Description
Debates over the role of ideologies in world politics – in, for example, guiding foreign policy, legitimating regimes, generating or undermine norms, provoking state and non-state violence, or stabilising international organizations – depend on assumptions about how ideology might influence political outcomes. International Relations theorists must work with at least a tacit account of the ‘power of ideology’ – the causal mechanisms or constitutive relationships through which ideology could be relevant. Yet no such account of ideology’s power has been systematically and effectively articulated in IR scholarship, or so I argue here. Three broad tacit accounts do exist – focused on ideological belief, on the instrumental use of ideology as a political tool, or on ideology as manifested in discourse – but all suffer from important explanatory paradoxes and confusions. I proceed to offer a more effective account which presents ideologies as a kind of cultural ‘infrastructure’ that sustains, shapes and sometimes transforms patterns of collective political action through multiple interacting causal mechanisms. I draw on empirical research from political science, political psychology, political theory, sociology and history, as well as insights from social theory and complexity theory, and apply my account to key changes in world politics, including the collapse of the Soviet Union, the restructuring of the liberal world order in the later 20th Century, the growth of religious and far-right terrorism, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. With a proper theory of ideological infrastructures, I argue, we are able to capture the importance of ideology in world politics, without presenting it as simply overriding or displacing rational power-politics and self-interested cooperation.
