6.3: Theories

Everybody Has a Theory

Theory sounds like the moment a perfectly interesting subject becomes homework. In reality, theories are organized ways of deciding what matters. They tell us what to notice, which causes to investigate, and which questions we should ask first. Imagine two countries increasing their military presence along a disputed border. One analyst asks which country is militarily stronger and whether either side can trust the other. Another asks whether institutions or diplomacy might reduce the tension. A third investigates how historical narratives transformed a strip of territory into something people might die for. A fourth asks whether colonial borders, trade routes, resources, or economic inequalities sit underneath the conflict. They are observing the same border, but they are not seeing the same world. Theory is not the only choice analysts make. They also choose where to point the camera. Political scientists often describe this as the level of analysis. At the individual level, we might examine the beliefs, personalities, or decisions of particular leaders. At the state level, we might focus on political institutions, regime type, public opinion, economic interests, or national identity. At the international or systemic level, we look outward at alliances, distributions of power, international institutions, and the broader structure within which states operate. The same crisis can therefore look very different depending on whether we begin with a president, a government, or the international system surrounding them. Global Studies often moves among these levels because global problems rarely stay politely inside only one of them. Three of the most influential traditions in International Relations, realism, liberalism, and constructivism, begin with very different assumptions about political behavior. Critical political economy, postcolonial and Global IR, and feminist approaches widen the conversation further by questioning whether conventional theories have focused too narrowly on states, great powers, European history, and formal institutions. None provides the whole answer and that is why we need more than one.

Realism: Assume Nobody Is Coming to Save You

Realism begins with a grim but important observation: there is no government above governments. Within a state, institutions exist to enforce laws. States lack an equivalent supreme authority. The United Nations, international law, alliances, and treaties matter, but no global government possesses unquestioned authority over every state. International Relations scholars call this condition anarchy. It does not mean chaos. It means the absence of supreme political authority above sovereign states. Hans Morgenthau (1948) placed power and national interest at the center of international politics. Kenneth Waltz (1979) later argued that competition arises partly from the structure of an anarchic international system, while John Mearsheimer (2001) contends that great powers have incentives to maximize relative power because no state can ever be completely certain about another state’s future intentions. Even within realism, however, scholars disagree about how much power states actually need. Defensive realists, associated especially with Waltz, generally argue that states seek enough power to preserve their security and survival; accumulating too much power can provoke balancing coalitions and make a state less secure rather than more. Offensive realists, most prominently associated with Mearsheimer, are more pessimistic. Because states can never know one another’s future intentions with certainty, great powers have incentives to maximize their relative power when opportunities arise and, if possible, prevent rivals from becoming dominant. The disagreement is subtle but important: one version of realism asks how states can become secure, while the other asks why genuine security may remain impossible as long as other great powers exist. Governments can observe capabilities. They cannot observe the future. A military described as defensive today may be controlled by another government tomorrow. Political leaders therefore worry not only about what other states intend to do but what they could do. Robert Jervis (1978) shows how this produces the security dilemma. One government increases defensive capabilities because it feels insecure. Its neighbor sees the buildup and becomes frightened, so it arms itself. The first government interprets the response as proof that its fears were justified. Neither side has to begin by wanting war. Fear can do much of the work. Realism remains relevant in the 2020s because territorial conflict, nuclear deterrence, strategic competition, alliances, military spending, and disputes over places such as Taiwan remain significant. Yet contemporary power also includes semiconductors, cyber capabilities, sanctions networks, energy systems, data, and supply-chain chokepoints. A state can be militarily powerful and still discover that somebody else controls a technology it needs. Realism explains a great deal. Its difficulty is that governments also cooperate constantly.

Liberalism: Maybe We Can Build Some Rules Around Here

Governments trade, share scientific information, coordinate aviation, regulate telecommunications, negotiate environmental agreements, and participate in thousands of international arrangements that rarely become headlines because they generally work. Liberal theories ask why cooperation occurs despite anarchy. Robert Keohane (1984) argues that institutions can reduce uncertainty, provide information, monitor commitments, establish expectations, and lower the cost of repeated cooperation. Institutions do not make governments nice. They can make keeping an agreement more useful than breaking it. Keohane and Nye’s concept of complex interdependence further emphasizes that governments are connected through finance, trade, migration, communication, energy, technology, environmental systems, and institutions (Keohane & Nye, 2012). Military force remains important but is not useful for every problem. A fighter jet is impressive but it remains remarkably bad at negotiating a climate agreement.

Contemporary globalization has also revealed a darker side of interdependence. Economic connections can become sources of coercive leverage when states control important financial, technological, informational, or supply-chain networks (Farrell & Newman, 2019). The same networks that facilitate cooperation can create pressure points. Liberalism also opens the state itself. Governments are not single brains. Legislatures, businesses, voters, bureaucracies, courts, interest groups, civil society, and political institutions all influence international behavior. Still, institutions and incentives do not always explain why states want such different things in the first place. For that, we need ideas.

Constructivism: The World Means Things Because We Make It Mean Things

Alexander Wendt titled one of the most influential articles in modern IR “Anarchy Is What States Make of It” (1992). His point was not that anarchy is imaginary. It was that the absence of world government does not automatically determine how states interpret one another. Why can one country possess a large nuclear arsenal and cause relatively little fear in an ally while another country’s smaller arsenal generates intense alarm? The missiles alone cannot explain the difference. Relationships, history, identity, and expectations matter. Constructivists argue that international politics is shaped not only by material resources but by identities, norms, ideas, language, and shared meanings (Wendt, 1992, 1999). States do not necessarily enter the international system with interests permanently fixed. Interaction helps construct those interests. Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink (1998) likewise show how international norms can emerge, spread, and become internalized. Practices once accepted by powerful political actors including formal empire and slavery, became increasingly illegitimate as social movements, institutions, political leaders, and publics challenged them.

