Download This PaperStructural Realism and Geopolitical Thought: Intertheoretical Explanation from a French Perspective
Occasional Paper No. 4, Centre for International Relations, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada
Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, Learned Societies Conference, Winnipeg, Manitoba (June 1986), International Relations Section, International Relations Theory Session, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, 8 June 1986
40 Pages Posted: 29 May 2020
Date Written: June 8, 1986
Abstract
The revitalization of the realist perspective as a descriptive and explanatory framework for theorizing about international political relations represents a major, and arguably the most important, feature of current developments in the field. In part, this phenomenon reflects the reviewed emphasis in recent scholarly reporting on systemic regularities in international politics that tend to support the core propositions of realism: state-centrism; power-arbitration; and, self-interested motivation. With sufficient frequency to be noteworthy, these analyses have been couched in the idiom of geopolitics. Nowhere in the Western industrialized world has geopolitical thinking been reasserted more vigorously than in France. While a significant number of restatements, updates, and refinements of classic themes have been put forward from conventional circles, some of the most forceful arguments for a geopolitical reading of international events and trends have originated from less expected sources, including figures associated with postwar anti-colonialism. It is the heterogeneity of the world views of its exponents which has rendered contemporary French-language geopolitical thought so compelling. Scholarly competition on a normative base, in turn, has militated in favor of generalized technical competence. This new writing, like its IR realist counterpart, reveals that professional and normative impetuses have had a discernible influence on the choice of the analytical techniques to be adopted and the abstractions to be employed in the search for more scientifically-viable formulations of international political theory.
Keywords: geopolitics, international relations theory, structural realism, geopolitical theorizing
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