My interest in international relations was originally an expansion of my interest in politics in general, and has since supplanted it as domestic and local politics in my red home state have become both less inspiring of optimism and more removed from me physically and personally. On the one hand, I have a compulsive desire to take any given question or unknown and produce a comprehensive answer to it (eliminating uncertainty, which I don’t have much tolerance for in my daily life); on the other, I am fascinated by explorations of the decisions in the human world that have the most impact on the greatest number human lives – and the human world isn’t a particularly certain place, nor one that lends itself to comprehensive answers (as Marx’s writings show, and, clairvoyant or not, I am no Marx).

International relations, for me, provides a whole world to disambiguate that is already neatly problematized, all the more enticing since so many of those talking about it are given free rein to declare themselves “certain” about their view on the basis of certain argumentation while another countervailing perspective can be equally accepted in spite of running completely against the first; who doesn’t like to be right? The unstable epistemological and ontological frameworks of the subject, in other words, only serve to make it more attractive as both a challenge and opportunity to actually apply my brain beyond rote memorization or even the “free” response types of activities that are, in fact, bound by frameworks that strictly dictate just what kind of forms an answer to the freely-chosen problem can take. UBC’s history courses, tightly wound around analysis of and interaction with primary sources, have not been an entirely friendly place for me as I try to surf along more interesting social currents to find things that need explaining.

However, as I found in my original Theories of International Relations course during my first degree in France, I think the way IR “theories” have actually taken hold in my head is in the form of “lenses,” not as explanations with proven quanti-fides of the positivist-rationalist variety, as our book discusses – perhaps under the influence of our professor, a self-styled realist who nonetheless tolerated few bad words against the UN peacekeeping forces in which he was a ranking member (hardly a realist-minded mission, attempting to establish peace through a supranational entity). In fact, since reading John Searle’s book (The Construction of Social Reality, widely credited with the inception of the concept of social constructionism in social philosophy, which, even awarding merit to its critics alleging nothing new had been “inceived,” at least brought the concept to the fore of the fields most intimately tied to social structures), I can’t help but see the world we inhabit and the theories we craft to explain it in constructivist terms: as much as I like to look at the IR field as free and ambiguous, that I completely disregard the possibility of there being a world “out there” to quantify, I find myself at odds with the (former?) basis of this discipline that fascinates me. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I find people too interesting to atomize them (that is, treat them statically the way the unimaginative who ended up in the natural sciences treat literal atoms).

In this regard, I feel more comfortable in this course than I have in the few other POLI courses I’ve taken at UBC. My patience wears thin with people who are critical for lack of other defining features, but I haven’t rolled my eyes in class yet; I get bored out of my mind when I’m limited by things I can assign a confidence interval to, and feel relatively confident I won’t be required to replace the batteries in my graphing calculator any time soon. But feeling comfortable in the course, not feeling out place, isn’t my way of saying I’m in my comfort zone – my last theory course presented the lenses idea as a given, and skirted around the exceedingly difficult question the word theory poses; this course, that I will admit I expected to be more review than effort, is promising a healthy re-take at what I think I know, and attractive or not, certainty and the ossification it begets are not healthy in the pursuit of knowledge: brittle perspectives can only break with time.