Contemporary conflicts over climate responsibility, Indigenous sovereignty, digital privacy, migration, gender, and artificial intelligence are partly conflicts over what forms of behavior the international community should regard as legitimate. This is competition over meaning. What counts as terrorism rather than resistance? Humanitarian intervention rather than imperial interference? Self-determination rather than separatism? Who is called a refugee, migrant, dissident, settler, or freedom fighter? Labels influence political possibilities. Constructivism helps us see why.

Critical Political Economy: The Rules Were Not Written on a Blank Page

Robert Cox (1981) famously distinguished theories attempting to solve problems inside an existing system from critical theory, which asks how the system itself was produced. A world map can make sovereign states look remarkably equal. Every country receives a border and a label. Most receive a seat in the UN General Assembly. Zoom out and equality becomes difficult to find. States vary enormously in wealth, military capability, access to finance, technological infrastructure, institutional influence, and bargaining power. Colonialism, slavery, imperialism, industrialization, resource extraction, debt, and uneven development helped create those inequalities. Political independence and economic independence are therefore not the same thing. A newly independent country can gain a flag and legal sovereignty while inheriting an economy structured around commodity exports, foreign capital, external debt, or trade relationships built under empire. Formal equality can coexist with structural dependence.

Contemporary scholarship pushes this analysis into the emerging multipolar system. Wijaya and Jayasuriya (2024), for example, argue that changes in global order should not be understood only by counting powerful states. Domestic business classes, state-market relationships, industrial strategies, and competing forms of capitalism also shape the new geopolitical economy. A multipolar world is not simply a world with more powerful countries. It may also contain multiple models of capitalism, development, state intervention, technology, and political authority competing at the same time.

Postcolonial and Global IR: Europe Is Not the Beginning of the World

Conventional International Relations often tells its history through Westphalia, European balance-of-power politics, the world wars, the Cold War, NATO, and European integration. Those histories matter enormously but they are not the history of the entire planet. Postcolonial scholars have long challenged the tendency to treat European experience as universal and everyone else as a case study. Amitav Acharya’s work on Global International Relations calls for a discipline that takes multiple regions, civilizations, histories, and forms of political organization seriously rather than simply inserting non-Western examples into theories developed elsewhere (Acharya, 2014, 2023). His 2023 work explicitly examines forms of world order predating European global dominance and argues that the history of international relations should recognize Near Eastern, Indian, Chinese, Islamic, Indian Ocean, and other political orders rather than beginning automatically with the European sovereign-state system. This changes the question. Instead of asking only how the European state system spread around the world, we can ask what other political orders existed before, alongside, and beyond it. Empires, tributary systems, trading networks, religious communities, Indigenous confederacies, maritime networks, city-states, and diasporas have all organized political life across territories. The sovereign state is enormously important, yet is not humanity’s only political invention.

Feminist Perspectives: Security for Whom?

Feminist scholars ask another question conventional International Relations historically neglected: when governments say they are protecting national security, whose security are they protecting? Cynthia Enloe and other feminist scholars show how international politics depends upon forms of gendered labor and power that can disappear when analysis focuses only on presidents, diplomats, and armies (Enloe, 2014). Wars are fought by soldiers, but they are sustained and experienced by caregivers, refugees, factory workers, military spouses, nurses, domestic workers, displaced families, and communities whose work rarely appears on strategic maps. Sanctions target states but affect households. Military bases transform local economies. Conflict can intensify sexual violence. Cuts to services can transfer burdens onto unpaid care work. A state can be secure while many people living inside it are not. That insight will matter when we turn to human security.

Theory Is a Flashlight, Not the Sun

Theories are not museum exhibits. Scholars continue revising them as politics changes. Contemporary work places realism, liberalism, constructivism, poststructuralism, and critical theory into conversation with the actual choices of political actors rather than treating them as sealed philosophical camps (Gaskarth, 2024). Take Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. A realist may focus on military power, alliances, deterrence, territory, and strategic rivalry. A liberal may emphasize international law, institutions, sanctions, economic interdependence, and alliance coordination. A constructivist may examine Russian and Ukrainian national identities, historical narratives, and competing interpretations of sovereignty. A critical political-economy approach might examine energy networks, finance, sanctions, defense industries, and unequal capacities to absorb economic costs. A postcolonial perspective might investigate global hierarchies and historical interpretations of great-power politics. A feminist perspective might move the analytical camera toward displacement, caregiving, sexual violence, household insecurity, and the gendered consequences of war.

Even in the same conflict, different evidence becomes visible. Theories illuminate different parts of reality and hide others. Realism is useful when security and strategic competition dominate. Liberalism clarifies institutions and cooperation. Constructivism reveals identity and legitimacy. Critical political economy exposes structural inequalities. Global IR challenges whose histories become theory. Feminist scholarship reveals forms of insecurity that disappear when the state becomes the only actor that counts. If one theoretical lens explains absolutely everything you encounter, there is a decent chance you have stopped testing the theory and started using it as a personality. Global Studies asks us to move among lenses. Doing so makes the concept waiting in the next section increasingly complicated. States want control. Global problems demand cooperation. People want belonging. Markets cross borders. Institutions require compromise. Sovereignty, as it turns out, is having a complicated century.

Table \(\PageIndex{1}\): Theoretical lenses

Lens	The Question It Asks
Realism	Who has power, and who can threaten whom?
Liberalism	When and why can states cooperate?
Constructivism	How do ideas, identities, and norms shape politics?
Critical Political Economy	Who benefits from the structure of the global system?
Global IR / Postcolonial	Whose history and political experience gets treated as “theory”?
Feminist Perspectives	Whose security and labor disappear when we only look at states?