Valid, descriptive theories of the world are an essential prerequisite to emancipatory critique – epistemic shifts from Eurocentric thought are impossible without reclaiming the concept of objectivity.

The rejection of positivism which is a central element of recent critiques of mainstream IR has tended to extend to rejection of the notion and possibility of science itself. Science, often written in quotation marks ‘science’, is seen as inherently part of the project of Enlightenment-modernity, a mode of technical instrumental knowledge which is necessarily a means of control and domination of both society and nature 22 . An important component of the critique of the positivist orthodoxy is exposure of its coincidence with the interests of the powerful. Dominant ideas and methods which rest on claims of value-free scientificity and neutrality are shown to mask or legitimise the interests of the powerful and the exercise of power and domination. The very claim to be able to produce value-free, neutral scientific truth is rejected in a world of inherently conflicting interests. Instead, the ‘illusion of objectivism must be replaced with the recognition that knowledge is always constituted in reflection of interests’ (Ashley 1981: 207).

There are two kinds of conflation which are embedded within this critical stance. The first conflates the contents of natural scientific knowledge with the uses to which it is put in society. Much scientific knowledge, in both natural and social sciences, has indeed been produced by and in the explicit interests of the powerful, an integral part of the construction and maintenance of unequal and oppressive social orders, and the administration of accumulation and imperialism. But it is important not to conflate the contents of knowledge with its social conditions of production and use. When scientific knowledge is developed for and utilised in the service of oppression or commercial profit as opposed to the increased satisfaction of human needs, the oppression results from social forces, not from the cognitive properties of scientific knowledge 23:

Even assuming all the results of a research project are objectively true, the area chosen for investigation may be determined by contentious ideological assumptions or practical interests. Thus it is likely that drug companies have concentrated on artificially synthesized drugs to the detriment of research into those occurring naturally in plants; and it is certain that military might and commercial profit are the chief determinants of which secrets of nature get uncovered. In a world where science was funded with a view to satisfying human needs and conserving planetary resources, quite different discoveries might be made – neither more or less objective than the findings of modern science, but useful for different purposes. (Collier 1994: 180; see also Collier 1979).

The second conflation reduces scientific method to a positivist approach, equating positivist social science with social science per se with technical instrumentality. It is often asserted that the problem with positivist IR is that it applies the method of natural sciences or ‘the scientific method’ to the study of social phenomena 24 . This is a mischaracterisation of the real nature of the problem, which is that positivism first misunderstands the method of natural science, and then applies these misunderstood methodological principles to the study of social phenomena (Bhaskar 1997). Recognition of this enables us to retrieve the possibility of a particular form of social inquiry which can be called scientific or objective from abandonment along with positivism 25 .

A positivist understanding of scientific inquiry rests on a Humean notion of cause as constant conjunction between empirical variables or events, and explanation as the discovery of empirical regularities and correlations. When such empirical regularities are discovered they can be used to make predictions. This assumes an empiricist ontology and epistemology: the world consists only of that which is available to direct experience, and the only source of knowledge is through direct sensory experience. Critiques of positivism are correct to question these assumptions about knowledge and the world, but they are not correct in equating this with scientific method. Positivism consists of philosophers’ misunderstanding of the actual practice of natural science. The practice of experiment is central to the method of some natural sciences. A scientific experiment involves establishing closure: creating an artificial environment where the external and internal conditions are controlled so as to isolate particular features and mechanisms. This enables scientists to discover about aspects of reality which are not empirical : the causal properties and necessary ways-of-operating of specific mechanisms in nature which are real because they have the capacity to bring about change, given appropriate conditions and inputs, but are not empirical – they cannot be seen, only the effects of their operation can be seen. This non-positivist, philosophical realist theory of science, epistemology and ontology is very different from the positivist misunderstanding of scientific method and explanation. Scientific theories and the discovery of natural laws refer to real properties and causal powers of structured entities, not empirical events and regularities (Bhaskar 1997).

