Let me begin with a confession that will surprise exactly no one who has spent more than a semester inside this beautiful, broken, self-important “discipline”; we call it, after decades of debates on not being sure what to call it, International Relations. I have been here for years. I have read the books. I have attended numerous conferences with watered-down coffee and cold sandwiches. I have nodded gravely at panels where people used the word “problematize” as if it were a verb that actual humans use. I have gone to multiple seminars in my country on its way to becoming a Vishwag… (ah, it's not wise to go there yet) where terrible relations with neighbors were explained by what was written to a king at around 300 BCE! I have pretended that the difference between a neorealist and a neoliberal institutionalist is a matter of profound consequence for a fifteen marks answer in my Masters, rather than it being disagreement about whether the anarchy problem can be solved with more committees (Keohane’s bet) or simply endured with more aircraft carriers (Waltz’s shrug). Waltz reminds me of when I have had dreams about whether Waltz was a structural determinist or just a man who really hated psychology and the next day discussed it on a first date with a lovely lady.. umm boys, wasn’t a good idea! I have also watched full-grown adults nearly come to blows over whether “agent-structure” should be hyphenated. But time and again we failed to predict and warn the world who looked at our departments about the impeding crises!

I am a fraud. We are all frauds. But we are frauds with footnotes, and that makes us feel legitimate.

First off, the discipline of International Relations. If we can even call it a discipline, which is itself a question that has generated approximately seventeen thousand journal articles exists in a permanent state of epistemological crisis. We do not know what we study. We do not know how to study it. We cannot agree on whether we are a science, a humanities field, a branch of history, a subfield of political science, as is taught in India that wandered off and got lost, or simply a very elaborate support group for people who are anxious about the news and have a footnoting fetish. The one thing we do agree on is that the annual ISA conference should be in a city with decent bars. That is not a theory. It is the only consensus we have.

And yet, here we are. Still here. Still writing. Still pretending that the next article, the next framework, the next “turn”, likely post-positivist, post-colonial, post-human, post-whatever will finally give us the key. It will not. I know this. You know this. The department chairs all around know this, which is why they are applying for a grant to study resilience in post-conflict societies rather than anything that might actually predict when the next conflict will start or do anything to minimize human suffering. Resilience is a beautiful word. It means nothing. It gets funded.

A Tour of our Theoretical Brothel

Let us begin with the theories. Theories are what we sell to undergraduates. They are the lenses, the frameworks, the paradigms that promise to turn the chaotic mess of world politics into something orderly, something you can put in a PowerPoint slide. They are the different color-tinted shades through which we see the world as declared by Baylis and Smith, but they did not mention that they were the flimsy shades I once bought for 30 rupees at Batla House during Eid, which broke the moment a bit of pressure was applied while wearing them on my  face. I have read all the theories. Read them all with enthusiasm, with irony, with despair. I have stood in front of eighteen-year-olds juniors and told them that the difference between neorealism and neoliberalism is the difference between “you’re hosed” and “we can maybe get a working group together.” They did not laugh. They were taking notes. I wanted to cry.

Realism is the oldest sex-worker (editor denied me to use the word I intended to) in the theoretical brothel. It has been around since Thucydides wrote about Melos (“the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must”—a line that has justified more war crimes than any other sentence in human history), and it has not learned a single new trick since. Kenneth Waltz gave us structural realism, the supposed scientific version, which is parsimonious and elegant and wrong about the end of the Cold War. John Mearsheimer gave us offensive realism, which is just structural realism with a Red Bull and a persecution complex. He has predicted the imminent decline of the United States for about thirty years now. At some point, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Realism’s great insight- that power matters. Well, it's not an insight. It is a tautology. Realists say states are rational actors, but rationality is defined as whatever a state does to survive, which means that whatever a state does is by definition rational. When the USSR collapsed peacefully, they said it was because the balance of power shifted. When states start wars they lose, they say it was because they miscalculated. Miscalculation is just a fancy word for “the theory didn’t predict this, but we’re not changing it.” It’s a horoscope: “Today you will face a challenge. That challenge might be war. Or a paper cut.”

And yet realism remains the default language of policymakers. Why!? Because it gives them permission to be brutal. “We’re just realists,” they say, as they sell weapons to dictators and to groups who arm child soldiers. “It’s the security dilemma,” they say, as they escalate a conflict they started. Realism tells the powerful that their power is necessary, and the powerless and the bombed, dead child under the debris of his school that their suffering is structural. It is also the theory that every IR professor secretly uses when they are not being observed, because it’s the only one that doesn’t require a flow chart, maybe. And they are terrible with niceties in arguments!

