Study sheet: Critical Theories and Globalization

📋 Course Outline

1. Globalization and World Politics
2. From International to World Politics
3. International Relations as a Discipline
4. Theories as Analytical Lenses
5. Liberal Internationalism
6. Realism and Neorealism
7. Social Constructivism
8. Marxist World Politics
9. Marxism and World Politics
10. Poststructuralism and Power
11. Postcolonial and Decolonial Approaches
12. Feminist Approaches to International Politics
13. Meta-Theoretical Divisions
14. Competing Views of Globalization
15. Globalization: Myth or Reality

📅 Key Dates

1. 1910the first journal in the field was published as the Journal of Race Development and is now known as Foreign Affairs
2. 1919the Department of International Politics was established at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, an event often treated as the formation of the academic discipline of International Relations
3. late 1980sSocial constructivism developed in the United States

📖 1. Globalization and World Politics

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Globalization : The process of increasing interconnectedness among societies such that events in one part of the world increasingly affect distant peoples and societies.

★ Must-know

📌 Globalization can refer either to increasing interconnections and impacts among political, economic, cultural, and social events or to the ideology associated with neoliberal capitalism since the late 1970s.

Further detail

• The book has three main aims:
  • to offer an overview of world politics in a global era
  • to summarize the main approaches to understanding contemporary world politics
  • to provide the material necessary to develop a concrete understanding of the main structures and issues defining world

💡 Memory Hook

Increasing interconnectedness → distant political, economic, cultural, and social events have greater effects.

📖 2. From International to World Politics

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• World politics : The study of broadly defined political and power relations among a wide range of actors, including states, institutions, organizations, and other social groups.

★ Must-know

• Examples of non-state actors include: multinational corporations, transnational terrorist groups, social classes, non-governmental organizations such as human rights groups

Further detail

• According to Oxfam, 82 per cent of global wealth is held by 1 per cent of the world’s population, while the richest 27 people possess the same wealth as the poorest 50 per cent, or 3.8 billion people.

💡 Memory Hook

International politics emphasizes states; world politics includes states and non-state actors.

📖 3. International Relations as a Discipline

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• International Relations : A diverse and interdisciplinary field that studies major problems and power relations shaping world politics.

📝 Essential Points

• Its subfields include:

  • international history
  • international security
  • international political economy
  • international law
  • international organizations

• International Relations draws on:

  • History
  • Law
  • Political Science
  • Geography
  • Sociology
  • Anthropology
  • Gender Studies
  • Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies

💡 Memory Hook

History → Political Science dominance → critique of Eurocentrism → Global IR

📖 4. Theories as Analytical Lenses

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Theory : A simplifying device that helps determine which historical or contemporary facts and events matter most when explaining the world.

★ Must-know

• The principal theories introduced are:
  • liberal internationalism
  • realism
  • Marxism
  • constructivism
  • poststructuralism
  • postcolonial and decolonial approaches
  • feminism

Further detail

📌 Theories can be explicit analytical approaches or implicit assumptions inherited from family, social class, peer groups, or the media.

💡 Memory Hook

Different coloured sunglasses make the same world appear different.

📖 5. Liberal Internationalism

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Liberal internationalism : Liberal internationalism holds that human beings and societies can improve, capitalism is the best economic organization, representative democracy supports liberal improvement, and ideas matter alongside material power.

★ Must-know

• Liberals argue that states are legally sovereign but their practical freedom is constrained by negotiations with public and private actors, making interdependence central to world politics.

• Liberal order involves:

  • laws
  • agreed norms
  • international regimes
  • institutional rules

Further detail

• Important liberal actors include:
  • individuals
  • multinational corporations
  • transnational actors
  • international organizations

💡 Memory Hook

Liberal cooperation and interdependence contrast with realist conflict and self-help.

📖 6. Realism and Neorealism

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Realism : A view of world politics as a struggle for power among sovereign states seeking to maximize their national interests in a self-help system.
• Sovereignty : Sovereignty means that no actor above the state can compel it to act in specific ways.
• Neorealism : Neorealism emphasizes how the structure of the international system shapes state behaviour, with the post-Cold War system described as moving toward multipolarity after a phase of unipolarity.

