How to Debate International Relations Motions

A lot of BP debating motions are either exclusively or partially about international relations the
political dynamics between states, international organisations, and other international actors.
Some of these motions might be tightly focused on international relations, for example This
House Would Abolish the Veto of the Permanent Members of the UN Security Council. Other motions
might be classified in the first instance as belonging to another genre of motion, such as
economics or ethics, but have significant international elements, such as This House Believes That
Developing World Nations Should Nationalise Their Oil Industries or This House Believes that Radio
Transmitters are a Legitimate Target in Warfare. These notes are mainly concerned with how to
debate the former sort of motion those most explicitly and primarily about international
relations. But they should be useful for all motions in which international relations has some
relevance.

The Role of Facts

International relations (IR) motions require debaters to strike a tricky balance between making
too much, and too little, reference to empirical facts. For almost all IR debates, there are a large
number of relevant facts that you might want to bring up in the debate and indeed, many
international relations motions get set because of important recent events in world politics which
debaters are assumed to know something about (e.g. This House Believes the West Should Intervene in
Syria). It is thus generally important to have some good background knowledge of the real world
states of affairs pertaining to the motion, both to give the general appearance of being
knowledgeable (which is not officially a ground for winning a debate but is likely to help teams
persuade judges), to make clear what you mean (purely abstract theorising without any facts can
often be confusing) and to make plausible arguments about the motion.
A common problem with IR debates, however, is that debaters have a tendency to resort
to making lots of factual assertions (example trading as its sometimes called) as a substitute for
analysis (i.e. the provision of detailed reasons why they are right). Since basing an argument on
facts is crucial outside of debating, it is important to understand why this over-reliance on facts
can be problematic within debating. Within the realm of a debate, no one can go to check
whether your factual assertions are accurate or not. As a consequence, a) if two opposing teams
simply assert different but equally plausible factual claims, judges have no way of deciding who
was right (other than using their own specialist knowledge or best guess at what might be right,
which they are generally prohibited from doing), and b) if we treat any factual assertion as
sufficient to demonstrate an argument, this encourages debaters to simply invent whatever
factual statements suit their case. So over-reliance on factual assertions is considered ineffective
debating, and an argument that is ultimately supported only by a factual assertion is generally
going to be considered less persuasive by judges than one supported by several reasons and a
detailed explanation of why it is right.
But this is not to say that facts should be abandoned entirely in IR, or any other, debates.
So how should you know when it is appropriate to make reference to facts? As Ive already
noted, some general reference to the facts is important to show you have a good command of
what the motion is about. Beyond this, there are five major circumstances in which referencing
facts can be effective and persuasive.
(i) When the fact can be expected to be widely known by an ordinary intelligent
person: This is in fact quite a broad category in a debate about Syria, for example,
anyone who engages with the news at all should know that there is a multi-sided
conflict going on in Syria, that a large component of the conflict is a battle between
the Assad regime and rebel forces seeking to overthrow it, that it has seen substantial
violence committed by both sides against civilians, that many other nearby states
 (Lebanon, Iran, Israel, Turkey) have stakes or even some direct involvement in the
conflict, and that the west conducted a partial intervention recently in Libya to
support a rebellion against the Gaddafi government, that might have some parallels
to the Syrian case. Just because a fact is widely known does not necessarily make it
undeniable, and it certainly doesnt mean that an argument based on the fact is
necessarily right. But a team wishing to assert that a fact widely known by intelligent
people is wrong need would need to provide a very convincing explanation of how
and why it is wrong.
(ii) When the fact is superficially plausible and explained in considerable and
persuasive detail. For example, a debater makes an argument that in dictatorships
power is rarely entirely wielded by one person, but instead there are important
political battles waged between the figure of the dictator and their immediate
entourage, other political factions, members of the bureaucracy and so on. The
debater refers to the Soviet Union under Stalin, or Italy under Mussolini as examples,
and explains how these leaders were still somewhat constrained by, for example,
other members of the Soviet politburo, or the Italian monarch who eventually
removed Mussolini from power in July 1943. These facts may not be widely known
by ordinary intelligent people today, but they are plausible and well explained. They
can obviously be denied or critiqued by the other side, who, by offering equally
plausible characterisations with better explanation, could defeat them. But as it stands
they serve to support the debaters overall argument.
(iii) When the fact is primarily being use to not prove an argument but to illustrate (i.e.
make clearer) the speakers meaning. So, for example, whilst making an argument
about states having a responsibility to protect their citizens human rights, a debater
might briefly refer to the Rwandan Genocide or ethnic cleansing in the former
Yugoslavia to indicate the sorts of things they think count as breaches of their
responsibility to protect. This factual examples dont prove that the speaker is right to
assert that states have this responsibility, but they clarify what the speaker means in
saying that states have such a responsibility, helping the judges understand the
argument.
(iv) Relatedly, when the fact is superficially plausible and only being used to add to
the plausibility of another claim rather than definitively proving it. So, for
example, in a debate about developing world countries established special economic
zones for investment and economic growth, a debater argues that such focusing of
investment in certain zones tends to overload infrastructural capacity, resulting in
huge economic wastage from congestion, repairs, pollution and so forth. They
invoke the Chinese city of Guangzhou as an example. It is not widely known whether
Guangzhou does suffer from such problems but it is plausible to the ordinary
intelligent person, since it is widely known that Guangzhou is a large city, is one of
Chinas special economic zones, and that China in general suffers from significant
congestion in its major cities. It lends a small amount of additional plausibility to the
debaters argument by providing a plausible case of where it could be true, but it does
not clearly demonstrate that argument or add a huge amount to the analysis
underpinning it. Nevertheless, given that it takes so little time to cite this it as a
plausible example, it is probably worth doing.
(v) When the fact is explicitly accepted by both sides of the debate. If, for example, it
becomes clear early in a debate that both the government and opposition teams
accept that the presence of NATO forces in Afghanistan is helping the Taliban
recruit new supporters, then even though this is in reality unclear, it is a point of
agreement in the debate, and can be a legitimate foundation for further arguments
and assumptions. An exception to this principle might be if the fact in question is
 extremely widely known to be false but one would hope that in this case that teams
in a debate would not agree that it is true!

