Theories of international relations which claim objectivity inevitably harbour subjective biases. Elucidate.

Robert Cox's formulation is the point of departure: theory is always for someone and for some purpose. He separates problem-solving theory, which takes existing relationships as the given framework and works to make them function smoothly, from critical theory, which asks how that order came about and whom it serves. Problem-solving theory is not neutral; it is conservative by construction, because taking the order as given is itself a choice.

Realism. It presents anarchy, self-help and the state as timeless facts, but these are the abstractions of a particular history — post-Westphalian Europe universalised. Its parsimony conceals the choice of what to omit: colonialism, gender and the domestic sources of foreign policy all vanish. Realism has also functioned as an American social science, its agenda tracking Washington's concerns from bipolarity to unipolarity to China.

Liberalism. Democratic peace theory, interdependence and institutionalism carry an implicit teleology in which the Western liberal state is the endpoint of development, which licenses intervention and conditionality as progress.

The revealing critiques. Feminist scholarship — Enloe's question of where the women are — shows that a supposedly objective field studied a world in which the personal was systematically excluded. Post-colonial writing shows the discipline theorising an international system whose formative experience for most of humanity, colonial rule, is treated as background. Constructivism supplies the general point: anarchy is what states make of it, so the field's foundational premise is itself socially constructed.

Assessment. The honest response is not to abandon rigour but to abandon the pretence of a view from nowhere — to state one's standpoint, since a declared bias can be argued with while a concealed one cannot.