IS INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS RESEARCH SCIENTIFIC AND OBJECTIVEEXPLAIN YOUR ANSWER - Essay Example

Moreover, the ongoing debate regarding the true nature of IR research will be discussed, as well as the theoretical formulation of positivism in international affairs. Scientific method implies constructing theories explicitly, obtaining sensibly consistent propositions from those theories, and methodically verifying those propositions through controlled assessments of cases. Hence, the scientific paradigm is concerned with identifying underlying or causal descriptions and with determining how well the recommended causal description forecasts trends across studies (Boucher 1998).

Most fundamental attributes of the scientific approach, evidently, are not dissimilar in the field of social sciences from other disciplines, even though laboratory or controlled experiments are evidently awkward in social research (Crawford 2000). There is certainly nothing about in research in international relations that renders it oddly incompatible with scientific method (Navari 2000). Scientific approach obliges merely a few critical requirements on IR research. Nevertheless, researches in international affairs that are relatively founded on the scientific approach progress from a diversity of theoretical and substantive frameworks.

The most recognised, numerous would argue only justifiable, challenger for the position of science and objectivity in IR is positivism, relating the conditions of knowledge directly to method, verifiability, and generality (Woods 1996). In a paradoxical distortion of the conservative positivist scorn for the simply analytic explanations of the political principle they aim to surpass, IR attains it scientific qualities more by characterisation than by demonstration. If the discipline keeps any apparent functionality it is a capability in explaining and sharpening the assumptions of positivist science (Cassels 1996).

International relations research