Examining the Scholarship of Injustice in International Relations

International Relations (IR) emerged as an academic discipline with a clear purpose: to understand war and prevent it. Yet over the decades, the dominant theories of the field came to prioritize power, stability, and survival over questions of right and wrong. The “scholarship of injustice” is a critical lens that examines how IR, especially in its Realist form, has sidelined justice as a serious intellectual concern. It asks an uncomfortable question: has the academic study of world politics quietly become a tool that justifies the dominance of the powerful rather than a force for human emancipation? This post explores how this happened, why it matters, and what alternatives scholars have proposed.

What the scholarship of injustice means 🔗

The phrase “scholarship of injustice” points to a structural problem within the academic study of international politics. It argues that mainstream IR scholarship has not merely failed to address injustice but has, in subtle ways, helped reproduce it. By describing the world purely as it appears to be, dominated by power and self-interest, scholars risk treating that reality as natural, permanent, and even rational.

The core of the critique rests on a distinction between describing reality and endorsing it. A discipline that only documents how powerful states behave, without questioning whether that behaviour is just, ends up normalizing domination. As one analysis of the concept notes, this kind of sterile version of empiricism in mainstream scholarship, with inadequate normative concern, only widens the gap between power and justice. The “is” of world politics becomes mistaken for the “ought.”

The difference between peace and justice 🔗

A key insight here is that the absence of war is not the same as justice. Stability can exist alongside deep inequality, exploitation, and the silencing of weaker actors. A world without open conflict may still be profoundly unjust if it freezes existing hierarchies in place. Justice, by contrast, carries a more positive meaning: it points toward liberating human consciousness from the use or threat of force. When scholarship measures success only by the maintenance of order, it quietly accepts injustice as the price of peace.

How realism came to dominate the field 🔗

To understand why IR has been criticised for neglecting justice, we need to look at its dominant paradigm. Realism is a set of related theories that emphasize the role of the state, national interest, and power in world politics, and it has dominated the academic study of international relations since the end of World War II.

Realism rests on a few foundational assumptions. According to a widely used introduction to the theory, the state is the principal actor in international relations, it acts as a unitary and rational entity pursuing the national interest, and it operates within a condition of anarchy where no central authority exists above sovereign states. In this self-help system, survival and security become the highest goals.

Why this leaves little room for justice 🔗

The Realist worldview holds that states operate in an arena where ethical norms may not straightforwardly apply, focusing instead on advancing national interests and prioritizing security. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains that for Hans Morgenthau, a founding figure of classical realism, international politics is fundamentally a struggle for power rooted in human nature. When power is treated as the basic currency of world affairs, moral aspirations and demands for justice are pushed to the margins as idealistic distractions.

It is worth noting that classical realism was not entirely amoral. The same source highlights that Morgenthau treated the protection of human life and freedom as a kind of transcendent standard, and acknowledged that international politics would be far more dangerous without moral restraints and international law. This reveals a normative undercurrent in realism that later, more rigidly “scientific” versions tended to abandon.

The historical roots: post-war origins and the cold war 🔗

The neglect of justice is not accidental; it is tied to when and where modern IR took shape. The discipline first formalized after World War I, driven by the desire to understand and prevent the causes of conflict, with idealism championing international law and the League of Nations. But the perceived failure of these idealist principles to prevent the Second World War helped trigger the rise of realism.

The discipline came into its own largely through American scholarship. As scholarly histories of the field describe, the United States began producing the classics of the international relations genre in the 1940s and 1950s, and realism became a dominant mode of American thinking about international affairs. Foundational texts such as E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis and Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations were explicitly designed to correct what their authors saw as dangerous misunderstandings about the nature of international politics.

The shadow of bipolarity 🔗

The Cold War deepened this orientation. With the world organized around US-USSR rivalry, scholarship naturally gravitated toward questions of deterrence, balance of power, and national security. Structural theories such as neorealism emerged, arguing that the behaviour of states is shaped by the anarchic structure of the international system itself. In this climate, questions about global poverty, colonial legacies, and human dignity seemed secondary to the urgent business of managing superpower competition and avoiding nuclear catastrophe.

