Significance:

The main reason why we should study IR is the fact that the entire population of the world
is divided into separate political communities, or independent states, which profoundly affect
the way people live. An independent nation or state may be defined as an unambiguous
and bordered territory, with a permanent population, under the jurisdiction of supreme
government that is constitutionally separate from all foreign governments: a sovereign
state. Together, those states form an international state system that is global in extent. At
the present time, there are almost 200 independent states. With very few isolated exceptions,
everybody on earth not only lives in one of those countries but is also a citizen of one
of them and very rarely of more than one. So virtually every man, woman, and child on earth
is connected to a particular state, and via that state to the state system which affects their
lives in important ways of which they may not be fully aware.
States are independent of each other, at least legally: they have sovereignty. But that does
not mean they are isolated or insulated from each other. On the contrary, they adjoin each
other and affect each other and must therefore somehow find ways to coexist and to deal
with each other. In other words, they form an international state system, which is a core
subject of IR. Furthermore, states are usually embedded in international markets that affect
the policies of their governments and the wealth and welfare of their citizens. That requires
that they enter into relations with each other. Complete isolation is usually not an option.
When states are isolated and cut off from the state system, either by their own government
or by foreign powers, the people usually suffer as a result. That has been the situation at
various times recently with regard to Burma (officially, the Union of Myanmar), Libya,
North Korea, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Like most other social systems, the state system can have
both advantages and disadvantages for the states involved and their people. IR is the study
of the nature and consequences of these international relations.

History:

The state system is a distinctive way of organizing political life on earth and has deep historical
roots. There have been state systems at different times and places in different parts of
the world, in for example ancient India, ancient Greece, and Renaissance Italy.

However, the subject of IR conventionally dates back to the early modern era (sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries) in Europe, when sovereign states based on adjacent territories
were initially established. Ever since the eighteenth century, relations between such independent
states have been labelled ‘international relations’. Initially the state system was
European, later it was Western. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, the
state system was expanded to encompass the entire territory of the earth. The world of
states is basically a territorial world; it is a way of politically organizing populated territory,
a distinctive kind of territorial political organization, based on numerous different governments
that are legally independent of each other. The only large territory that is not a state
is Antarctica, and it is administered by a consortium of states. Today, IR is the study of the
global state system from various scholarly perspectives
Why Study IR?
Traditionally, international relations is the most macro level of all the subfields of political science, as the
international system and the actors that make up that system are the basic units of analysis. Rather than looking
at the specific political processes within nation-states (such as the study of American government) or across
different political systems (which is comparative politics), IR looks at the ways in which decisions made
within a country affect that country’s relationships with other countries or nation-states. The focus remains on
the interaction between countries or among countries and other actors in the international system, including
nonstate actors such as multinational corporations (MNCs), international organizations (IOs), and
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). It also looks at the impact of these macrolevel decisions on the
various actors who exist within the nation-state and how they, in turn, affect these major decisions. Hence, IR
looks at who makes the decisions (from the role of the government to the individual decision maker) and how
those decisions then affect the people, society, culture, or even individuals within the nation-state or other
nation-states. In short, IR looks at ‘‘big picture’’ questions.

Relevance:
Every time a country
decides to go to war, it has implications for what happens not only to the
people in that country but in other countries as well. For example, when
President GeorgeW. Bush authorized the invasion of Afghanistan in October
2001 in retaliation for the September 11 attacks, he committed U.S. forces to
fight. That meant ensuring that there were enough U.S. military forces available
to fight that war. But it also meant supplying the military for that invasion,
which resulted in more money being required for the Defense
Department. Tax money spent for the military cannot be spent for other
things, such as education; this is known as ‘‘guns versus butter.’’ So directly
or indirectly, that decision affected citizens of US.

