Scholarly record

ON THE BORDER, OUTSIDE: THE POST-POSITIVIST INFLUENCE IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY AND POLITICAL THEORY

M. Ivanescu, L.M. Filimon

Abstract

Positivism has been the dominant paradigm across the social sciences. Its quasi-monopoly has been broken only in the last several decades when with the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s grounbreaking study The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), other meta-theoretical stances have managed to assert themselves. From the 1980s onwards, the field of International Relations (IR) has witnessed the emergence of a reflectivist current characterized by the embrace of post-positivism. Reflectivist theories – from poststructuralism, strands of feminism, Critical Theory to postcolonialism and Green theory – did not overthrow and replace the dominant IR theories (neorealism and neoliberalism). Instead, they managed to expand the framework for research outside the state-bound, systemic, and institutional setting proposed by the positivist stance. Where social sciences are concerned, post-positivism disputes the fact that the logic and research principles borrowed from the natural sciences are entirely adequate for the study of society and social relations. In this regard, post-positivism problematizes both the existence of a neutral observer far removed from the object of its study and the need to model research on law-like regularities based on the correspondence between theory and fact. Post-positivism reevaluates what science is supposed to be as well as how and what can be researched. In the first part of this paper, we analyze the positivist and post-positivist paradigms in political sciences (PS) followed in the second part, by an analysis that contrasts the main ideas of positivism with the post-positivist stance that emerges in International Relations (IR) during the 1980s.

Publication Impact Profile

No metrics available.

PLUMX see details

DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2017/12/S01.016

Publication details

Back to publication list