Supporters argue that if IR is the study of foreign affairs and relations, it ought to include non-state actors as well as the state.
Thus, issues such as gender (often in terms of feminism which generally holds salient the subordination of women to men) and ethnicity (such as stateless actors like the Catalans or Rohingya people) can be problematized and made into an international security issue—supplementing (not replacing) the traditional IR concerns of diplomacy and outright war.
The post-positivist approach can be described as incredulity towards metanarratives—in IR, this would involve rejecting all-encompassing stories that claim to explain the international system.
This is something which has often been ignored under traditional IR as positivist theories make a distinction between positive facts and normative judgement—whereas post-positivist argue that discourse is constitutive of reality; in other words, that it is impossible to be truly independent and factual as power-free knowledge cannot exist.
Instead, they attempt in-depth analysis of cases in order to "understand" international political phenomena by asking relevant questions to determine in what ways the status-quo promote certain power relations.