What can International Relations Theory learn from the origins of World War I?

Lebow, Richard Ned

doi:10.1177/0047117814556157

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 16 publications

(28 reference statements)

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“…Although Realists do not always expect war to break out, the Realist literature on World War I would expect war to break out under the same conditions (Clark 2013; Lebow 2014).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching Critical Understandings of Realism through Historical War Simulations

Mendenhall

Tutunji

2018

APSC

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This article presents a simple modular simulation for teaching the advantages and limitations of Realist theory in an introductory international relations course. The advantages of this simulation include low preparation time, minimal resource requirements, and ease of integration with existing curricula. The game design is built around Kenneth Waltz's "three-image" framework for analyzing international politics, in a way that increases scenario complexity but not game difficulty. The article describes the full simulation process, from game design and implementation through debriefing and assessment. Two historical simulations were conducted: the first helped students to understand Realism and the second helped them to see its limitations. The article concludes with a discussion of the results of a voluntary, anonymous postgame survey that is intended to assess achievement of our learning objective.

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“…Although Realists do not always expect war to break out, the Realist literature on World War I would expect war to break out under the same conditions (Clark 2013; Lebow 2014).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching Critical Understandings of Realism through Historical War Simulations

Mendenhall

Tutunji

2018

APSC

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“…If one can actually carry out that experiment, so much the better: I don't have to simply imagine what would happen if I stopped pedaling the bicycle, I can go and try it out for myself. When it comes to the general cultural form of bureaucracy, or the ideological proclivities of officials at the World Bank, or the democratic character of two regimes in a particular inter-state dyad, concretely manipulating those factors to see what might result might be impractical or even impossible, but it is sufficient that we be able to spell out what that counterfactual world might look like if we were able to do so (Lebow 2010). Because of their manipulationist form, causal claims at least implicitly inhabit "a space of alternative possibilities" and let us see how "if these initial conditions had been different or had changed in various ways, various of these alternative possibilities would have been realized instead" (Woodward 2005, 191).…”

Section: The Generality Of Causal Claimsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Explanations are intended to solve problems and resolve problem-situations, and to do so by shaping the practical capacity of the recipient-and not simply to provide information that takes existing capacities for granted. 1714 And even into the present, e.g (Lebow 2014)…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Causal claims and causal explanation in international studies

Jackson

2017

J Int Relat Dev

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Many discussions of causation, especially those in the social sciences, are hampered by their reliance on an impoverished conception where the necessary and essential mark of a causal connection is systematic cross-case covariation. This leads to an observational understanding of causation as connected to general patterns, as well as a thorough-going conflation of causal claims and causal explanations. If we think of a causal explanation as a response to a specific kind of practical problem-situation in which the task is how to accomplish something and we shift to a manipulationist understanding of causation, many things become clearer. In particular, we see that the various efforts to conduct real-world open-system evaluations of casual claims are often misguided, inasmuch as such evaluations are often mistaken for causal explanations of observed outcomes.

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“…Given the centrality of the Great War to the field of IR (e.g. Lebow, 2014; Levy and Vasquez, 2014), reinterpreting it as a fundamentally imperial constellation (Gerwarth and Manela, 2014) also has the potential to contribute significantly to a re-thinking of how we understand international order itself, and particularly its supposedly peaceful character. This article takes the imperial context of the Great War as a starting point for the re-description of international order via the experiences of some of its colonised subjects.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bring up the bodies: international order, empire, and re-thinking the Great War (1914–1918) from below

Sabaratnam

2023

European Journal of International Relations

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What does international order look like when analysed from its margins? Such a question is the obvious consequence of efforts within International Relations (IR) to take empire, colonialism and hierarchy more seriously. This article addresses this question by examining one of IR’s most important touchstones – the Great War – through the experiences of peoples in southeast Africa. It argues that to do this, we should use the methodological approaches of histories ‘from below’ and contrapuntal analysis. When looking at the Great War from the vantage point of southeast Africa (contemporary Mozambique), the key patterns of interaction organising the international look different to those emphasised in traditional accounts of international order and hierarchy. Notable features are the significant continuities and intersections between structures of war and colonialism, the racialisation of death and suffering, the effects of white imperial prestige as a strategic preoccupation and the deep historical roots of anti-colonial resistance. Reading upwards and contrapuntally from these histories, the paper argues for a redescription of international order as reflecting not predominantly a balance of power or a normative framework for the organisation of authority, but a dynamic matrix of structural violence. Reading order from below in this way helps us better capture how the international is implicated in the production and reproduction of everyday life for many people, as well as in more dramatic political transformations such as those generated by experiences of war and resistance to colonialism.

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What can International Relations Theory learn from the origins of World War I?

Cited by 8 publications

References 16 publications

Teaching Critical Understandings of Realism through Historical War Simulations

Teaching Critical Understandings of Realism through Historical War Simulations

Causal claims and causal explanation in international studies

Bring up the bodies: international order, empire, and re-thinking the Great War (1914–1918) from below

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