THEORIES OF

GLOBAL POLITICS

Realist Theory
Based on combined ideas of human selfishness/egoism
and the structural implications of international anarchy
Implies a strong tendency towards conflict, though open
violence and war can be constrained by the balance of
power
The key dynamics in the international system flow from
the distribution of power (capabilities) between and
among states

Liberal Theory
Based on a belief in harmony or balance
Free trade, democracy, and the construction of
international organizations lead to peace, cooperation
and integration
Over time, however, neoliberalism has become
increasingly indistinct from realism

Critical Theories since 1980s

Key theories include Marxism, social constructivism,
post-structuralism, feminism, green politics and
postcolonialism
In different ways, critical theorists challenge norms,
values and assumptions on which the global status quo
is based
Many theorists question the belief that there is an
objective reality out there separate from the beliefs,
ideas and assumptions of the observer

Michel Foucault

On Madness and Civilization (interview held in 1971)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzoOhhh4aJg

Critical Perspectives (P.67)

Embracing post-positivist approaches
Intimately linking subject and object
No truth or fact out there
Theory is not neutral toward reality
Theory is always for someone for something
(R. Cox: P.120)
For critical theorists, knowledge is always
political

Critique of Enlightenment
Problem: Age of Enlightenment
Focused on reason, science, freedom
Direct causes: the Two Total War
Came out of technology, science and nation-state
Apparently there is something wrong with
Enlightenment
Something we cannot see properly
As we mostly narrate its positive sides

Marxism
Marxism is two things
Political project
Analysis of system of capitalism

Political project has lost popularity since

1990s
Globalisation has sparked the more interest
in Marxist analysis
Intensification of capitalist order

Marxism
Marx viewed history as a dialectical process where
internal contradictions within each mode of production,
reflected in class conflict, lead to social revolution and the
construction of a new and higher mode of production
Slavery Feudalism Capitalism Communism
Historical materialism
Analysis of capitalist mode of production
Capitalists have to rob the workers of labour value in order to
increase their investments

Hegemony
Element of culture was developed
by Antonio Gramsci
Why did not the revolution take
place?

Bourgeois is not simply in political

power
It controls cultural institutions: church,
education, media

Hegemony is not just top-down

The workers internalized it

Two strands of Marxism

Materialism and Culture
Materialism developed into the Dependency and World
Systems theories
Studying economic ties between the developed world and the
third world

Culture developed into the Frankfurt school

Focusing on the way in which Capitalism is naturalized
through culture
Machinery and de-humanization (The Holocaust)

Dependency and World Systems

Theories
Marx did not care about the region outside
Europe
Dependency theory:
highlighted the extent to which, in the post-1945 period,
traditional imperialism had given way to neo-colonialism or
dollar imperialism.

World-systems theory:
The world-system consists of interrelationships between
the core, the periphery, and semi-periphery.

World Map in 1914

World Map after 1945

Post Structuralism
We do not use language but language shapes who we are

Power is the discursive ability to determine what is normal

Power does not often look like dangerous but rather rational
Excluding mad, prisoner, drug user, homo sexual

Power does not come from individuals or elites

Intersubjective: Both winners and losers participate

Post Structuralismcontinued
Criticizing Western meta narratives
Christianity (absolute and universalism), Science, Progress,
Individualism, Freedom, Justice
Meta-narratives are naturalized: We do not experience them

as narratives but as real

Deconstruction: De-naturalizing meta-narratives at hand and
trying to see beyond veil

Panopticon
Originally Benthams idea
From punishment to self-discipline

Feudal Society
Physical punishment

Modern Society
Education, military, citizenship

Social Media
Constant self-surveillance: looking at ourselves through the eyes of
the others

Social Constructivism
Both Realism and Liberalism claim decision making is
rational
SC claims we are part of social systems and which affect
our decision making
We just follow expectations usually without thinking
Constructivists do not regard the social world as something out
there, in the sense of an external world of concrete objects;
instead, it exists only inside (p. 71)
How does the constructivist regard the self?

