International Relations. A self-Study Guide to Theory

tional system. No higher authority exists “to govern” international politics. 
Sovereignty is the basic norm inherent in the structure of the international 
system (when understood as a system of states). 
In short, theories of IR (implicitly or explicitly) build on assumptions 
about the most relevant structures of international relations, the “nature” of 

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those structures and their “effects” on actors in international relations. A very 
basic ontological question is the “nature” of the structural context: to what 
extent can we assume that the structures of the international system consist of 
material conditions? Do they instead consist of ideas such as norms or col-
lective knowledge? Or, alternatively, both? We can easily think of structures 
in terms of how material resources, technology, weapons, economic power, 
etc., are distributed. But we can also think of structures in terms of (immate-
rial) norms and rules inherent in the system or in social institutions found in 
international relations, such as international organizations or international re-
gimes. From what you have learned in Units 2 and 3, you know that assump-
tions of material and/or ideational features of the world belong to the most 
fundamental ontological “starting points” of any reasoning.
The theories presented in this book will thus not only demonstrate differ-
ent ontological perspectives on actors, but on structures too. We will learn 
about different theories of IR because they have different theoretical ways of 
ontologically taking into account the structural context of actors’ interactions.
2.3.
Assumptions about the interrelation between agency and 
structure 
The relationship between active and self-reflecting agents and the structural 
context in which their activity takes place lies at the core of the agent-
structure-problem in IR. Agency usually refers to the capacity of human ac-
tors to act independently and to make their own free choices. Structure con-
sists of all factors of the social context that constrain (or enable) human ac-
tion. 
The “nature” or “being” of this relation is a question of social ontology, 
an ontological position of the primacy of structure or agency. Is social struc-
ture ontologically “prior” to human behavior or is human agency? This query 
involves further questions about the nature of the entities, in this case that of 
actors and social structures, as we discussed them in the previous section. For 
systematical reasons, the following units will discuss ontological aspects of 
the interrelation between agency and structure together with the epistemolog-
ical and methodological implications of different ontological positions on the 
agent-structure-problem. Please be aware that this problem is, at its core, on-
tological. For that reason, it is discussed in the section “Ontological assump-
tions about actors and structures”. However, in the overview at the end of this 
unit, the agent-structure problem will take a separate position because of its 
epistemological and methodological implications. 

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In short, the question of how agency and structure interrelate is not only 
ontological but also epistemological and methodological. As an epistemolog-
ical question, it seeks an explanation in terms of the interrelation of agency 
and structure: does structure “cause” agency or does agency “cause” struc-
ture? Perceived as a causal relation, this is usually understood as a temporal 
cause-effect-relation in the Humean sense described in Units 2 and 3. How-
ever, as will be shown later, there are theories of IR that assume a different 
“causality” in the interrelation between agency and structure. We learned in 
Unit 2 that there are two basic positions with regard to this question: method-
ological individualism and methodological holism. Both aspects, the ontolog-
ical and the explanatory, relate to each other as follows: 
1) Social existence IS a “whole”; it has its own “ontological quality” that is