This is not a definitive list ultimately, the persuasiveness of facts depends on the debate in
question and the way in which they are used. But these five circumstances can serve as a general
indicator of when the use of facts is likely to be effective.

States Rights

A lot of IR motions involve debates about the rights of states to do something (e.g. tax imports
into their country), have something done to them (e.g. be provided with economic aid), or not
have something done to them (e.g. not have a military intervention conducted against them).
How can one persuasively assert these rights? Where do they come from?
There are many possible answers to these questions Im going to sketch some
important ones in outline. I am intentionally not going into very deep analysis here in part
because a) there are many different ways one could fully develop these arguments and b) because
the best way to get better at debating is to develop and analyse these arguments yourself, rather
than just replicate someone elses take on them.

(i) The Rights of the States Citizens: Perhaps the most classic and frequently utilised
foundation for asserting that a state has rights is building those rights on the
individual rights its citizens have. Conceptions of Human Rights and political and
civil rights are widely spoken about in international discourse, and codified in
documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International
Convention on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Convention on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights these documents collectively constitute the
International Bill of Human Rights. All individuals could in theory be protected by a
single world government but this would undermine the capacity for different
communities of peoples in the world to autonomously choose their own different
ways of life. As such, there is a strong principled reason to support the existence of
many different states, somewhat (if imperfectly) united by common bonds of
national identity and culture, that allow individuals rights to protected in societies
which are organised in different ways so as to most closely match the preferences and
wishes of their respective populations. The grounding of a states rights in its citizens
rights is therefore most compelling when the states government is democratic or at
least has strong support from the population. But even where this is not the case, the
state may effectively protect its citizens core rights, rights which might be violated by
interference by outside states. A state can thus possess a right of non-interference
based upon its peoples rights to autonomy (and perhaps also life given that
interference of a military form will almost always cause civilian casualties).

