Sincetaking up IS 290 as an outsider from the premise of social science I was hellbent since day one to understand which theory I best fit in. Be it a realist ora liberalist or even perhaps as Marxist. Till the day I understood whatPostmodernism is.
Or so I thought. As one reads on Postmodernism, variousfields in a person’s life gets changed. Fromthe way he may view things to the way he addresses things. Postmodernism has engagedmy thinking as to what is the best way to approach a subject matter. It hasleft an open door with other types of theories in International Relations.Postmodernism has provided me the idea of enforcing the process ofdeconstruction to which is why by addressing the question as to whether a postmodernismis useful, and for what, is to clarify what it is we are actually pinpointingabout when we speak about postmodernism.
One may derive from the term that itssupporters eagerly distances themselves from certain aspects of what thestructure is without however fully admonishing the idea of it: theirexistential faith is both ‘post’ and ‘structuralist’. Let’s deconstruct thisstatement. Structuralism is a wide term which appoints a range of differentapproaches in the human sciences which in this case is International Relations.What these two have in common is the stance that the most productive standpointinto examining society is by the nature of the relations among the parts makingup the investigated social structure.
This makes it quite different fromindividualism, which deduces that society does not exist as an occurrence with eitherinherent or superficial powers, or that, we find all social constructs muststart from the properties, or the beliefs, interests of an individual. In comparison,where structuralism posts as that any social element that being be a person,state or god exists only in particularly patterned in a way that itsconstituted relations connecting them to other components in a system, and thatone can only grasp the value of each component by analyzing it in the manner ofits insertion into a structure of social relations.
