Call it cliché if you want, but at times an interest in international relations feels like something that I was pushed into because of my personal history, rather than something I actively chose to pursue. I was born and raised in Jerusalem, Israel (or Al-Quds depending on who you ask), a diverse and ancient city whose contested international identity is so central to the perspectives of the two peoples which inhabit it that it acts as the definitive symbol for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Every family dinner, every personal introduction, every friendship has at some point compelled me to voice an opinion on or at the very least to provide an explanation for the situation in my hometown and the conflict which surrounds it.
I know what you’re thinking and don’t worry, I will not use this blog to ramble endlessly about the conflict or the region and how ‘my side’ is always right and ‘their side’ is always wrong. The above introduction serves a different purpose. Even though in the minds of many my connection to Israel would point to me being an ardent follower of the ‘realist’ school, I instead find Israel and its context to be a good starting point from which to question the validity of the realist paradigm and the concept of the ‘real world’ on which it both depends and which it supposedly seeks to describe. In my mind, the ever-shifting and widely divisive context which I happened to be born in to illustrates the problems with the positivist claim that the naturalism of the ‘hard sciences’ can be entirely applicable to a humanly constructed, artificial, and thus innately ideological phenomenon – namely, so-called ‘international relations.’
Thus, I find it puzzling that realists claim to study the world at a distance, with the same objectivity of a scientist in the lab, when the world they are studying is itself a human construction. Surely, the governing ‘rules’ of such a system, if any are ever even found, will be susceptible to shift with the tides of human experience and behaviour unlike any phenomenon in the “traditional” sciences. The rules governing mathematics, chemistry, kinetics, and so on, existed long before human observation of them made them known. Yet the supposed ‘rules’ of international relations (of which none are readily agreed upon) are entirely the product of human behaviour and owe their ‘universality’ not only to the continuation of that behaviour but to its continuation in a consistent manner, something which to me seems impossible.
This is all to say that I think that the palpable existential crisis which IR seems to be undergoing is warranted and reflects the inherent complexity of studying something which depends on understanding human beings. In that sense this supposedly terminal illness in the field, namely its insistence on internally questioning its very foundations, identity, and purpose, is not only productive but necessary. We as human beings, in our infinite intricacies, are not rocks or gravity or hydrogen or any other invariable element of the natural world. And a field which seeks to explain our behaviour on the grandest, most productive, most destructive, and most important of scales (that is, the global scale) would, in my opinion, be wise to take this complexity in to account.