A Systematic Review of Neoliberalism and Realism in International Relations

Abstract

This article gives both theoretical and practical explanations about two major theories that can be found in modern world, neoliberalism and realism. The main body of this article had been separated into two parts, each part focusing on one theory. For each part, it follows the same order, starting with history as a background to later gives the key beliefs, which is the main spotlight that leads the political decisions of countries. Types of each will also be given as a way to show that none of the theories are extreme, each one of them has varies of types that use the fundamental definitions as basis but add changes or the shift of the main focus in each different type. International relations have become unprecedently complicated due to Covid-19 and the war between Ukraine and Russia, and that also means the status of international organization has been highlighted in the past few years. One of the members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is Saudi Arabia, which will be the main case used in this article to show how neoliberalism and realism has been constructed and demonstrated. From the willingness of Saudi Arabia joining the WTO and their compliance to WTO, it can find that in different scenarios, different theories were being used, which shows that no country is solely dependent on one theory. As a systematic review article, various documents, journals and articles from other scholars are being used as references and concluded their thinking in this work. In addition, evaluation can also be found as an extra thinking from the author to increase the practicability of this article, so it is not just an overview of other works but also include new understandings that might brough the precious research of these two theories into another level.