I used these two memes, crafted by an LLM using a set of prompts that I wrote, to introduce international relations (IR) theories – Realism, Liberalism, and Constructivism – to my two PME graduate seminar groups today.
As part of the discussion, which I used to start off both seminar class meetings, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, I placed a bottle of Fortaleza Blanco on my table/desk and asked the students, drawing on the assigned readings, to talk about how adherents to each of the three IR schools of thought would approach the one bottle in a room of 13-15 people.
In short, Realists see the one bottle as a scarce commodity and are primarily concerned with ensuring that they receive their share or the entire bottle. Liberals (big “L”) believe that the ideal path forward is for the group to establish rules, norms, agreements, and institutions for sharing the bottle so that everyone benefits from it and gets a share. Constructivists believe that it’s first important to understand how the different people in the group understand what the bottle means to everyone, how it’s seen by different people because the behavior of states in the international system is shaped by identities, norms, and ideas (how states perceive their interests) and not only by material (military, economic) power – so, if the group sees themselves as friends/colleagues, then they will approach the one bottle as something to share whereas if the group’s members see each other as competitors, each will seek to secure their part of the bottle or the entire bottle.
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