POLI 381 Lecture 2: January 15th 2016
28 Feb 2016
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People choose what has the best costs and benefits for them. One of the problems with ir theory is that some tend to ignore these normative costs. The empirical and the normative do interact, this is key, remember this. They also interact in this way: we want to study a question because we think it"s important. Our empirical research may impact our normative interests. We take events and order them into patterns, and then using these patterns we explain things or predict things. Other countries will attempt to keep strong countries down. Countries will align against and fight a war against countries they find threatening. From a theory like this, we can generate predictions. If a power is rising, we can expect other countries to align against it. We can test these theories by looking at instances where these conditions seem to be met. This means that we need theories that are reasonably clear in what they predict.