Agent-Structure problem
M. Weber: Actors are free and
individual agents

E. Durkheim: Actors are socialized

into social systems
Bottom up or Top down?

Anthony Giddens
Its not top down or bottom up but
both
Who we are comes from social
structure
Our action affect that structure
It is a continuous dynamism
- In 1980s SC was marginalized,
but today half of IR scholars are
constructivists

Feminism
Comes to close to our daily lifes
Seems to cast us a fixed role: Men as
sexist and women as victims
Response: Men are not (always) dicks
Social Constructivist Approach:
Women are not born as women but socially
constructed as being Women (and men are vice
versa)

Feminismcontinued (1)
Criticizing male-dominant politics
The roles of women are ignored and exploited in the
male-dominated international bodies and institutions
This statement was, however, seen unscientific

Since 1990s the theory has got more

supporters in IR
Power comes from social structures:
In which both winners and loser partake

Feminismcontinued (2)
Politics is, therefore, not about the states
or governments:
Everyday is a game of power between social
individualism
The personal is political

Myth of Protection
Classical views:
Men soldiers protect women and
children
In practice, men soldiers hurt women

Feminist view:
Powerless women can be used as a
tool

Green Politics
Addressing the issues such as limits to
growth and population time bomb
Sustainable development
The balance between modernization and
environmental degradation
Eco-socialist regards environmental crisis is
produced by capitalist economic system
which commodified nature and draws it into
system of market exchange

World Population

World Hunger Map

Post Colonialism
Colonialism (16th C to 1945)
Monopoly trade (1500-1800)
Capital investment (1800-1945)

After WWII (since 1945)

Creation of the Third World
Invention of development

Post Colonialism: Change & Continuity

Change = formal freedom & equality
Continuity = informal hierarchy, inequality, dependency

Edward Said (1935-2003)

Born in Jerusalem (Palestine)
under Christian family
High schooled in Egypt and immigrated to the US for
undergraduate and graduate studies (BA at Princeton,
MA and Ph.D. at Harvard)
Taught at the Columbia University more than 40 years
Sympathetic with Muslims in Palestine

Orientalism
They cannot represent themselves: they
must be represented
Colonized subjects
Muslims
Poor workers
Ethnic minorities
Women

Saids own experience

Much of the personal investment in this
study derives from my awareness of being
an Oriental as child growing up in two
British colonies. All of my education, in those
colonies (Palestine and Egypt) and the
United States, has been Western, and yet
that deep early awareness has persisted

Saids own experience (2)

In many ways my study of Orientalism has
been an attempt to inventory the traces upon
me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose
domination has been so powerful a factor in the
life of all Orientals. This is why for me the
Islamic Orient has had to be the center of
attentionAnyone resident in the West since
the 1950s, particularly in the United States, will
have lived through an era of extraordinary
turbulence in the relationship of East and West

On Orientalism
Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the
corporate institution for dealing with the Orient--dealing with it by making statement about it,
authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it,
settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a
Western style for dominating, restructuring, and
having authority over the Orient (p.3).
Said is much influenced by Michel Foucaults works.
The relationship between Occident and Orient is a
relationship of power and domination

Saids question on objectivity in

scholarship
What I am interested in doing now is
suggesting how the general liberal consensus
that true knowledge is fundamentally nonpolitical (and conversely, that overtly political
knowledge is not true knowledge) obscures
the highly if obscurely organized political
circumstances obtaining when knowledge is
produced
The US social scientists studying Russia or
Vietnam were not objective at all (p.11)

Knowledge and Power

Foucault: Power is not cohesion
We do not feel power as it that way, rather power
naturalizes our social relationship

Naturalization has two sides

Dominant: Understand privilege as natural
Marginalized: Looking at oneself through the eyes of
dominant,