Exploring Post-modernist Approaches in International Relations

Most theories of international relations promise to explain how the world works. Realism tells us states pursue power in an anarchic world. Liberalism points to cooperation and institutions. But what if the very tools we use to describe global politics-words like “sovereignty,” “anarchy,” or “national interest”-are not neutral mirrors of reality? What if they actively shape the world they claim to merely describe? This is the provocative starting point of the post-modernist approach, which questions whether objective, universal “truth” about world politics is even possible.

What is the post-modernist approach to international relations? 🔗

Post-modernism, often used interchangeably with post-structuralism in this field, is a critical approach that entered international relations scholarship in the 1980s. Its defining feature is a deep distrust of any account of human life that claims to have direct, unmediated access to the truth. Where mainstream theories aim to discover the laws governing world politics, post-modernists ask a different question: how did we come to believe these “laws” in the first place, and whose interests do they serve?

An important point to understand at the outset is that post-modernism does not offer a competing theory of international politics in the way realism or liberalism does. Instead, it works as a critical lens that interrogates the assumptions underlying all IR theories. The scholars associated with it-Richard Ashley, James Der Derian, David Campbell, and Michael Shapiro-drew heavily on the philosophy of thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard.

The rejection of meta-narratives 🔗

At the heart of post-modernism lies a suspicion of what Lyotard called meta-narratives (or grand narratives). A meta-narrative is a sweeping, all-encompassing story that claims to explain history and society as a whole. The idea of inevitable human progress, the Marxist account of class struggle leading to revolution, or the belief that science and reason will steadily improve life for everyone-these are all grand narratives.

Lyotard argued that such narratives are inherently exclusionary because they ignore the diversity and plurality of human experiences. By presenting one story as the universal truth, they silence alternative perspectives and ways of knowing. Post-modernists extend this scepticism to international relations theory itself. When realism claims that all states, in all eras, behave the same way because the international system is anarchic, it is telling a grand narrative-one that conveniently presents a particular Western, state-centric vision of politics as a timeless truth.

This is why post-modernists are wary even of theories that claim to be liberating. They point out that modernity’s faith in science and technology as engines of progress also produced the capacity to build weapons of mass destruction. The same rational, scientific worldview that promised to improve life made nuclear annihilation possible. Grand narratives, in other words, can be dangerous precisely because they appear so reasonable.

The power-knowledge relationship 🔗

Perhaps the single most influential idea post-modernism brought into international relations is the link between power and knowledge, developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault argued that power and knowledge are not separate things. They are intimately bound together: power produces knowledge, and knowledge in turn produces power.

How power produces “truth” 🔗

The conventional view assumes that knowledge is neutral-that facts simply exist, and power may suppress or hide them. Foucault turned this on its head. In his view, knowledge produces specific effects, problems, and identities. Through his studies of medicine, psychiatry, and prisons, he showed that categories like “sickness” and “deviance” are not objective conditions waiting to be discovered. They are constructed through arbitrary truth claims and institutional practices that decide what counts as normal and what counts as abnormal.

Applied to the international, this means that concepts like “state sovereignty” and “anarchy” are not natural facts about the world. They are constructs that validate particular visions of world politics at the expense of others. The discipline of international relations does not simply observe global politics from the outside; it participates in producing the very reality it claims to study.

Power beyond the state 🔗

Foucault also challenged the assumption that power flows only from the state or the sovereign. He argued that conceiving of power exclusively in terms of sovereignty fails to recognise that power extends far beyond the state and is exercised in everyday relationships-between doctors and patients, teachers and students, in families and workplaces. For him, power was not just a repressive force that says “no.” It was a productive, creative force that produces discourse, forms knowledge, and shapes what we accept as reality.

This insight reshaped how scholars analyse global governance. Foucault’s concept of governmentality-the various techniques through which populations are managed-has been used to examine how international institutions discipline and shape the behaviour of states and citizens, often without any single power openly commanding them.

Deconstruction and the politics of language 🔗

If Foucault gave post-modernism its theory of power, Jacques Derrida gave it a method: deconstruction. Derrida argued that Western thought is structured around binary oppositions such as presence/absence, speech/writing, and self/other. These pairs are never neutral. One term is always privileged as positive or superior, while the other is treated as secondary or inferior.

Deconstruction is the practice of exposing these hidden hierarchies and showing that they are unstable. Crucially, deconstruction does not destroy a text or simply prove it wrong. Instead, it reveals the internal contradictions within seemingly coherent arguments and demonstrates that the privileged term often secretly depends on the very term it claims to be superior to.