Liberalism, oh God bless a liberal heart, is the theory that believes in progress. It is the annoying optimist at the dinner party who keeps saying “but look at the data on trade and rankings on peace” while the house is burning down. Liberals gave us democratic peace theory—which was true until it wasn’t (see: the Cod Wars, Ecuador–Peru in 1995)—and wait, then they added caveats about “consolidated democracies” and “democracies that haven’t had a coup recently.” Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye gave us complex interdependence, which argued that the world was getting too complicated for war especially among advanced industrial states. Then 9/11 happened, and they started selling books about terrorism and non-state violence.

Liberalism’s great contribution was institutions. The European Union was supposed to be the proof: centuries of Franco-German rivalry resolved through coal and steel. It worked. Then Brexit happened, and Hungary turned authoritarian while still collecting EU funds, and the “liberal international order” started to look less like a structure and more like a PowerPoint slide from a 1990s State Department briefing. Francis Fukuyama gave us the “end of history,” now the most famous wrong prediction in the discipline. He has spent the last twenty years writing books about political decay and explaining that he didn’t really mean it. We’ve all been there, Frank.

Then comes the smart kids’ favorite - Constructivism. It is what happens when you realize realism and liberalism are both wrong, but you still want to publish. Alexander Wendt’s great line—“anarchy is what states make of it”—is one of the most beautiful sentences ever written in the discipline. It is also, for all practical purposes, a blank check. Constructivism is excellent at explaining after the fact why something happened. Why did the Cold War end peacefully? Because Gorbachev’s “new thinking” changed Soviet identity. Why did the US invade Iraq? Because neoconservative ideas became hegemonic. Plausible, but impossible to test. What if Gorbachev had been a hardliner? What if the neocons had lost the 2000 election? Constructivism’s answer is “things would have been different,” which is not a theory. It’s a tautology dressed in a turtleneck.

Marxism and critical theories never got invited to the IR party but show up anyway to tell everyone the party is a symptom of capitalist exploitation. Marxists are sharp pompous thinkers with their sharp arguments but they never dress sharply. Anyways, imperialism, uneven development, extraction from the periphery; these are descriptions of how the world actually works. But Marxism’s predictions have a habit of not arriving on schedule. The revolution keeps not happening. Capitalism keeps not collapsing. Good luck, Marxists, explaining “late-stage” capitalism how I willingly and knowingly subscribe to and send real money to an AI firm (probably with connections to the Pentagon and possibly funded by Saudis seeking to bomb Iran that also wastes gallons of water) on creating an AI VR cam model! Meanwhile, postcolonialism has made “decolonizing the discipline” a career path. You can get tenure by writing the same paper about how the Third World was never really included in the “international” over and over again. I am not saying it’s wrong. I am saying that at a certain point, critique becomes a performance, and the performance becomes a product, and the product gets published, and the world remains exactly as it was.

Postcolonialism taught us that the ‘international’ was always built on empire. We nodded, formed a section, and then continued the same division of labor: the West produces theory; the rest produce case studies to test it. We now call this ‘global IR’ and feel virtuous. But look at any syllabus, any citation count, any editorial board. The hierarchy is intact. It seems we have simply learned to speak about it in the passive voice.

Feminist IR taught us that gender is not a variable but a structure, and then spent twenty years trying to convince the mainstream that “adding women and stirring” was not the point. J. Ann Tickner and Cynthia Enloe have been screaming this into the void since the 1990s. The void in IR has started to nod occasionally, but it still doesn’t cite them in the intro chapter. The void, to be read as men, as usual never listen! Green IR pointed out that the international system is destroying the planet, and was mostly ignored until the planet started destroying itself. Poststructuralist IR taught us that language constitutes reality, which is useful for deconstructing the speeches of leaders but less useful for stopping them from ordering drone strikes. I once heard a poststructuralist give a brilliant deconstruction of “humanitarian intervention” while the bombs were falling on Libya. He was very pleased with himself. The bombs did not care.

Every theory has its moment. Every theory produces a generation of PhD students who will spend five years learning its language and then another five years unlearning it because the job market demands “policy relevance.”

The Failure Log, or, Why We Have Never Predicted Anything

Let me now do something that will make my colleagues uncomfortable. Here is a partial list of major events the discipline did not predict, could not explain without post-hoc theorizing, and in some cases actively argued against.

1. The end of the Cold War (1989–1991). Realists said bipolarity was stable. Liberals said interdependence would transform. Constructivists didn’t exist in the mains. Then the USSR vanished. Gone were the many good things, including the original Stolichnaya and Soviet Vodka, before our generation got to drink them. The field produced a thousand articles explaining why it was actually inevitable. It was not inevitable. The CIA didn’t see it. The KGB didn’t see it. We missed it. Then we pretended we hadn’t.

