International Relations Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The field of international relations (IR), narrowly defined, analyzes the interactions between nation-states. Yet actors other than nation-states are analyzed by scholars of IR: international organizations, terrorist organizations, multinational corporations, and transnational movements are all explored within the field.

The study of IR has a long history—a history often revolving around human conflict. The exploration of Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military strategist, of the art of war was motivated by the Warring States period in Chinese history from 600 to 400 BCE; the writings of ancient Greek historian Thucydides trace the competitive interactions of the Greek city-states; and the writings of Italian political scientist Niccolò Machiavelli outline his governance principles for a prince in the context of the wars of Italian unification in the sixteenth century.

While the study of conflict has been central to the field of IR, a multitude of topics are also discussed within the field. Traditionally, IR is divided into four subfields: international security, international organization, foreign policy analysis, and international political economy. This article will briefly review the major topics discussed within each of these subfields, beginning with a discussion of IR theory, a set of ideas guiding investigations into the world of international politics.

IR Theory

Historically, the field of IR investigates the interactions or lack thereof between nation-states, commonly defined as politically sovereign territories. There are notable exceptions to this that have grown over time to include international organizations, multinational corporations, ethnic movements, and transnational actors such as nongovernmental organizations and terrorist groups. Still, a key component to all IR research is the nation-state, whether as a dependent or an independent variable.

For several decades, the core of IR scholarship has revolved around a set of paradigmatic theories or approaches, which contain sets of assumptions about the state of the world. These assumptions are then used to deduce predictions to be tested against events in the world. For many years, realism has been the ascendant body of theory holding sway in the field.

Realism dates back to the ancient (BCE) era. Realist theories emphasize power and the drive by states or statespersons to gain it. Writings from ancient China and Greece emphasize that the drive for power often resulted in war or could be harnessed to augment state power. There are numerous variants of realism. Classical realism emphasizes the innate human drive for power. Neorealism emphasizes the global distribution of power in a world that lacks a sovereign arbiter at the global level, described as anarchy, and creates conditions permissive for war when power becomes imbalance. Neoclassical realism focuses on the domestic politics within states driving them to augment their capabilities, often leading to war. Offensive realism points to a world where an innate drive for power combined with anarchy creates powerful incentives for states to constantly expand, leading to incessant conflicts. Again, while all of these variants differ regarding the mechanism by which power translates to war, all predict a usually violent world filled with power struggles that cannot be easily remedied or controlled by norms, ideas, or international institutions.

For decades, the main competitors to realism were grouped under the rubric of liberalism. Early liberal thinkers departed from the realist assumption that there is an innate human drive for power, rather advocating the traditional liberal argument that humans are inherently peaceful. During the twentieth century, liberalism was overshadowed by World War I (1914–1918) and World War II (1939–1945).While wars appear endemic in the international system, periods of peace have historically lasted far longer than periods of war, suggesting there are human or political limits on the drive for power or the effects of anarchy. Today, two liberal approaches garner the most attention in the study of IR, liberal institutionalism and liberal internationalism. Institutionalists contend international institutions, such as the United Nations and the European Union, serve to enhance cooperation and limit conflict among states, even when those states desire power. Liberal internationalists explain domestic factors, such as public opinion and systems of checks and balance, constrain a state’s external behavior. One popular and controversial supporting argument of the latter concept is called “democratic peace,” which alleges democracies are less prone to instigate hostile aggression toward one another as no two democracies have fought a major war with another for at least two hundred years.

A third major IR theory is known as constructivism. Constructivists criticize realists and liberals for taking state or individual preferences for granted. According to constructivists, states and/or individuals want their political interactions with other states to be dynamic. One popular constructivist approach examines how international institutions may socialize states into new modes of behavior. Related studies examine how national identities and changes in those identities shift state thinking away from materialist/consequentialist calculations (“I should or should not based on expected outcome”) to appropriateness calculations (“I should or should not based on extant norms”). Still other constructivist-oriented scholars examine how institutions diffuse norms, define sets of actors (e.g., refugees), and frame international problems (e.g., climate change).

In addition, IR theorists have studied gender-based approaches to examine numerous topics in IR including the causes of war, the gendered nature of economic development, and the gendered nature of state sovereignty. Last, Marxist oriented approaches, designed by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the mid-nineteenth century, continue to receive attention as well, especially in studies of world systems theory and development policy.

These examples have merely touched the surface of the theoretical debates in the field. Indeed, IR is at times criticized for being overly theoretical, yet at its core, IR is a practical discipline. Scholarly IR trends have often been dictated by real-world events. For example, World War II brought to the fore realist-oriented arguments concerning the importance of power. The Vietnam War (1959–1975) and the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary management system in 1971, affecting the world’s major industrial players, incited significant scholarship on hegemonic decline, the potential implications for international institutions, and new scholarship on liberal theories of international politics. The end of the cold war in 1991 brought criticism of realist and liberal-based IR ideas, forcing scholars to pursue more identity-based explanations in world politics typically associated with constructivist approaches. Thus, real-world events have historically driven inquiry in IR and continue to do so in each of IR’s four subfields. We begin with a discussion of the oldest field within IR, international security.

