Monday, January 10, 2011

Essays on English School of International Relations: Prologue (1 of 7)


To be honest I am not familiar of the tenets of the English School of International Relations nor its whole conception and repercussions with other theoretical schools in the field. Philippine universities with IR departments do not discuss British School of International Relations (BSIR) or worst is excluded in the curriculum. Probably because of the colonial effect that we were so Americanized in all aspects of living from culture, education, form of government and etc. Thus we adopted American IR from its ontology to its epistemology and hence every IR departments or any social science department has its own American studies. The only thing that I can recall is Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society which was one of the readings in my theory master course but still we did not discuss it extensively. That is why am so glad to have taken this course.
     As part of the course requirement which I must submit six essays about the six authors, I started with the convenor Herbert Butterfield which I did not like his writings concomitant with the development of BSIR. I discussed whether or not his works immensely and significantly contributed to the development and evolution of the BSIR? On Martin Wight’s case I explored the idea of his contribution on the theory of IR. For Hedley Bull I chose the question “to what extent does his conception of international society comply with the contemporary international relations.” In Adam Watson essay I discussed his new contribution on BSIR which is on ‘the practice of hegemony’, though this was not discussed in the class but I think it is imperative that we should also consider the changing or development of the mind’s author. On the other hand, I assessed the five different elements of Michael Donelan’s views on the nature of international politics. And lastly but not the least, I looked onto the notion of humanitarian intervention in contemporary world politics vis-à-vis R.J. Vincent’s argument about basic rights and humanitarian intervention.

No comments:

Post a Comment