Richard K. Ashley

Richard K. Ashley is a postmodernist scholar of International relations. He is an associate professor at the Arizona State University's School of Politics and Global Studies.

Ashley studied at the University of California, Santa Barbara and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was research assistant to Hayward Alker. Initially, Ashley's research was on the balance of power in international relations, particularly in his The Political Economy of War and Peace (1980). He soon began to shift his approach to metatheoretical questions and Critical Theory. By the mid-1980s, Ashley had adopted a postmodernist and subversive approach to international relations theory, exemplified by his influences: Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Ashley was one of the first to challenge the position of mainstream realism and liberalism, most notably in "The Poverty of Neorealism" (1984).