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The adjective "international" was coined
- was coined by the English political philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, in 1780.
- it has for most of its existence referred to relations among sovereign states.
- In Bentham’s time nation and state were often used interchangeably so his meaning was closer to what we would call today ‘interstate’ relations.
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Before 1919
-before institutionalization
-was not considered as a discipline
-Representatives: Machiavelli, Immanuel Kant, John Locke... -
1919: became a discipline
-The discipline was born in 1919 with the establishment of the first University department in Wales, Aberystwyth.
-The discipline soon made its way into the American and British universities. -
After the First World War
-Institutionalisation of the discipline has started with the foundation of different university departments and think tanks.
-Reference question of the study was simple: how war can be avoided? What ought to be done to avoid major disaster in the future?
- The main line thinking was classical diplomacy and the balance of power (the distribution of power among states such that no single country can be strong enough to assert its will or dominate all the others.)
-Representative: Woodrow Wilson -
The First Great Debate (1930s-1960s)
-Theoretical debate
-between Liberalism and Realism
-Liberalists though that war was partly the result of the balance of power and partly the result of misunderstanding, miscalculations, and recklessness. Realism, for example, Edward Hallett Carr maintained that liberalism is utopia, Utopians are "naivety". -
The second establishment of the discipline after the Second World War
-liberalism failed to retain a strong hold and a new theory emerged to explain the continuing presence of war and conflicts.
-Realists’ position. Edward Hallett Carr maintained that goal stood in the way of the analysis.
-It was the realist position in the dispute about what could and could not be achieved in a world of competing states which gave the discipline its identity in the 1950s and 1960s.
-became known as the double establishment of the discipline -
The Second Great Debate (1950s-1960s)
Epistemological debate
between Behaviourism and Traditionalism
Behaviourism: scientific approach, methods of natural sciences.
Traditionalism: classical approach, interpretive, more historical and better attuned to normative judgements. -
The Third Great Debate (Maybe 1960s-1980s)
-Ontological debate
-between Neorealism and Neoliberalism, Neo-Maxism, even radical international relations theories
-also called "Neo-neo debate" or "Interparadigm debate"
-Representatives: Neo-realism, Waltz neo-realist theory; Neo-liberalism: in 1970, Robert O. Keohane, John Burton, Ernst Haas. Neo-marxism: divided the world between "North" and “South”; Robert Cox and Immanuel Wallerstein.
- also been described as being between realism, institutionalism and structuralism. -
The Fourth Great Debate (1980-1990)
-debate between positivist theories and post-positivist theories of international relations.
-addressing methodological as well substantial issues, about how we study IRs.
-The debate was started as an epistemological debate.
-The participants were the constructivism and its counterparts, the rational or positivist approaches (liberalism, realism and Marxism).
-Constructivism insists that facts in social sciences are not objective. Representative: Alexander Wendt.