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Oxford University Press Summary §

• There is no easy way to access decision-makers’ reasons for their action and all world political events have many possible explanations. Therefore, we must always make certain assumptions about people’s motivations and the possible explanations of events. Thus, we are inevitably led into the realm of theory in explaining world politics.
• Explanations drawing on different assumptions can lead us to focus on different aspects of world political problems and to seeing world politics in very different ways. Recognizing the centrality, and the plurality, of theoretical frameworks and interpretations of events is important for a student of IR because there is always more than one story to tell about why something happened in world politics.
• Classically, key theoretical positions in IR have been considered to be realism and liberalism and their neo-variants, alongside Marxism.
• Traditional representations of the theoretical centre of the discipline are problematic in that they can provide a rather narrow view of what IR is about (i.e. inter-state war and peace) as well as assuming that different theoretical points of views ‘see’ the same world of international politics. As such, it has often not been recognized that choosing a theory is not necessarily an apolitical question but reflects values and political leanings.
• Dissatisfaction with the ‘interparadigm debate’ among the three main theories (realism, liberalism, Marxism) has led to the so-called fourth debate between rationalist and reflectivist approaches, which primarily disagree on epistemological and methodological grounds over how best to gain access to the social world.
• Rationalist theorists, for example Robert Keohane and Stephen Walt, tend to accept the notion of foundationalism, the assumption that there are secure grounds for making knowledge claims. They draw on a positivist philosophy of science and tend to reject and marginalize reflectivist approaches in the discipline.
• Today there is a plurality of IR theories on the scene, although the mainstream tends to deny the legitimacy of many of them for not being scientific or for not dealing with the most important issues in IR (inter-state war). It is argued here that it is important to foreground the pluralism of theoretical positions in IR, despite the fact that some established scholars such as Kal Holsti regret the proliferation of theoretical positions in the field.
• Recognizing plurality is important for opening up debate in IR and in legitimizing new approaches as well as in bringing IR closer to other social science disciplines.
• Despite their disagreements the theories represented in this book share three things:
  1. Belief in centrality of theory in understanding the world
  2. Belief in the fact that all theories have a history and that comparing theories from different backgrounds is not easy, as they often emerge from very different intellectual traditions
  3. Each holds a position of some kind on theory-practice relationship
• Plurality of theories presents two problems:
  1. Whether there can be said to be a discipline of IR at all
  2. How should one choose between the theories that see the world in very different ways?
• While the editors and contributors value this plurality in that the different views and angles allow us to see different worlds as starting points for analyses, readers must come to their own judgements. In enabling students to make informed and reflective judgements on questions such as these, a pluralistic approach to the discipline is needed.