The core reason I was drawn to the content of this course was I hoped it would address the idea that IR theories have been continually changing, and expanding to the point that its theorists can no longer agree on what the important aspects to study even are. In class, it was mentioned that historically IR boundaries were confined to male-oriented realists who strictly studied the state as the main actor of this subject. Recently it has become a blend of many different perspectives, some which focus on finer details within the state such as foreign policies in order to examine how states interact with each other on the international platform. This leads the study away from simply causes and effects of war on states, but to further international issues such as various humanitarian crises.

One concept that really stuck out to me from the first few lectures was Kal Holsti’s opinion that the expansion of theories bringing about an ‘erosion of consensus’ in IR has been a negative aspect. I don’t believe this to be true as in all other subjects, even the hard sciences, scholars are consistently debating about different concepts and recreating each other’s experiments and studies in order to concretely explain hypotheses. There could be many mistakes in the general knowledge we have today if everyone had just accepted new ideas at face value and refrained from diving deeper and reflecting on concepts with their own experiences and ideas. In my opinion, it is a very positive thing that you could potentially have multiple different answers to the same question depending on which IR theorist you asked. This way you can take the best points from each answer and build off one another to encourage a greater understanding of IR and its many different perspectives and not get stuck looking through the same single lens. In the conclusion of Chapter 1, Kurki and Wright explain that IR theorists are like salespeople trying to validate their own theory and delegitimize another. This is consistent with my stance above that all claims are open for criticism and debate which will help to positively progress theory through interpretation from other thinkers.

In the introduction of the textbook, it talks about how theory is necessary for the study of IR because if asked explicit questions about why states behave the way they do, leaders may lie to cover the real reasons behind their decisions. On the other hand, state leaders may not even be fully aware of what drives the decisions and actions they make. I think that theory can also help to predict state actions or policies in the future by evaluating a state’s past positions on a particular issue and categorizing this with specific ideologies. This categorization can help to explain the reasoning behind certain actions even when leaders and decision makers don’t identify the underlying causes.

Greg

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