ABSTRACT
Realism has had a tremendous impact on the study of international relations but it does have political and theoretical critics. It is, they argue, politically pessimistic, morally problematic, and methodologically reductivist. As long as there have been realists there have been criticisms of and alternatives to that tradition. A lot of the work we explore in the remaining chapters of this book stems from a reaction against realism’s view of the limits and possibilities for international politics. In Chapters 5-7 we look at analyses of IR that emphasize interdependence and globalization and at those critical theories who refuse to take the world as they find it but attempt to think about how to transform it. As we have seen, the dominance of realism came at the expense of utopianism. Utopianism and idealism are terms used pejoratively to describe liberal approaches to IR. Despite being dismissed as utopian, liberalism is the historical alternative to realism and it is still thought to offer important insights in to the practices of international politics.
