I’m a sucker for international relations theories because they wrestle with trying to understand how the world works, how wars start and stop, why some countries get powerful and others don’t. It’s an amazing field. That being said, it’s the beginning of a new semester and I am by my class.
“Perspectives in Conflict and Peace” is the name of the class and I was handed a 28 page syllabus with a list of 220+ required and recommended readings.
(Reality check to you hopeful grad school applicants, you better work on increasing your reading speed and/or understanding how the parts of a book go to together to form an argument. Fail to do that and you will be spending most of your life over the next several years destroying your eyes and posture hunched over books.
It’s a little intimidating, but I’m really excited about the content of this class. International relations is one of my fields of study, particularly theories surrounding conflict and peace, which address an area I’m looking at as a potential dissertation area.
The trick with international relations is that the subject can be so overwhelmingly diverse. For the casual observer, international relations seems to be made up of hundreds of countries, millions of organizations, billions of people and all with different needs. These things all seem to clash in a ridiculously mysterious and somehow cataclysmic competition for influence, power, resources, etc.
It’s easy to throw up your hands and just assume that it’s all going to burn anyway. However, that really does a disservice to our understanding of the world.
Another response is to just bury your head in the sands of isolationism and not really care about what’s going on in the world assuming that somehow you will be able to avoid whatever issue you see on the horizon. I think international relations scholars actually recognize this, are concerned about it and want to make the complexities of world politics a little clearer for the rest of us. Unfortunately, this field of writing can be as dizzyingly (sp?) diverse as the world it observes.
My goal for this post is to clear some of the clutter and share with you five fairly common perspectives on international relations and world politics that are not just helpful to scholars, but can also be helpful for your own understanding as your peruse the headlines of the day.
1. The Realist, or Balance of Power Perspective
This is perhaps the oldest perspective on international relations, largely because it makes intuitive sense. The realist perspective assumes a couple of elements to international politics.
1) Countries operate in an anarchic environment, which means there’s no overarching authority that is capable of ruling or controlling all countries.
2) The realist perspective also assumes greed, or a desire for greater power comparative to other countries as being the primary motivator of a country’s international relations decisions.
There are a few variants of the realist perspective that choose to focus on certain elements as being critical decision-making pieces or causes to actions taken by countries which can create war or peace.
These sub genres of realism can be called collective security, nuclear deterrence, and nuclear proliferation.
Collective security relies on the idea that powerful nations ensure peace and prevent global wars. Wars do happen but they’re generally asymmetric or local in nature, not global.
The nuclear deterrence school focuses on a preponderance of power and influence that is gained through being able to threaten nuclear annihilation on a country because one has a large nuclear arsenal. The problem with this theory is that it is very untested, for obvious reasons. It’s a theory built on a theory.
Nuclear proliferation suggests proliferation can actually be helpful to building a stable balance of power. However, this is also a theory of a theory and runs the problem of contradicting key realists concepts regarding balances of power and maintaining a stable status quo with just a few powerful countries on top.
2. The Globalist Perspective
The globalist perspective was first introduced in the 1800s by Alfred Toynbee, a British historian who developed the century war cycle. This cycle is really quite intriguing to me in that Toynbee started with global wars that were followed by periods of peace, which were then followed by a small war that usually preceded another global war.
Toynbee argued that these cycles generally occurred in 100 year intervals. This is a particularly helpful analysis if you’re looking at the post World War II world, however it does require an awful long time to develop, and the definition of what constitutes a global war can be difficult to determine.
3. The Arms Race Perspective
That one also makes intuitive sense because it’s basically based on the premise that you can predict a war is coming when you see particularly powerful countries developing greater military capabilities. The arms race perspective assumes that an unexpected increase in military spending budgets, or capabilities will usually lead to a war as a country that is rearming rapidly takes its neighbors by surprise who then try to stop it from reaching some level of power.
Conversely an unexpected decrease or unilateral decision to disarm can actually lead to better relations with a rival, and even lead to peace. This perspective does help bring about a certain degree of connection between some of the empirical data surrounding disarmament, arms races, and their correlations to war. However, the best that can be shown is that sudden buildups in one’s military capacities can lead to war. This means that they can only be a correlation the war and not a cause.
So while it might be justifiable for China’s neighbors to get antsy about China’s continually increasing military budget this doesn’t necessarily mean that’s going to lead to a Asia war, or even a global war. The weakness of the arms race perspective is that arms races are always occurring between countries and that’s it’s really hard to define what a war producing arms race looks like. It’s not as predictive in practice as it may seem to be intuitively.
4. The Decision-Makers Perspective
Being someone who likes to talk about communications likes reading biographies on great political leaders, this one makes sense to me too. The decision-makers perspective focuses on decision-making individuals and institutions as being the main drivers of war and peace in the world. The major ingredient of this school is the issue of perception: How an elite perceives their adversary or partners in peace, and their power relative to those opposite them is considered the key ingredient for determining whether or not a war will begin, continue and/or end.
The current conflict in Ukraine is a great example here. Vladimir Putin has done an incredible job of developing a personality cult that the global media loves to invoke whenever they’re trying to determine just what Russia is going to do next. The assumption is that in a strongman government where there is one distinct very powerful ruler the decision-makers perspective is what carries the day because a very visible elite at least appears to be leading the efforts and making foreign-policy.
However, this is a very incomplete picture since it generally tends to focus only on countries where there are those visible elites in existence. It discriminates in its illustrative evidence too much. It cannot really explain international relations as a whole, but can really only seek to explain the decisions of individual countries, at individual times, in individual places and circumstances.
5. The Democracy and War Perspective
You probably have heard it or read it somewhere, but it seems to be that there’s a prevailing notion that democracies don’t fight other democracies. It’s pretty consistently true to the point where it has more or less become a truism.
However, this doesn’t mean that democracies don’t engage in war. However, the democracy and war perspective does look at the interaction between democracies and the likelihood and length of conflicts that they are willing to engage in. This is based on the assumption that democracies have some very unique properties that may limit what kinds of wars and the duration of those wars that they are willing to engage in. This makes pretty intuitive sense considering that democracies are representative forms of government and when democratic leaders make the decision to go to war, their decisions are going to be observed, criticize and/or voted on in the very near future. Such leaders have to be concerned with that, so the focus is on fighting wars that can be one quickly, that have a very strong moral appeal, or wars that pose some kind of existential threat (real or perceived) to the democratic community.
At the end of the day, we all use international relations theories.
It’s intriguing to me to read about these different theories because at one point or another I’ve seen myself utilizing these frameworks in evaluating different conflicts around the world. This suggests to me that these different theories definitely have their merit and are able to interpret or explain specific conflicts.
However, in a class that’s titled “Perspectives on Conflict and Peace” (and as my good professor noted the first day of class) the goal is to actually develop general theories of war and peace so that we might be better informed in a more systemic way of how we can actually avoid the pitfalls of the past that led to major wars and learn the precepts of peace.
Interestingly enough, that really seems to be the major underlying question behind all these theories and behind this class in general:
How can peace be created?
It’s a fascinating question that I hope to return to in the coming weeks and months in this space, because assuming that you can understand peace or how to create it if you really understand war and how to avoid it is based on the assumption that conflict seems to be a more permanent state of human existence then peace.