International Relations Theory Doesn’t Understand Culture

Yet culture enters rationalist arguments, too, in three ways: when adherents explain the rational choice of norms, when they accommodate cultural preferences, and in their argument that common knowledge is essential to solving coordination problems. Rationalists see cultural norms, values, and practices as a major source of such knowledge, and thus common culture is important to solving the variety of coordination problems actors navigate every day. The idea that pragmatism could only ever sustain a thin social order—and that a common culture was needed to undergird robust bonds, institutions, and practices—focused much of the school’s post-decolonization research on the possibility of international society in a culturally diverse world.

Source: foreignpolicy.com