History of IR

By Gézuka
  • Period: 500 BCE to

    Classical Phase

    Many philosophers, such as Thucydides, Kant or Hobbes, were concerned with the occasional phases of international relations and focused on their domestic interpretation.

  • The establishment of the Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Politics at the University of Wales

  • Period: to

    Interwar Period

    After the 'Great War' the discipline was symbolically born. The institutionalization (research, teaching) was carried out during that time. The aim of institutionalization was not solely the maintenance of peace but also the war's inefficiency as a tool for foreign policy.

  • Establishment of the International Relations Department at the LSE

  • Establishment of the Montague Burton Chair of International Relations at Oxford University

  • American universities IR departments were established during the 1930s

    The American universities' IR departments gained more and more influence and academic acceptance during the WW2 and the Cold War due to the abandonment of the isolationist American foreign policy.

  • 1st Great Debate - ontological

    1919 - Liberalism
    - W. Wilson, N. Angell
    - Liberalism believes in the balance of power, which could secure peace. This balance involves the institutionalization of international relations.
    1938/48 - Realism
    - Carr and Morgenthau
    - Classical realism seeks to explain the international relations through the human nature, which causes the fragile and tense int. order. They believe that through the change of human nature the world could be a better place. Higly influenced by Machiavelli and Hobbes.

  • 2nd Great Debate - epistemological

    Behaviuralism
    - it sought to establish a more 'scientific' approach
    - it involves the operationalization of the subjects, seeks to test hypotheses and in the end to establish general rules regarding the human behavior
    Traditionalism
    -based on historical examples, but not actual patterns
    - Morgenthau usually applied it

  • 3rd Great Debate, the Neo-Neo Debate - ontological

    Neoliberlism
    - Keohane
    - The expansion of int. trade and technical unification creates the need of int. cooperation or already global governance?
    Neorealism
    - Waltz
    - he argued that neorealism should detach itself from the influences of int. trade, politics and should create so models but on the other hand accept the existence of the real world. (If we detach those things what remains actually?)
    Neo-Marxism
    - Cox and Wallerstein
    - introduced the theory of global 'South' and 'North'

  • 4th Great Debate - epistemological

    Rationalism
    - is a positivist approach and still believe in the possibility of transformation of social facts to numerical data
    Constructivism
    - argue that facts in social sciences are not objective due they are socially constructed because they are examined in social texture therefore it is not possible to quantify them