Asumsi-asumsi dalam Realisme antara lain:
a. the nation-state (usually abbreviated to ‘state’) is the principle
actor in international relations. Other bodies exist, such as individuals and
organisations, but their power is limited.
b. the state is a unitary actor. National interests, especially in times of war, lead the state to speak and act with one voice.
c. decision-makers are rational actors in the sense that rational decision-making leads to the pursuit of the national interest. Perhaps this is why war has been so common throughout recorded history. Since individuals are organised into states, human nature impacts on state behaviour.
Realists believe that our selfishness, our appetite for power and our inability to trust others leads to predictable outcomes.
In Machiavelli’s view, rulers obey the ‘ethics of responsibility’ rather than the conventional religious morality that guides the average citizen – that is, they should be good when they can, but they must also be willing to use violence when necessary to guarantee the survival of the state.
Morgenthau set out an approach that emphasised power over morality. Indeed, morality was portrayed as some-thing that should be avoided in policymaking. In Morgenthau’s account, every political action is directed towards keeping, increasing or demonstrating power. The thinking is that policies based on morality or idealism can lead to weakness.
In Theory of International Politics (1979), Kenneth Waltz modernised IR theory by moving realism away from its unprovable (albeit persuasive). His theoretical contribution was termed ‘neorealism’ or ‘structural realism’ because he emphasised the notion of ‘structure’ in his explanation. Rather than a state’s decisions and actions being based on human nature.
Realism is a theory that claims to explain the reality of international politics. It emphasises the constraints on politics that result from humankind’s egoistic nature and the absence of a central authority above the state. For realists, the highest goal is the survival of the state, which explains why states’ actions are judged according to the ethics of responsibility rather than by moral principles.
Liberalism is based on the moral argument that
ensuring the right of an individual person to life, liberty and property is the
highest goal of government. the main concern of liberalism is to construct
institutions that protect individual freedom by limiting and checking political
power.
while democracies are unlikely to go to war with one another, some scholarship suggests that they are likely to be aggressive toward non-democracies – such as when the United States went to war with Iraq in 2003.
liberal norms are anti-statism (a belief that the power of the government should be limited) and anti-imperialism (a belief that conquest of foreign peoples is wrong). A core argument of liberalism is that concentrations of unaccountable violent power are the fundamental threat to individual liberty and must be restrained. The primary means of restraining power are institutions and norms at both domestic and international level. At the international level institutions and organisations limit the power of states by fostering cooperation and providing a means for imposing costs on states that violate international agreements.
3. The English School
The English school is built around three key
concepts: international system, international society and world society.
Hedley Bull (1977, 9–10) defined the international system as being formed ‘when two or more states have sufficient contact between them, and have sufficient impact on one another’s decisions to cause them to behave as parts of a whole.’ According to this definition, the international system is mainly about power politics among states whose actions are conditioned by the structure of international anarchy. world society is more fundamental than international society because ‘the ultimate units of the great society of all mankind are not states … but individual human beings’ (Bull 1977, 21). Thus, world society transcends the state system and takes individ-uals, non-state actors and ultimately the global population as the focus of global societal identities and arrangements.
4. Constructivism
By. Sabrina Theys
Constructivism sees the world, and what we can know about the world, as socially constructed.
Alexander Wendt (1995) offers an excellent example that
illustrates the social construction of reality when he explains that 500
British nuclear weapons are less threatening to the United States than five
North Korean nuclear weapons. These identifications are not caused by the
nuclear weapons (the material structure) but rather by the meaning given
to the material structure (the ideational structure). (P 36)
Constructivists, On The Other Hand, Argue That ‘Anarchy Is What
States Make Of It’ (WENDT
1992).
Another central issue to constructivism is identities and
interests. Construc-tivists argue that states can have multiple identities that
are socially constructed through interaction with other actors. Identities are
repres-entations of an actor’s understanding of who they are, which in turn
signals their interests. (P 37).
5. Marxism
7. Post-Structuralism
Poststructuralists argue that ‘knowledge’ comes to be accepted as
such due to the power and prominence of certain actors in society known as
‘elites’, who then impose it upon others.
By. Sheila Nair
A key theme to postcolonialism is that Western perceptions of the
non-West are a result of the legacies of European colonisation and imperialism.
No comments:
Post a Comment