Junaid,

I can’t speak to your experience in other courses affiliated with the Watson Institute, but as a former teaching assistant for Introduction to International Relations I object to your inaccurate and misleading characterization of that course.

For example, no one ever asked you to “take as fact the idea of democratic peace theory” — instead, we asked you to consider it and evaluate it as an argument for liberalism as an IR theory. Among the many questions for democratic peace theory is whether other similarities between liberal democracies such as military alliances or capitalist economies might confound the relationship. Democratic peace theory also says that democracies do not go to war with other democracies, not that democracy is an “inherently peaceful form of government.” Democratic peace theory is fully consistent with your assertion that “western democracies singlehandedly remade the world as their battlefield.”

I am similarly confused by your claim that: “logical conclusion of this ideology [democratic peace theory]: the systematic designation of non-Western forms of governance as inherently warlike and barbaric.” You seem to misunderstand that democratic peace theory says a particular shared regime type is a sufficient condition for peaceful interaction between states, not a necessary one. As far as democratic peace theory is concerned, there could very well be other regime types besides democracy with the property that no two states sharing the type fight one another.

You characterize the coverage of the First and Second World Wars as representing these episodes as “exceptions to an otherwise perfect Western order.” In fact, numerous readings assigned during the course beginning with Craig and George recounted the violent wars of conquest and religion associated with the rise of the European state system. The World Wars were a special focus for us due for their scope and scale, which we suggested makes them particularly important cases for theories of war, not because they were minor exceptions to Europe’s otherwise unblemished history.

I agree with you that introductory IR courses neglect the role of European colonialism in the formation of international law and IR theory. They also obscure the origins of international relations in turn of the century racial politics, which origins scholars such as Robert Vitalis have done much to uncover. But if you are going to criticize a discipline and its pedagogy, you should represent it accurately.