At the same time, this theory of state rights establishes a logical justification for
intervention in states which do not function as actual protectors of their citizens
rights i.e. those that are either unwilling or unable, as many modern scholars
describe it, to meet their Responsibility to Protect (R2P or RtoP). What counts as a
state failing to meet its responsibility to protect is, of course, a question to which
there are many possible answers.
(ii) The Need for International Order: A separate foundation for states rights,
especially the right of non-interference, is the importance of international order,
peace and stability a prerequisite for much material, social and psychological
development. Without states having a presumptive right to be allowed to manage
 their own affairs without interference, it is easier for other states to start conflicts,
and makes all states more worried about the possibility of other states interfering in
their affairs, fuelling arms buildups and militaristic measures to maximise their own
security. A right against non-interference thus provides some legal/moral protections
for international order, peace and stability. Even if states are abusing their own
citizens, it could be argued that intervention in those states would undermine
international order by making it easier for other states to in turn launch further
interventions, generally destabilising international order.
(iii) International Law: Many states rights derive from reciprocal treaties and
agreements which assert and recognise such rights. These treaties may not be
enforced by a world government, but can still be a foundation for an argument that
states have recognised each other as possessing certain rights, and ought not to
violate them. Relatedly, it could also be argued that violating specific rights
undermines the general force of international law in the globe, which is problematic
as it is a critical protection for many forms of vital interaction, like trade, diplomacy,
tourism, aid and so forth.
(iv) Domestic Order: An additional defence of states rights might be that they are
critical to the maintainance of order at the domestic level in that states society. In
certain highly unstable societies, for example, even a government which is not
particularly nice might be critical to maintain a minimal standard of order and life in
the society, and may therefore have presumptive rights against intervention to the
degree that there is no better available solution to the problem of stabilising that
society. Along similar lines, the state may also be able to assert certain positive rights
to receive aid from other countries, so as to ensure domestic order and wellbeing.
(v) Compensation/Redress: Many states and societies over history have been abused,
mistreated or exploited by other powers most obviously the former colonies of
European states, or states subject to proxy-wars or interventions by the Cold War
superpowers of the USA and USSR. This may give these states right to compensation
or redress, to undo or ameliorate the damage done by outsiders in the past.

All these foundations for a states rights can be subjected to counter-argument. For example,
whilst it might be the case that a state has a right to compensation for past injustices, if those
injustices were a long time ago, it might not be clear whether people still alive today, who werent
responsible for the injustices in question, can really be held responsible (equally, though, if they
continue to benefit from those past injustices, that might give a reason to think that they still
owe compensation for them). So these five foundations provide just a starting point for thinking
about states rights.

Military Interventions

The above section already offers some starting points for thinking about the permissibility of
military interventions. But heres an assortment of some relevant empirical information.

There are several pieces of international of major relevance to military intervention. Some
generally prohibit intervention, for example:
a. Article 2(7) of the UN Charter: Nothing contained in the present Charter shall
authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the
domestic jurisdiction of any state.
b. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter: All members shall refrain in their international
relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political
 independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of
the United Nations.

But some also establish legal foundation for intervention, for example:
c. Chapter VII/Article 42 of the UN Charter: the UN Security Council is authorised to
take such action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore
international peace and security.
d. Preamble to the UN Charter: We the peoples of the United Nations [are]
determined to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth
of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and
small.
e. The Responsibility to Protect (2001) [R2P] Report of the International Commission on
Intervention and State Sovereignty, which asserts that states have a responsibility to
protect the rights of their citizens, and that when they are unable to do so the
international community has a responsibility to support them, and that when they are
unwilling to do so, the international community has a responsibility to try and get
them to do so or to otherwise protect the citizens rights itself.
f. Article 1(3) of the UN Charter: To achieve international co-operation in solving
international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character,
and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental
freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.

And also note Article 51 of the UN Charter, which establishes the right of states to Self-
Defence, sometimes invoked to justify intervention.

There has been a mixed record of Military Intervention in practice. Many examples can be
found, but here are some potentially successful interventions (though for many the success is open
to debate):

Vietnam into Cambodia Dec 1978

Tanzania into Uganda 1979
India into East Pakistan (Bangladesh) Dec 1971
United Kingdom into Sierra Leone 2000
UN Coalition into Iraq 1990-1991
NATO in Bosnia Herzegovina 1994-5
NATO in Former Yugoslavia 1999
US into Haiti 1994

For potential failures (though again, how thoroughly they failed is arguable) see:

UN in Somalia 1992-4
Soviet Union in Afghanistan 1979
Coalition of the Willing into Iraq 2003
US into Vietnam 1965-1975
UN into Congo 1960-1965

For very ambiguous interventions:

NATO into Afghanistan 2001-present

UN, then China, into Korea 1950-1953
Its also worth being aware of three particular problems faced by interventions:
1. Asymmetric Warfare: Interveners are often massively more powerful, in terms of
conventional military hardware, than their opponents as a result, their opponents often
resort to guerrilla and insurgency warfare, which tends to be difficult to defeat, drawn
out, and often results in high numbers of civilian casualties (killed by both sides).
2. The CNN Factor: The ever increasing need to factor in domestic opinion to decisions
over interventions, with western publics in particular often appearing very reluctant to
tolerate high levels of casualties in conflicts due to extensive media coverage.
3. The Side Effects of Intervention: Disruption to economies, civilian lives, and infrastructures
tends to produce refugee flows, which can spread instability and intervention to
neighbouring states.