📝 Essential Points

• The balance of power produces order when states act to prevent any one state from dominating the system.

💡 Memory Hook

Sovereignty → power struggle → balance of power → military self-help

📖 7. Social Constructivism

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Social constructivism : The view that people make and remake the social world, so structures, identities, interests, and responses to anarchy can change.

★ Must-know

• Alexander Wendt summarized the constructivist view with the claim that “anarchy is what states make of it” (Wendt 1992).

Further detail

📌 Social constructivism is an approach to the philosophy of social science rather than a complete theory of world politics, so constructivists must combine it with a political theory such as realism, feminism, or usually liberalism.

💡 Memory Hook

Realists treat anarchy as given; constructivists argue that states make and remake it.

📖 8. Marxist World Politics

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Marxism : Also known as historical materialism, an approach that explains world politics through class forces and the unequal capitalist world economy.
• World systems theory : World systems theory divides the international economy into a wealthy capitalist core, a semi-periphery, and an exploited periphery supplying natural resources and cheap labour.

★ Must-know

• For Marxist theory, states, multinational corporations, and international organizations ultimately represent dominant class interests in the world economic system.

Further detail

📌 Marxist theorists consider economic autonomy more important than sovereignty because all states must operate according to the rules of the international capitalist economy.

💡 Memory Hook

Realists prioritize states; Marxists prioritize classes and global capitalism.

📖 9. Marxism and World Politics

★ Must-know

📌 The capitalist world economy severely constrains states’ freedom of manoeuvre, especially that of poorer and weaker states.

• Marxist theory treats classes rather than states as the most important actors in world politics, with the behaviour of other actors ultimately explained by class forces.

Further detail

📌 For Marxist theorists, economic autonomy matters more than sovereignty because all states must follow the rules of the international capitalist economy.

💡 Memory Hook

Global capitalism, not sovereign states, is the central anchor.

📖 10. Poststructuralism and Power

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Poststructuralism : Jean-François Lyotard, 1984 — Sceptical of any account of human life that claims direct access to truth and examines how knowledge claims depend on power relations.

★ Must-know

📌 Michel Foucault argues that power produces knowledge, while knowledge depends on and reinforces existing power relations.

• Jean-François Lyotard defines the postmodern as “incredulity towards metanarratives,” meaning scepticism toward theories claiming clear foundations for knowledge.

Further detail

• Poststructuralist international theorists examine dominant concepts in International Relations by analysing the specific power relations and conditions that make those concepts appear truthful.

💡 Memory Hook

Power produces knowledge → knowledge reinforces power relations.

📖 11. Postcolonial and Decolonial Approaches

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Neocolonialism : The continued military and economic subordination of the Global South by powerful Western interests after formal colonial rule.

★ Must-know

📌 Postcolonial scholars argue that realism, liberalism, Marxism, and poststructuralism are Eurocentric because they emerged in Europe from specific European problems, including imperialism.

📌 Postcolonial and decolonial approaches explain global hierarchies through the historical combination of racial, gendered, class, and national differences.

Further detail

• At the turn of the twentieth century, international relations explicitly referred to “race relations” because much research focused on administering colonies.

• In 1903, W. E. B. DuBois argued that the central problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the “colour-line”.

💡 Memory Hook

Eurocentric theories explain the world from Western experience, whereas postcolonial approaches foreground the Global South.

📖 12. Feminist Approaches to International Politics

★ Must-know

📌 Feminism is not a single theory but a group of approaches united by their analysis of how differences between women and men are constructed within hierarchy and power.

📌 Postcolonial and decolonial feminists argue that equal rights in a Western-style democracy are insufficient when poor women of colour in the Global South remain subordinated by the global economic system.

📌 Feminist research analyses how gender affects world politics and how world politics produces gendered concepts such as the state, war, and sovereignty.

