“Kenneth Waltz, arguably the most influential international theorist since the Second World War, put it like this: ‘Students of international politics have had an extraordinarily difficult time casting their subject in theoretical terms’ (Waltz 1990, 21). IR students today might think this claim outdated. For it was made at the very moment when IR was experiencing a dramatic widening of its theoretical horizons. From the late 1980s onwards, traditional realist, liberal and Marxist approaches were being joined on the stage by numerous new theories: critical theory, constructivism, neo-Gramscianism, feminism, post-structuralism, postcolonialism and so on. As a result, IR theory today is a very crowded field. And yet Waltz never changed his mind. For him, most of the approaches studied as ‘international theories’ were nothing of the kind. Instead they were theories of domestic society that people were using to think about international affairs. Such theories, argued Waltz, are not useless
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51