy is what states make of it
(a) Therefore, the world that realists portray as natural or given is in fact far
more open to change
(i) Constructivists think that self help is only one possible response to the
anarchical structure of world politics.
(ii) The structure of world politics is subject to change, but so also are the
identities and interests that neorealism or neoliberalism take as given.
1. Constructivists think its a fundamental mistake to think of world
politics as something that we cannot change
d) Marxist Theories
i) A marxist paradox: one the one hand Marxist theory has been incredibly
influential historically but on the other it has been less influential in the discipline
of IR than either realism or liberalism
(1) From a marxist POV, both realism and liberalism serve the class and imperial
interests of the most powerful actors in world politics to the detriment of most
of the rest of the world
ii) Most important feature of world politics is that it takes place in a highly unequal
world capitalist economy
(1) In this world economy, most important actors are classes, and the behavior of
all other actors is ultimately explicable by class forces
iii) the world economy severely constrains states’ freedom of maneuver, especially
that of smaller and weaker states.
, iv) World politics is seen as the setting in which class conflicts are played out
v) In the branch of Marxism called world systems theory, the key features of the
international economy is the division of the world into core, semi-periphery, and
periphery areas.
(1) In the semi-periphery and the periphery there exist cores that are tied into the
capitalist world economy, while even in the core area that are peripheral
economic areas.
(2) What matters is the dominance of the power not of states but of global
capitalism, and it’s these forces that ultimately determine main political
patterns in world politics.
vi) Sovereignty is not nearly as important for Marxist theorists as for realists (since it
refers to political and legal matters, whereas the most important feature of world
politics is the degree of economic autonomy, and here Marxist theorists see all
states as having to play by the rules of the international capitalist economy)
e) Poststructuralism
i) Reached international theory in the mid-1980s but has been super popular in
recent years
ii) Also sometimes referred to as postmodernism.
iii) Various definitions:
(1) One simple definition by Jean-Francois Lyotard: “post modern is incredulity
towards meta narratives”
(a) Meta narrative means any theory that asserts it has clear foundations for
making knowledge claims and involved a foundational epistemology.
iv) Concerned with distrusting and exposing any account of human life that claims to
have direct access to “the truth”
(1) Realism, liberalism, social constructivism, and even Marxism, are all suspect
from a poststructuralist perspective bc they claim to have uncovered some
fundamental truth about the world.
v) Important poststructuralist in IR argues that power produces knowledge.
(1) All power requires knowledge and all knowledge relies on an d reinforces
existing power relations
(a) there’s no such thing as truth existing outside of power
f) Postcolonial and decolonize approaches
i) Postcolonial scholars question whether Eurocentric theories can really purport to
explain world politics as a whole
ii) Post-colonialism has also become more popular since 9/11 which encouraged ppl
to try to understand how the histories of the West and Global South have been
intertwined
iii) Postcolonial scholars argue that the dominant theories, specially realism and
liberalism, are not neutral in terms of race, gender, and class, but have helped
secure the domination of the western world
(1) It suggests that Marxism didn’t pay sufficient attention toe the way that racial
and gendered identities and power relations were central to upholding class
power
iv) Decolonial scholarship takes it one step further and thinks about how to
“decolonize” the dominant theories and ways of knowing.
g) Feminism
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