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The «Great Debates» in the theory of International Relations:
a historiographical analysis

Ferman O.,

Independent researcher, Istanbul, Turkey, oguzhanferman@gmail.com

Article received: 2024.10.17 12:32. Accepted: 2025.07.02 12:32


DOI: 10.17976/jpps/2025.06.10
EDN: PZUJAI

Rubric: Theory and methodology of political studies

For citation:

Ferman O. The «Great Debates» in the theory of International Relations: a historiographical analysis. – Polis. Political Studies. 2025. No. 6. https://doi.org/10.17976/jpps/2025.06.10. EDN: PZUJAI

Abstract

This article analyses the concept of “Great Debates” in the history of International Relations Theory. It pays special attention to the discussion in Russian academia, which focuses on the “factuality” and “criteria” of the concept, as well as the intellectual evolution of the discipline. The initial assumption of this article is that the “Great Debates” as a concept has two main dimensions. First, “Great Debates” themselves are historical events, and second, there can be a historiographical model formed out of the concept. Models serve as conceptual tools which help to simplify and generalise different cases by presenting them via clusters of traits or attributes. The concept is used for modelling the intellectual exchanges that redefine the mainstream of the discipline in parallel with the general trends in social sciences. Such a model is both a historiographical and a metatheoretical tool for evaluating traditions, schools, or theories of international relations (IR) as a discipline. The main goal of this article is to put forward the historiographical criteria in accordance with the previous metatheoretical findings and the history of the discipline. Two criteria for the “Great Debates” are proposed, which are “change in the dominant school of thought in the mainstream of the IR theory” and “parallelism between the ‘Great Debates’ and the three stages of social sciences, as “The Differentiation” from History, “The Dismissal of the Past”, and “The Convergence” with History. Based on this model, the author draws two conclusions about the course of the IR discipline. First, IR theory has been following intellectual developments in social sciences. Second, the current situation of world politics, which is the study object of the discipline, also affects how schools of thought replace each other in mainstream IR.

Keywords

Great Debates, history of IR theory, historiographic models, critical historiography of IR, history of the social sciences, realism, idealism, constructivism.

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