Carlos Escudé

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Carlos Escudé is a Yale-trained Argentine political scientist and author who during the 1990s was special adviser to Foreign Minister Guido di Tella on foreign policy strategy vis-à-vis the Western powers. Escudé's work is associated with neomodernism and peripheral realism. These approaches posit an interstate system with two complementary hierarchies that are only partially overlapping.

Peripheral realism is a foreign policy theory that argues that the international system has an incipiently hierarchical structure based on differentiated roles: rule-makers, rule-takers and rogue states. It appraises the costs, for the citizens of weaker states without rule-making capabilities, of defying the order established by the stronger, rule-making actors of the interstate system. This global power hierarchy is complemented by a moral hierarchy that acknowledges that all cultures are not morally equivalent. This is where neomodernism comes in. If all cultures were morally equivalent, then all human individuals would not be endowed with the same human rights, because some cultures award some men more rights than are allotted to other men and women. Hence, if all men and women are endowed with the same human rights, all cultures cannot not be morally equivalent, because cultures that acknowledge that ‘all men are created equal’ are superior, in terms of their civil ethics, to those that do not. In the West, the neomodern era is characterized by this inevitable conflict between postmodern relativism and modernity’s assumptions about the essential equality of human individuals. Concomitantly, the neomodern world-system is characterized by the two hierarchies, one related to an ethics of human rights and the other related to a logic of power.