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Post Positivism

Postpositivism in IR rejects applying positivism, which uses natural science empiricism, to social sciences like IR. Postpositivist theories integrate more security concerns beyond states, including non-state actors. They study both high politics between states and everyday low politics involving various actors. This allows issues like gender, ethnicity, and other non-traditional concerns to be addressed as international security issues alongside traditional concerns like diplomacy and war. Postpositivism also rejects all-encompassing theories and instead asks questions to understand power dynamics rather than claiming to explain the entire international system.

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251 views

Post Positivism

Postpositivism in IR rejects applying positivism, which uses natural science empiricism, to social sciences like IR. Postpositivist theories integrate more security concerns beyond states, including non-state actors. They study both high politics between states and everyday low politics involving various actors. This allows issues like gender, ethnicity, and other non-traditional concerns to be addressed as international security issues alongside traditional concerns like diplomacy and war. Postpositivism also rejects all-encompassing theories and instead asks questions to understand power dynamics rather than claiming to explain the entire international system.

Uploaded by

Nahian Salsabeel
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Post Positivism In IR

In international relations theory, postpositivism refers to theories of international relations


which epistemologically reject positivism, the idea that the empiricist observation of the natural
sciences can be applied to the social sciences.

Postpositivist (or reflectivist) theories of IR attempt to integrate a larger variety of security


concerns. Supporters argue that if IR is the study of foreign affairs and relations, it ought to
include non-state actors as well as the state. Instead of studying solely high politics of the state,
IR ought to study world politics of the everyday world—which involves both high and low
politics. Thus, issues such as gender (often in terms of feminism which generally holds salient
the subordination of women to men—though newer feminisms allow for the reverse too) and
ethnicity (such as stateless actors like the Kashmiris or Palestinians) can be problematized and
made into an international security issue—supplementing (not replacing) the traditional IR
concerns of diplomacy and outright war.

The postpositivist approach can be described as incredulity towards metanarratives—in IR, this
would involve rejecting all-encompassing stories that claim to explain the international system.
It argues that neither realism nor liberalism could be the full story. A postpositivist approach to
IR does not claim to provide universal answers but seeks to ask questions instead. A key
difference is that while positivist theories such as realism and liberalism highlight how power is
exercised, postpositivist theories focus on how power is experienced resulting in a focus on
both different subject matters and agents.

Often, postpositivist theories explicitly promote a normative approach to IR, by considering


ethics. This is something which has often been ignored under traditional IR as positivist theories
make a distinction between positive facts and normative judgements—whereas postpostivists
argue that discourse is constitutive of reality; in other words, that it is impossible to be truly
independent and factual as power-free knowledge cannot exist.

Postpositivist theories do not attempt to be scientific or a social science. Instead, they attempt
in-depth analysis of cases in order to "understand" international political phenomena by asking
relevant questions to determine in what ways the status-quo promote certain power relations.
In 2009, 21 percent of international relations faculty characterized their scholarship as post-
positivist.

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