Deconstructing IR’s binaries 🔗

Post-structuralists influenced by Derrida focus on dismantling the binary oppositions that underpin IR thinking-pairs like domestic/international, inside/outside, order/anarchy, and developed/developing. Consider the last one. When we sort the world into “developed” and “developing” countries, we quietly imply that development follows a single linear path, with Western societies as the model everyone should emulate. A deconstructive reading exposes how this binary naturalises certain economic arrangements while delegitimising alternative paths.

The inside/outside divide is another revealing example. Mainstream theory treats the domestic realm (order, community, security) and the international realm (anarchy, danger, war) as fundamentally separate. Post-modernists argue these two spheres are actually mutually constitutive-what happens “inside” states shapes and is shaped by what happens “outside.” Treating them as neatly separate obscures important connections and power dynamics.

The role of language in building reality 🔗

A common thread running through both Foucault and Derrida is the idea that language does not simply label a reality that already exists-it helps construct that reality. The word “sovereignty” is not a description of something we can point to in nature. It is a concept with a particular history that, once accepted, organises how we see the world and what we treat as legitimate. National identity itself is built through language: scholars like David Campbell have shown how identities are constructed by defining who counts as “us” and who is cast as the threatening “other.”

Interrogating sovereignty and anarchy 🔗

The most direct contribution of post-modernism to international relations is its re-examination of the discipline’s foundational concepts. Realism rests on two pillars: the international system is anarchic (there is no world government above states), and the sovereign state is the primary actor. Post-modernists treat these not as eternal facts but as historically variable constructs.

Richard Ashley used Foucault’s insights to destabilise notions like “anarchy” and “sovereignty,” revealing them as contingent rather than fixed. In his influential work on the “anarchy problematique,” Ashley showed how realism’s entire framework depends on first assuming a sovereign, unified state inside, against which the dangerous anarchy outside can be defined. The two ideas prop each other up. Remove the assumption of the orderly sovereign state, and the supposedly natural condition of international anarchy starts to look like a story we tell rather than a fact we observe.

This matters because foundational concepts shape policy. If anarchy is simply “the way things are,” then competition, suspicion, and military build-up appear rational and unavoidable. But if anarchy is a construct produced by particular ways of speaking and writing about world politics, then alternative arrangements become thinkable. Post-modernism opens space to ask whether the world must be organised this way at all.

Why post-modernism matters today 🔗

The post-modernist approach has faced sharp criticism. Detractors argue that by rejecting objective truth, it leaves us with no firm ground to stand on, no way to distinguish better arguments from worse ones, and little practical guidance for policymakers. Some also find its writing dense and its focus on texts disconnected from the material realities of war, poverty, and inequality.

Yet its influence has been considerable. By insisting that we ask whose interests our knowledge serves and whose voices it silences, post-modernism helped open space for feminist IR, postcolonial theory, and other critical approaches that centre those at the margins of global politics. For students examining global politics from a non-Western vantage point, this is significant. The perspectives of newly independent and developing nations-emphasising non-alignment, economic justice, and South-South cooperation-were long dismissed in mainstream theory as merely regional concerns. Post-modernism’s power-knowledge framework helps explain why certain experiences get treated as “real” international relations while others are marginalised.

In an era of contested narratives, misinformation, and competing claims about what is “really” happening in world affairs, the post-modern toolkit remains surprisingly useful. It trains us to look beneath the surface of supposedly objective debates and to notice the power relations that quietly decide which truths are allowed to count.

What do you think? If concepts like sovereignty and anarchy are constructions rather than natural facts, does that make them any less powerful in shaping how states actually behave? And can a country challenge the dominant narratives of global politics while still operating within an international system built on those very concepts?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poststructuralism_(international_relations)
2. https://fiveable.me/theories-of-international-relations/unit-8/postmodernism/study-guide/c8ojKrCHKml650Jr
3. https://thescholedge.org/index.php/sijmas/article/download/604/546
4. https://www.e-ir.info/2014/05/12/foucault-and-international-relations/
5. https://www.e-ir.info/2015/12/12/from-sovereignty-to-war-foucaults-analytic-of-power/
6. https://iep.utm.edu/jacques-derrida/
7. https://banotes.org/international-relations/post-structuralism-international-relations-diverse-perspectives/
8. https://www.academia.edu/1506651/Michel_Foucaults_Considerable_Sway_on_International_Relations_Theory