Realism's Grip on IR Discourse Sidelined Ethics
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- The author argues world politics discourse has become predictable, with every military strike, diplomatic initiative, economic sanction, or strategic partnership justified in the name of 'national interest' — and TV debates reduced to a shared vocabulary of power, deterrence, balance of power, strategic autonomy, and security.
- International Relations as an academic discipline has been largely shaped by Western intellectual traditions, with most academic research originating in the United States, according to the source.
- Stanley Hoffman argued in his article that IR is an 'American Social Science,' a claim the source says is difficult to refute given that the modern international order emerged when European powers dominated the world, leaving the Global South with little role in designing the institutions, norms, and rules that continue to govern global politics.
- Hans Morgenthau's Realism became the dominant framework for understanding international affairs after World War II, portraying the international system as anarchic and arguing that states, absent a central authority, are compelled to pursue national interests.
- Public discourse has reduced Realism to two defining ideas — anarchy and national interest — and the theory has travelled from classrooms to newsrooms, becoming the default language through which foreign policy is interpreted.
- Published July 29, 2026, the piece contends that the defining geopolitical crises of recent years 'tell a very different story' than Realism's purely power-focused framework predicts.
Why it matters: For Global South nations excluded from designing post-WWII global institutions, the absence of ethics from foreign policy discourse means crisis responses default to Realist power calculations, sidelining the equity considerations raised by populations outside the Western IR tradition. The piece, published July 29, 2026, frames this as a structural blind spot in how geopolitics is publicly debated.
