Critical international relations theory is a diverse set of schools of thought in International Relations (IR) that have criticized the theoretical, meta-theoretical and/or political status quo, both in IR theory and in international politics more broadly — from positivist as well as postpositivist positions. Positivist critiques include Marxist and Neo-Marxist approaches and certain ("conventional") strands of social constructivism. Postpositivist critiques include poststructuralist, postcolonial, "critical" constructivist, Critical Theory (in the strict sense used by the Frankfurt School), neo-Gramscian, most feminist and some English School approaches, which differ from both realism and liberalism in their epistemological and ontological premises.
Such theories are now widely recognized and taught and researched in many universities, but are as yet less common in the United States. They are taught at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels in many major universities outside the US, where a major concern is that "a myopic discipline of IR might contribute to the continued development of a civil society in the U.S. that thinks, reflects and analyzes complex international events through a very narrow set of theoretical lenses"
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or theory:
“From whichever angle one looks at it, the application of racial theories remains a striking proof of the lowered demands of public opinion upon the purity of critical judgment.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“We commonly say that the rich man can speak the truth, can afford honesty, can afford independence of opinion and action;—and that is the theory of nobility. But it is the rich man in a true sense, that is to say, not the man of large income and large expenditure, but solely the man whose outlay is less than his income and is steadily kept so.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)