Further detail

• Standpoint feminists argue that women’s subordination gives women a distinctive standpoint on world politics, understood as a social position rather than an economic class.

• In 1988, J. Ann Tickner reformulated Hans J. Morgenthau’s six principles of political realism by showing how they reflected hegemonic masculine values and by taking women’s experiences as the starting point.

💡 Memory Hook

Gender is not outside world politics: it both shapes politics and is shaped by it.

📖 13. Meta-Theoretical Divisions

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Naturalism : Hollis and Smith, 1990 — The view that the natural and social worlds are sufficiently alike for social theories to explain the social world in a manner similar to natural science.

★ Must-know

📌 An explanatory theory treats the world as external to theory, whereas a constitutive theory holds that theories help construct the world they describe.

📌 Foundationalism holds that truth claims can be judged true or false through neutral or objective procedures, whereas anti-foundationalism denies that such neutral grounds exist.

Further detail

• Realist and liberal theories in International Relations tend to be explanatory, while most approaches that became influential during the last 30 years tend to be constitutive.

💡 Memory Hook

Explanatory theories observe an external world, whereas constitutive theories help construct it.

📖 14. Competing Views of Globalization

📝 Essential Points

📌 Feminist approaches assess globalization through its gendered effects, including how neoliberalism and economic globalization disproportionately harm women of colour.

📌 Postcolonial and decolonial scholarship argues that globalization preserves colonial forms of power and can intensify Western economic and military control over the Global South.

• Liberal approaches generally view globalization as a potentially progressive process, whereas Marxist approaches view it as the latest stage of global capitalism, neoliberalism.

• Poststructuralists treat globalization not as an objective reality existing independently of interpretation but as a discourse produced through power and historically specific regimes of truth.

💡 Memory Hook

Liberal optimism → Marxist critique → poststructuralist discourse → postcolonial hierarchy → feminist gender analysis.

📖 15. Globalization: Myth or Reality

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Globalization : The widening, deepening, and acceleration of worldwide connectivity or interconnectedness.
• Globalization : Globalization is described in Chapter 2 as a complex and contradictory process that simultaneously unifies and divides the world.

★ Must-know

• Major criticisms of globalization are that it is:

  • uneven
  • imperialist
  • exploitative
  • enabling of harmful transnational forces
  • weak in democratic accountability

• The main arguments for globalization as a new phase are:

  • expanding economic interdependence
  • revolutionary communications
  • global risks
  • a global culture
  • an emerging global polity
  • cosmopolitan thinking

• Hirst and Thompson’s five conclusions are:

  • the contemporary internationalized economy is not unique
  • genuinely transnational companies are relatively rare
  • investment remains concentrated in the richest states
  • trade, investment, and finance are concentrated in blocs
  • coordinated blocs could regulate global markets

Further detail

• Examples of globalization include:

  • the Covid-19 pandemic
  • pollution and climate change
  • global supply chains
  • international social movements
  • global franchises

• At least 40 per cent of the world’s population is not connected to the internet, which challenges claims about the extent and depth of globalization.

💡 Memory Hook

Globalization can mean a genuinely interconnected world or a myth concealing continuing inequality and Western power.

📊 Synthesis Tables

Main Theoretical Perspectives

Perspective	Primary actors	Central view
Liberal internationalism	States, individuals, corporations, transnational actors, and institutions	Cooperation, progress, interdependence, and institutions
Realism	Powerful sovereign states	Power struggle, national interest, balance of power, and self-help
Social constructivism	Socially constituted actors	Structures, identities, and interests are changeable
Marxism	Classes and capitalist forces	Class conflict and global capitalist inequality shape world politics

Theories of Globalization

Approach	Central interpretation	Main concern
Liberal	Potentially progressive global integration	Expanding interdependence and participation
Marxist	Latest stage of global capitalism	Core–semi-periphery–periphery inequality
Poststructuralist	Power-produced discourse	Regimes of truth
Postcolonial/decolonial	Continuation of colonial power	Western domination of the Global South
Feminist	Gendered process with unequal effects	Gender, race, class, and lived experience