Ir Mid Term

Front 1

Grotius

Back 1

- father of international law
- lived through the thirty year war, a bloody battle between Christians and catholics. thought how do i stop this? law was the solution
- Just War theory: jus ad bellum, arguing it is possible to distinguish just war from unjust cause of war
- defines what is just and unjust. ex: just- self defense unjust- add territory
- international law solution to stop wars from happening
- authority derived from natural law (God)

Front 2

Hobbs

Back 2

- realist
- human nature is selfish and the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short
- solution: leviathon theory- need powerful authority to enforce agreements
- need for government to order people
- government would be so powerful that citizens of that nation would be awstruck. people would offer their liberty to gov and they control everything to allow them to have better lives.
- anarchy is the reason for state of nature, why life is brutish and short because people are chaotic and only care about themselves
- states will seek power at the expense of others
- states will not cooperate because no int'l police. need int'l police
-security dilemma exists because people are not cooperative

Front 3

Locke

Back 3

- optimistic about state of nature
- intrinsically inclined towards communities and cooperate.
- people have the power
- ensure individual rights by limiting government
- government is there to organize social systems and protect property

Front 4

Smith

Back 4

- relation of individual to an economic process
- human nature:
1) tendency of man to improve
2) better self through competition
- free trade economy: trade across national borders without interference from government

Front 5

Hume

Back 5

- contributed to understanding of balance of power between different branches of government
- he believed that you can't generalize about human nature applying it to how states work. ex: states and humans don't function on the same scale
- balance of power central to everthing

Front 6

Montesque

Back 6

- discovered separation of power
- introduced legislative, executive, and judicial branch
- all to be bound by rule of law
- his theory framed the constitution

Front 7

Rousseau

Back 7

- general will
- majority rules
- believed government should be the expression of the people
- general will source of all law
- still believed that no government fits everyone's needs

Front 8

Popper

Back 8

- sees scientists as problem solvers first
- believed that you can't say you have researched, but you don't know what the problem is . without direction, no research
- demarcation: defining what is science and what is not.
- much of IR theory based off of popper's idea of science
- induction: bottom up (observe, than get ideas
- deduction: top down (start with idea, than observe)
- what makes a hypothesis useful is that it is falsifiable (that it can be wrong)
- ex: all ravens are black. find one non-black raven and hypothesis is false. even if you find all ravens in the world, never can say statement is true, but you have strongly corroborated giving you confidence.
- can't prove theories, just corroborate them.
falsifiability: concept used to determine if a theory should be corroborated or not. the idea of whether a theory is falsifiable is important in the sense that rather than assuming the validity of the theory, it determines why its false.
- positivism: learning acquired through observation
- against ad hoc (when you do something that suits the purpose of the moment, ) ex: smoking is harmful except on wednesday to validate the data.
- gradual, conservative, linear vision of how we learn. kuhn questioned what popper was saying about how we learned.
- believes that science does progress based on good methods
- looked at historical review of science. at the people who studied the data. looked at the structure of scientific revolution. how we made these leaps in knowledge.

- popper was a positivist- data matters, verification is important

Front 9

Kuhn

Back 9

- believes that science does progress based on good methods
- looked at historical review of science. at the people who studied the data. looked at the structure of scientific revolution. how we made these leaps in knowledge.
- how we choose to drop one theory and move on to another.
- paradigm: he looked back at how scientists work. they worked in a certain pattern or method. claimed that paradigms shifted in science. a paradigm is a conceptual framework that tells you as a scientist what to do. a framework that is used to explain and solve a problem. a paradigm is also used to solve a problem for instance in international society by creating a frame for the solution.
- what to observe, what not to observe
- types of questions to ask and not ask
- how you should be structuring the questions
- how to interpret results
- not easy to break away from conceptual paradigm.
- anomalies: over time there are going to be things in the paradigm that can't be explained, called anomalies. you than accept that the work has been falsified and move on to the next hypothesis
- scientists will continue to ask the same questions until the anomalies become so great, than a new idea comes in. anomalies need to be solved. but never change the fundamental question.
- normal science vs. revolutionary science
- can't get support if you work outside the paradigm.
- ex: during capirnicon time ppl believed earth center of world. anomalies existed. normal science. than anomalies became too much. introducing revolutionary science. sun at center of earth.
- a bad set of scientific beliefs can progress and can be believed to be true until a crisis happens leading to a revolutionary idea, than the paradigm shift.
- revolutionary science than becomes the normal science and the cycle continues.
- kuhn tried to explain how we got from H1-->H10, crisis is the motivator of events.
- sees science as evolving. "species evolve but do they become more closer to the truth". it nots about science being closer or farther to the truth.
- how do you know whats closer or farther from the truth if you don't know what the truth is.
- popper was a positivist- data matters, verification is important
- khun was a post-positivist-we know what we believe we know because of who we are
- paradigms are a form of culture (kinds of questions do we value)
- cultures produce knowledge
- popper angry with kuhns ideas

