Journal on Policy and Complex Systems
At large , IR scholars have deceived themselves and only saw what they were already acquainted with . In the picture of social systems and international politics , they saw the image of linearity ( Richards , 2000a , p . 3 ). Consequentially , they blindly used positivist approaches to come up with general theories based on inductions and deductions rooted in a simple and linear image of the world . However , the real world has never been linear and it has rarely fitted within the general laws and causalities found by social scientists . Repeatedly , new trends and unexpected events have confuted IR theories and required us to seek for new correlations . Eventually , the discrepancy between the real and the theoretical became so vast that IR theorist started to look for new epistemologies beyond positivism during the eighties .
Unfortunately , the pursuit for a new epistemology in IR resulted in a twofold failure . First , it failed to replace empiricism , which far from being dead is even experiencing a resurgence in narrow scope quantitative research ( Mearsheimer & Walt , 2013 ). Second , it failed in finding a coherent epistemology capable of dealing with the nonlinear ontology of social systems and international politics . Scientific realism and critical theory were still fixated on the same linear world that positivist looked at . By assuming that the natural and the social worlds were governed by equal and objective recurrencies , scientific realism and critical theory recurred to a positivist epistemology to study international politics ( Smith , Booth , & Zalewski , 2008 , p . 35 ). Conversely , post-modern and post-structural theories , like constructivism , ended up rejecting the image of an objective and “ external world ” to focus on the observer or “ subjective self ” ( Smith et al ., 2008 , p . 30 ). Yet , by doing so , they focused on ontology and overlooked epistemology , leaving the task of the interpretation to the subjective , and biased , self ( Smith et al ., 2008 , p . 18 ).
Offering an alternative to general theories or pluralism , this paper suggests that the complexity of politics can only be unraveled using an interdisciplinary research method that incorporates complex systems theory with IR : a method that allows for an ontological closure between the ‘ real world ’ and the world of our theories . The consequence of this closure is exciting as it implies that we can advance our knowledge of international politics by making more detailed and holistic analyses of the international system that do not rely on oversimplifications for modeling . The methodology put forward by this study does not fixate on one specific level of analysis , but instead focuses on the multilevel nature of nonlinear dynamics in the international system to find theoretical insights and explain the relationships between agents and system behavior ( Downey , 2012 , p . 92 ). Instead of arbitrarily defining the agents of the international system and assuming how they behave , it assumes what are the properties of agents ( autonomy , self-containment , and interdependence ) and how behavior is generated ( through the processes of performance system , credit assignment , and rule discovery ).
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