2. 9/11 (2001). We spent the 1990s writing about democratic peace, regional integration, and the triumph of the liberal order. We had almost nothing to say about non-state actors who could fly planes into buildings. After 9/11, everyone rebranded as a terrorism expert. I know a scholar who spent the 1990s writing about the democratic peace and is now a tenured counterterrorism professor. This is not a criticism. This is survival.

3. The 2008 financial crisis. How many IR journals published articles predicting this in 2006 or 2007? Almost zero. International Organization did a special issue in 2010. Excellent articles. Three years too late. We had theories of hegemonic stability but hadn’t noticed the hegemon’s financial system was built on subprime mortgages. The economists failed too, but at least they had mathematical models that looked really impressive.

4. The Arab Spring (2010–2012). One day, the Middle East, oh sorry, West Asia (I really do not want Nawal El Saadawi lecturing me in my dreams) was stable authoritarianism; the next day it was not. The discipline had spent decades telling us that the “authoritarian bargain” was stable. Then a fruit vendor in Tunisia set himself on fire. We rushed to publish special issues on social media and youth bulges. All true. None predicted.

5. The Russian invasion of Ukraine (2022). The CIA was warning. Satellite imagery showed troop buildups. The IR community was debating whether it would actually happen. Realists said, “of course it’s coming.” Liberals said, “economic interdependence will deter.” Constructivists said, “it depends on how Putin’s identity is performing this week.” When the tanks with the Z painted on them rolled, we were not prepared. Our theories had convinced us that what happened next was either inevitable or impossible, and we had stopped looking.

6. October 7, 2023. The entire edifice of Israeli deterrence, built on realist assumptions, collapsed in the morning. My Islamist scholar friend did not predict it over the years I have known him. Hamas did something every deterrence theory said was irrational. Theories do not do well with “irrational” or “unprecedented.” Hence, we also do not do well with Trump’s foreign policies. The discipline’s finest minds took to Twitter to say, “this is a failure of intelligence.” But the theories themselves had nothing.

7. The Iran-Israel direct exchange (April 2024). The first direct attack from Iranian soil in history. Three hundred drones and missiles. A coalition intercepting them. Every escalation model, every crisis-stability matrix, was rendered obsolete in a night. I watched a panel at ISA where three distinguished scholars used the word “unprecedented” fifteen times in an hour. That is not theory. That is just being surprised in real time.

8. March 2026 US-Israel War on Iran - The Supreme Leader died, the Iranian society did not march as Trump declared, the region behaved in a way which maybe one Chinese professor got somewhat right, and our celebrated levels of analysis did not analyze yet again. The theories had almost nothing—again. As one analyst put it, “foreign policy paradigms die hard,” but the discipline that worships them remains “compulsive,” “impulsive,” and “ideologically confused.”

I could go on. The rise of China. The resurgence of populism. The Taliban’s return to Afghanistan. The genocide in Gaza. Each of these events was, according to the dominant theories of the time, either impossible, highly unlikely, or already explained. And each happened anyway.

The Nihilist’s Option (Or, Why I Briefly Considered Becoming a Plumber)

Given this record, the obvious conclusion is that the discipline is worthless. It generates endless internal debates while the world burns. It trains students in languages no one outside the academy understands, then sends them out to compete for jobs that are disappearing. It is, in the words of a colleague who left to become a consultant, “a pyramid scheme of self-citation.”

I have felt this nihilism in my bones. I have sat through conference panels where a scholar spent forty-five minutes explaining, with a PowerPoint of seventy-two slides, why his framework for “non-hegemonic regional integration in the Muslim world” was a significant contribution. I looked around. Everyone was nodding. No one was asking: does this stop a bomb? Does this feed a child? Does this do anything outside this hotel ballroom with the real sad sandwiches?

I have thought about becoming a welder, a plumber, a bike mechanic or anything that produces something tangible. I have imagined the relief of never again reading a journal article that begins “This paper seeks to problematize the discursive construction of threat narratives.” I have imagined the simple dignity of fixing a pipe, something that does not require a footnote.

But I have not walked out. Not yet. And the reason is not because I believe the discipline will suddenly become predictive. It will not. The reason is something else, something harder to name.

Let me be fair—something I am not required to do in a satire. Part of why IR looks like a failure is that we expect it to do what it cannot. We want predictions like physics: if x, then y, with coefficients. But physics does not study objects that change their own laws mid-experiment. There lies the beauty of social sciences and humanities. A state can wake up one morning, decide its identity has shifted, and invalidate every model. The demand for certainty is a demand that reality stop being political. That demand will never be met. The failure, then, is not just the discipline’s. It is also ours for expecting social science to be a crystal ball.

Why I Haven’t Quit (The Dumb Stubborn Hunch)

Here is the embarrassing truth. I keep doing IR because the people who run the world, like the generals, diplomats, prime ministers, lobbyists, the people with the maps and the missiles, they also do not know what they are doing. But they pretend they do. And their pretending kills people.

