Specialisation Course
International Relations
MSc in Political Science (track International Relations)
2020-2021
Semester 1 block 1
,UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM SPECIALISATION COURSE IR
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, UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM SPECIALISATION COURSE IR
Table of Contents
Lecture 1: International Relations Theory – The Anarchy Problematique ............................ 5
Q&A Session 1: IR Theory – The State of the Art FINISH! ............................................... 16
Seminar 1: IR Theory – The End of International Relations? ............................................. 18
Debate 1: Climate Change and the Paris Agreement ........................................................... 34
Essay 1: International Relations Theory .............................................................................. 71
Lecture 2: Conflict and Security – International Conflict ................................................... 74
Q&A Session 2: Conflict and Security – War and Armed Conflict .................................... 91
Seminar 2: Conflict and Security – Civil War ..................................................................... 93
Lecture 3: Research – Migration and Externalisation........................................................ 107
Q&A Session 3: Research – Migration and Externalisation .............................................. 123
Debate 2: Humanitarian Intervention and R2P .................................................................. 125
Essay 2: Conflict & Security.............................................................................................. 128
Lecture 4: International Political Economy – Explaining Openness and Protectionism ... 137
Q&A Session 4: IPE – The Consequences of Openness ................................................... 150
Seminar 3: IPE – Pathways to Economic Development .................................................... 151
Lecture 5: Research – State Building................................................................................. 160
Q&A Session 5: Research – State Building....................................................................... 174
Debate 3: International Trade ............................................................................................ 176
Essay 3: State Building ...................................................................................................... 178
Lecture 6: International Organisation ................................................................................ 187
Q&A Session 6: The Power of IOs .................................................................................... 200
Seminar 4: IOs – Institutional Complexity and Pathologies .............................................. 201
Debate 4: The Refugee Crisis and the EU ......................................................................... 212
Essay 4: International Organisations ................................................................................. 214
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, UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM SPECIALISATION COURSE IR
SPECIALISATION COURSE INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Lecture 1: International Relations Theory – The Anarchy
Problematique
31/08/2020
Lecturer: Darshan Vigneswaran
Good research begins with good questions. IR plays host to a series of intriguing and
compelling theoretical conversations because it has a common concern with a particular type
of puzzle: how is order produced in conditions of anarchy? This became a troubling question
in the early twentieth century as governments struggled to address the problems of seemingly
recessive conflict amongst European states. How could we create a lasting peace when
governments continually sought to resolve their disagreements through resort to armed force?
The World Wars were the first of a series of urgent problems that seemed fraught by the
absence of a global government and that demanded means of encouraging states to choose
collaboration over competition. Efforts to build international organizations, create common
markets, reduce global poverty and inequality and meet the urgent threats to our shared
environment pose similar puzzles. Practices, norms, rules and institutions have emerged to
ameliorate the absence of a global governing force. As such, they have become core concerns
of this expanding field.
The anarchy problematique serves as a useful portrait of 20th century IR in the United States.
As the discipline has globalised and as we moved into the 21st century, various groups of
scholars began to question whether anarchy constituted the best organising principle for a
common research agenda on global politics. Indeed, some have asked whether the field of IR
can be meaningfully conceived as sharing a focal point of inquiry anymore. Now the spent
debate between rationalism and constructivism is giving way to new opportunities for
collaboration, in the form of empirically oriented, mid-range and pluralist theoretical
development. At the same time, new forms of divides appear to be growing within key
paradigms, such as the empiricists vs. meta-theorists in positivist research and the structuralists
vs. post-structuralists in post-positivist research.
This week aims to provide you to with the materials to both pose and begin to answer broad
questions about the nature, purpose and evolution of the field. The lecture will demonstrate
how the concept of anarchy was used to frame intellectual inquiries into a variety of global
political problems and then discuss the theoretical conversation between rationalism and
constructivism that this helped to generate. In the second hour of the lecture we will move on
to consider emerging forms of theoretical collaboration and division to give you a sense of the
cutting edge of theoretical development in the field. The seminar will then seek to apply these
concepts to thinking about a concrete research problem. Finally, the debate seeks to apply these
principles to make sense of one the most urgent global governance issues of our time: climate
change. More specifically, we will ask what was achieved in the Paris meetings of 2015.
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, UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM SPECIALISATION COURSE IR
Anarchy is what States Make of it: The Social Construction of Power Politics – Alexander
Wendt (1991)
Social- and critical construtivist (Critical Global Security Studies module, UoY)
• Foundational (material reality) vs anti-foundational (no reality outside discourse),
theory privileged over material 'facts'
• They say we understand the reality through created meanings which all understood
differently in each culture, IR and the international system is human creation of shared
norms and ideas, state identity is pre-given
• They claim that realists have failed to foreseen the end of the Cold War, perceptions
constantly change, brute fact of military capacity is given meaning via interpretations
and shared knowledge
• Critical constructivism is anti-foundational (no objective world outside discourse and
language), constructs are related to context of power, those in power can tell what
security is, identity is produced via what is 'secured' and 'threat', shaping the self-other
image, state-identity emerges through discourse, critical security studies broaden the
understanding of security away from military meanings, denaturalising dominant
discourse
‘Wendtian’ contructivism
• Key constructivist text, he argues a constructivist version of the security dilemma
• Realism and liberalism both claim decision-making is rational, he shares rationalist
ideas
• But social systems, norms and values shape state decisions
• The security dilemma is a feature of international relations
• But realist approaches fail to grasp a key point: states give meaning to the security
dilemma – states give meaning to anarchy and the issue of self-help
• Mistrustful states assume the worst about other states and so define their interests in
self-help terms, states give the meaning of the system, state is the author of the structure
• But perceptions of states, relationships and interests of those states can change, in fact,
they are always changing
• Brute fact of military capacity is given meaning via interpretation and shared
knowledge
Constructivism in International Relations: Sources, Contributions, and Debates –
Emanuel Adler (chapter 5 in the Handbook of International Relations, 2013)
Sources
• Empirical research, just as much as any other research method, originally it analysed
the construction of social reality by norms, now it increasingly analyses by rights and
normative implications of such contributions, the focus has shifted to identity and its
strategic consequences
• Philosophical and sociological foundations of constructivism
o Constructivism is a metaphysical stance about the reality that scholars seek to
know about the knowledge with which they seek to interpret reality
o It is a social theory about the role of knowledge and knowledgeable agents in
the constitution of social reality
o It is a theoretical and empirical perspective, saying that IR research and theory
should be based on sound social ontological and epistemological foundations
Contributions
• Became ‘naturalised’, scholars now research IR and world politics through a
constructivist or synthetic lens without ‘flag waving’
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