Consequences of International Actions

IR motions frequently require a lot of detailed consequentialist analysis with different sides of
the debate often disagreeing about the likely effect of different actions: for example, intervening
in Syria, reducing trade barriers against other states, abolishing the veto of the permanent
members of the United Nations Security Council, and so forth. Being able to plausible explain
what the likely consequences of such actions are requires consideration of a number of different
factors:

1. The interests and motives of relevant actors: What do, for example, the US, Russia,
China, African Union, Al-Qaeda, Red Cross, or multinational companies want? Often IR
debates depend on offering plausible pictures of what such actors motives are and you
can do this in a few ways, such as:
a. Giving examples of their past behaviour we know, for example, that Russia
wants to retain a predominant level of influence over the former Soviet states by
the way it has used gas supplies to attempt to coerce the Ukraine, objected
strenuously to proposals to include Eastern European states in NATO,
intervened in Georgia to depose an anti-Russian government, and so forth. By
informing judges of such past behaviour, you can potentially build up a plausible
picture of the actors interests.
b. Analysing their ideologies/cultures/worldviews: For example, by explaining the
nature of the brand of Jihadist Islamic fundamentalism held by Al-Qaeda leaders,
you can offer some plausible claims about their intentions.
c. By analysing their situation/circumstances: Most actors have some very basic
interests the need for security, the desire to economically develop, the desire
for some degree of autonomy, and you can often build from these minimal
interests, in combination with a consideration of the environment an actor is in,
to work out what broader interests they might need to fulfil in order to meet
those basic interests. For example, Japan wants a basic degree of security and
prosperity but given the balance of power in East Asia, this ensures that it has
consequent interests in a) maintaining American willingness to be involved in
East Asia as a counterbalance to China and North Korea; b) maintaining good
relations with other democratic powers in the region like South Korea and India;
c) maintaining access to trade routes that run through the South China seas, and
so forth.
2. The perceptions and beliefs of relevant actors: Actors are not only guided by brute
motives they also have perceptions about the world and beliefs about the future,
including the prospects for success of certain policies, which shape their behaviour. For
example, the United States under George W. Bushs administration did not invade
 Afghanistan and Iraq because it loved invading places, or just because it wanted oil or
vengeance. More crucial was the belief that intervention could establish democracies in
these states, and that establishing democracies in these states would improve regional and
global security. That belief appears to have been very erroneous, but nevertheless
crucially shaped behaviour. It does not appear to be shared, at least not to the same
degree, by the subsequent Obama administration.
3. The costs and benefits of certain courses of action: Actors make decisions from a
menu of possible actions, all of which have their benefits and costs. So the list of
available options, and the costs and benefits associated with each, is critical to predicting
actors responses to policies.
4. The capabilities of actors: Not all actors can do everything, either because they literally
lack the technological ability or resources to do something, or because their
circumstances make it unlikely or very costly. Say, for example, the US intervenes in an
African state with which China has recently heavily invested and built up good relations.
Superficially, one might think a debaters assertion that China would counter-intervene,
fight US forces, and bring the world to the brink of great power war, might look
plausible. China certainly has interests in the state in question which need protecting, and
might be more able to endure the costs of major war than the US (given typical western
sensitivity to high casualties. But a bold prediction that China will do this overlooks the
simple fact that China currently lacks the capability to project forces across the world in
this way given its lack of Aircraft Carriers or other advanced naval capital ships, and its
weak logistical support or experience at large-scale overseas military operations. Similarly,
the UN cannot itself launch a military intervention against the government of Sudan,
because UN peacekeepers are not heavily armed forces capable of conducting large-scale
warfare against proper armies. And its not always a matter of pure power and expertise
Kazakhstan cannot realistically ally with the West against Russia (even if it wanted to,
which it probably doesnt), because its enormous land border with Russia makes it
almost entirely unable to defend itself against the prospects of Russian intervention.
5. Existing relationships: States do not relate to all other states in the same way, but have
established relationships rooted in mutual benefit, historical affinity,
cultural/religious/ethnic commonalities, or something else. In terms of its total military
power, Iran is less threatening than, for example, Britain or France but the USA feels
much more threatened by Iran than Britain or France, because of its history of co-
operation and its cultural affinity with the latter, and its history of antagonism with the
former.
6. Internal political processes: Actors often cant be properly thought about as being a
single person-like entity. Often, actors engage in somewhat incoherent policies, or
choose policies based on internal political bargaining, calculations and process. For
example, the UNs response to individual crises depends crucially on negotiation between
the members of the UN Security Council (especially the five permanent members), which
may yield decisions not really in the interests of the UN itself, or many of its members.
The United States response to an event may, similarly, reflect more the domestic
political interests of the US President, or other politicians or groups in gaining popularity
from the general populace, rather than protecting long-run US interests in the globe
(especially on issues that arent critical to core US concerns). Considering the internal
politics of actors is thus often critical to assessing how they behave internationally.
7. Strategic calculations: Often missing from debates about IR is a recognition that states
do not simply look at possible actions and then instantly pick the one that most directly
serves their interests. States are strategic i.e. they have to consider how, in turn,
different actions they take might provoke responses from other states around them.
Superficially, for example, Japan building up its military forces might seem to obviously
 increase its security. But if that build up increases Chinas fears of Japan, increases other
states fears of Japan and pushes them closer to China, and provokes a much larger
build-up by the Chinese government, then Japanese security may in fact go down. So a
policy may not actually provoke the most obvious course of action from an actor, if
strategic considerations about how other actors would respond to that that course of
action restrain an actor from doing it. Considering how actors view the likely chains of
possible responses by others to their own actions is thus crucial to deep analysis in IR.

