Once again, I am paying a visit to the two old schadenfreude in International Relations; positivism and postpositivism. To briefly introduce them, it would suffice to say that positivism strives for revealing timeless laws in international affairs, and postpositivism defends a more context-based approach, aiming to situate developments in time and place, along with the ideas behind them. So while positivism seems like a strict father who rejects everything that is not “his way”, postpositivism looks more like the wise person who would sincerely listen and try to understand if you opened up to (the intrinsic relationship between masculinity and positivism is indeed a classic feminist argument).
Yet, I have a question to the people who have been there with these two fellows. One of the classic textbooks for graduate-level IR theory courses maintain that positivists dig out causal relationships by observing behavior and unearthing repeated patterns. Thus, the book continues, “unobservable entities such as discourses or social structures” remain out of their agenda.
While I am not concerned with ontological choices of positivism, I am rather curious on why discourses are classified as “unobservable entities”. Can we not feel the existence of racist and sexist discourses with all our senses? Do we not read them, see them, hear them and be exposed to them on a daily basis?
Emre Baran 