Original citation

The failure of prediction 
The social sciences have long grappled with the problem of prediction. 
Some see prediction as central to the success of the social sciences, an 
indispensible tool if we want to control what happens in the world around 
us. In this sense, prediction is an unavoidable part of IR. Others argue that 
the complexity of human civilisation and our limited ability to accumulate 
and process knowledge make accurate prediction impossible. 
Though it provides interesting food for thought, we do not need to get 
too involved in this debate to see the difficulties of prediction. The most 
immediate evidence is the failure of anyone in IR to see the end of the 
Cold War coming. Instead, the vast majority of IR scholars and writers 
were in thrall to theories that failed to account for the possibility that the 
international order could or would change so completely. One reason was 
the tendency of scholars in IR to reify international actors and structures 
– treating dynamic, contested, and evolving systems as if they were static, 
unified and fully developed. The problem of reification continues to 
plague many subfields in IR. This is particularly true with reference to 
states, which are often treated as stable, cohesive and fully developed 
actors on the world stage, akin to an individual human being in its 
ability to speak with a single voice on any given issue. This assumption 
simplifies the state and allows us to make generalisations about state 
behaviour, a key goal of IR. At the same time, it underestimates the 
likelihood of change, leaving analysts surprised and shocked when states 
are transformed by events going on inside and outside their borders. In the 
late 1980s, reification led many academics and policy-makers to believe 
that Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms of the Soviet Union would have little 
influence on either the USSR or the international system. His reforms, it 
was assumed, would not lead to a Soviet withdrawal from Central and 
Eastern Europe, much less to the collapse of the Soviet system. For a 
student just starting out in IR, it should be comforting to know that even 
the experts are sometimes embarrassingly wrong.
There are many more specific explanations of why the experts failed to 
see that the end was nigh in 1989. One of these argues that because many 
in the discipline saw orderly virtue in the bipolar structure of the Cold 
War international system, they were deeply reluctant to contemplate its 
collapse. This was particularly true of structural Realism – discussed in 
Chapters 1 and 5 of this guide – which assumed that the structural stability 
of the international system would block any large-scale systemic change. 
This analysis, located at the systems level of analysis, focused on 
the constraints imposed on actors’ autonomy by the international system 
itself. By assuming the stability of these constraints, IR blinded itself to the 
possibility of their passing between 1989 and 1991.
Another explanation of IR’s failure to predict the Cold War’s end 
emphasises the way in which the West understood – or misunderstood – 
the USSR as a system of power. This explanation, carried out at a unit