ADVANCED THEORY OF
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
SUMMARY
,1
,Inhoud
WEEK 1...................................................................................................................................................3
Carvalho: The Big Bangs of IR: the Myths that your teachers till tell you about 1648 and 1919....3
Ringmar: Audience for a Giraffe: European Expansionism and the Quest for the Exotic................5
WEEK 2...................................................................................................................................................6
Mallard and McGoey – Strategic ignorance and global governance: and ecumenical (=
representing a number of different Christian churches) to epistemologies of global power.........6
WEEK 3...................................................................................................................................................9
Gaston: The idea of the epistemological obstacle..........................................................................9
Zanotti: questioning universalism, devising an ethics without foundations: an exploration of IR
ontologies and epistemologies.....................................................................................................10
Lobo-Guerrero: The technological transcendence of liberalism...................................................13
WEEK 4.................................................................................................................................................16
Bartelson: Introduction: Sovereignty and Fire..............................................................................16
Ferguson and Mansbach: Polities past and Present.....................................................................22
Oakeshott: History is a Fable........................................................................................................23
Weldes: Representing Missiles in Cuba........................................................................................24
WEEK 5.................................................................................................................................................24
Cox: Social Forces, States and World Orders (critical theory).......................................................24
Guzzini: A reconstruction of Constructvism in IR..........................................................................29
Mohanty: ‘Under Western Eyes’ revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles..32
Herbort et al.: The West: a securitizing community?....................................................................33
WEEK 6.................................................................................................................................................37
Waltz: Structural Realism after the Cold War...............................................................................37
Axelrod and Keohane: Achieving cooperation under anarchy: Strategies and Institutions..........40
Kratochwil & Ruggie: International organization: a state of the art on an art of the state...........43
Williams: Why ideas Matter in IR: Morgenthau, Classical Realism, and the Moral Construction of
Power Politics...............................................................................................................................47
Duedney and Ikenberry: Liberal World.........................................................................................51
Lecture notes Advanced Theory of International Relations..................................................................52
Lecture 1 – 9/9/20........................................................................................................................52
Lecture 2: 16/9/2020....................................................................................................................54
Lecture 3: 23/9/2020....................................................................................................................57
Lecture 5: 7/10/2020....................................................................................................................61
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, WEEK 1
Carvalho: The Big Bangs of IR: the Myths that your
teachers till tell you about 1648 and 1919
1648: “Birth” of the sovereign state + anarchic states-system
1919: “Birth” of IR
“The lack of dialogue between left and right hands of the discipline (mainstream vs. revisionist)
concerning history and historiography is highly detrimental to the discipline and its ability to make
sense of the subject matter that it purports to have unique expertise in.”
Myth of 1648: provides a distorted view of how the modern sovereign state and states-system came
into being – and thus of the naturalness and quality of the basic units that IR takes for granted a
rigid statis ontology that is ill-equipped to handle the challenges of global governance, suzerainty,
empire and international hierarchy.
Revisionist critique: neither the modern state nor the anarchic states-system originated in 1648 + the
initiation of sovereignty was all but missing within the Treaties of Westphalia, which in fact
comprised a constitutional document for the Holy Roman Empire.
Sovereignty and international hierarchies did not just come into being in 1648 in Europe.
International hierarchies, albeit under anarchy, have been the norm in world politics in the last 400
years, the sovereign state being the bare exception. So: neither sovereignty not the anarchic
international system originated at Westphalia. It was instead the result of a long process of change.
Textbooks perpetuate the myth and an important underlying denominator is Eurocentrism – “the
ideas of sovereignty and the anarchic international system was created by the Europeans all by
themselves”. This is not true: there are influences to be found from China, India, the Middle East and
the Americas post-1492.
Myth of 1919: this is detrimental in at least 4 ways:
1) It presents the discipline as an a-historical extrapolation backwards of current development
and concerns in IR
2) It allows for a reading of the historiography of the discipline where certain theoretical
perspectives win out due to their ability to best explain the so-called ‘real world’.
3) It glosses over the Eurocentric and racist foundations of the discipline, because of:
- Whiggish reading of the disciplines birth
- empiricist epistemology (knowledge = based on experience derived from the senses)
cannot deal with the challenges IR faces today.
4) IR was miraculously born overnight in 1919 = a problematic assumption
The myth itself consists of 3 elements:
1) IR was ‘born’ in 1919
2) The discipline was born out of the calamities of WWI and was established as an idealist
attempt to solve the problem of war.
3) Interwar idealism lost out to realism in the First Great Debate (idealists vs. realists), due to
idealism’s failure in theory and in practice either to prevent or explain the increasing
interstate violence of the 1930s that culminated in WWII.
When the first bit of historiographical consciousness came around the 1970s, it was essentially about
asserting realism as the dominant theoretical approach in IR by virtue of its embrace of positivism as
a means of explaining the so-called ‘realities’ of international relations, rather than founding its
analysis on a priori ‘idealist-political’ foundation.
Debunking the myth:
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