Worldview library
Explore the perspectives
International Relations theory is not a single political spectrum. The traditions below disagree about what drives world politics, what evidence matters most, and what kinds of arguments carry the most weight. This page is a field guide to the current Foundation, module, and Profile model, not a claim that people fit perfectly into rigid boxes.
Atlas
The inventory runs on continuous dimensions. The Atlas is a browse map of recurring profile patterns in the current model: nearby combinations from the Foundation-plus-Profile architecture, not a rarity chart or a live user distribution.
Why this is not a political compass
The worldview families here are theoretical orientations, not political positions. A person can hold realist instincts on great-power rivalry while holding solidarist instincts on humanitarian law. They can be persuaded by critical political economy on trade and by institutionalism on arms control. Most serious analysts in this field draw on more than one tradition, depending on the issue.
The Foundation is designed to surface which framework dominates your instincts in aggregate, not to assign you a permanent label. The runner-up family often remains nearly as important as the primary one, and some results are better read as overlap than as a sharply sorted type.
Each tradition is an umbrella
None of the families below is a single unified school. Each is a grouping of related arguments that share certain premises — a family resemblance, not a doctrine.
Realism includes classical realists (who ground the argument in human nature and statecraft), structural realists (who locate the explanation in systemic anarchy), offensive realists (who argue the structure pushes toward power maximization), and defensive realists (who argue it often rewards restraint). They share the premise that power and self-help are durable features of world politics — they disagree on what follows from that.
Liberalism is also an umbrella. The tradition modeled here — liberal institutionalism — emphasizes how rules, monitoring, and repeated interaction can make cooperation more durable. Other liberal strands include commercial liberalism (trade and economic interdependence reduce the incentive for conflict), republican liberalism (democratic institutions shape what governments can credibly commit to internationally), and sociological liberalism (transnational actors and networks matter). The Foundation primarily tests institutionalist instincts.
Constructivism ranges from conventional constructivism (norms and identity are empirically important variables) to critical constructivism (which asks whose interests prevailing norms serve) to poststructuralism (which questions the stable identities that even conventional constructivism assumes). What they share is the claim that the meaning of threats and interests is partly socially constructed.
Critical political economy includes Marxist political economy, dependency theory, world-systems theory, neo-Gramscian IPE, and structural power analysis. They agree that global economic structures shape state autonomy in ways that conventional security analysis misses — they differ on which structural mechanisms matter most and whether reform from within is possible.
Traditions modeled in the Foundation
These four traditions are the ones the Foundation scores directly. Each page explains what the tradition emphasizes, what it misses, and how the rest of the product builds on that baseline rather than replacing it.
Realism
World politics is shaped by the distribution of power and the absence of any authority above states.
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Institutionalism
Cooperation can be made durable through shared rules, monitoring, and repeated interaction — even without a world government.
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Constructivism
The meaning of threats, alliances, and interests is partly constituted by identity, norms, and shared social expectations.
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Critical Political Economy
World politics is shaped by who controls production, finance, and access to markets — not just who has the most tanks.
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How the traditions read major issues
Three recurring questions in contemporary foreign policy — seen through all four modeled traditions side by side.
Great-power rivalry
How does each tradition explain the logic of major-power competition — its causes, its dynamics, and what, if anything, can constrain it?
Strategic Realist
Reads rising-power competition as structurally determined. When a state grows strong enough to challenge the dominant power, conflict risk rises regardless of the challenger's ideology or intentions. The mechanism is not malice but the logic of self-help under anarchy: both sides must assume the worst. Balancing — through alliances, arms investment, and forward positioning — is the expected response.
Liberal Institutionalist
Argues that rivalry can be managed through sustained institutional engagement. Economic interdependence creates domestic stakeholders for stability on both sides. Military transparency and arms-control frameworks reduce the miscalculation risk that turns competition into crisis. The historical record of major-power peace among trading democracies is taken as evidence that structure alone does not determine outcomes.
Social Constructivist
Emphasizes that the intensity and character of rivalry are socially constructed — shaped by historical memories, mutual recognition failures, and identity narratives that make adversarial relationships feel inevitable. Points to cases of successful enmity transformation (Franco-German, US-Japanese) as evidence that structure is not destiny. Rival identity constructions can be disrupted through sustained diplomacy, socialization, and domestic political change.
Critical Political Economist
Interprets great-power competition partly as a contest over economic governance — currency dominance, technology standards, supply-chain geography, and control of the institutions that set the rules of international trade and investment. Military rivalry is real, but the deeper contest is over whose production and financial structures define the next phase of the world economy.
Trade and technology decoupling
How does each tradition interpret the drive to restrict trade and technology flows in the name of national security — and at what cost?
Strategic Realist
Treats economic interdependence primarily as a vulnerability when a partner is also an adversary. Technology leadership translates into military advantage, making controls on dual-use exports rational even at economic cost. Relative gains logic applies: a trade arrangement that develops the adversary's industrial base is strategically harmful even if it produces net economic growth.
Liberal Institutionalist
Warns that broad decoupling is costly to both parties, undermines the multilateral trading rules that have underpinned global growth, and is likely to be self-defeating as third parties hedge rather than align. Prefers targeted, narrowly scoped controls embedded in multilateral frameworks — export controls on genuinely dual-use items, investment screening for critical sectors — over wholesale economic separation.
Social Constructivist
Focuses on the framing: 'decoupling' and 'supply-chain security' are not neutral technical descriptions but constructions that activate adversarial identities and foreclose alternative framings (mutual dependence, shared governance, managed competition). The political narrative shapes the policy as much as the underlying material reality, and the framing can become self-fulfilling.
