When Political Scientists from different sub-fields get together – as, for example, at
APSA meetings – there is a stereotypical exchange that sometimes takes place between
specialists in American Politics and those in International Relations (IR). Americanists, looking
at recent work in IR, admonish IR specialists for constantly returning to first principles. They
suggest IR theory spends too much time rehashing old debates and re-examining underlying
paradigmatic assumptions. The field would be better off, this critique implies, if IR researchers
devoted more effort to cumulating knowledge through Kuhnian normal science.
In this paper, I espouse a contrary position. Ironically enough, given the IR sub-field’s
reputation, I contend IR would benefit from greater self-consciousness about first principles.
The way IR theorists often describe what their subject matter is about does not fully correspond
to the actual content of writing on grand theory in IR. Greater self-awareness about the issues
that become points of engagement in IR theory could lead IR research and debates to be more
productive.
Specifically, I seek to show that an important strand in IR theory involves debates about
what might or might not be possible in the future. I will describe these as “possibilistic” debates
and discuss how they differ from the more familiar notion of “probabilistic” claims in IR theory.
While probabilistic causal hypotheses can be used as a basis for forecasting likely future
outcomes, possibilistic arguments are associated instead with what might be called “feasibility-
casting.” Finally, in contrast to the familiar “as if” assumption used in deductive theorizing,
arguments about possibility are often asserted through the use of what I will call an “and
therefore” clause.
The claims made in this paper should not be construed as part of an either/or argument. I
do not assert that IR is “really” about possibilistic claims rather than probabilistic or other types
of argumentation. I also do not assert that possibilistic debates are more important than other
issues in IR theory. I further do not claim that possibilistic arguments represent a wholly
independent dimension of debate; instead, they depend in part on probabilistic causal hypotheses.
My thesis in this paper is simply that debates about the possible represent a sufficiently distinct
and important aspect of IR theory that they deserve to be given more explicit attention.
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