Postpositivism (or reflectivism) in international relations theory attempts to integrate a larger variety of security concerns. Supporters argue that if IR is the study of foreign affairs and relations, it ought to include non-state actors as well as the state. Instead of studying solely high politics of the state, IR ought to study world politics of the everyday world—which involves BOTH high and low politics. Thus, issues such as gender (often in terms of feminism which generally holds salient the subordination of women to men—though newer feminisms allow for the reverse too) and ethnicity (such as stateless actors like the Kurds or perhaps Palestinians) can be problematized and made into an international security issue—supplanting (not replacing) the traditional IR concerns of diplomacy and outright war.

The postpositivist approach can be described as incredulity towards metanarratives—in IR, this would involve rejecting all-encompassing stories that claim to explain the international system. It eliminates the 'neo-neo' debate by arguing that neither could be one true story. A postpositivist approach to IR does not claim to provide universal answers—but seeks to ask questions instead. A key difference is that while positivist theories such as realism and liberalism highlight how power is exercised, postpositivist theories focus on how power is experienced resulting in a focus on both different subject matters and agents.

Often, postpositivist theories explicitly promote a normative approach to IR, by considering ethics. This is something which has often been ignored under traditional IR as positivist theories make a distinction between positive facts and normative judgments—whereas postpostivists argue that discourse is constitutive of reality; in other words, that it is impossible to be truly independent and factual as power-free knowledge cannot exist. Postpositivist theories do not attempt to be scientific or a social science. Instead, they attempt to tell a story about international relations by asking relevant questions to determine in what ways the status-quo promote certain power relations.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Critical international relations theory".