International Relations and the Search for Thinking Space: Another View of the Third Debate

Abstract

Recent debates in International Relations have seen some of the characteristic dichotomies of the discipline under severe and sophisticated challenge. The proposition, for example, that the study of International Relations, is somehow “independent” of mainstream debates on theory and practice in the social sciences is now widely rejected. The disciplines change in attitude on this issue owes much, in the 1980s, to the influences of an as yet small group of scholars who have infused the “third debate” in International Relations with an appreciation for previously “alien” approaches to knowledge and society, drawn from interdisciplinary sources, which repudiate (meta) theoretical dualism in all its forms. Utilizing the sponge term “postpositivism” Yosef Lapid has concentrated on an important aspect of the “third debate,” one which has seen positivist based perspectives repudiated in favor of critical perspectives derived, primarily, from debates on the philosophy of science. This paper takes a broader view of the “third debate” in focusing on some of the broader patterns of dissent in social theory that are now evident in its literature. It argues that for all the differences associated with the new critical social theory approaches, theirs is critique with common purpose. Its purpose: to help us understand more about contemporary global life by opening up for questioning dimensions of inquiry which have been previously closed off and supressed; by listening closely to voices previously unheard; by examining “realities” excluded from consideration under a traditional (realist) regime of unity and singularity. Its purpose, reiterated: the search for “thinking space” within an International Relations discipline produced by and articulated through Western modernist discourse.

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