International relations: More sophistry than science

In light of recent shifts in international diplomacy, most visibly shaped and constrained by enduring US hegemony, it is increasingly difficult to take the discipline of International Relations (IR) at face value. IR has long been presented as a neutral, explanatory science, capable of clarifying how states interact, compete and survive in turbulent global politics. It claims to illuminate the logic of power and diplomacy but this claim was never well founded to begin with; recent developments reveal something more unsettling.

From its very inception, International Relations has functioned more as sophistry than science. Instead of objectively explaining global events, it offers polished arguments that make existing power structures appear coherent, legitimate and morally acceptable. What might look like analytical gaps are not oversights but deliberate. The discipline has not failed to explain domination; it has been carefully designed to normalise, manage and justify it. This is not a new corruption or incidental flaw; it is the very condition of IR’s existence.

IR is structurally sophistic for three reasons. First, it emerges alongside empire. Second, it is funded and institutionalised by hegemonic power. Third, it functions not to explain domination but to legitimise it. These are not external influences on an otherwise neutral field. They are constitutive of what International Relations is and how it operates.

Michel Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge helps make sense of this. For Foucault, knowledge is not produced outside power and then applied. It is produced within power relations and actively shapes them. Disciplines do not merely describe reality. They produce regimes of truth: structured ways of seeing, speaking and thinking that determine what counts as knowledge, who may speak authoritatively and which questions are considered reasonable or excessive.

International Relations is such a regime of truth. It does not simply analyse global politics; it helps produce ‘the international’ as a governable object. It defines what power looks like, how it should be exercised and how it should be justified. In doing so, it renders certain forms of domination normal, necessary and even benevolent.

The historical origins of IR are revealing. The discipline emerged in the early twentieth century, not as a timeless science but as a response to imperial crisis, global war and the need to manage a world dominated by European, and later, American power. Its foundational concepts, including sovereignty, order, balance and stability, are political solutions for maintaining hierarchy within a formally equal state system, not neutral descriptors. Central to this framework is the Westphalian model of international order. On its surface, Westphalia promises sovereign equality, non-intervention and mutual recognition. In practice, it has always been selectively applied. It protected European powers while enabling colonial expansion beyond Europe. Today, it shields powerful states while rendering weaker ones open to intervention, coercion, and discipline.

Despite these contradictions, the Westphalian system is treated as sacrosanct. Students are taught to accept it as the only viable model of international order. Alternative political traditions, non-Western forms of authority and indigenous conceptions of sovereignty are marginalised or treated as deviations. This is not accidental; it is how a regime of knowledge reproduces itself.

The same logic underpins the discourse of the ‘rules-based international order’. Presented as the ethical and legal foundation of global politics, it promises constraint, predictability and fairness. Yet in practice, rules apply unevenly. Powerful states reinterpret, suspend or ignore them when it suits their interests. Weaker states are disciplined for transgression. The order is rules-based in rhetoric, not effectively.

Here, the sophistry of IR becomes clear. The discipline provides the language that makes contradictions coherent. Intervention becomes a humanitarian responsibility. Sanctions become normative enforcement. Coercion becomes leadership. The point is not to deny that rules exist but to obscure how selectively they operate. Power is not denied; it is reframed.

The concept of soft power, famously articulated by Joseph Nye (2004), is a recent addition to the elaborate sophistry of international politics. Yet, in reality, there is no such thing as soft power. ‘Soft’ methods are not gentle alternatives or morally distinct strategies; they are inseparable from the logic of power itself. In Foucauldian terms, soft power is meaningless as a separate category: it is simply a tool within the broader regime of power, inherently structured to shape behaviour, produce compliance, and legitimise domination. Attraction, persuasion, or cultural influence are never neutral; they operate within the same networks of authority that enforce hierarchy, normalise inequality, and manage the international system.

This reframing is sustained by funding and institutional sponsorship. In the United States, IR is embedded in an ecosystem of defence departments, security agencies, policy-linked foundations and think tanks with revolving doors into government. The scale of this funding is enormous. Its interests are clear. The discipline does not merely study power; it is nourished by it.

This does not mean scholars are told what to conclude. Power rarely works so crudely. Instead, it shapes the terrain of inquiry. Certain questions are rewarded: how to stabilise order, manage rivals, deter adversaries or improve compliance. Others are marginalised. These include whether the order itself is just, whether hierarchy is legitimate, or whether domination could be dismantled rather than merely administered.

Funding does not dictate conclusions line by line. It determines what counts as ‘serious’ scholarship. This is exactly what Foucault meant by power/knowledge: the production of truth through institutions, incentives and exclusions. IR may appear pluralistic or critical, yet the horizon of the politically thinkable remains tightly bound.

Importantly, this does not require bad faith. Scholars may sincerely believe they are being critical. Debate is allowed; dissent circulates. But it circulates safely. The discipline’s tolerance for critique is not a weakness; it is a strength. Like classical sophistry, IR values argumentative sophistication over ontological disruption. It allows power to be endlessly discussed without ever being meaningfully threatened.

For students and scholars in the Global South, the consequences are profound. IR is often experienced not as a tool for understanding the world but as an instrument of intellectual discipline. Students are taught to internalise frameworks that legitimise the erosion of their own sovereignty. They learn to speak the language of order even as their political and economic autonomy is constrained.

This dynamic is especially visible in international aid and development. Aid is framed as benevolence, charity or responsibility. Yet donor states are not running charities: they develop institutional routines that reflect their domestic economic structures and in countries where private (capitalist) interests dominate, bureaucracies often institutionalise mechanisms that align state projects, including ODA, with those private sector priorities. Consequently, donor countries frequently seek economic or strategic returns from the aid they disburse. Aid is famously used as a mechanism of control. Structural adjustment programmes, austerity measures and conditional lending reshape domestic economies in ways that align with donor interests. The social consequences are often severe. Dependency, in this view, is not accidental; it is structural.

IR supplies the vocabulary that makes this arrangement acceptable. Development replaces exploitation. Assistance replaces extraction. Partnership replaces dependency. In Foucauldian terms, aid functions as a technology of governance. IR provides the knowledge that justifies and administers it.

Viewed together—the Westphalian system, the rules-based order, the aid regime—it is clear IR is not a neutral science. It is a professionally credentialled rhetoric of power. It reassures weaker states that rules exist while instructing stronger ones on how to bend them without naming the act.

Calling this sophistry is not polemical. Sophistry was never about lying outright. It was about persuasive coherence in the service of authority. IR excels at this. It teaches how to speak about power in ways that preserve its prerogatives, how to critique without consequence and how to manage domination without ever calling it by name.

The demand is for intellectual honesty. The problem is not that IR sometimes gets things wrong. The problem is that, as institutionally constituted, it cannot help but reproduce a particular vision of world politics, aligned with those who fund it, house it and benefit from its authority.

The way forward lies in genuine decolonisation. This means not simply adding Southern voices to existing frameworks — but questioning the frameworks themselves. It means refusing the universality of Westphalian sovereignty, interrogating the moral innocence of aid and rejecting the fiction that order can be separated from coercion.

Such a project will be uncomfortable because it threatens entrenched interests. Without it, IR will remain what it largely has always been: not a science of the international but a discipline that makes contemporary domination appear reasonable, inevitable and just.

Kweku Ampiah is a professor in Japanese Studies in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds, UK.