IR Worldview Inventory

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Library

What the Foundation scores against, and what to set your result beside.

Start with a name you were given, a thinker you have heard of, or a decision you would have made differently.

Nothing in the Library changes your result.

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Traditions

The traditions the Foundation scores against. Each is broader than fourteen questions can capture.

Supporting traditionRealismNo authority stands above states, so power and self-help decide more than rules or good intentions.Supporting traditionInstitutionalismShared rules, monitoring, and repeated dealings can make cooperation last without a world government.Supporting traditionConstructivismWhat counts as a threat, an ally, or an interest depends on identity, norms, and shared expectation.Supporting traditionCritical political economyWho controls production, finance, and market access shapes world politics alongside military power.

Thinkers

Four thinkers, each read from cited work within a dated window. No thinker is assigned a Foundation reading.

Published thinkers: 4

ThinkerJohn MearsheimerPublished · reviewed ThinkerRobert KeohanePublished · reviewed ThinkerAlexander WendtPublished · reviewed ThinkerSusan StrangePublished · reviewed

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Decision Patterns

Authored ways of approaching a hard choice. Compare them; none is assigned to you.

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All Decision Patterns
  1. Several LensesHold several explanations open until the case clearly favors one.
  2. Power with LimitsProtect strategic position while setting firm limits on escalation and overreach.
  3. Power and LeverageUse credible pressure when it can convert advantage into lasting position.
  4. Coalitions FirstChoose the course that partners can sustain together over time.
  5. Rules and CooperationBefore abandoning an agreement, ask whether clearer terms and better monitoring could make it work.
  6. Meaning and LegitimacyJudge a move by how identity, history, and legitimacy shape its meaning.
  7. Justice and ProtectionLet severe risks to people outweigh sovereignty only when legitimacy and limits support action.
  8. Power Behind the RulesAsk who sets the terms, who benefits, and who bears the cost behind formal rules.
  9. Capacity and AutonomyFavor choices that build capacity and preserve future room to maneuver.
  10. Different by DomainUse the logic that fits the domain instead of forcing one rule across every case.

Foundation readings

Four ways of explaining world politics, each with two strategic postures.

P

Power

How leverage, position, and timing decide what is possible.

R

Rules

How rules, enforcement, consultation, and restraint make cooperation last.

M

Meaning

How public meaning, legitimacy, and shared expectations decide what action can be sustained.

S

Structure

How production, finance, capacity, and dependence narrow practical choice.

Open the full archetype directory →

Reading a Foundation result: dimensions, blends and coverage

How the pieces fit

Your Foundation result is the headline. Everything else here explains, compares, or challenges it.

  1. Your Foundation result

    The headline reading: one archetype, or a blend of two under the same posture.

  2. What explains it

    Posture, normative orientation, and the closest tradition explain parts of the reading.

  3. Other questionnaires

    Security, Technology, AI Governance, Perspective Runs, and Cases each answer their own question.

Where the score comes from

Your score comes only from your answers. Thinkers, cases, and decision patterns are editorial material and never feed into it.

How the scoring works →

Variants and blends

A normative orientation changes how a reading weighs order against justice. A blend keeps two explanations active under one posture.

Order-first
Starts by protecting coexistence, continuity, and limits on imposed agreement.
Conditional
Treats order and justice claims as conditional on the case, the authority, and the likely consequences.
Justice-first
Starts by asking what protection or obligation is owed beyond settled order.

A blend appears when two explanations score close together under one posture. It names a family of nearby profiles.

Dimensions

What sits behind every reading. A score is a position on this model's scale, not a percentile.

Security rivalry
How much weight rivalry, uncertainty about intentions, and positional competition carry in an explanation.
Institutions and rules
How far rules, monitoring, and repeated interaction can make cooperation last.
Domestic politics
How coalitions, regime type, capacity, and other domestic conditions steer foreign policy.
Identity and legitimacy
How legitimacy, recognition, identity, and social meaning define interests and threats.
Markets and dependence
How production, finance, trade dependence, sanctions, and leverage set the room for action.
Restraint and advantage
Whether the safer strategic instinct is to hold back or to use an available advantage.
Order and justice
How sovereignty, settled order, wider protection, and moral obligation are weighed against each other.

How the dimensions are scored →

The other questionnaires and exercises

Security, Technology, and AI Governance are their own questionnaires. Perspective Runs put you in another actor's seat. Cases ask for one judgment on a live question.

None of these changes your Foundation result.

SecurityDeterrence, escalation, alliances, and the use of force, decided case by case.TechnologyControls, capacity, openness, and strategic dependence, decided case by case.AI GovernanceWho should be allowed to build, release, and stop powerful AI.Perspective RunsThe same questions, answered from another actor's seat.CasesOne judgment on a live question, with the record up to a stated date.

What is not covered

Four traditions do not cover the field. Feminist, postcolonial, and green approaches are described here and not scored.

The Foundation draws mainly on traditions developed in Anglo-American and Western European International Relations. It does not adjust a score for nationality or culture.

What the traditions leave out

Feminist IR

Feminist IR asks who disappears when the discipline looks only at states, power, and security. Its core concepts, security, sovereignty, power, rest on assumptions about gender that are rarely examined. Feminist scholars have studied how war falls differently on women and men, how militarism draws on ideas of masculinity, and what security would mean if it started from human vulnerability instead of state survival. The tradition runs from liberal feminism, which wants more women inside existing institutions, to critiques of militarism and of the gendered foundations of the state itself.

Why it is not yet modeled: Scoring feminist IR would need questions on human security, gender, and the critique of militarism that the bank does not contain. Scoring it with the current questions would produce readings the answers cannot support.

Postcolonial and Decolonial IR

Postcolonial and decolonial scholars argue that the discipline was built by and for a world organized by European colonial power, and that this origin decides which questions get asked and which actors count as agents. They trace how colonial legacies structure inequality today, recover perspectives from the global South that the canon left out, and ask whether 'sovereignty', 'anarchy', and 'security' mean the same thing to states whose borders were drawn by colonial powers.

Why it is not yet modeled: Scoring it would need questions on colonial legacies, Eurocentrism, and the politics of knowledge that would have to be written and tested from scratch. Someone whose first orientation is postcolonial is likely to land in critical political economy or constructivism, the nearest readings the questions can reach.

Green IR and Ecological Security

Green IR asks what the international system looks like once ecological limits are taken seriously. Climate change, resource scarcity, and biodiversity loss reshape security calculations, economic structures, and the legitimacy of governments in ways the older paradigms were not built to handle. The state-centered security frame, green scholars argue, misses the largest long-run threats to human welfare, and an international order worth the name has to reckon with planetary boundaries instead of treating nature as scenery behind great-power politics.

Why it is not yet modeled: Scoring green IR would need questions on ecological security, the relation between development and environmental limits, and the governance of the global commons. Those are commitments of their own, and the seven dimensions cannot carry them without changing what the dimensions mean.

English School / International Society

The English School stands between realism and liberalism. States, it argues, form an international society: a community with shared norms, rules, and institutions that constrain behavior even without a world government. It takes international law and diplomacy seriously as social practices in their own right. Its pluralism-solidarism debate asks whether that society is organized around state sovereignty or around wider humanitarian norms. That debate maps onto the Foundation's order-justice dimension, which makes the English School the tradition the questions come closest to reaching without scoring.

Why it is not yet modeled: The order-justice dimension captures one debate inside the tradition. Its account of international society, of diplomacy as an institution, and of how international orders form historically has no questions of its own.

Read the method and its limits →