Theories of international relations which claim objectivity inevitably harbour subjective biases. Elucidate. (Answer in 250 words)

- Theories of international relations which claim objectivity inevitably harbour subjective biases. Elucidate. (Answer in 250 words)
Introduction
No theory surveys world politics from nowhere. Every theory selects a problem, a unit and a time horizon, and those choices carry an interest — which is exactly the charge critical and Marxist scholarship brings against the positivist mainstream.

Body
1. The founding formulation: Robert Cox (1981) held that theory is always for someone and for some purpose. Problem-solving theory takes the prevailing order as given and thereby serves it; critical theory asks how that order came about.
2. The claim under attack: Morgenthau's objective laws rooted in human nature, and Waltz's Theory of International Politics (1979), present themselves as parsimonious science while quietly making great-power survival the thing worth explaining.
3. A national discipline: Stanley Hoffmann called international relations an American social science (1977), and Robert Vitalis traced its origins to imperial and racial administration.
4. The Marxist optic: Wallerstein's world-systems analysis shows that anarchy describes the core while the periphery experiences hierarchy; Gramscian hegemony explains consent rather than only coercion.
5. Feminist exposure: Cynthia Enloe's Bananas, Beaches and Bases (1989) asked where the women were, and J. Ann Tickner reread Morgenthau's six principles as a gendered account of rationality.
6. Constructivist and post-colonial turns: Wendt (1992) argued that anarchy is what states make of it, while Acharya and Buzan's Global IR and Ayoob's subaltern realism recover non-Western experience of the state.
7. The limit of the critique: Keohane's caution stands. Showing that knowledge is situated does not license anything; evidence, replication and intersubjective standards survive.

Conclusion
Value-neutrality is untenable, but disciplined argument is not. The honest response is to declare the standpoint and then defend the claim, which is what makes critique a method rather than a complaint.