Contemporary IR Scholars UPSC Actually Rewards: Mearsheimer to Acharya

Most Paper II answers stop at Morgenthau and Waltz — the scholars every other copy in the pile also quotes. The marks move when your answer carries the contemporary IR scholars: the living debate, not the textbook's greatest hits. This working set is drawn from the IR approaches and key-concepts chapters (IGNOU BPSC-107, BPSC-110, MPS-004) we teach Paper II-A from.

The working set

• John Mearsheimer — offensive realism: great powers maximise power because survival under anarchy demands it; the "tragedy" is structural, not chosen. Deploy on China's rise, the Ukraine debate.
• Stephen Walt — balance of threat, not merely power: alliances form against perceived intent, not raw capability. Deploy on Indo-Pacific coalitions, the Quad.
• Robert Keohane — neoliberal institutionalism: institutions persist after hegemony and make cooperation possible without a hegemon. Deploy on the WTO, climate regimes.
• Alexander Wendt — constructivism's one-line entry: "anarchy is what states make of it" — the international system is socially constructed, not fixed. Deploy on any theory-of-IR question.
• Amitav Acharya — the "multiplex world" and norm localisation; the Global-South corrective to Western IR. Deploy on multipolarity and India's worldview — the examiner's home turf.
• Susan Strange — structural power in the global political economy; states retreating before markets ("the retreat of the state"). Deploy on globalisation and IPE questions.
• Joseph Nye — soft power and smart power; indispensable on India's cultural diplomacy and the limits of coercion.

How to deploy without name-dropping

A scholar earns marks only as an argument — position, application, and (where the verb demands) counter-position. "As Mearsheimer argues, structural pressure rather than intent drives China's assertiveness; Acharya replies that a multiplex order gives middle powers the room the tragedy misses" is one sentence of genuine analysis, and it is exactly what the "critically examine" verb is asking for. The full scholar compendium — one-line views per sub-topic, enriched from 40+ IGNOU courses — ships with the Foundation Batch.

Grounded in: IGNOU BPSC-107, BPSC-110, MPS-004 (IR approaches & global politics) and the PSIR Vault scholar compendium. verify each scholar attribution against the compendium before publish

Swetank Pandey — PSIR Faculty, ALS IAS · Author, Arihant Q-Beat Series

Teaches the 115-session PSIR Foundation at Karol Bagh, Delhi; marks 450 answers per mentorship student against a 6-part rubric.