Abstrakt
The second greater International Relations’ debate concerned methodology in the field’s study. The position of “traditionalists”, based on a more embracing perspective, which relies on knowledge about history, politics, law, foreign affairs, was challenged by the “scientism” which brought “scientific” models, general theories and concepts, among others, to explain IR issues.
As a matter of fact, International Relations constitute a very complex area of knowledge. Moral questions, intuition, subjective philosophical ideas, the unpredictable changing of variables in International Politics do not allow the exclusive use of techniques from behaviorism.
Otherwise, one could easily obliterate vital aspects in a study, and fail the goal of a full and realist explanation as a result. Yet, it is known that postmodernism criticized hardly the possibility of objectiveness in human analysis.
Thus, it is defended that the so called “behaviorist methodology” does not guarantee, by its own, the quality of a successful research work, because the methods of interpretation, comparison and systematization are required, and are no less rigorous than the others.