The blog question for this week is a really interesting one. The way Professor Jackson words the question, he implies that it's important to define an entity using a theory of international relations. On the contrary, I think the guest speaker from Wednesday, Dr. Howard, made it seem as though explaining something through theory is inconsequential compared to actually dealing with the situation or organization at hand.
However, if you are determined to focus on the theories and schools of thought behind the issues, you have to accept differences between explanations as unavoidable. It is up to the individual to decide which explanation they feel is most likely. There is also the possibility that the real answer is a combination of the answers produced by different schools of thought. People and countries rarely do anything for just one reason.
Also, the question " If one perspective is accurate, does this necessarily mean that the others are wrong?" is very confusing to me. How could we ever know for certain that one perspective is accurate? The intersubjectivity that Wendt loves so much assures that we can never be certain. But, if you could prove for certain that a perspective was accurate, it would not make other perspectives wrong. It can be compared to viewing a statue from different points in a room. One person might say "that is a statue of the front of a man" and another might say "it is a statue of the back of a man", but only a person that has traveled around the room and looked at the statue from different points can say "it is a statue of a whole man." However, all three people would technically be right.
This is a great post, I think you highlight the important aspects of this blog question.
ReplyDeleteOne question I had is whether or not you think theory shapes policy or policy shapes theory?
You do articulate the basics of my question within your blogpost, I was hoping you could expand a little.
You state that even if one "could prove for certain that a perspective was accurate, it would not make other perspectives wrong." Can you expand upon your meaning? Do you mean that theories can be simultaneously accurate, or that the one concrete example couldn't represent the full spectrum of international relations? To apply your analogy of the statue, if several persons were standing in the same spot, evaluating the statue from exactly the same perspective and one proclaimed that it was the front of a man and the other proclaimed it was the back f a man, and another the profile of a man, then who would be right? I think this is why international relations theories are discussed with an understanding that at some point the theories will blatantly contradict each other, so deciding whether or not theories are true is not as simple as saying they can all be correct.
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