1 Masterclass: research questions in International Relations

Hello, my name is Jamie Gaskarth. I’m Professor of Foreign Policy and International Relations at The Open University. In this video, we’ll explore two kinds of research question, one aimed at understanding, and the other explaining international politics. As we’ll see, they lead to different, but equally valid research avenues.

First up is Roxanne Doty’s article from 1993, ‘Foreign policy as social construction: a post-positivist analysis of US counterinsurgency policy in the Philippines’ published in International Studies Quarterly. The title is a clue to the kind of approach Doty will adopt, emphasising social construction and post-positivism. This article emerges from the so-called ‘third debate’ when a new generation of scholars began to question the taken-for-granted assumptions of IR scholarship. The aim was to deconstruct how we describe the world and unpick our knowledge claims.

Traditional positivist research tended to ask why things happened, which meant comparing and ranking the causes of things. Roxanne Doty notes that ‘why’ questions ‘generally take it as read the possibility that a particular decision or course of action could take place.’ Instead in this article, Doty wants to explore a ‘how possible’ question. How do our practices enable certain social actors to act in the way they do?

Doty identifies two ‘how possible’ questions. Here, we’ll just discuss the first: ‘how were particular subjects and modes of subjectivity constituted so as to make possible United States interventionist policies in the Philippines circa 1950?’ There are three mechanisms Doty identifies by which subjects are constituted: presupposition, predication and subject positioning.

Presupposition means the assumptions you make about reality. Who are the important actors in world politics? How do you expect them to behave? Predication is about the qualities one associates with the subject. Here, you might look at the adjectives used. Are they angry, sad, lazy, emotional, cold? Subject positioning is how you relate subjects to one another via means such as binary oppositions, north/south, male/female, civilised/uncivilised, rational/irrational?

Her analysis looks at the US intervention in the Philippines and how it was made possible via these mechanisms. Looking at official records of the intervention, Doty notes a pattern in the kinds of predication attached to the Filipino population. They are described as childlike, inept, wasteful. Meanwhile, the US has obligations, is responsible, and must protect them – paternalistic images.

The presupposition Doty identifies was that Asian thinking was very different from non-Asian thinking. This difference is structured in terms of reason and passion, with the US as reasonable and the Filipino population as passionate and emotional. A further supposition was that the Filipino population could be divided into good and evil. This leads to particular subject positions. A hierarchy is implied, with the US as reasonable, good and possessing moral obligations, while the Filipinos were passionate, some were evil, and all had to be looked after rather than be independent.

These were common ways of thinking and describing during the colonial era. Look at it that way, it begins to make sense how the US could justify intervention to itself and others, overriding the autonomy of the Filipinos. In essence, ‘how possible’ questions are a kind of gap-spotting exercise, where much of the literature focuses on what happened and why. ‘How possible’ questions introduce the important element of how these events are enabled. It leads to a radically different way of thinking about international

politics, critiquing power structures, delegitimising forms of domination, including the production of knowledge.

Our second research question is drawn from an article by Virginia Page Fortna from 2004. This too was published International Studies Quarterly. But it’s a very different sort of project. Fortna asks, ‘Does peacekeeping keep peace? International intervention and the duration of peace after civil war.’ It was written at a time when many scholars were questioning whether UN peacekeeping did more harm than good, with Edward Luttwak arguing, ‘We should give war a chance.’

Fortna notes a ‘lack of rigorous testing of the effectiveness of these interventions by the international community.’ In other words, she too spots a gap in our understanding. Fortna’s paper examines peacekeeping in the aftermath of civil wars. She adopts a positivist approach to explain outcomes by hypothesis-testing. Her two hypotheses are ‘that peacekeeping contributes to more durable peace, and the null hypothesis that it does not make peace significantly more likely to last.’

Fortna explains that at first glance in civil wars since 1944, there is another round of fighting between the same parties in about 42% of cases, where no peacekeepers were deployed, and in approximately 39% of those with peacekeeping. The numbers are even worse for UN peacekeeping with peace slightly more likely to fail when UN peacekeepers are present than when they are absent.

After the Cold War, the record of peacekeeping is slightly better. But in none of these tabulations is the difference between peacekeeping and no peacekeeping statistically significant. But looks can be deceiving. Fortna takes the analysis further by arguing we need to be able to gauge the degree of difficulty of the various cases, as well as the durability of the peace. UN peacekeepers are more likely to be deployed to difficult situations.

When you factor that in, Fortna suggests that ‘after 1989, when the International community deploys peacekeepers, the risk of another round of fighting drops by almost 70 per cent.’ She concludes that ‘peacekeeping works, particularly after the Cold War when most of the attempts to keep peace after civil wars have been made.’ ... It does not guarantee lasting peace in every case, but it does tend to make peace more likely to last, and to last longer.’

These two articles are great examples of clear research questions leading to fruitful research and interesting findings. To recap, Doty’s is a ‘how’ question. And by posing it in this way and then doing lots of empirical research in the National Archives, she draws attention to the power structures and knowledge claims that legitimise intervention by powerful states.

Meanwhile, Fortna uses a positivist approach to test hypotheses. Setting out clear parameters for the research and defining her cases carefully, she provides a stronger evidence base with an important conclusion: UN peacekeeping works. In your own research, you need to begin by thinking about the puzzle you want to examine and the best way of interrogating it. Will you ask a ‘how’ question to understand something, or a hypothesis-testing ‘why’ question to explain it? Either way, this will hopefully say something important about the way international relations operate.