Over the course of these past few weeks, we have covered a
lot of different theories of international relations. When I first came to this
class, I only had the general idea of the international system as it is
portrayed in the classical realist theory. I knew there was a balance of power
in this anarchic system and international politics was a zero-sum game.
Being vehemently opposed to this point of view because I
have always had an idealistic view on life, I argued that this system of
anarchy could not possibly prevail. I considered mankind to be in this state of
evolution (probably something I learned from classical anthropology) whereby
one day we would reach a stage where there would be no more wars and John
Lennon’s ghost would sing Kumbaya in
a free for all concert in Antarctica. My first blog post regarding the Hoffman
reading concluded with me saying that realism is ‘frozen’ and needs to be more
flexible in its approach. Sir Nausherwan’s comment said ‘I think you'll find
realism to be considerably more flexible and sophisticated than how Hoffmann
explained it…..IR will continue to develop and hopefully you'll have a more
holistic understanding of it by the end of this course.”
He wasn’t wrong
because we do see how flexible realism has progressively gotten over the course
of the past few readings. We’ve analyzed seemingly rigid concepts like anarchy
and assessed many different meanings and interpretations of the word. We’ve
learnt about offensive and defensive realism which add more complexity to the
debate in IR theory. Our understanding of interests in terms of hard power and
soft power has increased. We have looked at primal human instincts a lot and
how they fit into IR according to the bureaucratic model by Morton and
Halperin.
We have seen attempts to broaden the scope of IR theory such
as Realist Liberalism by John Herz in which he tries to accommodate both sides
of the Great Debate. In all likelihood, we have only scratched the surface of
international relations and it should be interesting to know how our viewpoints
change as we study some more realism (because it never stops) and move onto
constructivism. We're on the yellow brick road headed to Oz, but the writing on the signs is very small and a hundred pages long every week. Should be fun.
Great post Zuhair and I'm glad to see the evolution of your thought. So while we may briefly touch on realism in the coming weeks ahead, we have indeed moved significantly further down the yellow brick road. We will be grappling with new theoretical frameworks such as liberalism, constructivsm, postmodernism and other '-isms' in the coming weeks ahead. The hope is by the end of the course, you'll have good working knowledge of IR theory and can then apply that when looking at events in the "real" world.
ReplyDeleteOur time in the Land of Oz is brief, but let's milk it for all its worth!