Ep 54: Jonathan Kirshner on Realism
School of War
00:00
The Limits of the Scientific Approach to International Relations
Scientific approach to international politics often is looking at very large allegations of data. What they're really engaging in is trying to understand what the average actor will do in average circumstances. In international politics we are almost always more interested or exclusively interested even in the particular behavior of a specific actor and at distinct time. That will often vary greatly from actor to actor so knowing how the average actor might behave in a normal time drawn as if a ball you know randomly from an earned full of large balls rarely is helpful for giving us insights into the real world.
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