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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 March 2022
The idea of integrative pluralism offers a promising path for the development of theory in international security and international relations. Instead of either trying to shoehorn all theorising into a single, limited paradigm or giving up entirely on theoretical progress, the integrative pluralist approach calls for bringing diverse approaches together. More precisely, integrative pluralism involves explaining specific phenomena by linking causal processes across multiple layers of reality, and then using the findings to inform broader theoretical constructs such as IR theory paradigms. Elements of the integrative pluralism approach are already visible in the work of mainstream scholars such as Snyder and Katzenstein, as well as of critical scholars such as Sjoberg and Hansen, but the field has tended to overlook these scholars’ efforts at theoretical integration. To more explicitly develop integrative pluralism for our field, this article first draws on critical realist philosophy and social theory. It then illustrates how further steps in this direction might be taken, in particular by highlighting the integrative pluralist aspects of Kaufman's applications of symbolic politics theory to explaining ethnic conflict and war more generally.
1 See Tim Dunne, Lene Hansen, and Colin Wight, ‘The end of International Relations theory?’, European Journal of International Relations, 19:3 (2013), p. 406; Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and its Implications for the Study of World Politics (London, UK: Routledge, 2011); Daniel J. Levine and David M. McCourt, ‘Why does pluralism matter when we study politics? A view from contemporary International Relations’, Perspectives on Politics, 16:1 (2018), pp. 92–109. See also Kristensen, Peter Marcus, ‘International Relations at the end: A sociological autopsy’, International Studies Quarterly, 62:2 (2018), pp. 245–59Google Scholar.
2 John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, ‘Leaving theory behind: Why simplistic hypothesis testing is bad for International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 19:3 (2013), pp. 427–57.
3 Lake, David A., ‘Why “isms” are evil: Theory, epistemology, and academic sects as impediments to understanding and progress’, International Studies Quarterly, 55:2 (2011), pp. 465–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 For example, Rudra Sil and Peter Katzenstein, Beyond Paradigms: Analytic Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Jeffrey Checkel, ‘Theoretical pluralism in IR: Possibilities and limits’, in Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse, and Beth A. Simmons (eds), Handbook of International Relations (London, UK: SAGE, 2013), pp. 220–41; Bennett, Andrew, ‘The mother of all isms: Causal mechanisms and structured pluralism in International Relations theory’, European Journal of International Relations, 19:3 (2013), pp. 459–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lake, David A., ‘Theory is dead, long live theory: The end of the Great Debates and the rise of eclecticism in International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 19:3 (2013), pp. 567–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lapid, Yosef, ‘Through dialogue to engaged pluralism: The unfinished business of the third debate’, International Studies Review, 5:1 (2003), pp. 128–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Patrick T. Jackson and Daniel H. Nexon, ‘International theory in a post-paradigmatic era: From substantive wagers to scientific ontologies’, European Journal of International Relations, 19:3 (2013), pp. 543–65; Kavi Joseph Abraham and Yehonatan Abramson, ‘A pragmatist vocation for International Relations: The (global) public and its problems’, European Journal of International Relations, 23:1 (2013), pp. 26–48; Acharya, Amitav, ‘Advancing global IR: Challenges, contentions, and contributions’, International Studies Review, 18:1 (2016), pp. 4–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Dunne, Hansen, and Wight, ‘The end of International Relations theory?’, p. 416.
6 Sil and Katzenstein, Beyond Paradigms, pp. 2, 20.
7 Walt and Mearsheimer, ‘Leaving theory behind’.
8 Colin Wight, ‘Theorizing International Relations: Emergence, organized complexity, and integrative pluralism’, in E. Kavalski (ed.), World Politics at the Edge of Chaos: Reflections on Complexity and Global Life (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2015), pp. 53–77; Wight, Colin, ‘Bringing the outside in: The limits of theoretical fragmentation and pluralism in IR theory’, Politics, 39:1 (2019), pp. 64–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sandra D. Mitchell, Biological Complexity and Integrative Pluralism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Sandra D. Mitchell, ‘Complexity and explanation in the social sciences’, in C. Mantzavinos (ed.), Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Philosophical Theory and Scientific Practice (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 130–45.
9 On Europe, see Mearsheimer, John J., ‘Back to the future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War’, International Security, 15:1 (1990), pp. 5–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on Asia, see Friedberg, Aaron L., ‘Ripe for rivalry: Prospects for peace in a multipolar Asia’, International Security, 18:3 (1994), pp. 5–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Stuart J. Kaufman, Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Stuart J. Kaufman, Nationalist Passions (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).