Critically, its important not only to analyse a debating motion in terms of points 1-6 as they
currently are in our present. The policy represented by a motion may itself alter points 1-6, so that
you need to work out what the policy does to 1-6, and then in turn work out what will happen in
the world subsequently. Again, this is often a failure of poor debates (on IR or anything else)
they fail consider how actors will respond to new structures of incentives and costs, and new
opportunities and capabilities, that motions create.

Conclusion

These notes have tried to sketch out some starting points for debating IR motions in particular
focusing on the use of facts, the way to make claims about states rights, the implications of
military interventions, and the method for trying to work out the likely consequences of potential
IR motions. A final few words of advice that didnt fit into any of the above sections:
1. Dont forget about non-state actors in the right circumstances, political parties, NGOs,
pressure groups, citizens associations, charities, corporations, think tanks, or even
individual people might have important roles to play in IR.
2. Try to learn more about some particularly important causal relationships in world
politics: for example, the fact that high levels of trade tend to discourage violent conflict,
that democracies and non-democracies are more likely to go to war with one another
than non-democracies and non-democracies or democracies and democracies (indeed,
democracies appear to never, or almost never, go to war with one another), the fact that
global warming is likely to severely damage equatorial economies before northern
hemisphere ones, the fact that regime changes from autocracies to democracy tend to
provoke nationalism and violence, the role of globalisation in the world economy
undermining the freedom of states in choosing strategies for economic development, and
so forth. Some basic IR textbooks, like Baylis, John & Smith, Steve, The Globalization of
World Politics contain good introductions to many of these processes.
3. Keep up to date with international news particularly good sources include the BBC
website (www.bbc.co.uk), the International Herald Tribune, the Economist (though be
wary of its strong ideological biases) and the Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk). The
Australian-based website www.theconversation.com, which has many articles written by
academics for a general audience, is also worth checking out and not just for IR issues.
4. In general debaters often prepare a matter file of useful notes and information for
debating and its well worth doing for IR in particular. A basic 20th and 21st Century
timeline, lists of the leaders of countries, and so forth, are useful.
5. For further reading, check out:
a. The last few pages of The Times History of the World which give great
summaries of changes to the global economy, developments in terrorism,
instances of conflict since 1945, and so forth.
b. Two good IR theory books: Brown, Chris, Understanding International Relations (3rd
edn 2005); and Nau, Henry R., Perspectives on International Relations (2009/2011).