Critical Approaches - Essay Example

International Relations The best international relations approach is realism because it best describes the world and international relations, is a resort for order and sanity when sovereignty, lives, and power are threatened, mark’s hegemony today, and suits individual lives thereby dominating international relations. Realism makes the best insights in the explanation of the world and the international relations compared to the other approaches namely idealism, Marxism, feminism, ecological, eco-feminist, and post-modern approach.

However, realism worst failing is the high reliance on Great Power Relations ignoring the influence of small powers that could cause threats (Rø, 65). Realism assumes the state to be the paramount player in the economy, and the state is assumed to be unchanging monolithic entity. The problem with this assumption is the non-consideration of agency and internal factors that have an impact on state behaviours. Since most of the realism theory deals with power and the state, a misguided assumption of the state and power relation is the worst failing of the theory.

I believe the weakest approach is the feminist approach because it emphasizes on the relation between power and gender instated of emphasizing on the unequal dissemination of resources and power. The best insight of the feminist approach is that women have been oppressed systematically with men historically being dominant. Despite this being the main insight of the theory it lacks a direct relation between the iniquity of power and resource distribution by emphasizing on power and gender relations.

The need to cater for unequal power and resource distribution under feminism was not dealt with until recently with the advent of contemporary feminism.Work CitedRø, Johannes. Mechanistic Realism and Us Foreign Policy: A New Framework for Analysis. , 2013. Print.