ABSTRACT
The last few years have seen a marked upsurge in philosophical discussions within the field of IR. This was in large part a reaction to a particular kind of bifurcation that gripped the field in the 1980s and into the early 1990s: on the one hand, the dominance of the neorealist-neoliberal debate and its emphasis on technical, as opposed to conceptual, questions (Powell 1994; Niou and Ordeshook 1994), and on the other hand, a variety of efforts to introduce social-theoretical and philosophical considerations so as to move the field in a radically different direction (Kratochwil and Ruggie 1986; George and Campbell 1990). This bifurcation-christened the “Third Debate” by Yosef Lapid (1989)—produced a rather unfortunate situation in which the “debate” was largely a dialogue of the deaf, with most of the social and philosophical theory on the side of the dissidents while most of the empirical propositions were on the side of the fairly unreflective neopositivists. The field appeared to be heading for some kind of profound fissure.
