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As a third year International Relations student, I will admit that in selecting course 367B I had relatively modest expectations as to the potential for learning something completely new. I believed that my first year had provided me with a sufficient education regarding the internal debates of the discipline- having covered the theories of realism, liberalism and constructivism to a degree within my first year and having felt comfortable applying them in a, in hindsight, very general way within discussion and written work.

Of course, learning is concerned not only with known unknowns, but unknown unknowns, to crib from Rumsfeld. For me, the course has already begun to illustrate the extent to which much of the academic discipline of IR was an unknown unknown to me.

What conceptual grounding I did have, and my conception of the applicability of the various theories, was uncomfortably close to Professor Crawford’s recounting of the academic environment of the 1980s- realism was, in my mind, king, appealing to my own deeply held cynicism and appreciation for absolute principles such as the Six Principles of Political Realism expressed within Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations. Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, according to Mao- given the amount he was able to amass, I am inclined to agree with him.

Liberalism was at best naive and at worst wilfully ignorant in my eyes, this assessment being based on cherry-picked historical examples (such as the failure of the League of Nations and the various high-profile deficiencies of the United Nations) and a deliberate deconstruction of key arguments within it (e.g. Democratic Peace Theory being a driver of peace only dyadically rather than monadically, despite the precepts of the theory indicating that peace should be a general inclination of democracies regardless of who they are facing)

Constructivism, whilst not a theory I would dismiss out of hand, was something I felt to be rather specialised and lacking in practical application- as if the events of international relations are socially constructed, prediction of the progress of the world was extremely difficult to conduct, as by their very nature socially constructed realities are nigh impossible to discern when they are reality.

In general, theory seemed to me to boil down to unrealistic aspirations for utopia (liberalism), impractical, mainly academic analysis (constructivism), or a misanthropic but ultimately accurate conception of humankind as amoral, power hungry and tribal (realism). Not to mention, dry and simplistic assessments of human beings, who fail for the most part to conform to simplistic assessments of their motivations and behaviours.

I was therefore pleasantly surprised by Professor Crawford’s class from the outset- his focus upon the academic context whilst retaining crucial actual historical incidents as illustrative points served to force me to consider the blind-spots I had cultivated in my studies. I had never taken seriously the notion that my own process of receiving and processing knowledge might be fundamentally flawed, with epistemology being a vague consideration as I formulated my opinions on the status of the world and the causes and consequences of key international events.

Whilst my pessimistic belief in the supremacy of realism remains, Professor Crawford’s highlighting of the parochial nature of realism as a theory given the development of the international system in recent years has ignited my curiosity. Whilst we may not be able to come to a definitive conclusion as to any objective laws of international relations (there is no law in IR, which I found a concise and effective maxim to remember), I am confident through studying theories of IR I might be able to at least be able to anticipate one of a number of eventualities that may take place in various future scenarios. Just because I cannot define all of the variables in play, does not mean that they are meaningless, or that a more simplistic analysis is right. In this class, I hope to be able to understand my own limitations in interpreting events, and perhaps take a more eclectic theoretical approach.