International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism: Defending the Discipline.

• Author: Leslie, Alison
• Position: Review

By D.S.L. Jarvis

University of South Carolina Press, 2000

As befits a book devoted to the subject of international relations, this volume is filled with images of deadly warfare and the necessary balance of powers, the running feud between the proponents of the traditional modem or "realist" school of thought which has dominated the field for much of the last 50 years, and a particularly subversive strain of postmodern deconstructionist theory which Jarvis believes now threatens to overturn, if not destroy, their work.

Offering his book as a self-styled "Baedeker" to the so-called Third Debate, he repeatedly warns against the dangers of allowing international relations--an inherently outward-looking discipline concerned, by definition, with world affairs--to be held captive by an approach which he argues offers little more than a frustratingly tautological exploration of ontological and epistemological meaning.

Hardly a mindless defender of the status quo, he dearly welcomes postmodernist theory's particular role within his own field in stimulating much-needed debate in a discipline currently somewhat at sea, thanks to the effective discrediting of both Marxist theory and nation-state ideology in the post-cold-war world. Attempting to save the baby by concentrating on the contents of the bathwater, he strives to rescue...