International Relations Theory

Abstract

International relations emerged as a discipline in its own right toward the end of World War I as scholars and practitioners of international politics sought to study the causes of war and the prospects for peace in a systematic fashion. Early academic IR was dominated by a group of liberal thinkers who have been pejoratively known as “idealists” or “utopians.” While not nearly as naive in their assumptions or as uniform in their outlook as these labels suggest, these thinkers tended to believe that war is futile and that peaceful change is possible, given the right domestic and international institutional structures. When liberal hopes for a more peaceful and just world order faded in the face of the failure of the League of Nations and the looming prospect of a second world war, liberal internationalism came under attack by realists, such as the British historian E. H. Carr. In his influential book The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939), Carr criticized liberal internationalism, or “utopianism” as he called it, for its failure to explain and predict international politics and its inability to provide effective practical measures for controlling them. Rather than concentrating on normative assumptions of how the world should be, as he accused liberals of doing, his realist approach takes the realities of power in international politics as a starting point for analysis. After World War II, realism became the dominant way of thinking about international relations among scholars and policy-makers.