Examine the post- modernist critique of Realism in international politics. (2010, 20 Marks)
Postmodernism entered International Relations in the 1980s, during the third debate (the fourth on Ole Wæver’s count), as a challenge to the positivist claim that theory can describe the world from nowhere. Where realism claims to report the permanent facts of power and anarchy, postmodernists ask who decided that this account counts as knowledge, and answer that the decision is always an exercise of power.
Philosophical tools
- Jean-François Lyotard: the postmodern condition is incredulity toward metanarratives, including realism’s story of timeless anarchy.
- Michel Foucault: power/knowledge are mutually constitutive, and genealogy recovers how a concept came to seem natural.
- Jacques Derrida: deconstruction and double reading expose the hierarchies hidden in binaries such as inside/outside, sovereign/anarchic and self/other.
The critique, point by point
- Anarchy is an interpretation, not a fact. Richard K. Ashley (The Poverty of Neorealism, 1984; Untying the Sovereign State, 1988) argues that anarchy does not itself entail the security dilemma. Realism’s reading of it does, after excluding cooperation, community and law from the frame.
- A self-fulfilling theory. Reading anarchy as a security dilemma pushes states to arm; armament produces rivalry and war; war is then cited as proof that realism is scientific.
- Sovereignty as a boundary. R. B. J. Walker (Inside/Outside, 1993) shows that sovereignty reserves justice and progress for the inside and leaves only survival and recurrence outside. IR theory records what political theory had to exclude.
- Danger is written, not found. David Campbell (Writing Security, 1992) treats foreign policy as a practice that produces state identity by naming threats. After the Soviet collapse, rogue states, narcotics and terrorism filled the vacant space.
- Diplomacy and war as constructed practice. James Der Derian (On Diplomacy, 1987) reads diplomacy as mediated estrangement. His Virtuous War (2001) names violence fought at a distance and presented as clean and costless, a description that fits today’s drone and algorithmic targeting.
- The constructed lineage. Thucydides, Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes were recruited after the fact into a tradition that lends timeless authority to a mid-twentieth-century American theory.
- Objectivity as a standpoint. Realism was codified by scholars advising great powers, so its “timeless wisdom” is the experience of the powerful. Sankaran Krishna carries the method to India: his cartographic anxiety (1994) reads the obsession with sacred borders as a national identity written onto maps, and Postcolonial Insecurities (1999) reads the 1987 Sri Lanka intervention as nation-building violence, not mere balance of power.
Assessment
Strengths. The critique explains why realist “facts” feel inevitable. It reopens questions of identity, exclusion and ethics, and anticipates constructivism’s claim, in Alexander Wendt’s words, that anarchy is what states make of it.
Weaknesses.
- Relativism and performative contradiction: if no account can be privileged, neither can the postmodern one.
- No positive programme: Robert O. Keohane (“International Institutions: Two Approaches”, 1988) challenged the “reflectivists” to produce a research programme, and critics say they still offer no guide to action.
- The material objection: armies, borders and nuclear arsenals constrain states however they are narrated. The return of war in Ukraine and the lapse of New START (5 February 2026) remind us that a dilemma can be real even if it was first constructed.
Conclusion
The postmodern critique does not refute realism; it historicises it. It shows that realism is partly a discourse that helps make the world it describes. Its value lies in making realists answerable for their assumptions, while the persistence of armed rivalry shows that a deconstruction is not the same thing as an alternative.