IR Worldview Inventory

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Browse Cases, build a Foundation baseline, and add Focus Areas, AI Governance, or Perspective Runs where useful.

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Use the Worldview Map, the field guide, and methods when you want to browse profiles or challenge the model.

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Ways of reading world politics

Explore what different traditions notice, what they explain, and where their arguments come apart.

Start with a name, a thinker, or a decision.

Decision Patterns and evidence-coded public positions are reading aids. They never become your Foundation result.

Browse Foundation archetypesView your Profile

Foundation archetypes

Four explanatory lenses combine with two strategic postures. The rows summarize a continuous profile; they are not population types.

P

Power

How leverage, position, and strategic timing shape the available choice.

R

Rules

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

M

Meaning

How public meaning, legitimacy, and shared expectations shape what action can sustain.

S

Structure

How production, finance, capacity, and external dependence constrain practical choice.

Open the full archetype directory →

Variants and blends

Normative orientation changes how an archetype weighs order and justice. A blend keeps two lenses active under the same posture.

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

A blend appears only when two modeled lenses resolve close enough under one posture. It remains a family of nearby profiles; pair-specific interpretation is withheld until it receives editorial review.

Modeled traditions

The closest modeled tradition supports a Foundation reading; it is not a second Foundation result. Each tradition remains broader than the instrument can represent.

Supporting traditionRealismWorld politics is shaped by the distribution of power and the absence of any authority above states.Supporting traditionInstitutionalismShared rules, monitoring, and repeated interaction can make cooperation durable even without a world government.Supporting traditionConstructivismThe meaning of threats, alliances, and interests is partly constituted by identity, norms, and shared social expectations.Supporting traditionCritical political economyWho controls production, finance, and market access shapes world politics alongside military power.

Foundation dimensions

These dimensions preserve the tradeoffs beneath the headline label. A score describes a position within this model, not a percentile.

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

How the dimensions are scored →

Decision Patterns

Decision Patterns are authored ways of approaching a choice. The directory supports comparison and does not calculate, match, or diagnose a user.

Open the Worldview Map →

Browse all Decision Patterns
  1. Several LensesKeep several explanations in play 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 durable position.
  4. Coalitions FirstChoose the course that partners can sustain together over time.
  5. Rules and CooperationTry rules, monitoring, and repeated cooperation before abandoning the institutional route.
  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.

Thinkers and public positions

Published entries are dated, scoped interpretations built from cited public evidence. They describe a position within an evidence window and never assign a person or organization to an archetype.

Published entries in the validated directory: 4

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

Browse evidence-coded public positions →

Focus Areas and contextual records

Security and Technology are Focus Area questionnaires; AI Governance is a separate domain result; Perspective Runs are role-conditioned comparisons; Current Cases are time-bounded judgment exercises.

These records sit beside the Foundation. They do not rescore it.

SecurityA Focus Area questionnaire about deterrence, escalation, alliances, and the use of force.TechnologyA Focus Area questionnaire about controls, capacity, openness, and strategic dependence.AI GovernanceA separate domain result about governance choices for advanced AI, kept outside the Foundation score.Perspective RunsRole-conditioned comparisons that show how a stable baseline travels under a defined vantage point.Current CasesTime-bounded judgment exercises with authored case readings and the user’s own recorded judgment.

Coverage gaps and methods

Four modeled traditions do not exhaust International Relations. Important approaches remain under-modeled because the current dimensions and item coverage cannot represent them adequately.

The Foundation draws mainly from traditions developed in Anglo-American and Western European International Relations. It does not adjust a score for nationality or culture, and it does not claim equivalent coverage across strategic traditions.

Read the current coverage gaps

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, including security, sovereignty, and 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 it is 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 by asking whether 'sovereignty,' 'anarchy,' and 'security' mean the same things to states whose borders were drawn by colonial powers.

Why it is 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, which may place them 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 environmental problems that also 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 it is 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 asks whether international society is primarily organized around state sovereignty or broader humanitarian norms. This debate maps onto the Foundation's order-justice dimension, making the English School the tradition most partially captured by the current instrument.

Why it is not yet modeled: The English School's full theoretical depth is not yet modeled, including its account of international society, the role of diplomacy as a social institution, and the historical sociology of international order. The order-justice dimension captures one important debate within the tradition, but the broader framework deserves dedicated dimensions and item coverage.

Read the methods and limits →

How the labels fit together

The inventory uses a deliberate hierarchy so that supporting evidence never competes with the Foundation result.

  1. Foundation result

    One pure archetype or a legitimate same-posture blend supplies the headline Foundation reading.

  2. Supporting interpretation

    Strategic posture, normative orientation, and the closest modeled tradition explain parts of the result without replacing it.

  3. Separate records

    Focus Areas, AI Governance, Perspective Runs, and Current Case judgments remain scoped to their own questions.

How scoring and evidence differ

Foundation scoring resolves the answers in a completed questionnaire. Historical comparisons and public positions use separate editorial evidence records; they do not feed back into the score.

Read the scoring and evidence method →