Special Lecture:

“Is chess a fitting or a misleading metaphor/analogy/model
for understanding strategic interactions in international relations?”

Talk by: Visiting Professor KOPPER Ákos from Eötvös Loránd University (Head of Department of International Relations and European Studies), Budapest (Hungary)

On November 13^th 2019, Professor Kopper gave a special lecture at the College of International Relations of Ritsumeikan University about the potential and limitation of chess for serving as an explanatory model of international relations. International society is highly complex, and it needs a model to describe its various manifestations. Chess has been frequently used as a potential model for the illustration of international conditions, yet its limitation in doing so has not been sufficiently investigated yet. Professor Kopper in his lecture addressed this limitation by discussing the role of chess as a demonstrative tool for the study of international relations. In doing so, Professor Kopper first provided various examples of how chess, along with its diverse forms in history, had been used for the study of international relations. Thereafter he discussed its potential and limitation for international relation studies, by having recourse to three different approaches: chess as a metaphor, chess as an analogy, and chess as a model. As argued in the lecture, each of these three approaches has a different degree of explanatory power about, or in other words expressive modes of, reality: metaphors having the least and models having the strongest explanatory power. Through a careful consideration of the three approaches, Professor Kopper concluded that it was not possible to grasp the entire complexity of international society through chess moves, either as a metaphor or as an analogy or as a model. Yet, as also argued in the lecture, it is possible to throw light upon certain aspects of the actual conditions of international relations, by employing chess-pieces for, for instance, political cartoons.

Professor Kopper’s lecture contributed to the study of the core research subject of the College of International Relations to a great extent. This could be seen through both the large number of questions raised by the audience and their written comments collected after his lecture. Though a powerful explanatory model is yet to come, this special lecture provided an inspiring atmosphere for future research directions.

See a related article written by Professor Kopper for further details:

Akos, Kopper, What Image Does IR Project? Chess, A Visual Metaphor for IR (2017) International Studies Review, Vol. 19(3): 337–361