I returned to university a few years ago to write some Master thesis and have something to do apart from having my life being wasted by torturous campaigns designed by geniuses. That obviously did not work out, because the range of ‘the genius’ is quite endless so to say.
So we’ll get back to blogging. Blogging has a good side: If you do not want to read it, and this also applies to ‘so-called experts’, THEN DON’T READ IT. Another advantage would be that scientific (and/or factual) scrutiny is not hugely important; you don’t need to attribute every little similarity in sentences to the existence of the Pope so to say.
The obvious disadvantage is that you can’t earn a single buck from rambling on a blog. The ideal situation would have been that I’d be granted some access to scientific articles while being left alone, but we all know how that worked out. A non-existent pandemic, a bunch of wars that will go on for eternity and an enormous fake campaign later the scientists must be the happiest folk in the world, with myself being more dead than alive.
A true win-win situation that must have been, and surely still is.
All right, below is my idea. I wrote down something very similar back in the day, but slightly ‘cuter’. Essentially if you depart from the position of any agent in a 2D manifold there will be constraints and stimulus when it comes to a range of possibilities. Now it’s a bit more organized, back then it was far more ad-hoc, but essentially it’s just the same, with a few tweaks and turns.
The question is what kind of theory this is going to be. Originally it was designed as an International Relations (IR) theory, but maybe it’s more like a general social theory. Anyway, that is not important for now, as I only got bugged by smart folk for a decade. Don’t forget to kill yourselves when you read this, because that’s what you’re supposed to do, or at the very least just try your own medicine on yourselves and see what you are capable off. (I will reveal a big secret here: You’re such a miserable bunch of n00bheads that you won’t get anywhere anyway apart from uttering big words and hiring more IT guys for more fake stuff. A taste of your own medicine surely gets you in expensive hospitals for at least a year.)
On a more practical note: This idea is way too big for a Master Thesis so I can’t really go for it. A pity, but that’s how it is. So let’s just blog and work my way through here, with the occasional rant on the smart folk mingled in, cuz boy, are they smart!
So the text below was not a real proposal, but just a bit of info designed to discuss with my professors to see what would be possible.
Proposing a Unified Model in International Relations
Table of Contents
Domestic (or inner) information processing determines outward behavior
Intermediate Parameter — Trust Level among Agents
Towards Concrete Behavior – Two More Steps
Motivation
This is actually an old idea of mine which I originally intended to write down during my return at this department as a Master student. Sadly enough it is only now though that I can finally start working on the final thesis, but I do hope this can still be written down. Below I will start explaining my idea.
Many scholars, especially from the non-West have argued that theories in International Relations (IR) are not universal, that is they largely come out of a Western tradition and are supported by powerful academic institutions, while they not be offering too much explanatory power when researching the behavior of (largely) non-Western states. The question here is 2-fold: First of all is this really true? Are the theories that are being developed really non-universal? And if so, is it actually possible to conjecture a truly universal theory, or at the very least parts of it?
Both the historic development of different areas and different philosophical traditions could at least theoretically lead to different theories of the world. An example of different historic development would be the emphasis of Western scholars on ‘balancing’ as an attempt to curb military power of a nation-state. However, empirical evidence simply shows that this is not consistent behavior, and therefore might be overemphasized in IR at the very least. On the notion of different philosophical traditions it can be said that many theories originating from the Indian subcontinent long have argued that the distinction between ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ is largely non-existent, contrary to Western tradition.
The idea of this thesis is simply to propose a universal model in a descriptive manner, with brief explanations at every point of it, and just leave it at that, because a real comprehensive explanation of the model would really be more of a PhD project and probably take many, many pages. Many (but not all) of the components described below are in fact pretty well known already, but just haven’t been put into something more comprehensive as far as I know, essentially living on ‘isolated islands’ instead of being part of an ‘integrated whole’.
The Actual Model
This is the most important section of this little epistle. Below we will focus on Ontological Issues of reality, the agent vs structure problem, the two dependent values that will be used (information and trust level), information processing and the concrete process of decision making.
Ontological Issues
Very much simplified we can say that there has been a longstanding discussion concerning ‘visible’ vs ‘invisible’ or ‘concrete’ versus ‘abstract’ and what of these constitute ‘reality’. I will argue that this distinction is a fallacy, and consequently largely invalid. It simply does not matter all that much, and it might even be argued that in the larger scheme of things the ‘invisible’ actually plays a larger role than the ‘visible’, if one insists on using said terminology. This fallacy is important to point out because in this model we will regard the world, and by extension the world of IR as a social world, which as we will see below, is controlled by human agents.
