The essay firstly explores the extent to which political science – that encompasses IR – is ontologically more likely to produce nomothetic knowledge than a close discipline: history. Nomothetic knowledge would thus be constituted of verified large-scale social patterns that compose the reality of international politics, this so-called reality being a complex blend of universal laws. A law could be defined as the ‘mechanistic processes that bring about standardised outcomes.’ And, precisely, a ‘nomothetic enterprise’ aims at exploring those ‘processes’ – nomos, in ancient Greek, signifies laws. Were there objective patterns that could have helped to predict this conflict? The essay’s title is a worthwhile question given the great stake of drawing out laws from reality. This example is useful to outline the extreme difficulty to bring out a law that would explain an International Relations (IR) phenomenon – here, the invasion of Iran by Iraq. the little influence of the United Nations’ resolution 479 –, or the economic motivations of Saddam, such as getting full sovereignty over the strategic waterway of Shatt al-Arab and a constructivist one would put forward the role of the idea according to which the majoritarian Shi’i population in Iraq could be seduced by the 1979’s Islamic Revolution, and then turned against the Sunni regime of Saddam.
What were the causal mechanisms that led to the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980? A realist lens would emphasise the power maximisation that the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, sought to become the regional hegemon towards the nascent threat represented by the new Islamic Republic of Iran a liberal scholar would first point out the institutional failures – e.g.
0 kommentar(er)
