 Often, post-positivist theories explicitly promote a normative approach to IR, by considering ethics.This is something which has often been ignored under "traditional" IR as positivist theories make a distinction between "facts" and normative judgments, or "values".During the late 1980s and the 1990s, debate between positivists and post-positivists became the dominant debate and has been described as constituting the Third "Great Debate" (Lapid 1989).