Agent Centered
The world will be considered an agent-central world, and we will largely departing structural analysis (what some would call the agent-structure problem), as in the end, the world is a social world. Agents can be anything, from an individual or a group representing the state, local leader(s), institutions, companies, multilateral organizations ranging from international financial entities to environmental groups, etc, etc. This thesis will indeed use a very broad definition of “agent”.
The second part is most important. Agents do not work individually but in conjunction with 1 or more other agents. The relationship between them is what determines matters here. It’s this interaction that drives the world of IR. Humans don’t function individually, and neither do individual agents in the world of IR. This is an important notion and will be emphasized: e.g. this thesis will argue that it is not the anarchic world order that determines state behavior, but the type of relationship between different agents.
The model can be as easy or complicated as desired, for example a bipolar world order similar to the cold war can be described as 2 agents competing, or the model can be enhanced by adding more agents, which (obviously) can be both state and non-state agents, who all (naturally) have different capacities and outlooks, while maintaining what is considered a ‘bipolar world order’ while being able to gain more nuanced results.
Dependent Value – Information
- Key parameter: information, both ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’, which are determined by the factors described below:
- The Abstract. The problem is that many of these points are obvious, but in different situations work differently, just like the ‘balancing’ issue pointed out earlier. As we will see soon many of the points influence others and vice-versa. Surely more research is needed here.
- First we have institutions: The factors listed below directly and indirectly determine how institutions function, and subsequently highly influence the decision making process of agents. Which one of the ones listed below would be ‘the most or least important’ is a difficult question to answer — for now.
- Education: This seems fairly straightforward, most agents are shaped by their respective education, which can be very different from person to person; sometimes compliance prevails, and sometimes revolutionary tendencies prevail, with all kinds of middle ground.
- Culture: Including religion, which largely works domestically, modern examples are the Netherlands and Germany, or even North and South Korea. Cultural issues however can have fierce consequences though, with medieval Europe being a good example.
- Ideology: Which influences language policies, education, all forms of institutions, sometimes even culture (The Chinese Cultural Revolution is a relevant example), the existence of internationalism vs. nationalism vs. isolationism, etc, etc.
- Language: This is a very difficult parameter, but one that surely exists. The ways in which language works are surely not overly well understood though. Examples include, but are not limited to: Domestic language policy (TW: 漢賊不兩立) and the proclamation and creation of Standard languages enforced from above, or the more complicated ways countries like Norway, India and Belgium have organized their language. Language seems to be a tool for state-building. It is also safe to say that different ideologies handle language differently. In interstate agent-to-agent relations its consistency seems to be far less obvious. A typical case would be the US and the UK. It is obviously that in the earlier years the the relationship between the two was not great, despite speaking the same language. It can be hypothesized that a) if two main powers are forced into cooperation (from ww1 on) or b) one has largely surpassed the other in capacities (post ww2), language might play a role. What is easier to say is that the language and the cultural and research artifacts of the active hegemon have a much larger value than other languages, and ‘knowledge’ written in these languages have far larger value internationally. The above surely needs more research and analysis.
- Time: This we can divide in three parts:
- Zeitgeist
- The concrete amount of time available to an agent to take decisions.
- Technical sophistication (for example comparing now versus 100 years ago)
- Sense of History: The sense of ‘historic belonging or progress’ that an agent might or might not have, for example, but far from limited to:
- Revisionism
- God’s chosen country
- White man’s burden
- Class struggle
- Etc
- Distribution of information: towards individuals (e.g. agenda setting in media outlets, the Great Chinese Firewall)
- Future expectations (material and non-material): Is the general tendency considered upwards, stable, or downwards. This is largely dependent on what the priorities of the agent are. If for example long term stock prices are of major concern then the particular agent is probably viewing the future positively, but if rainforest preservation is a concern then the agent must be scratching its head in despair.
Obviously it is necessary to elaborate on the above, give clearer example, and simply go through more of the existing research. Now we will go on with ‘concrete material’ examples:
- The concrete (distribution of material resources). A lot has been written already, so I will keep this section comparatively brief:
- Military power (estimation of own capacities vs. estimation of other capacities)
- Economic power (e.g. economic peace vs. theories of oppression)
- Human resources (referring to size and age-composition of the population)
Furthermore are there three points to make here. It seems that with increased transparency and information sharing made possible with new technologies the chances of having disastrous wars can be lowered.
