Read the paper and complement with other readings to identify and explain the

different IR theories. Analyze any international event through the lens of all the
different theories. Min 400 words. Don't forget to use citations.

Traditionally, there have been two central theories of IR: liberalism and realism. Although
they have come under great challenge from other theories, they remain central to the
discipline. Liberalism in IR was referred to as a `utopian' theory and is still recognized
as such to some degree today. Its proponents view human beings as innately
good and believe peace and harmony between nations is not only achievable.but desirable.

Immanuel Kant developed the idea in the late eighteenth century that states that shared liberal
values should have no reason for going to war against one another. In Kant's eyes, the more
liberal states there were in the world, the more peaceful it would become, since liberal states
are ruled by their citizens and citizens are rarely disposed to desire war. His ideas have
resonated and continue to be developed by modern liberals, most notably in the democratic
peace theory, which posits that democracies do not go to war with each other.

Further, liberals have faith in the idea that the permanent cessation of war is an attainable
goal. Taking liberal ideas into practice, US President Woodrow Wilson addressed his famous'
Fourteen Points' to the US Congress in January 1918 during the final year of the First World
War. As he presented his ideas for a rebuilt world beyond the wat, the last of his points was
to create a general association of nations, which became the League of Nations. When the
League collapsed due to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, its failure became
difficult for liberals to comprehend, as events seemed to contradict their theories.

Despite the efforts of prominent liberal scholars and politicians such as Kant
and Wilson, liberalism failed to retain a strong hold and a new theory emerged to explain the
continuing presence of war. That theory is known as realism. It gained momentum during the
Second World War when it appeared to offer a convincing account for how and why the
worst conflict in known history originated after a period of supposed peace and optimism.

Liberal thought also claims a right of resistance, whose modern justification refers to a
dimension or space of coexistence] constitutively independent of sovereignty and reluctant or
directly rebellious before the authority that does not respect it. This space, shaped by the
musings of the private conscience and the non-state public conscience, that is: the invisible
space of freedom of thought and the visible space of freedom of expression and commerce,
where the subject expands freely exchanging products and ideas.1

As its name suggests, advocates of realism purport it reflects the reality' of the
world and more effectively accounts for change in international politics
Thomas Hobbes is often mentioned in discussions of realism due to his description
of the brutality of life during the English Civil War of 1642-1651. Hobbes described human
beings as living in a chaotic state of nature that he perceived as a war of all against all.

Other thinkers contributed to the theory of Political Realism. Among them stands out, for
example, Machiavelli, who contributed to Political Realism from a pragmatic perspective.
However, it was Thomas Hobbes, in the seventeenth century, the first thinker who formally
dealt with the broad and philosophical development of classical Political Realism 2.

As no such contract exists internationally and there is no sovereign in charge of the world,
disorder and fear rules international relations. That is why war seems more common than
peace to realists, indeed they see war as inevitable. When they examine history they see a
world that may change in shape, but is always characterized by a system of what they call
international anarchy as the world has no sovereign to give it order.

The middle ground

The thinking of the English school is often viewed as a middle ground between liberal and
realist theories. Its theory involves the idea of a society of states existing at the international
level. Hedley Bull, one of the core figures of the English school, agreed with the traditional
theories that the international system was anarchic. The English school is often characterized
as having an international society approach to Inter. This describes a world that is not quite
realist and not quite liberal, but rather a world that has elements of both.

Constructivism

1 E. Dotti, J. (2005). Observaciones sobre Kant y el Liberalismo. Araucaria, 7(13) [traducido], p. 05.
2 HERNÁNDEZ ÁLVAREZ, Hector. Hobbes y el Realismo político: el mal en la naturaleza humana
[traducido] [en línea]. Filosofía & co. [Consulta: 20-07-2023] Disponible en: https://filco.es/hobbes-
realismo-politico/
Constructivism is another theory commonly viewed as a middle ground. It also has some
familial links with the English school, unlike scholars from other perspectives, constructivists
highlight the importance of values and shared interests between individuals who interact on
the global stage. To understand constructivism is to understand that ideas, or 'norms' as they
are often called, have powet.IR is, then, a never-ending journey of change chronicling the
accumulation of the accepted norms of the past and the emerging norms of the future. As
such, constructivists seek to study this process.

