Introduction

Abstract

In the twentieth century, theoretical innovation in the academic field of international relations was fostered by a series of “great debates”. In the first decades following World War II, Realist theories engaged the progressive and transformational arguments of post-Versailles Idealists and their belief in the pacifying effects of international institutions, with reference to enduring patterns of competition and conflict in international history and an imputed innate human lust for power. With neither position clearly vanquished – the basic point of contention remains a defining fault-line in the discipline – a second debate was provoked by champions of the behavioral revolution who were skeptical of interpretive histories, legal philosophy, and theories that ascribed causal power to imputed unobservable, unmeasurable, and hence unscientific constants of human nature. Dominant during the 1960s and 1970s, the behavioral revolution generated much data but produced very little by way of substantive theoretical breakthroughs. By contrast, the 1980s and early 1990s were characterized by remarkable theoretical innovation. At first dominated by a reinvigorated debate between Realism and Idealism, with adherents to Kenneth Waltz’s Neorealist Theory of International Politics squaring off against scholars inspired by the ideas found in Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye’s Power and Interdependence and the related discussion of international regimes, a third debate emerged as constructivists wedded an interest in the role of shared ideas with a commitment to interpretivist methods to challenge both Neorealist and Liberal adherents to materialist and positivist approaches to explaining international politics. In retrospect, the 1980s appear to have been something of a golden age of theorizing about international relations. Subsequent decades have not been characterized by major theoretical innovation, even if the research programs inspired by these debates produced incremental progress reminiscent of the sort of research Thomas Kuhn termed “normal science, ” itself often associated with what Robert Cox derided as merely “problem solving.”1