11 Mitchell, Biological Complexity and Integrative Pluralism, p. 216.
12 Dunne, Hansen, and Wight, ‘The end of International Relations theory?’, p. 409.
13 Mearsheimer and Walt, ‘Leaving theory behind’, p. 431.
14 We have a reservation relating to the commitment to a temporal sequence of causes, which evinces a rather ‘flat’ view of social ontology, in which readily apparent events or conditions follow one after another. Indeed, such a view can be seen as deriving from a neopositivist view of explanation to which we do not subscribe. See David Little, Varieties of Social Explanation: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Social Science (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), pp. 13–19. Detailed further below, we contend that causal processes may interact in complex ways rather than playing out in a linear and chronological fashion.
15 Lake, ‘Why “isms” are evil’, pp. 466–7.
16 Daniel J. Levine and Alexander D. Barder, ‘The closing of the American mind: “American School” International Relations and the state of grand theory’, European Journal of International Relations, 20:4 (2014), pp. 863–88.
17 See, for example, Legro, Jeffrey W. and Moravcsik, Andrew, ‘Is anybody still a realist?’, International Security, 24:2 (1999), pp. 5–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Balkan Devlen, Patrick James, and Ozgur Ozdamar, ‘The English School, International Relations and progress’, International Studies Review, 7:2 (2005), p. 172.
19 Stated, respectively, in John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 3; and Mearsheimer, John J., ‘The false promise of international institutions’, International Security, 19:3 (1994), pp. 5–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
20 Mearsheimer and Walt, ‘Leaving theory behind’, p. 432; Lake, ‘Why “isms” are evil’, p. 469.
21 See Rose, Gideon, ‘Neoclassical realism and theories of foreign policy’, World Politics, 51:1 (1998), pp. 144–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 See, respectively, Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Moravcsik, Andrew, ‘Taking preferences seriously: A liberal theory of international politics’, International Organization, 51:4 (1997), pp. 513–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bruce M. Russett and John R. Oneal, Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2001).
23 Brown, Chris, ‘The poverty of Grand Theory’, European Journal of International Relations, 19:3 (2013), p. 290CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For examples of the ‘practice turn’, see Pouliot, Vincent, ‘The logic of practicality: A theory of practice of security communities’, International Organization, 62:2 (2008), pp. 257–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bigo, Didier, ‘Pierre Bourdieu and international relations: Power of practices, practices of power’, International Political Sociology, 5:3 (2011), pp. 225–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 Bennett, ‘The mother of all isms’, pp. 472–4.
25 Wight, ‘Bringing the outside in’, p. 67.
26 Mitchell's form of scientific pluralism has been described as ‘modest’, in that it does not hold that pluralism is a function of irreconcilable theoretical claims. Bouwel, Jeroen Van, ‘Towards democratic models of science: Exploring the case of scientific pluralism’, Perspectives on Science, 32:2 (2015), pp. 153–4Google Scholar. However, while some ‘modest’ approaches to pluralism are guided by the goal of (eventual or at least ‘in principle’) theoretical unification, Mitchell is bit less modest than this, contending that unification is not even in principle the goal of integration because of the ‘contingency, context sensitivity, and nonlinear interaction among contributing causes’. Sandra D. Mitchell and Michael R. Dietrich, ‘Integration without unification: An argument for pluralism in the biological sciences’, The American Naturalist, 168 (2006), p. S78; Jamie Shaw, ‘Pluralism, pragmatism and functional explanations’, Kairos: Journal of Philosophy & Science, 15 (2016), p. 20.
27 Mitchell, Biological Complexity and Integrative Pluralism, p. 10.
28 Sandra D. Mitchell, Unsimple Truths: Science, Complexity, and Policy (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 115.
29 Wight, ‘Bringing the outside in’, p. 68.
30 Mitchell, Unsimple Truths, p. 118.
31 Ibid., p. 109.
32 Bennett, ‘The mother of all isms’, p. 263.
33 Mitchell, Biological Complexity and Integrative Pluralism, p. 189.
34 Wight, ‘Bringing the outside in’, p. 68. See also Mitchell, Sandra D., ‘Integrative pluralism’, Biology and Philosophy, 17:1 (2002), pp. 55–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
35 Mitchell, Biological Complexity and Integrative Pluralism, p. 216.
36 See Colin Wight, Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006). An anonymous reviewer pushed us on this issue, contending that Mitchell was in fact a pragmatist and therefore a scientific anti-realist. This is difficult to square with Mitchell's clear emphasis on the way the nature of the biological domain impinges on explanatory strategies. In our view Mitchell is clearly an explanatory realist – explanations should seek to explain a (relatively) mind-independent reality – is also committed to naturalism, and yet is a methodological pragmatist. This is a combination of philosophical positions that parallels critical realism. Mitchell, ‘Complexity and explanation’; Shaw, ‘Pluralism, pragmatism and functional explanations’, p. 4, fn. 3; Sandra D. Mitchell, ‘Pragmatic laws’, Philosophy of Science, 64 (1997).