Critical Political Economist
Reads decoupling as a restructuring of global production hierarchies — a contest over which state's firms control key nodes in the technology supply chain. Asks who bears the adjustment costs (workers, consumers, smaller trading partners) and who benefits (domestic contractors, capital that relocates). Skeptical of framing that treats decoupling as a cost-free national security necessity rather than a political choice with distributional consequences.
Humanitarian intervention
When, if ever, does mass atrocity justify overriding sovereignty — and what explains the pattern of when interventions happen and when they do not?
Strategic Realist
Deeply skeptical. States invoke humanitarian language to justify actions driven by strategic interests; the correlation between intervention and material stakes is too consistent to ignore. The non-intervention norm protects weaker states as much as it shields bad actors. Realists prefer restraint except where core interests are directly engaged, and warn that intervention tends to create new instabilities it cannot manage.
Liberal Institutionalist
More permissive when institutional authorization exists. R2P and UN Security Council authorization transform the legitimacy calculus — multilateral intervention with clear objectives and exit criteria is preferable to both unilateral action and inaction. Skeptical of unauthorized intervention on precedent grounds, but supports the institutional framework for managed, collective response to mass atrocity.
Social Constructivist
The tradition that best explains why the humanitarian intervention norm emerged when it did. Norm entrepreneur networks, the evolution of sovereignty as responsibility, and the diffusion of R2P are prime constructivist cases. The tradition also raises critical questions: whose suffering activates the norm, whose does not, and whether the norm has been selectively applied in ways that reflect power rather than principle.
Critical Political Economist
Skeptical and critical. Examines the material interests behind humanitarian rhetoric: strategic resources, market access, defense industry interests. Notes that intervention patterns correlate with economic stakes as much as with the severity of crises, and that post-intervention economic arrangements tend to favor the intervening powers and their investors. Humanitarian framing is analyzed as ideology that obscures material motivations.
Important traditions not yet fully modeled
These traditions matter for understanding world politics. They are not yet scored outputs of this version of the inventory — adding them would require new dimensions and items that the current question bank does not support. They are included here because omitting them without explanation would misrepresent the theoretical landscape.
Feminist IR
Feminist IR asks who is made invisible by mainstream IR's focus on states, power, and security. It argues that the discipline's core concepts — security, sovereignty, power — are shaped by assumptions about gender that are rarely examined. Feminist scholars have examined how war affects women differently from men, how militarism is connected to masculine norms, and what a security agenda centered on human vulnerability rather than state survival would look like. The tradition spans liberal feminism (getting more women into existing institutions) and more radical critiques of militarism and the gendered foundations of the state.
Why not yet modeled: Adding feminist IR as a scored family would require new dimensions on human security, gender analysis, and the critique of militarism that the current item bank does not support. Doing it with the current questions would produce spurious classifications.
Postcolonial and Decolonial IR
Postcolonial and decolonial IR scholars argue that the mainstream discipline was built on and for a world organized by European colonial power, and that this origin shapes what questions get asked and which actors get treated as agents rather than objects. They emphasize the colonial legacies that structure contemporary international inequality, the silenced perspectives of the global South, and the need to decolonize both the canon and the practice of IR. They also challenge the universality of Western IR concepts — asking whether 'sovereignty,' 'anarchy,' and 'security' mean the same things to states whose borders were drawn by colonial powers.
Why not yet modeled: Its inclusion would require dimensions on colonial legacies, Eurocentrism, and the politics of knowledge production in IR that would require substantial new question design and validation. The current instrument is likely to misclassify people whose primary orientation is postcolonial — they may land in critical PE or constructivism as the closest available buckets.
Green IR and Ecological Security
Green IR asks what the international system looks like when ecological limits are taken seriously. Climate change, resource scarcity, and biodiversity loss are not just environmental problems — they reshape security calculations, economic structures, and the legitimacy of governance in ways the traditional paradigms were not designed to address. Green IR scholars argue that the state-centric security frame systematically misses the most consequential long-run threats to human welfare, and that a meaningful international order must grapple with planetary boundaries rather than treating nature as a backdrop to great-power politics.
Why not yet modeled: Adding green IR would require new dimensions on ecological security, the relationship between development and environmental constraint, and the governance of global commons. These are distinct theoretical commitments that cannot be captured by the current seven dimensions without stretching their meaning.
English School / International Society
The English School occupies a middle ground between realism and liberalism. It argues that states form something like an international society — a community with shared norms, rules, and institutions that constrain behavior, even in the absence of world government. It is distinctive for taking international law and diplomacy seriously as social practices rather than mere instruments of power. The pluralism-solidarism debate within the English School — whether international society is primarily organized around state sovereignty or broader humanitarian norms — maps onto this Foundation's order-justice dimension, making it the tradition most partially captured by the current instrument.
Why not yet modeled: The English School's full theoretical depth — its account of international society, the role of diplomacy as a social institution, and the historical sociology of international order — is not yet modeled. The order-justice dimension captures one important debate within the tradition, but the broader framework deserves dedicated dimensions and item coverage.
A note on coverage and the Western canon
The traditions described here — and the Foundation that draws on them — reflect IR theory as it has been predominantly taught and published in Anglo-American and Western European universities. This is a real limitation. IR as a discipline has been shaped by the strategic concerns, historical experiences, and institutional positions of a particular set of actors. Scholars from non-Western contexts often read the same international situations through different priors, shaped by colonial legacies, geographic position, and strategic cultures that the mainstream theoretical canon was not designed to capture.
This inventory measures theoretical orientation as expressed through questions drawn from that canon. It does not adjust scores for national background, and it does not claim to capture how people from all strategic cultures approach world politics. The postcolonial and decolonial traditions in the gap section above are partly a response to this problem.