International Security

As previously mentioned, issues surrounding war and peace, involving international security, have been a central feature of IR research for centuries and continue to remain dominant among IR scholarship today. One of the most well-known ideas throughout all of political science is the balance of power: the concept that states will join forces to stop any one state from becoming too powerful in the international system. The theory has been offered to explain both world wars of the twentieth century, the Gulf War (1990–1991), and even the refusal of many states to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. While considerable controversy exists as to exactly how well the idea of balance of power explains state behavior, its endurance as a core concept in international security is unquestionable.

Any discussion of the balance of power begs the question of how power is defined and measured. Tremendous scholarship in IR has wrestled with the question of defining the concept of power. If key IR theories, such as realism, gain key insights into the world by examining power, scholars should be interested in discovering the type of power sought by state leaders and whether those definitions relate to historical context.

Similarly crucial to discussions of international security is the notion of state alliances. Extensive studies have inquired as to whether alliances forestall or hasten the onset of war, what types of states are chosen as allies, and the nature of burden sharing within those alliances. Given that alliances, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, remain important in the geopolitical realm even today, research on bilateral or multilateral alliances continues apace.

While early security scholarship focused almost exclusively on the great powers and their wars and alliances, significant scholarship influenced by global current events has risen in IR to explain the wars taking place beyond the great powers’ realm. Increasing attention has turned to issues such as third-party intervention in wars, the effectiveness of peacekeeping operations, and ethnic, religious, and civil conflicts. As the threat of great-power war subsided in the late twentieth century—after the cold war—and into the twenty-first century, IR inquiries and research have turned away from the study of great powers and their wars. Major-world-power confrontations have become less relevant and frequent in comparison to the global armed conflicts occurring in modern times. No longer does IR rely solely on the billiard ball model of war, in which states are assumed to be unitary rational actors achieving strategic goals. Rather, as substate and nonstate actors increasingly play roles in international conflicts, theories about why and how conflicts arise must change accordingly.

In particular, growing research on asymmetric warfare, including terrorism, has become increasingly common in the field, paralleling the twentieth-century evolution of transnational terrorism’s capabilities and activities. There are similarities between the debates about balance-of-power politics in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe and the investigation of the origins and effects of terrorist activities. As earlier scholars sought to understand why some nation-states were engaged in internal and external conflicts at different periods, terrorism analysts seek to identify the operational patterns and political agendas, at either the societal or the individual level, that can trigger or predict terror operations. Thus, although the actors are different, the underlying questions are often similar.

Finally, in the past two decades, scholars have begun to question the state-centric view of security. Due in part to increasing interest among policy makers in human security and failed states, some IR scholars now suggest that issues such as development, human rights, and genocide have eclipsed state-level conflict dynamics as the most important line of study in the field. While this scholarly push toward human security has had only limited influence to date, the emphasis on human security issues suggests that the move away from great-power politics as the center of the security field will continue well into the future.

International Organizations

Studies of international organizations have exhibited a cyclical nature. Initial studies focused on behavior within organizations and voting patterns of member states. These early studies questioned the politics within the organizations and analyses of the functional programs within them. A major theory surrounding the utility of international organizations was that of functionalism: the idea that through technical cooperation, international institutions would lead to broader political cooperation, as was the case in the European Communities established as the precursor to today’s European Union.

Studies of the European Union and its predecessors as well as the United Nations proceeded apace, but by the 1980s, a liberal theory, neoliberal institutionalism, began treating international organizations more theoretically. According to neoliberal institutionalism research, international organizations could tame the ambitions of states by providing information, reducing transaction costs, and lengthening the shadow of the future, all of which would lead states to choose to engage in cooperation rather than conflict to achieve their policy goals. A heated debate ensued between these liberal scholars and realists about the general question of the efficacy of such international institutions.

Today, more detailed studies of international organizations not only investigate whether institutions help states cooperate but also examine when and under what circumstances these institutions are efficacious. A key controversy is the question of compliance: do institutions change state behavior or simply codify existing state behavior? The question has driven scholars to conduct more careful measurements of outcomes in areas such as human rights, the environment, trade, and international finance to determine pre and post behavior with regard to international institutions. For example, is international peacekeeping successful because it creates strong incentives for warring parties to stop fighting or because it is authorized only in cases where it is likely to succeed?

Two other areas of inquiry within the international organization subfield have recently emerged. The first examines the determinants of institutional design: why do institutions look like they do? It is no accident that the United Nations Security Council’s permanent veto players are the victors of World War II, nor is it an accident that the largest economies have disproportionate influence in voting at the International Monetary Fund. Similar decisions about institutional rules, voting procedures, and organizational structure are made for every institution, and those decisions are fundamentally political. This new research attempts to shed light on this design process.

The second inquiry treats organizations less as agents of states but rather as independent entities that, like their state members, have independent preferences over outcomes in world politics. When organizations (international or nongovernmental) are placed on a par with states in terms of their ability to act autonomously, IR scholars must deal with a new set of actors that can influence international events such as human rights standards, environmental policy, and even arms control. This forces us to reconsider our state-centric theories of IR but also adds a level of richness to our explanations of world politics.