37 Chernoff, Fred, ‘Critical realism, scientific realism, and International Relations theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 35:2 (2007), p. 403Google Scholar.
38 Roy Bhaskar, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009); Georgios Evangelopoulos, ‘Scientific Realism in the Philosophy of Social Science and International Relations’ (PhD dissertation, Department of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2013); Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Heikki Patomӓki, After International Relations: Critical Realism and the (Re)Construction of World Politics (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002); Milja Kurki, Causation in International Relations: Reclaiming Causal Analysis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
39 Frédéric Vandenberghe, What's Critical About Critical Realism? Essays in Reconstructive Social Theory (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), p. ix.
40 Margaret Archer et al., ‘What is critical realism?’, Perspectives: A Newsletter of the ASA Theory Section, available at: {http://www.asatheory.org/current-newsletter-online/what-is-critical-realism} accessed 8 August 2018.
41 Bhaskar, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, pp. 103–04; Ingen, Michiel Van, ‘Sublating the naturalism/anti-naturalism problematic: Critical realism, critical naturalism, and the question of methodology’, International Studies Quarterly, 23:3 (2021), pp. 835–61Google Scholar.
42 Bhaskar, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, p. 106.
43 Andrew Collier, Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar's Philosophy (New York, NY: Verso, 1994), pp. 19–20.
44 Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences (3rd edn, London, UK: Routledge, 1998).
45 Heikki Patomäki and Colin Wight, ‘After postpositivism? The promises of critical realism’, International Studies Quarterly, 44:2 (2000), p. 235.
46 Kurki, Causation in International Relations, p. 233.
47 Berth Danermark, Mats Ekström, Liselotte Jakobsen, and Jan ch. Karrlson, Explaining Society: Critical Realism in the Social Sciences (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), p. 5; Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism, pp. 9–12.
48 Kurki, Causation in International Relations, p. 174.
49 Andrew Sayer, Realism and Social Science (London, UK: Sage Publications, 2000), pp. 12–13; Douglas V. Porpora, ‘Cultural rules and material relations’, Sociological Theory, 11:2 (1993), p. 222.
50 Wight, ‘Bringing the outside in’, p. 70.
51 Andrew Bennett and Jeffrey Checkel, Process Tracing: From Metaphor to Analytic Tool (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
52 Steinmetz, George, ‘Odious comparisons: Incommensurability, the case study, and “small Ns” in sociology’, Sociological Theory, 22:3 (2004), pp. 371–400CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
53 David Dessler, ‘Beyond correlations: Toward a causal theory of war’, International Studies Quarterly, 35:3 (1991), pp. 337–55.
54 Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’ Trap? (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017).
55 Colin Wight, ‘Mechanisms and models: Some examples from International Relations’, in M. Archer (ed.), Generative Mechanisms: Transforming the Social Order (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2015), p. 52.
56 Wight, Agents, Structures and International Relations, p. 294.
57 We utilise the term ‘middle-range’ theory fairly loosely, as Merton himself did, to mean any theory that goes beyond empirical observation and simple hypothesis testing, but is less than the ‘total systems’ of ‘grand’ theories. Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York, NY: Free Press, 1968), pp. 45–8.
58 Mitchell, Unsimple Truths, p. 106.
59 Bhaskar, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, p. 215.
60 Chernoff, Fred, ‘The study of democratic peace and progress in international relations’, International Studies Review, 6:1 (2004), pp. 49–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
61 Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). We thank an anonymous reviewer for reminding us of this example.
62 Scheff, Thomas J., ‘Academic gangs’, Crime, Law and Social Change, 23:2 (1995), pp. 157–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
63 Jack L. Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 32 and passim.
64 Ibid., p. 41.
65 Ibid., pp. 98–104.
66 See, for example, Sean Lynn-Jones, M., ‘Offense-defense theory and its critics’, Security Studies, 4:4 (1995), pp. 660–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Charles L. Glaser and Chaim Kaufmann, ‘What is the offense-defense balance and can we measure it?’, International Security, 22:4 (1998), pp. 44–82.
67 Interestingly, though the broader paradigm has not systematically done this, prominent realists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have increasingly turned to such factors when explaining what they see as wrongheaded US foreign policies. See, for example, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007).
