Reflection Week 6: And Now for Something Completely Different...

This week seemed strangely empty without a trip into D.C., which usually breaks up the monotonous classwork nicely. However, Dr. Peter Howard’s presentation was one of the more interesting and enjoyable presentations we have had for our Wednesday labs. Even more than Mr. Bame, Dr. Howard really gave us a picture of what it must be like to work in the State Department, especially for someone who used to be a professor, integrating broad sweeping ideas and mindsets and the minutiae of an office job. Dr. Howard’s (qualified) remark that IR theories had “nothing” to do with his job was actually rather interesting to think about after his presentation. The very fact that the IR theories are studied in real life proves that whatever government officials do on a daily basis, some higher-level theoretical knowledge must play an important role in their work. Yet their work is not primarily concerned with molding the global political society to work according to a theory, but to simply solve whatever urgent dilemma the world has to deal with. This served as a reminder to me that IR theories are not completely hypothetical. They must, at least in broad terms, describe the mundane workings of the world. However, Dr. Howard’s presentation also reminded me that the government of the US, and all states, is not some undefined self-aware entity but is made up of the interaction between actual human beings with thoughts and consciousness. The more I think about actual people like Dr Howard -- even if they are less personable than he -- working to accomplish the kinds of actions that he described, the more unrealistically rigid many conceptions of the state laid out in the various IR theories, especially the mindless, pre-programmed realism, seem to be.

This leads into the second part of my reflection nicely. After studying and nitpicking over the different IR theories for almost a month and a half, switching gears to start questioning the universality of everything we have learned is rather difficult for me to wrap my mind around at first. During discussion, I kept falling back into mentally trying to apply IR theory to solve an issue raised by a classmate, only to realize they didn’t apply in this situation, at least, not clearly enough for a student like myself to see. It feels to me as though each step of this class is opening my mind a little wider than before, letting me integrate my new knowledge with older knowledge before adding yet another perspective to the mix. I had been subconsciously starting to see world politics as a simple clash of different perspectives, but this new advancement reminds me that it is much more complex and far-reaching than that.