Foreign Policy Analysis

Although foreign policy is the smallest field within IR, scholars have long studied its process and politics in either case oriented or comparative fashion. The bulk of this literature highlights the process by which decisions are made at the state level. For example, studies in the field examine how particular procedures guide state behavior in potentially suboptimal ways or whether bureaucratic politics serve as an intervening variable between leader preferences and policy outcomes.

In foreign policy, the processes between institutions are analyzed to determine how internal institution debates shape foreign policy outcomes, often relying on the U.S. model in this context. Specifically, scholars have examined how executive-legislative politics influence the decision to use military force, whether courts can effectively limit executive autonomy in foreign policy, and how public opinion influences foreign policy choices in areas ranging from isolationism to military force to economic sanctions.

A significant literature ties research in cognitive and social psychology to individual-level decisions in the realm of foreign policy. Political psychologists have attempted to decipher individual leaders’ operational codes (rules by which decisions are made), how group decisions during international crises are made, and the effect of stress or other psychological phenomena in decision making.

The area of comparative foreign policy also continues to experience a slow but steady accretion of knowledge. The field experienced a renaissance in the 1980s as scholars examined theories such as the diversionary theory of war, the rally around the flag effect, and the dynamics of public opinion and war in comparative political perspective. Although data difficulties can limit work in this area, as information on micro level political processes around the globe become more visible via the Internet, this field is likely to experience growth.

While research in the area of foreign policy analysis remains vibrant, it has dwindled in importance during the past two decades. Research using economic policy as a dependent variable tends to be folded into international political economy, while studies examining military aspects of foreign policy are largely subsumed by the security literature. Work continues in the area of political psychology in the field, and increasing numbers of scholars now draw on institutional theories developed in American politics (e.g., principal-agent models) to understand foreign policy issues.

International Political Economy

For much of the early twentieth century, questions involving trade and international finance were largely the purview of economists. Yet, after World War II, scholars and practitioners alike recognized that political choices can undermine even the most carefully constructed economic arrangements. Early work in the field of international political economy examined to what extent the post–World War II financial international institutions established by Bretton Woods were dependent on the presence of a great power—in this case the United States—willing to underwrite the global economic framework. The topic became particularly salient as the United States struggled to support the gold standard and eventually moved to a floating exchange rate in the early 1970s. Scholars debated the political options available to supplant or alter U.S. global economic leadership.

An equally prominent topic in the international political economy field during the 1970s involved economic interdependence. Scholars questioned whether interdependence in the areas of trade and finance was a source of cooperation or conflict among states. Further work investigated the political determinants of the expanding flow of international trade. For example, scholars noted that pairs of states engaged in a military alliance as well as pairs of states with democratic regimes are statistically more likely to have higher trade with one another. Work on trade has continued to expand to include the origins and effects of the international organizations that shape trade patterns: the World Trade Organization and a myriad of regional trade arrangements that now dot the globe.

In the past two decades, research on international monetary and financial relations has expanded dramatically. International political economy scholars note choices about exchange rate regimes (fixed vs. floating) are determined by domestic political factors as much as by macroeconomic conditions. Similarly, state choices concerning the money supply, taxation, and the provision of public goods have all been explored by IR scholars, who find variables ranging from political partisanship to political institutions influence such economic choices.

A large literature within international political economy has focused on development. Again, although there is a high degree of overlap with economics in this field, IR scholars have long noted the political nature of development: world systems theorists highlight the dependencies in North-South trade flows, some scholars examine how trade flows to the developing world are influenced by global organizations, and other scholars assess the influence of conditionality policy by the International Monetary Fund on economic growth rates. Still other scholars examine topics including the effects of remittances, foreign direct investment, and immigration flows on development in the global South. The research on development topics within international political economy is vast and varied and is growing quickly as scholars of many fields attempt to ascertain why economic growth in the developing world has lagged for so long and continues to do so.

Conclusion

The field of IR is extremely broad. In some ways, it is easier to suggest which topics are excluded from study rather than which ones are included. Indeed, the borders within and around IR are increasingly porous. Trade research and studies of human security increasingly focus on organizations that operate in those areas. Alliances are relevant to security and trade policy yet are also treated as organizations. In an era of globalization, economic and security factors are increasingly intertwined in foreign policy decision making. Examples of the intermingling of the fields are endless.

Increasingly, the boundaries between IR and other subfields also are becoming porous. On one hand, these blurry boundaries make the generation and testing of theory more difficult: no longer can IR scholars ignore important advancements in comparative politics, American politics, or political economy. On the other hand, the ability of IR scholars to explain or predict events in an increasingly complex world requires increasingly complex theory and research. While such complexity may make IR theories and research less parsimonious, it carries the promise of not only making the field more relevant to understanding today’s global crises, armed conflicts, and endemic socioeconomic and political problems but beginning to develop and implement the solutions.

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