Other countries are also affected by terrorist attacks and therefore have a
vested interest in confronting al-Qaeda. So it became necessary to round up
allies to work with the United States in Afghanistan so that the United States
did not have to bear that burden alone. That is the role of alliances, specifically
bringing in other countries to work together in pursuit of common goals. So other countries, and the people
within them, were affected by the
decision made by President Bush. And clearly, so were the people of Afghanistan.
The bottom line is that these are very difficult issues that generate complex
questions, and if someone is ever going to attempt to answer them, there is need to find a way to simplify the
reality so that we can focus on one aspect of the problem at a time. For example, in the case of September 11,
if we want to know more about the hijackers, we can focus on the men who acted together as part of a terrorist
group that sought to inflict damage on the United States. Or put into IR terms, we are looking at the impact
that a nonstate actor (al- Qaeda) had on a major international actor (the United States) in order to
influence U.S. policy in some way.
Or we can look at it another way that also would provide some explanation
for the actions of 9/11. In this case we can start by identifying the nineteen
men as individual actors who were part of a larger group and agreed to
engage in a suicide mission. If we were to take that approach, our focus
would be on the men as the actors and on what motivated them to act as
they did. This would be a smaller or more microlevel response.
Or we can approach it in yet another way: We can ask why Osama bin
Laden, as the leader of al-Qaeda, wanted to inflict damage on the United
States, which he saw as the ideological enemy of all that he believed in. In
that case, our focus would be on an individual leader who made decisions that had an impact on many other
people. This is an even smaller or more
micro level—that of a single individual.

Origin and evolution:

The origins of the discipline are to be found in one crucial historical moment: World
War I (1914–18) as we know it now, but the ‘Great War’ as it was known before
World War II. It was the most intense and mechanised war yet experienced, with new
technologies, including the advent of air power, allowing for new heights of destruction
to be reached. The unprecedented destructiveness prompted calls for the eradication
of war; it was indeed often referred to as the ‘War to End All Wars’. The traumatic
experience of the Great War for Europeans was perhaps compounded by the fact that
the years preceding it were relatively peaceful and stable, witnessing marked increases
in ‘the number of multilateral conferences, institutions, and organizations’ (Reus-Smit
1999: 133). In particular, significant strides were taken regarding the laws of war with
the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907, which seemed to vindicate liberal optimism
for international reform.
After the war, an understandable tide of anti-war sentiment surged through Europe –
the continent that had witnessed so many terrible wars over the centuries. It was
not only war’s destructiveness that fuelled anti-war sentiment, it was also its apparent
futility. As an instrument of foreign policy, war appeared to many to be ineffective and
counterproductive
But until the eighteenth
century, while war had always been lamented, it was rarely viewed as eradicable. This
is why English jurist Sir Henry Maine (cited in Howard 2001: 1) observed in the middle
of the nineteenth century, ‘War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern
invention’. It was only with the initiation of ‘plans for perpetual peace’ in the eighteenth
century, drafted most famously by the Abbé Saint Pierre and Immanuel Kant, that
thinkers and scholars put their minds to determining how peace might permanently
prevail over war in a system of states. But only after the Great War did a widespread
‘peace movement’ arise with the intention of eliminating war for all time.
To this sentiment were added practical, institutional measures, including the
establishment of the League of Nations at Geneva in 1920 and, in accordance with
the League’s Covenant, the Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague
in 1922 (originally the Permanent Court of Arbitration, as established under the 1899
Hague Conference). According to Chris Reus-Smit (1999), a new legislative principle of
procedural justice emerged at this time which found concrete expression in these new
institutions. Two precepts informed this new legislative justice: ‘first, that only those
subject to the rules have the right to define them and, second, that the rules of society
must apply equally to all’ (Reus-Smit 1999: 129). Reus-Smit (1999: 123–54) traces the
origins of these ideas back to the eighteenth century – to the Enlightenment and to
the American and French revolutions; but it is arguable that it was only in the aftermath
of the Great War that a new diplomatic and legal order took shape based on contractual
international law and multilateralism. The war not only marked a break with the
previous peace, it brought about a different kind of peace, one where permanent
international institutions were designed ‘to promote international co-operation and to
achieve peace and security’, as expressed in the League of Nations Covenant
This is the general context in which the discipline of International Relations was
established. It was a period of progressive institutionalisation of liberal–constitutional