Front 10

Lehrer

Back 10

- claims there's something wrong with the scientific method
- positive effects are being published more than negative effects
- the decline effect: tendency of many exciting scientific results to fade over time ex: positive aspects of the drug are diminishing. because of many reasons: publication bias of peer review journals or selective reporting
- decline effect exists also because we have many illusions about certain results
- problem of replicability of experiments: popper claimed it to be very important. author saying replicability is essential to science.
- believed there is room for scepticism in any scientific experiment.
- just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved, just because an idea is proved doesn't mean it is true

Front 11

Van Evera "hypothesis, laws, and theories"

Back 11

- laws and hypothesis composed of dependent and independent variables.
- laws can be deterministic (if A, then always B) or probablistic (if A than sometimes B)
-hard science (deterministic)
- social science (probabilistic)
- social sciences can be
- causal ex: A causes B
or spurious ex: A and B caused by C, coorelated but do not cause each other.
- van evera says to search for causal laws, not spurious laws to rule out laws.
- Hypothesis: can be causal or non-causal
- theory: causal law, establishing that A causes B
- explanation: causal law/hypothesis connecting cause to phenomenon
- antecedent condition: phenomenon which activates action of a causal law/hypothesis without it causation operates more weakly. ex: A causes some B if C is absent, A causes more B if C is present.
- other terms for antecedent condition
- intitial condition, activiating conditions, enabling conditions
- depedent variable: phenomionon caused
- Intervening variable: phenominon forming theory's explanation caused by IV and causes DV.
- theory that cannot be arrow diagramed is not a theory and needs reframing to become a theory.
- good theory tells whats specific causes produced specific phenomenon.
- what is a good theory?
1) parsimony: simplicity. explain as much as possible with as little as possible.
2) causation: we like good arguments. variable oriented analysis. arrow diagrams. causation is not a form of coorelation. just because things happen together doesn't mean they were caused by each other.
- intervening variables allow you to counter the argument.
3) we like theories that account for change-not dynamic
4) commensurability- economic development-->democracy. must define these things
5) objectivity value
6) prediction-whats the point if it doesn't predict
7) grandma test-interesting?
8) rival hypothesis-explain how everyone else's theory sucks. how they can't explain what you can explain

Front 12

Acharya and Buzan

Back 12

- why there is no international relations theory
- 1) western theory have established best method to understanding IR theory
2) hegemony (culture)
3) non-west IRT are hidden (Chinese don't publish much in english-prominent language of IRT
4) local conditions have not been favorable for the creation of IRT
5) west had a head start, but non-west catching up
6) combination of these theories
- all falsifiable types of hypothesis

- Weber response:
- myths are facts about the world that we base theories on.
- unconscious ideologies
- these myths are what make theories seem true to us.
- belief is culture, not science
ex of myth: U.S. is a class-less society

Front 13

Thucydides

Back 13

-Melian Dialogue
- war broke out between Spartans and Athenians
- Spartans exausted themselves so Athenians fight Melians for resources
- what are rules of politics that are timeless?
- what matters? power, allies, self interest, honor, rational, morality
- submit or die (ultimatum)
- Melians pleading for beutrality
- benefits to Melians of submission to Athenians:
-survival (won't be destoryed if they serve)
- spartans will help them (allies, kin)
Athenisn say spartans won't find their kinship in their self interst
- distribution of power--->drives behavior
- might makes right
- justice only exists between equals in power
- alliances only work when they are in someone's interst
- strength allows you to maintain your independence
- power politics
- Weber sees fear as a critical principle in IRT. fear heavily influenced what occurred in the situation between the Athenians and the Melians. the Melians acted out of fear.