68 Peter J. Katzenstein, Cultural Norms and National Security: Police and Military in Postwar Japan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 2.
69 Rudra Sil and Peter Katzenstein, ‘Analytic eclecticism: Not perfect, but indispensable’, Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, 8:2 (2010), pp. 19–24; Sil and Katzenstein, Beyond Paradigms.
70 Katzenstein, Cultural Norms and National Security, pp. 7, 27, 196–7.
71 Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
72 Laura Sjoberg, Gendering Global Conflict: Toward a Feminist Theory of War (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 53.
73 Ibid., pp. 78–81.
74 Ibid., pp. 87, 94–5.
75 Lene Hansen, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (London, UK: Routledge, 2006).
76 Ibid., pp. 22–4.
77 Ibid., pp. 25–6, 29–30.
78 Ibid., pp. 146–7.
79 Stuart J. Kaufman, Nationalist Passions (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).
80 Stuart J. Kaufman, ‘War as symbolic politics’, International Studies Quarterly, 63:3 (2019), pp. 614–25.
81 Therese Pettersson and Peter Wallensteen, ‘Armed conflicts, 1946–2014’, Journal of Peace Research, 52:4 (2015), p. 539.
82 Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
83 See, for example, Doug McAdam, Sidney G. Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Stacie E. Goddard and Daniel Nexon, ‘The dynamics of global power politics: A framework for analysis’, Journal of Global Security Studies, 1:1 (2016), pp. 4–18.
84 Stuart J. Kaufman, ‘The irresistible force and the imperceptible object: The Yugoslav breakup and Western policy’, Security Studies, 4:2 (1995), pp. 282–330.
85 Kaufman, Modern Hatreds.
86 Jack Snyder and Robert Jervis, ‘Civil war and the security dilemma’, in Barbara Walter and Jack Snyder (eds), Civil Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999).
87 Kaufman, Nationalist Passions.
88 John Duckitt, ‘Prejudice and intergroup hostility’, in David O. Sears, Leonie Huddy, and Robert Jervis (eds), Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 575.
89 Kaufman, Nationalist Passions.
90 Ibid.
91 Henri Tajfel, ‘Social psychology of intergroup relations’, Annual Review of Psychology, 33 (1982), pp. 1–39.
92 Duckitt, ‘Prejudice and intergroup hostility’.
93 Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, ‘The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice’, Science, 211:4481 (30 January 1981), pp. 453–8; Dennis Chong and James N. Druckman, ‘Framing theory’, Annual Review of Political Science, 10 (2001), pp. 103–26.
94 An example of this version of framing theory is Kimberly Gross and Lisa D'Ambrosio, ‘Framing emotional response’, Political Psychology, 25:1 (2004), pp. 1–29.
95 Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013).
96 Charles Tilly, Identities, Boundaries and Social Ties (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2005), p. 6.
97 Omar S. McDoom, The Path to Genocide in Rwanda: Security, Opportunity and Authority in an Ethnocratic State (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Lee Ann Fujii, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).
98 Barkin's work on ‘realist constructivism’ makes a similar case, and has begun to translate into productive explanatory work. Samuel J. Barkin, Realist Constructivism: Rethinking International Relations Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Samuel J. Barkin (ed.), The Social Construction of State Power: Applying Realist Constructivism (Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press, 2020).
99 Owen, John M., ‘How liberalism produces the democratic peace’, International Security, 19:2 (1994), pp. 87–125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
100 A deeper synthesis might also incorporate psychological insights, embodying Shannon and Kowert's argument that psychology and constructivism are not alternatives but theoretical allies. See Vaughn P. Shannon and Paul A. Kowert (eds), Psychology and Constructivism in International Relations: An Ideational Alliance (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012). As Kaufman has shown in Nationalist Passions, symbolic politics theory can be modified to serve as a theory of state action with all five causes interacting to explain state choices to engage in international conflict and cooperation.
101 Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Daniel H. Nexon, ‘Relations before states: Substance, process and the study of world politics’, European Journal of International Relations, 5:3 (1999), pp. 291–332.
102 See, for example, Stacie E. Goddard, Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, Miles Kahler, and Alexander H. Montgomery, ‘Network analysis for international relations’, International Organization, 63:3 (2009), pp. 559–92.
103 Kaufman, ‘War as symbolic politics’.
104 For a recent example, see Heikki Patomäki, Disintegrative Tendencies in Global Political Economy: Exits and Conflicts (London, UK: Routledge, 2017). We would like to thank [source] for this reminder.
105 For empirical evidence supporting this theoretical claim, see Stuart J. Kaufman, Richard Little, and William C. Wohlforth (eds), The Balance of Power in World History (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007).
