1. COMPARISON: What Questions Do the IR Paradigms Ask & Answer (& Think Are Important)? AKA: A Lion in the Room Prepared for Junior International Politics class at NENU, Fall 2015 With gratitude to my professors for introducing the metaphor, no copyright infringement intended!

2. Preface Rather than debating which theoretical approach is right or wrong, weaker or stronger, or even which one you agree with, it may be more useful to consider a colorful metaphor which illustrates the different ways each is interested in studying IR. Often, this thought experiment is described as the different questions about a “lion in the room”

3. First, imagine there is a lion in the room with us. We may all be imagining different lions, so we would next need to describe our lion and how threatening it seems. Each IR Paradigm asks different questions about “the lion in the room”

4. Realism asks... How can we kill this lion? How can we prevent this fierce, hungry lion from eating us?

5. Liberalism asks... How can we tame this lion and make it do tricks for us? (If we can't tame it, perhaps we can kill it and feast on lion meat.)

6. Constructivism asks... How did this lion get in here? (and what do those sharp teeth mean?)

7. Feminism asks... How would our situation be different if it were a lioness?

8. In closing, unless history bores you... Constructivism's questions are always interesting and important... though perhaps not the most urgent when faced with a hungry lion. Otherwise, we will keep getting more lions, and he'll always be “king of the jungle”! If we would like to have a classroom with only tame lions or without a lion, we need to know where lions come from and whose “interests” are served by keeping the lion hungry.

9. Hope that was helpful & funny, but don't try to write it on your exams or research papers!