What are the implications of this non-positivist theory of science for social inquiry? The fact of human reflexivity rules out the possibility of experiment and prediction in social inquiry, because it is impossible to establish closure in the social world 26 . Ideas are causally efficacious: through informing social action ideas have causal efficacy in codetermining or influencing what actually happens, including (usually as an unintended outcome) the reproduction of social relations. This means that ideas are part of the object of social inquiry, as is fore-grounded by all variants of so-called reflexive approaches in International Relations (Keohane 1988). When we study society part of what we study includes the ideas that are held in that society. But we also study other aspects of society which are irreducible to ideas or individuals – real but non-empirical structures of social relations, historically-specific socially-produced material conditions, and so on.

This non-positivist theory of knowledge and the world gives rise to a notion of objectivity which does not entail the positivist commitment to value-free neutrality. Philosophical realism holds that the world consists of natural and social objects or entities which exist and have particular properties and causal powers independently of what, if anything, is known about them 27 . Knowledge about different aspects of the material and social world can be non-existent, partial, more or less adequate, more or less right or wrong. This informs a notion of objectivity which refers to what is the case, regardless of what is thought or believed to be the case:

The first and central use of the word “objectivity” is to refer to what is true independently of any subject judging it to be true. To say that it is an objective fact that the Earth is the third planet from the Sun is to say that this is so whether or not anyone knows or believes it, or even is able to formulate the statement. To say that kindness is an objective value is to say that it is a value, whether or not anyone judges it to be a value; it would be a value even if the whole of society regarded it as a culpable weakness and it was only practised shamefacedly as a private foible. (Collier 2003: 134-5).

This notion of objectivity does not entail a belief that human beings can acquire absolute truth and certain knowledge about either social or natural phenomena. It is possible to acknowledge that knowledge is always inherently fallible and socially constructed while retaining a notion of the objective reality which ideas are about. This allows commitment to judgemental rationality – the possibility of judging between different ideas on the basis of their relative adequacy, in terms of their relation to objective reality 28 . In social inquiry objectivity does not imply some form of external position of independence ‘outside’ society 29 . All knowledge is socially produced; but all knowledge is also about something which exists independently of the knowledge about it. (This is the case even for knowledge about ideas).

The ‘common-sense’ view pervading recent discussions of epistemology, ontology and methodology in IR asserts that objectivity implies value-free neutrality. However, objective social inquiry has an inherent tendency to be critical, in various senses. To the extent that objective knowledge provides a better and more adequate account of reality than other ideas, such knowledge is inherently critical (implicitly or explicitly) of those ideas. 30 In other words critical social inquiry does not (or not only) manifest its ‘criticalness’ through self-claimed labels of being critical or siding with the oppressed, but through the substantive critique of prevailing ideas. Objective social knowledge constitutes a specific form of criticism: explanatory critique. The critique of dominant ideas or ideologies is elaborated through providing a more adequate explanation of aspects of the world, and in so doing exposing what is wrong with the dominant ideology. This may also entail revealing the social conditions which give rise to ideologies, thus exposing the necessary and causal relation between particular social relations and particular ideological conceptions.

In societies which are constituted by unequal structures of social relations giving rise to unequal power and conflicting interests, the reproduction of those structured relations is in the interests of the powerful, whereas transformation of existing structured relations is in the interests of the weak. Because ideas inform social action they are casually efficacious either in securing the reproduction of existing social relations (usually as an unintended consequence of social practice), or in informing social action aimed at transforming social relations. This is why ideas cannot be ‘neutral’. Ideas which provide a misrepresentation of the nature of society, the causes of unequal social conditions, and the conflicting interests of the weak and powerful, will tend to help secure the reproduction of prevailing social relations. Ideas which provide a more adequate account of the way society is structured and how structured social relations produce concrete conditions of inequality and exploitation can potentially inform efforts to change those social relations. In this sense, ideas which are false are ideological and, in serving to promote the reproduction of the status quo and avoid attempts at radical change, are in the interests of the powerful. An account which is objective will contradict ideological ideas, implicitly or explicitly criticising them for their false or flawed accounts of reality. The criticism here arises not, or not only, from pointing out the coincidence between ideologies and the interests of the powerful, nor from a prior normative stance of solidarity with the oppressed, but from exposing the flaws in dominant ideologies through a more adequate account of the nature and causes of social conditions 31 .