Secondly can there be a big role for international organizations achieving such transparency, from highly regulated ones such as the UN to independent journalists and news outlets.
Finally is the information processing of any agent a domestic/inner process, which we will elaborate on below.
Domestic (or inner) information processing determines outward behavior
Another key point would be that within a framework of different agents that have different relationships with each other, it is the domestic/inner processes of the agent that shapes the behavior towards the outside. (Structure is merely a simplification tool or just a heuristic.)
After determining the information the agents have access to it is possible to observe or analyze their views and beliefs about themselves and others, which lead to the next level: The trust level among agents.
Intermediate Parameter — Trust Level among Agents
- Key intermediate parameter: trust level. This is a 1-dimensional spectrum ranging from extremely high trust level to extremely low trust level and everything in between.
Available information is domestically or internally shaping a perceptions of the goals, capabilities and intentions of others. To give an example: A very famous example would be the Thucydides Trap. When described using this model it is obvious that at both sides the trust levels are low, which can lead to misinterpretations and a whole negative cycle. It is not the structure here determines the behavior, but the domestic attitude that agents are shaping and following. The US for example did surpass Britain peacefully as the main hegemon.
That said, the model also provides a solution: Raising the level of trust to at least the level of basic communication being possible, which requires third party (city-)states to intermediate, which is not an easy task, but at least a concrete solution.
Modern-day examples on the low trust level side would be US-Iranian or North Korean-South Korean relations, while on the high level trust side the relations between many European states can be pointed out. It is notable to point out that both Iran and North Korea consistently lack close partners in the international world, which makes it much harder to increase trust levels between these agents and others.
Towards Concrete Behavior – Two More Steps
First, one would be using human and/or group psychology to determine the order of preferences of the agents in our model.
Then secondly, for the decision making process there would be some form of game theory, an incomplete information game, but one where preferences constantly change. For example when we look at the overly well known example of 2nd world-war decision making by both Hitler and Stalin, then we for example we can say about Hitler that it is well known this views and preferences on ‘the human race’ heavily influenced real-time war strategies, something that can be explained using positivist methods.
Finally, in generally it can be said that high trust levels lead to more cooperative strategies while lower levels lead to more uncooperative strategies when using game theory. This is especially easy to say in relationships between functioning nation-states.
I have to say that the mathematics of this (if this doesn’t exist already) is still work in progress to me.
Caveats of Game Theory in IR
The first problem with game theory in IR would be this: There exists a far more human way to describe many concrete actions that agents pursue. This would simply be stating that the actions of agents are, being social beings to begin with, riddled with mistakes and false assumptions. There are two problems here: First of all is this prone to heavy manipulation (scientifically), which seems to be leading to necessity to add at least some form of positivism.
This however does not work at all with game theory, as by default human preferences are supposed to be followed rationally, regardless of how much they actually make sense to the objective observer. The pursuit of scientific truth therefore complicates matter a great deal.
The second problem with game theory would be that overly relying on game theory in IR be dangerous as e.g. ‘the gamification of nuclear war’ could easily prove being disastrous, which only need to happen once. This is where the importance of international institutions like the UN comes in, to ensure that some forms of ‘politics’ are ‘blacklisted’ (such as full-automatic warfare, the usage of nuclear weapons, mass murder, etc).
Another, but very different way of stating the above two problems would be that overly relying on mathematics in a social world can lead the way to disaster.
Finally it can be said that in high-stress situations the final process might get distorted. To come up with an often used analogy: Even the strongest chess players blunder when low on time. I think it is important to keep all these caveats in mind, which blur the ‘pure mathematical’ look that positivists tend to have to quite some extent.
Concluding Remarks
As I had to take a break from university and reading in general for quite some time the description of the model above obviously needs a lot of tweaking and refining. It will (obviously) also be necessary to go in more detail over the research that has already been conducted and the ideas that have been conjectured as of now. In short: A lot of work need to be done still, and I am well aware of that.
The basic idea of the model is remarkably simple though: Agents perceive the world in different ways, all being influenced by information. Their perceptions require them to act in certain ways domestically/internally, which in turn shapes their behavior both nationally and as a matter of extension also internationally, based on the level of trust there is in the surrounding environment. While there are some traps that have to be avoided, it seems to be possible that in order to ensure scientific scrutiny positivist methods can be used for the final part of the decision making process.
