Abstract
This chapter outlines a few post-positivist theories of international relations and compares them with positivist theories. At its core, the chapter aims to demonstrate that these two camps are not to be viewed as in constant turmoil, but in terms of complementarity and their objective contribution to the advancement of social science and IR. Thus, rather than critically comparing these two schools of thought, or focusing solely on their contradictions or strengths and weaknesses, it elucidates the complementary strengths of both these camps of thought. In addition, it outlines the relative advantages and disadvantages of both camps. In essence, in light of the standards used during that era, positivist theories seek to organise the early social scientific theories by using similar methods to those used to study the natural sciences. Post-positivist theories are a consortium of theories that are not particularly complimentary or unified in perspective with one another, but allied in their rejection, and critiques of core positivist rationales. Positivism was influenced by the wider political and social context of the time, just like post-positivism was, and still is influenced by contemporary social and international contexts. Both of these theoretical schools were conceived in lieu of (contrasting) social and international contexts. Positivism was devised with the advent of the Enlightenment and Renaissance movements. Post-positivism was devised later, after the World Wars and the Cold War, with the advent of new actors, opinions, values, and in sum a much larger variety of variables impacting the global order. In doing so, it has advanced the debate pertaining to theory and method in social science. With the advent of change in the international system and the global order, both schools have undergone revisions. Despite their differences, this chapter essentially strives to portray that both these schools are to be seen not from a perspective of opposing camps, but as genuine attempts to study the social and international systems as driven by the nuances and structural changes of the social and international systems and the resultant changes in global order.
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Another notable element is that there occurs some conflation in philosophical ontology, and scientific ontology from this debate. This is not addressed in this chapter, as it would exceed its scope.
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The debate involving positivism as a quarrel between philosophy and poetry was formulated as far back as Plato. See Egan, Kieran (1997). The Educated Mind. University of Chicago Press. pp. 115–116. “Positivism is marked by the final recognition that science provides the only valid form of knowledge and that facts are the only possible objects of knowledge; philosophy is thus recognised as essentially no different from science […] Ethics, politics, social interactions, and all other forms of human life about which knowledge was possible would eventually be drawn into the orbit of science […] The positivists’ program for mapping the inexorable and immutable laws of matter and society seemed to allow no greater role for the contribution of poets than had Plato. […] What Plato represented as the quarrel between philosophy and poetry is resuscitated in the “two cultures” quarrel of more recent times between the humanities and the sciences.”
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This distinction exceeds the domain of Realism, and is added for the purpose of substantiating a specific claim, which entails realist thinkers.
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For example, the “Correlates of War” (COW) project, founded at the University of Michigan in 1963 coded wars since 1816 but neglected “extra-state” wars, that is, imperial and colonial wars. It was criticized for reflecting a “historical legacy of Western Imperialism and racism that simply did not regard non-Western groups as civilized or as human beings equal to whites” and thus “did not bother to record in any systematic way the fatalities sustained by non-national groupings in imperial wars of conquest or pacification”. For details see Vasquez, John. (1993). The War Puzzle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p.27. The COW database later added 129 extra-state wars, with the help of revised methodology and new historical research (COW 2006: News & Notes).
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This is recommended to anyone who is interested in the philosophical details about positivism.
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Foucault, M. (1997). Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 (Vol. 1). Trans. C. Porter, New York: The New Press.
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Taylor, C. (1984). Foucault on freedom and truth. Political Theory, 12(2), 152–183.
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See for instance, Buzan, B. (2004). From international to world society? English school theory and the social structure of globalisation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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This holds for the past, as well as present era of IR scholarship. For facts and figures, see Wiebke Wemheuer-Vogelaar et al. (2016). The IR of the Beholder: Examining Global IR Using the 2014 TRIP Survey. International Studies Review 18(1): 16–32.
Further Readings
Jackson, R., & Sørensen, G. (2010). Introduction to international relations: Theories and approaches. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Reus-Smit, C., & Snidal, D. (Eds.). (2008). The Oxford handbook of international relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith, S., Booth, K., & Zalewski, M. (Eds.). (1996). International theory: Positivism and beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Baruah, I., Selleslaghs, J. (2020). Alternative Post-Positivist Theories of IR and the Quest for a Global IR Scholarship. In: Hosli, M.O., Selleslaghs, J. (eds) The Changing Global Order. United Nations University Series on Regionalism, vol 17. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21603-0_2
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