Is International Relations a Discipline?

International Relations as a Discipline

• The question of whether international relations is a distinct discipline is indicative of unease within the field.
• Unlike economics, sociology, or political science, the status of international relations as a discipline is debated.

Historical Context

• Political science separated from historical/legal studies, focusing on factual studies of political institutions and comparative analysis.
• Interdisciplinary approaches enriched political science with new theories and factual knowledge related to institutional and organizational regularities.
• International relations broke away from its historical base alongside the rise of interdisciplinary research but lacked a traditional body of theory or factual data.
• Early international relations was influenced by idealism and a focus on solving practical problems like achieving international peace, sometimes overshadowing the development of disciplinary knowledge.

Discipline Definition

• A discipline includes a set of skills and techniques, a body of theory and propositions, and a subject matter.
• Different disciplines can study the same subject matter from different abstract phases.
• International transactions fall within the purview of economics, sociology, psychology, and political science.

The Problem of a Discipline of International Relations

• Key questions:
  • Are any international transactions properly studied by a specifically international discipline?
  • Or do we merely apply existing disciplines to international relations?
• Kaplan knows of no convincing discussion that a specifically international relations discipline exists.
• If international events were epiphenomena of national events, we would deny the validity of a sub-discipline.

Requirements of a Discipline of International Politics

• The primary focus must be related to the traditional focus of political science in general.
• These core problems involve the institutional means by which political problems are solved and political values distributed within the international system.
• Interested in patterns of actions, not with particular cases.
• The differences between international politics and national politics are fairly obvious.
• International politics is the arena in which these ultimately authoritative states have to come into contact with each other and settle their conflicts without the supravention of any external political authority or master monad.
• The important organizational forms and patterns are the informal rather than the formal.
• The absence of a formal political system in the international arena does not imply the absence of the political management of problems.
• Bargaining may involve not merely the withholding of the item offered in exchange but the implicit or explicit threat of the use of force.
• The criteria for admission to membership, the duration of membership, the types of goals pursued by given kinds of organized international groupings, the limits placed upon these goals, and the factors that constrain all the preceding subjects are among the most important items of the subject matter of the discipline of international politics.
• The study of the discipline of international politics probably will make use of many of the same kinds of institutional analysis as does the discipline of political science in general.
• The strategic nature of the activity in the international system indicates that considerable insights may possibly be gained from strategic theory.
• The coordination of independent nation states on particular patterns of alignment and on certain kinds of goal limitations for reasonably long periods of time is not at all easy to understand.
• A normative model possibly may help to explain how independently chosen strategies converge toward a particular equilibrium-an equilibrium with respect to types of alignment patterns, types and limits of goal objectives, and norms and normative patterns.
• The discipline should have enough "give" to accommodate different insights, methods, theories, and skills.