The Social in International Relations: Mapping IR Theory through Social Theory

What conceptions of ‘the social’ underpin International Relations (IR) theories? Despite the growing engagement of IR scholarship with ‘the social’ dimensions of international politics, the concept remains surprisingly under-specified. Existing debates are theoretically rich but fragmented, offering limited guidance for understanding how different traditions conceptualise the social or how these assumptions are transmitted through the pedagogical accounts of the discipline encountered by students. This article argues that IR theories are underpinned by distinct yet often implicit conceptions of the social that function as unacknowledged ontological commitments. We develop a typology of six conceptions of the social grounded in social theory—functionalist, Marxist, rational choice, systems-theoretical, structuralist, and poststructuralist—and use it to re-read the traditions through which students most commonly encounter the discipline, from liberalism and neorealism to constructivism and critical approaches. We then trace how these conceptions have been reproduced and transformed through the discipline’s pedagogical canon taking widely assigned IR textbooks as our pedagogical point of departure. We show that the coexistence of heterogeneous conceptions renders the social both ubiquitous and under-specified, generating analytical and pedagogical ambiguities. By making these assumptions explicit, the article offers students, teachers, and scholars a clearer vocabulary for analysing, teaching, and debating IR theory.