Our pretending is different. When we pretend, we at least pretend with concepts. We use words like “hegemony,” “sovereignty,” and “exceptionalism” not because they are true in the way gravity is true, but because they are weapons. They are the only weapons we have. A missile destroys a building. A concept, if you use it right, can maybe… maybe make someone in power hesitate for a second. Can make a diplomat sound stupid in a briefing. Can make a journalist ask the question the official wasn’t prepared for. Can make a student realize that the “inevitable” war was actually the result of choices, and that choices can be unmade.

I remember a student who went to her professor after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. She was crying. She said: “I’ve read all the theories. None of them explains this.” The professor said: “You’re right. They don’t.” Then he told her that the purpose of the theories is not to explain. It is to give you a language to ask better questions. She looked at him like he was insane. Maybe he was. But she came back the next week with a list of questions the theories had helped her formulate. She is now doing a PhD. She will also be disappointed. It is the circle of life.

The theories are bad. The predictions are worse. The conferences are monuments to human vanity. But somewhere in the middle of it all is a stubborn, stupid, possibly hopeless commitment to the idea that how we think about the world changes the world. Not quickly. Not cleanly. Not in time to stop the next war. But maybe, maybe in time to make the war after that slightly harder to justify.

This is not a publishable claim. It will not get me tenure. But it is the only reason I have for staying.

Why We Must Keep IR-ing (I copied IR-ing from my best friend, with, of course, no credits to him, welcome to academia mate)

So here is the case, as best I can make it, for a discipline that has failed at almost everything it set out to do.

We are the memory. IR remembers empire when policymakers say “global governance.” It remembers genocide when diplomats say “stability.” It remembers broken promises and the long arc of violence that underpins the shiny surface of the liberal order. This memory is inconvenient. It is also necessary.

We are the language of critique. The powerful speak the language of national interest and strategic necessity. We speak the language of power analysis, securitization, and the social construction of threat. These are tools for saying: your “national interest” is not natural; it is made. Your “security” is someone else’s insecurity. Your “necessity” is a choice dressed in a uniform. Without this language, critique becomes mere opinion. With it, critique becomes something harder to dismiss.

We are the ones who refuse the inevitability narrative. The most dangerous thing in world politics is the belief that there is no alternative. That the war was unavoidable. That the massacre was necessary. That the suffering is just the price of order. IR, at its best, insists that outcomes are contingent. That choices were made. That someone, somewhere, decided this was the path, and that someone else could decide differently. This is not a theory. It is a stance. But it is a stance that matters.

We are the ones who hold the powerful to their own standards. When the US invades on false pretenses, we have concepts of sovereignty and just war. When Russia annexes territory, we have the UN Charter. The powerful care about legitimacy, and legitimacy is produced, in part, by the language we cultivate.

I am not saying this is enough. It is not enough. It does not stop bombs. It does not save lives. But it is not nothing. And when the alternative is silence, or complicity, or the smug nihilism that says nothing matters, I will take the discipline. Broken. Embarrassing. Full of failures. I will take it.

Coda: A Letter to the Next Generation

You are starting your IR degree in a world that is on fire. Genocide streams on your phone. The climate is collapsing. Democracies are turning inward. The theories you read in your first year will seem absurdly inadequate. You will be tempted to laugh, to walk out, to become a welder.

Do not walk out. Not yet.

Learn the theories well enough to pass the exam, and then learn them well enough to break them. Learn realism until you can recite Waltz in your sleep, and then ask: what does this erase? Learn liberalism until you can explain democratic peace, and then ask: whose peace is this? Learn constructivism until you can talk about norms without sounding pretentious, and then ask: who gets to decide what counts as a norm? Learn feminism until you see gender everywhere, and then ask: why did it take so long? Learn postcolonialism until you cannot read the word “international” without hearing the screams, and then ask: what now?

And then, when you have learned all of this, forget it. Go out. Watch. Listen. Ask questions the theories do not answer. Notice what the journals are not publishing. Read the footnotes, and then read what the footnotes leave out. And when you come back, if you come back, you will be something more than a scholar, hopefully. You will be someone who understands that knowledge is not power, but that it is the only thing that can make power hesitate.

The discipline failed. It fails every day. It will keep failing. But failing while trying to understand is different from failing while pretending to know. And the world is full of people pretending to know.

So keep IR-ing. Or do not. But if you stay, stay knowing that the theories will not save you, the conferences will not save you, and the only thing you will ever really produce is a slightly better question than the one you started with. And maybe that is enough. Maybe it is not. I will let you know after the next war.

Manashjyoti Karjee is an independent researcher specializing in security and international relations. He has an undergraduate degree in Political Science from Ramjas College, University of Delhi, and a Master’s degree in Politics and International Relations from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.