Change

Abstract

Radical contingency and a strict focus on endogeneity are almost absent from a century of inquiry into the nature of world politics. Since the works of Aristotle, change has instead been conceptualized as a result of “efficient causes,”¹ which puts emphasis on agency and not on structure. The literature on change resembles the discussions of crisis in that it has only recently become more interested in complex and unpredictable dynamics and structural dislocation. The three most influential and most widely cited books in the field, according to a study published by the journal Foreign Policy in 2005, are Robert Keohane’s After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (1984), Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (1979), and Alexander Wendt’s Social Theory of International Politics (1999). The Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) Project later unveiled the continuing relevance of the grand IR theories developed here.² According to the TRIP survey, “realism” is still regarded as the “paradigm” with the highest share in contemporary IR publishing, followed by liberalism and constructivism. Whether this reflects the actual distribution of shares in IR publishing will not be the question here; nor will there be an interrogation of the method of the survey.³ Interestingly, Marxism, the English School and feminism are categorized as “also-rans,” and the results are reflected in what IR experts in many countries name as the “scholars who have produced the best work in the field of IR in the past 20 years”—Alexander Wendt, Robert Keohane, John Mearsheimer and James Fearon—all of them Americans, and all of them more or less corresponding with a “mainstream” audience characterized by a rationalist-neo-positivist-materialist orientation—with only Wendt seeking a via media between different angles.