ABSTRACT
It has been said that the realist interpretation of the world in International Relations (IR) is full of conflicts. All nation-states are supposed to unceasingly compete with each other in order to maximize their profit and to secure their sovereignty. Liberalists may add to the list international organizations and multinational corporations considering the market as one of the main targets of the academic inquiry. In the case of constructivism, ideas and norms are added to the list. In any case, nation-states remain as the core composition of IR discourses, and they presumably exist prior to our inquiry. In other words, they are pre-given. Even if we take into account the newly developed non-Western IR theories, it seems to make little difference in terms of subjectivity and ontology. This is because the non-Western IR theories generally succeeded the Western philosophical foundations, particularly ontological ones, of the mainstream IR theories, which are exclusively grounded in the preset ontological subjectivity of nation-state. We usually and uncritically presume that ontology, or target of our inquiry, is given prior to our engagement with it. However, our epistemological engagement in IR in fact totally relies on the ontological agreement that supposedly exists among the researchers, and the very action of our inquiry successively confirms and even strengthens the ontological quality. In this sense, the relationship between epistemology and ontology must come under the light of our investigation, and this is what we tried to do in this edited volume.
