The Social in International Relations: Mapping IR Theory through Social Theory

Audrey Alejandro and Gustav Meibauer
Additional contact information
Audrey Alejandro: London School of Economics and Political Science

No 8yef7_v1, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: What conceptions of ‘the social’ underpin International Relations (IR) theories? Despite the growing engagement of IR scholarship with ‘the social’ dimensions of international politics, the concept remains surprisingly under-specified. Existing debates are theoretically rich but fragmented, offering limited guidance for understanding how different traditions conceptualise the social or how these assumptions are transmitted through the pedagogical accounts of the discipline encountered by students. This article argues that IR theories are underpinned by distinct yet often implicit conceptions of the social that function as unacknowledged ontological commitments. We develop a typology of six conceptions of the social grounded in social theory—functionalist, Marxist, rational choice, systems-theoretical, structuralist, and poststructuralist—and use it to re-read the traditions through which students most commonly encounter the discipline, from liberalism and neorealism to constructivism and critical approaches. We then trace how these conceptions have been reproduced and transformed through the discipline’s pedagogical canon taking widely assigned IR textbooks as our pedagogical point of departure. We show that the coexistence of heterogeneous conceptions renders the social both ubiquitous and under-specified, generating analytical and pedagogical ambiguities. By making these assumptions explicit, the article offers students, teachers, and scholars a clearer vocabulary for analysing, teaching, and debating IR theory.

Date: 2026-08-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme and nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/6a82c7fdf6481128a3edd93a/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:8yef7_v1

DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/8yef7_v1

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().