The disjunction from the human and social sciences 🔗

One of the sharpest criticisms in the scholarship of injustice is that IR became intellectually isolated. While disciplines like philosophy, sociology, and ethics developed rich traditions of thinking about justice, freedom, and human emancipation, mainstream IR drifted away from them.

Part of this drift came from how IR borrowed its methods. Some critics observe that as IR theory took over its conception of formal theory and quantitative techniques from economics, it also absorbed a lack of interest in its own history and in the normative questions that animate political theory. The result was a discipline preoccupied with prediction and structure, but disconnected from the deeper humanistic traditions that ask what a good and just world order should look like.

Reconnecting IR with normative concerns 🔗

The proposed remedy is to reconnect IR with the broader resources of human and social sciences, and even the creative arts. The argument is that the discipline must liberate itself from roots that facilitate the dominance of the powerful, and instead become a catalyst for universal human emancipation. This means treating justice not as an optional add-on but as a central object of inquiry, on par with power and security.

Injustice within the scholarship of justice itself 🔗

A striking twist in this debate is the recognition that even the scholarship explicitly devoted to “global justice” can contain its own injustices. A review of recent work in the field notes that some critics argue global justice scholarship has found little traction among scholars in the global south. The reason is a mismatch between the assumptions behind much of this literature and the lived experience of those who endured colonial rule.

This critique observes a troubling similarity between certain theories of global justice and now-discredited modernization theory: both can rely on an implicit “stages of development” model that ranks cultures hierarchically. In such a framework, the global north is positioned as the normative ideal toward which the global south should strive, and as the sole agent capable of delivering assistance. As a result, the local causes of injustice get glossed over, and the agency of those in the periphery is diminished.

Epistemic injustice and whose voices count 🔗

Closely related is the idea of epistemic injustice in IR – injustice in how knowledge itself is produced and recognized. Scholars working in this area point out that the contributions of women and thinkers from colonized regions have often been written out of the discipline’s canon and textbooks. Recovering these marginalized voices is presented as a form of restorative and transformative justice, reshaping not just what IR studies but who gets counted as a legitimate source of knowledge.

Indian perspectives on order and justice 🔗

The dominance of Western, Realist frameworks looks different when viewed from outside the global north. Scholarly accounts of Indian conceptions of order and justice identify several distinct perspectives, including Nehruvian internationalism, Gandhian cosmopolitanism, political Hinduism, and neoliberal globalism. Each offers a different view on the role of violence, the importance of morality, and the relationship between the individual, the community, and the state.

These traditions create real tensions with the standard Westphalian emphasis on state sovereignty and the balance of power. Gandhian thought, for instance, foregrounds non-violence and self-restraint in ways that directly challenge the Realist acceptance of force as a normal instrument of statecraft. Such perspectives illustrate that the neglect of justice in mainstream IR is not universal or inevitable; it reflects a particular history and geography of the discipline, one that alternative intellectual traditions can productively unsettle.

Toward a more just international relations 🔗

The scholarship of injustice is ultimately a call to expand the moral and intellectual horizons of the field. It does not necessarily reject the insights of Realism about power; rather, it insists that describing power should never become the same as endorsing its unjust uses. The challenge is to study the world honestly while refusing to accept that the way things are is the way they must remain, since the real is not always the rational, and much less the just.

This involves several shifts: treating justice and human rights as core concerns rather than peripheral ideals, recovering marginalized voices and histories, reconnecting IR with ethics and the humanities, and remaining alert to how even well-meaning justice scholarship can reproduce hierarchies. The goal is a discipline that helps illuminate possibilities for a fairer world rather than one that simply rationalizes existing inequalities of power.

What do you think? If a theory accurately describes how powerful states behave, does merely describing that behaviour make scholarship complicit in injustice, or is honest description a necessary first step toward change? And which intellectual traditions from outside the Western mainstream do you think could most help IR take justice seriously?

References

1. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/24115/1/Unit-34.pdf
2. https://www.britannica.com/topic/realism-political-and-social-science
3. https://www.e-ir.info/2018/02/27/introducing-realism-in-international-relations-theory/
4. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism-intl-relations/
5. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/international-relation
6. https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/87676/1/Brown_IRT%20and%20IPT.pdf
7. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14748851211000604
8. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/13540661231169165
9. https://www.studyshipwithkrati.com/post/unit-2-theories-of-international-relations-notes