Methods and the Future of IR Theory

Rational choice theory, imported into international relations substantially from economics and formal political science from the 1970s onward, models states or other actors as unitary decision-makers with consistent, ordered preferences who select the course of action expected to maximize their utility given available information and constraints. Applied to bargaining, crisis behavior, and interstate conflict, most influentially in the formal models later synthesized by James Fearon's widely cited 1995 article "Rationalist Explanations for War," rational choice approaches ask why rational, unitary actors ever fight costly wars rather than reaching a negotiated settlement both would prefer to the costs of fighting, identifying private information about capabilities or resolve combined with incentives to misrepresent it, commitment problems where actors cannot credibly bind their own future behavior, and issue indivisibility as the principal rationalist explanations.