Front 14

Morgenthau

Back 14

- "six principles of political realism"
- relative power politics ex: if you have 10 tanks, how many do the others have. power is relative.
1) objective laws truths- political realism believes that politics, like society,is goverened by objective truths that are rooted in human nature
2) interest defined in terms of power
3) universally valid
4) moral significance (assurance of national survival)
5) morality of states even if they have to violate personal morality
6) psychology we have to decieve ourselves in some ways
- image (psychology of politics)
-morality of IR politics is the pursue of the surivival of the state through increasing power

Front 15

Waltz

Back 15

- "the anarchic structure of world politics-theory of Int'l Politics"
- he coins a new type of realism-neo-realism (structural realism)>simplifies things. cleans it up and makes it more rigerous
- Waltz wanted to make a systematic form of realism.
- according to waltz what matters in IR?
-realists believe hard power (military, economy) matters most in IR.
- how do states act under anarchy according to waltz?
- they try to gather as much as they can. (relative gains)
- ex: if there was a trade agreement proposal between china and the U.S. and U.S. would gain, but so would China. neorealists (pessimists) would not sign trade aggreement because chinese gaining more than them even though they would gain some too.
- in realism everyone is a threat
- states don't want dependence on other states
- according to neorealism, you don't want specialization because becoming vulnerable because your dependent.

what matters to waltz in IR
- in a hierarchy:
- orderly (people take orders) command system
- units with functions

in an anarchy
- orderer
- units functionally equal
- capabilities (measured in terms of hard power)
- survival

-International Relations structures are like markets, sponaneously (ex: biopolarity, multipolarity) created, not intentionally. certain behaviors and selected and rewarded

major critiques
- neo-realism more contemporary than realism
- neo-realism is a statement of what doesn't matter rather than what does matter
- states that survive are the ones that don't take alliances seriously

Front 16

Jervis

Back 16

-security dilemma: what one state does to enhance their own security causes a reaction that can make them less secure in the end. because other states will become aggressive to equalize power.
- an increase in one states security decreases security of others.
- offense advantage: easier to destroy others army and take territory than to defend self
- defense advantage: easier to defend territory, than to take land.
- security dilemma is most brutul when strategy says that only way to be secure is through expansion.
- the status quo is that states must act like aggressors
- when the defense has the advatage, aggressor states can make self secure without endangering others.
- if defense is strong and the same size, the security dilemma will not stop the aggressor state from cooperating and aggression will be impossible.
- girves is neorealist
- reasons for war from a realist perspective is that everyone is agressive to secure their own state. ex: arms race. one builds a tank, another builds one, continues
- when defense has advantage, state that fears attack does not prempt but prepares to recieve attack.
- realists find security dilemma very dangerous. everyone feeling less secure during arms race.
- game theory (prisoners dilemma): to make predictions about future allows your to capture core dynamic of situation.
- rational self interested actors can end up with worst outcomes
- staghant (no action) through cooperation
- status quo- crisis
- everyone affraid of being suckered so they choose the status quo
- if they could gaurantee security dilemma, any state would want to avoid arms race.
- ways to reduce security dilemma: communicate with other country what your building. trust but verify.

Front 17

Kant

Back 17

- "to perpetual peace"
- liberalism (neoliberalism) idealism
- systems (types of gov matters) realists don't care about this like liberals do
- the type of gov influences behavior meaning peace or war
- kant believes it doesn't matter that the state has power (realists care about power), kant believes must know the behavior (gov) of state to determine what they'll do with the power.
- kant mistrustful of pure democracy need republic gov (representatives)
- democratic peace argument: democracy's do not go to war with each other.
- believed democracies more prone to war
- if normal condition is conflict, than peace must be created. liberalism: create peace by creating proper institutions and laws. people will do the right thing.
through 2 things:

1) regime type
2) league of peace (UN)
- no war
- realists believe any type of treaty will break becuase nations have self interest
- kant knows that powerful nations disregard the law. when they do that, they spend lots of time justifying their actions.
- cannot say that law has no affect on behavior
- kant believes man wants to be good. if right laws found, man will act on that.
- war is the natural state of man not only during hostility but also during the threat of it.
- peace established by pledging security

Front 18

Weber

Back 18

- critiqued waltz "man, the state, and war"
- he says to think about international politics in 3 images (levels of analysis)
1st- man (nature of man)
2nd- state (society>immediate cause of war)
3rd- system (permissive cause of war)
- the system permits man to cause war.
- anarchy is the over all cuase of war.
- realism believes that war is inevitable.
- lord of the flies compared
anarchy=beast
fear (myth)-don't know what it does, can cause many possibilities
- weber is arguing for complexity in waltz's theory.
1) is anarchy fearful? not until the beast enters
2) what does it do
- in waltz, the simplicity, lack of complexity critiqued by weber

Front 19

Kegley

Back 19

- neo idealist
- as world changes, paradigm shifts
- says there needs to be a melding between neo idealism (liberalism) and realism to come up with a not too hot, not too cold theory.
- kuhn would say it wouldn't work.