A normative commitment to the oppressed must entail a commitment to truth and objectivity, because true ideas are in the interest of the oppressed, false ideas are in the interest of the oppressors. In other words, the best way to declare solidarity with the oppressed is to declare one’s commitment to objective inquiry 32 . As Nzongola-Ntalaja (1986: 10) has put it:

It is a question of whether one analyses society from the standpoint of the dominant groups, who have a vested interest in mystifying the way society works, or from the standpoint of ordinary people, who have nothing to lose from truthful analyses of their predicament.

The philosophical realist theory of science, objectivity and explanatory critique thus provides an alternative response to the relationship between knowledge and power. Instead of choosing perspectives on the basis of our ethical commitment to the cause of the oppressed and to emancipatory social change, we should choose between contending ideas on the basis of which provides a better account of objective social reality. This will inherently provide a critique of the ideologies which, by virtue of their flawed account of the social world, serve the interests of the powerful.

Exemplars of explanatory critique in International Relations are provided in the work of scholars such as Siba Grovogui, James Gathii, Anthony Anghie, Bhupinder Chimni, Jacques Depelchin, Hilbourne Watson, Robert Vitalis, Sankaran Krishna, Michel-Rolph Trouillot 33 . Their work provides critiques of central categories, theories and discourses in the theory and practice of IR and narratives of world history, including assumptions about sovereignty, international society, international law, global governance, the nature of the state. They expose the ideological and racialised nature of central aspects of IR through a critical examination of both the long historical trajectory of imperial ideologies regarding colonized peoples, and the actual practices of colonialism and decolonisation in the constitution of international orders and local social conditions. Their work identifies the flaws in current ideas by revealing how they systematically misrepresent or ignore the actual history of social change in Africa, the Caribbean and other regions of the Third World, both past and present – during both colonial and neo-colonial periods of the imperial world order. Their work reveals how racism, violence, exploitation and dispossession, colonialism and neo-colonialism have been central to the making of contemporary international order and contemporary doctrines of international law, sovereignty and rights, and how such themes are glaring in their absence from histories and theories of international relations and international history.

Objective social knowledge which accurately depicts and explains social reality has these qualities by virtue of its relation to its object, not its subject. As Collier argues, “The science/ideology distinction is an epistemological one, not a social one.” (Collier 1979: 60). So, for example, in the work of Grovogui, Gathii and Depelchin, the general perspective and knowledge of conditions in and the history of Africa might be due largely to the African social origins of the authors. However the judgement that their accounts are superior to those of mainstream IR rests not on the fact that the authors are African, but on the greater adequacy of their accounts with respect to the actual historical and contemporary production of conditions and change in Africa and elsewhere in the Third World. The criteria for choosing their accounts over others derives from the relation between the ideas and their objects (what they are about), not from the relation between the ideas and their subjects (who produced them). It is vital to retain explicitly some commitment to objectivity in social inquiry, to the notion that the proper criterion for judging ideas about the world lies in what they say about the world, not whose ideas they are.

A fundamental problem which underlies the origin and reproduction of IR’s eurocentricity is the overwhelming dominance of ideas produced in and by the west, and the wilful and determined silencing of the voices and histories of the colonised. But the result of this fundamental problem is flawed knowledge about the world. Eurocentricity is therefore a dual problem concerning both the authors and the content of knowledge, and cannot be resolved through normative commitments alone. It is not only the voices of the colonised, but the histories of colonialism, which have been glaring in their absence from the discipline of International Relations.

Overcoming eurocentricity therefore requires not only concerted effort from the centre to create space and listen to hitherto marginalised voices, but also commitment to correcting the flaws in prevailing knowledge – and it is not only ‘the Other’ who can and should elaborate this critique. A vitally important implication of objectivity is that it is the responsibility of European and American, just as much as non-American or non-European scholars, to decolonise IR. The importance of objectivity in social inquiry defended here can perhaps be seen as a form of epistemological internationalism. It is not necessary to be African to attempt to tell a more accurate account of the history of Europe’s role in the making of the contemporary Africa and the rest of the world, for example, or to write counter-histories of ‘the expansion of international society’ which detail the systematic barbarity of so-called Western civilisation. It is not necessary to have been colonised to recognise and document the violence, racism, genocide and dispossession which have characterised European expansion over five hundred years.