IR

The most striking distinction between realism and liberalism is their inability to agree upon the basic foundation on which the whole structure of international politics rests on. While realism advocates the proclivity of nation states to be inexorable in their pursuit of national interest, liberalism goes on to identify sources of cooperation like trade and the very existence of international institutions that can serve as mitigating factors in the resolution of world disputes. It is this adaptability of the liberalist school of thought and its attempt to capture the complexity of the post modern age that has caused me to bend towards it despite the knowledge that realism is still anything but redundant. Realism has many vociferous followers, all armed with the incontrovertible fact that this model has been around for many thousand years and will never cease to become an integral component of international political analysis. Something that often goes neglected is that what we have before us is ‘International’ politics, a topic whose intricacy cannot be captured, in the slightest, by traditional schools of thought. Consider the phenomenal growth in the number of nation states plus the rise of non state actors and it becomes rather simple to fathom that this transnational world cannot be explained by any one single theory.