Developments in International Relations

This article offers a concise, though not exhaustive, intellectual history of International Relations (IR) as a formal academic discipline. It begins with the backdrop of the discipline’s emergence in the aftermath of World War I, and a critical account of the ‘first wave’ of theoretical activity, that is, idealism. This entailed a sharp onslaught in the form of the rise of realism which arguably transformed IR into an ‘American’ discipline which, the author feels, was good for neither realism nor IR as a discipline. This brings us to the methodological debate—known as the second great debate in IR—between the traditionalists and the behavioralists, and the author asks if it was only a ‘phoney war’. The period between the 1960s and early 1990s witnessed a bewildering multiplicity of theoretical developments and analytical concerns which ranged from game theory and decision-making models; through integration theory and ‘world society’ approaches; to the birth of neo- or structural realism. Meanwhile, the Marxist school of IR focused on the vital issue of the relations between the weak and strong in international politics—left unaddressed by the ‘American discipline’—and stimulated the literature on dependency and world system. The final sections of the article deal with the post-positivist tradition in IR (which sparked off the ‘third debate’) and the level-of-analysis problem (which highlighted the issue of macro- and micro perspectives in the study of IR). It concludes with the observation that this phenomenal diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches poses a major obstacle to agreeing on any grand definition of discipline of IR.