Abstract
Many of the participants in robust debates about theories of international relations are, in a sense, talking past each other. The incompatibilities and occasional excesses of debate arise from serious misunderstandings of what our craft is all about, what we do, and what we should be doing.
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- 1.
This text was first published as: “Hindrances to Understanding in International Relations,” Chap. 2, pp. 27–45 in Jose V. Ciprut (ed). The Art of the Feud: Reconceptualizing International Relations. Westport CT: Praeger, 2000. The permission to republish this text was granted on 10 March 2015 by the Copyright Clearance Center.
- 2.
It is perhaps one of the curiosities of contemporary debates in international theory that the relevant literatures happen to be predominantly in the English language.
- 3.
A less generous interpretation, and one that is open to serious criticism, is the thinking of some postmodernist and poststructuralist critics who argue that theories of international relations are little more than apologias for vested interests, in particular those of the American capitalist Cold War state (cf. George 1994). This rendering displays little familiarity with the development of international theory over the centuries. Rousseau’s highly critical stance against monarchism, Woodrow Wilson’s theoretical subversion of the principles of Realpolitik, and Karl Deutsch’s anti-statism may be for something, including knowledge, but they certainly did not promote conservative interests, no matter how those might be defined.
- 4.
This discussion of what theorists do is by no means exhaustive. In addition to the activities mentioned, there are others such as definitional and taxonomic work, the empirical identification of trends, and speculation about their consequences as well as formal explanations of limited phenomena such as alliances, regional integration, and the like. As for methodological work, Peterson (1992: 6–9) mentions deconstruction of error, such as in eliminating ‘falsehoods’ generated by sex-biased inquiry (but why not by nation- or class-biased inquiry?); reconstruction of fact (as when incorporating women’s activities and perspectives); and the reconstruction of theory, which involves a rethinking of fundamental relations among knowledge, power, and community.
- 5.
There are some exceptions to the discussion. Rousseau, for example, viewed all forms of interaction between states and societies as mere instruments of state stratagems to deal with conflicts. Hence, trade and international law were parts of the state’s armory for waging campaigns against adversaries, rather than aspects of international cooperation and collaboration.
- 6.
Scholarship continues to harbor implicit and explicit national biases A comprehensive review of the comparative foreign policy literature (Hudson 1995) demonstrates that a vast majority of studies use the United States as their data or case study source. Of 228 bibliography items, I have found only 24 (or 10.5 %) to be genuinely comparative or focused explicitly on a country other than the United States. Those lacking in theoretically inspired foreign policy studies include France, Germany, and England, to say nothing of Nigeria, India, and Brazil. Comparative foreign policy, a subfield of international relations, that aspires to universal and comparative status, utilizes only a single country out of more than a possible 185 as the predominant empirical basis for its ‘comparative’ generalizations.
- 7.
A succinct analysis of the science/value debate can be found in Nicholson (1996), esp. Chap. 9.
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Holsti, K. (2016). Hindrances to Understanding in International Relations. In: Kalevi Holsti: A Pioneer in International Relations Theory, Foreign Policy Analysis, History of International Order, and Security Studies. SpringerBriefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice, vol 41. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26624-4_7
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