Hi! Thanks for posting this, I think international relations/politics and different approaches to it receive too little attention in EA discussions and thinking and am happy to see contributions on the topic here on the forum! :))
However, your outline seems a bit overly reductive to me: Within international relations theory and discussions, the realist/idealist dichotomy has probably never existed in a pure form, and much less so since the end of the Second World War. Over the second half of the twentieth century until roughly today, these categories tend to be more reflective of how scholars and thinkers in the space classify themselves and their colleagues (see disciplinary overviews here, here, and here):
Liberalism (or Liberal Institutionalism)
Neo-realism (and many variants thereof, such as defensive and offensive realism or neo-classical realism)
Constructivism (again, with various versions)
English School of IR
Critical theories (Marxist IR, Feminist IR, Post-colonial IR, Postmodern IR, etc)
Also, I think it’s useful to point out that the contrast between “values” and “interests” can be quite misleading, since “interests” cannot be defined without some notion of “the good” and thus pursuing “national interests” also always requires some moral choice from the country in question (or from the country’s leaders). In addition, people who advocate for a foreign policy that promotes human rights protection and/or other moral values abroad will often have the empirical conviction that this “idealist” promotion of values is in the national interest of their home country (because they think a world without extreme moral infringements is more conducive to overall peace, lower rates of transnational crime and terrorism, etc.). All of this makes me feel rather frustrated (and sometimes also annoyed) when I hear people use labels such as “realism” or “idealism”, suggesting that the former is more empirically grounded or value-free (of course, this is not your fault as the author of this piece, since you didn’t make up these terms and are simply describing how they are used by others in this space).
Hi! Thanks for posting this, I think international relations/politics and different approaches to it receive too little attention in EA discussions and thinking and am happy to see contributions on the topic here on the forum! :))
However, your outline seems a bit overly reductive to me: Within international relations theory and discussions, the realist/idealist dichotomy has probably never existed in a pure form, and much less so since the end of the Second World War. Over the second half of the twentieth century until roughly today, these categories tend to be more reflective of how scholars and thinkers in the space classify themselves and their colleagues (see disciplinary overviews here, here, and here):
Liberalism (or Liberal Institutionalism)
Neo-realism (and many variants thereof, such as defensive and offensive realism or neo-classical realism)
Constructivism (again, with various versions)
English School of IR
Critical theories (Marxist IR, Feminist IR, Post-colonial IR, Postmodern IR, etc)
Also, I think it’s useful to point out that the contrast between “values” and “interests” can be quite misleading, since “interests” cannot be defined without some notion of “the good” and thus pursuing “national interests” also always requires some moral choice from the country in question (or from the country’s leaders). In addition, people who advocate for a foreign policy that promotes human rights protection and/or other moral values abroad will often have the empirical conviction that this “idealist” promotion of values is in the national interest of their home country (because they think a world without extreme moral infringements is more conducive to overall peace, lower rates of transnational crime and terrorism, etc.). All of this makes me feel rather frustrated (and sometimes also annoyed) when I hear people use labels such as “realism” or “idealism”, suggesting that the former is more empirically grounded or value-free (of course, this is not your fault as the author of this piece, since you didn’t make up these terms and are simply describing how they are used by others in this space).