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🌀 Post-Modernist Approach +
- Negates objective truth; knowledge is subjective, perspective-dependent.
- Mistrust of grand narratives (e.g., Marxism, Hegel’s historicism).
- Deconstruction: meaning analyzed relative to opposites and related words (e.g., gender analysis).
- Uses genealogy, text, narrative, discourse, deconstruction, double reading.
- Linked to Post-structuralism: analyzes IR beyond state structure.
- Main Thinkers: Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida.
📜 English School +
- Built on: International System, International Society, World Society.
- International System: states sufficiently interact to behave as a whole.
- International Society: like-minded states bound by rules and institutions.
- World Society: transcends states; includes individuals and non-state actors globally.
- Main Thinkers: Herbert Butterfield, Hedley Bull, Martin Wight, James Mayall.
🔍 Copenhagen School +
- Focus on non-military aspects of security; shift from traditional security studies.
- Main Thinkers: Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, Jaap de Wilde.
- Primary book: Security: A New Framework for Analysis.
- Members mostly at Copenhagen Peace Research Institute.
- Critics: McSweeney.
🧠 Rational Choice / Institutionalism +
- States and non-state actors are rational, maximize interests/preferences.
- Outcomes result from rational behavior; "logic of consequences".
- Key concepts: incomplete information, credibility, signalling, transaction costs, audience costs.
- Rational Institutionalism: actors use institutions to maximize utility.
- Main Thinkers: James D. Fearon, Thomas Schelling.
⚔️ Neo-Classical Realism +
- Analyzes international politics via domestic politics: state-society relations, political regime, strategic culture, leader perceptions.
- Synthesizes domestic and global politics; defensive & classical realist elements.
- Coined by Gideon Rose (1998).
- Main Thinkers: William Wohlforth, Thomas J. Christensen, Jennifer Sterling-Folker, Gideon Rose, Randall Schweller, Fareed Zakaria.