With Higher Education becoming increasingly commodified and education being again available only to those who can pay for it, we intend here to make a small contribution to education as a public good, available to all for free.
The War on Iraq and the US and British invasion of the country in 2003 has led to huge tensions in geopolitics. At the same time, the supposed ‘threat’ of international terrorism and continuing financial turmoil in the world economy have both brought to the fore the global politics of co-operation and confrontation. Whilst it might be possible to agree on the significance of these events, the explanation and/or understanding of them is dependent on prior theoretical choices.
On this website, we provide material on theories and concepts in International Relations. The material is introductory and provides a broad overview of the multiplicity of different IR theories currently debated within the discipline. The overall aim of the resource is to provide a solid theoretical and conceptual grounding of this diversity. As a result, it be possible to recognise not only how international theory informs policy-making and practice but also, perhaps, how truly contested the underlying assumptions of world politics are.
In more detail, the online resource is divided into three parts. After a discussion of Why Theory in the first session, highlighting especially the important difference between positivist and post-positivist IR theory, we will then cover three sets of positivist IR theories, i.e. neo-realism, liberalism and constructivism. The fourth session on constructivism, considering that some constructivists pursue a post-positivist line of enquiry, provides a bridge to the second bloc of sessions consisting of post-positivist approaches including feminist, historical materialist, poststructuralist and postcolonial theories. The third and final bloc of sessions includes the discussion of agency-structure, the role of ideas in IR and the more general purpose of IR theory. Here, we will review the theories introduced earlier by assessing their positions on these conceptual themes.
We hope that people will find this online resource interesting and useful for their own thinking about structural change in the global political economy.
Sydney, Australia and Nottingham, UK
Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton