This chapter turns to critical international theory. It clarifies that the roots of critical theory are from Marxism while also acknowledging that it departs from classical Marxism in significant ways. The emergence of a distinctive critical international theory in the early 1980s rapidly triggered a virtual explosion of different kinds of critical approaches to the study of international politics. The chapter then elaborates on the Frankfurt School's particular brand of critical theory and Jürgen Habermas' arguments in this field, which are concerned with undistorted communication. It then considers how critical international theory raises the possibility of distinguishing the barriers to and viable prospects for further human emancipation across the world.
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6. Critical International Theory
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16. The Political Economy of the Environment
Kate Ervine
The global community is confronted with an unprecedented array of overlapping environmental crises, threatening humanity and non-human species, though the impacts remain highly uneven, with nations and communities least responsible for contemporary ecological problems paying the highest cost. With widespread climate disruption projected to intensify in the coming years and decades, this work illustrates the critical need for effective and democratic governance. It unpacks the prevailing relations of power connected to the global political economy of advanced capitalism, dominant debates and disagreement about how environmental crises are understood, and how governments and various actors respond to climate crises based on these understandings and power structures. It pays particular attention to how uneven development and colonialism have shaped inequality and ecological decline, showing that effective and meaningful responses to planetary crises will also need to respond to the deep injustices and inequalities that mark the contemporary GPE.
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8. Critical Theory
Steven C. Roach
This chapter examines the various assumptions of critical theory espoused by the Frankfurt school, with particular emphasis on how the Frankfurt school’s critiques of authoritarianism and repression influenced the critical interventions by International Relations (IR) theorists. The chapter focuses on two major strands of critical International Relations theory: normative theory and the Marxist-based critique of the political economy. After providing an overview of the Frankfurt school and critical IR theory, the chapter explores critical theorists’ views on universal morality and political economy. It then discusses Jürgen Habermas’s ideas in international relations and presents a case study of the Arab Spring. It concludes by analysing the concept of critical reflexivity and how it can show knowledge and social reality are co-produced through social interaction, and how this interaction can, in turn, produce practical or empirical knowledge of the changing moral and legal dynamics of prominent global institutions.
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Introduction: Diversity and Disciplinarity in International Relations Theory
Steve Smith
This text argues that theory is central to explaining International Relations (IR) and that the discipline of IR is much more relevant to the world of international relations than it has been at any point in its history. Some chapters cover distinct IR theories ranging from realism/structural realism to liberalism/neoliberalism, the English school, constructivism, Marxism, critical theory, feminism, poststructuralism, green theory, and postcolonialism. Oher chapters explore International Relations theory and its relationship to social science, normative theory, globalization, and the discipline’s identity. This introduction explains why this edition has chosen to cover these theories, reflects on international theory and its relationship to the world, and considers the kind of assumptions about theory that underlie each of the approaches.
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3. How to think about Global Political Economy
Benjamin J. Cohen
This chapter examines the question of how we should think about Global Political Economy (GPE), and offers a multitude of theoretical approaches and perspectives. Perspectives can be distinguished from one another along five key dimensions: ontology, agenda, purpose, boundaries, and epistemology. At the most general level, the field is divided between two broad approaches, described as either orthodox or heterodox theoretical perspectives. Orthodox perspectives share a preference for a state-centric ontology, positivism, closed disciplinary boundaries, and rigorous methodology. They may be subdivided into three main variations: liberalism, realism, and constructivism. Heterodox perspectives are less state-centric, agendas are broader and more normative, boundaries are more open, and methodology is less formal. They include a variety of system-level theories, critical theory, and approaches that seek to extend the boundaries of the field in one direction or another. Fundamentally, our thinking about GPE should be ruled by two paramount principles: pragmatism and eclecticism.
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14. The Global Political Economy of Development
Ali Bhagat
Some major advances in the betterment of human life have been made in recent years but at the cost of accelerated climatic change and through uneven means of development. A reduction in child mortality, a rise in literacy and education, and by some measures the fewest people live in extreme poverty than they ever have before. Nevertheless, inequality on the multiple axes of health, income, environment, gender, education, technology, finance, shelter, food, water, and various other issues concerning access persist. This work examines efforts by various actors to deal with these problems with mixed and contested results. The analysis is centered around a key question: who benefits and why from globalised development? In so doing, it examines various development theories, traces the history of globalisation-led development post-WWII, and scrutinises contemporary challenges like the Great Recession and the Global Refugee Crisis, in order to understand the crisis prone tendencies of globalisation and its linkages to everyday practices in global political economy.
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15. The Global Political Economy of North–South Relations: A View from the South
J. P. Singh
Some major advances in the betterment of human life have been made in recent years but at the cost of accelerated climatic change and through uneven means of development. A reduction in child mortality, a rise in literacy and education, and by some measures the fewest people live in extreme poverty than they ever have before. Nevertheless, inequality on the multiple axes of health, income, environment, gender, education, technology, finance, shelter, food, water, and various other issues concerning access persist. This work examines efforts by various actors to deal with these problems with mixed and contested results. The analysis is centered around a key question: who benefits and why from globalised development? In so doing, it examines various development theories, traces the history of globalisation-led development post-WWII, and scrutinises contemporary challenges like the Great Recession and the Global Refugee Crisis, in order to understand the crisis prone tendencies of globalisation and its linkages to everyday practices in global political economy.
Chapter
1. Introduction: Diversity and Disciplinarity in International Relations Theory
Steve Smith
This text argues that theory is central to explaining International Relations (IR) and that the discipline of IR is much more relevant to the world of international relations than it has been at any point in its history. Some chapters cover distinct IR theories ranging from realism/structural realism to liberalism/neoliberalism, the English school, constructivism, Marxism, critical theory, feminism, poststructuralism, green theory, and postcolonialism. Other chapters explore International Relations theory and its relationship to history of international relations thinking in different parts of the world, social sciences more widely, normative theory, globalization, and the discipline’s identity. This introduction explains why this edition has chosen to cover these theories, reflects on international theory and its relationship to the world, and considers the kind of assumptions about theory that underlie each of the approaches.
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6. Theorizing the European Union after Integration Theory
Ben Rosamond
This chapter deals with recent theoretical work on the European Union. Three broad analytical pathways are discussed: comparative political science; a revitalized international relations (IR); and ‘critical theories’. This chapter discusses in turn the contribution to EU studies of comparative political science in general and new institutionalist political science, and in particular the emergence of social constructivist approaches to the EU, IR’s contribution to the theorization of EU external action, together with approaches from the subfield of international political economy (IPE), and a variety of critical theoretical readings of the EU. The chapter also explores how IR theories might be brought back into EU studies. The purpose of the chapter is to show how the EU still raises significant questions about the nature of authority, statehood, and the organization of the international system. These questions are doubly significant in the present period of crisis, where the issue of ‘disintegration’ comes to the fore.
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7. Critical Security Studies: A Schismatic History
Mutimer David and Derek Verbakel
This chapter provides a partial history of a label. It is partial both in that it is not, and cannot be, complete, and in that I, David Mutimer, am both the author of, and participant in, the history. It is therefore partial in the way all other history is partial. The label is ‘Critical Security Studies’. The chapter tells a story of the origin of the label and the way it has developed and fragmented since the early 1990s. It sets out the primary claims of the major divisions that have emerged within the literatures to which the label has been applied: constructivism, critical theory, and poststructuralism. Ultimately, the chapter suggests that Critical Security Studies needs to foster an ‘ethos of critique’ in either the study or refusal of security, and that the chapter is an instance of that ethos directed at Critical Security Studies itself.
