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INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

The inconvenient truth

Ken Booth

When, towards the end of the last century, many students of International Politics
stopped believing in realism, a number came to think that they could believe in
anything. As a result, theoretical pluralism – something surely to be welcomed, in
order to keep us all honest – was gained at the expense, oft-times, of scholarly
engagement with both the established great thinkers in our discipline and the great
issues of peace and war being played out in the arena of world politics: the daily and
historic drama of who gets what, when, and how across the globe.

Theory, the discipline, and Waltz

Against this background of IR’s notably indisciplined (inter)discipline through the
past twenty years, I identified three themes in Chapter 1: an appreciation of Kenneth
N. Waltz as a truly indispensable theorist in the study of International Politics; an
understanding of structural realism as a powerful picture of the international system
with which, or against which, any serious student must engage; and the claim that
realism (in its different guises) is not enough for those wanting to make sense of
world politics.
The need for a continuing and thoughtful engagement with realism was
explained in Chapter 1 in relation to the critical academic duty of holding up a
mirror to contemporary realities. This means, above all, exposing the ideas that have
made us – that have constructed and continue to sustain the structures of a world
that does not work for countless millions of people, and is inhospitable to the natural
environment on which all ultimately depend. The double anniversary for Waltz’s
classic books presents an opportune moment to examine aspects of the particular
version of realism which he developed, and at the same time consider realism in
general, as human society comes face-to-face this century with the costs of its
traditional ideas about living globally.