Richard Price and Christian Reus-Smit (1998) define constructivism from the selection of
three central ontological assumptions that this theory assumes about social life and its impact
on aspects of international politics: a) the importance of normative or ideational structures as
well as material structures; b) identities as constitutive of interests and actions, such that
understanding how interests are constituted is the key to explaining a wide range of
international phenomena that rationalists have misinterpreted or ignored; and c) the agents
and the structures are mutually constituted, but despite the constitutive power of the
structures, they do not exist independently of the knowledgeable practices of the social
agents.3

Critical Theories
Critical approaches refer to a wide spectrum of theories that have been
established in response to mainstream approaches in the field, mainly liberalism and realism.
In a nutshell, critical theorists share one particular trait, they oppose commonly held
assumptions in the field of IR that have been central since its establishment.

Postcolonialism
Differs from Marxism by focusing on the inequality between nations or regions, as opposed
to classes. Postcolonialism's origins can be traced to the Cold War period when much
activity in international relations centered around decolonization and the
ambition to undo the legacies of European imperialism.

The first movement of postcolonial theories was to assume that the classical organizational
forms were overwhelmed by the type of contemporary experience, which had become evident
3 VITELLI, Marina. Veinte años de constructivismo en relaciones internacionales. Del debate
metateórico al desarrollo de investigaciones empíricas: Una perspectiva sin un marco de política
exterior. Postdata [online]. 2014, vol.19, n.1 [citado 2023-07-20], pp.129-162.
on a global scale after the Second World War, that is, since decolonization as a historical,
political and cultural process. And although there are similarities with the known
development of postmodern criticism, it, in any of its available versions, did not incorporate
colonialism into its critical repertoire of modern rationality, of technical-instrumental
rationality, of great narratives.4

Feminism
Exposes the inequality inherent in international relations. It focused on explaining why so
few women seemed to be in positions of power and examining the implications of this on
how global politics was structured. Recognizing this introduces a 'gendered' reading of IR,
where we place an issue such as gender as the prime object in focus. It can be affirmed that
theories are systems of ideas through which the theoretical explains reality with respect to
how reality itself is. In particular, feminism was born in Western societies a few decades ago
and provides a conceptual framework to develop a perspective of the world that affects
women.5

Poststructuralism
It is an approach that questions the very beliefs we have all come to know
and feel as being 'real. Poststructuralism questions the dominant narratives that have been
widely accepted by mainstream theories. By introducing doubt over why the state exists - and
who it exists for poststructuralists can ask questions about central components of our political
world that traditional theories would rather avoid.

Feminist Poststructuralism (PEF) is based on academic theorizing after structuralism, whose

analyzes include different criticisms that sometimes contradict each other that do not mix
with other types of structural formations despite being of the same type. It integrates a diverse
range of theoretical positions influenced by post-Saussurean linguists, Marxism, especially
Louis Althusser's theory of ideology, the Lacanian current of psychoanalysis, the new French
feminism, which later joins authors such as Giles Deluze and Félix Guattari, Gayatri Spivak,
Judith Butler, etc.6
4 DE OTO, Alejandro. Siempre se trató de la modernidad y del colonialismo: Una lectura
entre teorías coloniales desde una perspectiva fanoniana. [traducido] Cuad. CILHA [online]
5 URRA MEDINA, EUGENIA. LA TEORÍA FEMINISTA POST-ESTRUCTURALISTA Y SU UTILIDAD
EN LA CIENCIA DE ENFERMERÍA. Cienc. enferm. [online].
6 OLIVARES-AISING, Daniela and MAYORGA ROJEL, Alberto Javier, 2023. Investigación
postcualitativa: aportes críticos desde el postestructuralismo feminista. [traducido] Revista Estudos
Bibliography
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https://filco.es/hobbes-realismo-politico.

E. Dotti, J. (2005). Observaciones sobre Kant y el Liberalismo. Araucaria, 7(13) [traducido].

Recuperado a partir de https://revistascientificas.us.es/index.php/araucaria/article/view/1088

VITELLI, Marina. Veinte años de constructivismo en relaciones internacionales. Del debate

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