Before the First World War, nobody would have called international relations an academic discipline in its own right. It existed, if it existed at all, as a minor sub-topic tucked inside political science departments, with no real boundaries of its own and no institutional home. That has changed completely. The field now has defined boundaries, a settled place in university curricula around the world, and a network of dedicated research institutions that didn’t exist a century ago – among them the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Foreign Policy Association in New York, and comparable institutes in Geneva and Paris, all built specifically to study world political affairs and the relationships between states.
Why the Field Needed to Exist
Part of the justification for treating international relations as its own discipline goes back to Aristotle’s old observation that human beings are inherently social, political animals – that no person can really live a life cut off from society. What’s changed since Aristotle’s time is the scale of that society. Today’s “society” effectively spans the entire globe, which means every person is, in a very real sense, a member of a global community and something like an international citizen, whether they think of themselves that way or not. Once that’s true, a citizen’s rights and duties can no longer be confined to a single state or a single society; they take on an international character almost by necessity.
The two world wars gave that argument real teeth. Beyond the physical destruction, hatred, and disease they left behind, they bequeathed a pile of harder, more calculated problems that any lasting peace would eventually have to solve. That need – for cooperative, deliberate, cross-border problem-solving rather than ad hoc diplomacy – is what finally gave international relations genuine scientific standing as its own branch of political science, distinct from the broader parent discipline. The field isn’t just a record-keeping exercise cataloguing the world’s problems; it exists to actually work toward solving them. And in a world where no event stays purely local anymore – where the effects of any significant incident ripple outward through the same networks of communication that have made the world feel more like a single, interconnected community – that kind of dedicated, systematic study has become hard to do without.
Three Phases in the Field’s Development
The discipline’s own history can be split into three fairly distinct phases.
The first phase runs up to the First World War. In this period, the study of international relations was largely practical rather than theoretical – concerned mainly with the work of diplomatic representatives and the everyday matters that came before ordinary decision-makers. Theory, in the modern sense, wasn’t really the point yet; the field was closer to a practical craft than an academic pursuit.
The second phase covers the interwar years, between the two world wars. This is where the first real theoretical thinking about international relations took shape, driven largely by one animating belief: that the newly formed League of Nations could, given enough support, solve the world’s major political problems. It was an optimistic, institution-centered phase, built on real faith that a shared international body could keep the peace.
The third phase began immediately after the Second World War, and it exists largely because the second phase’s optimism turned out to be misplaced. The scale of destruction in the Second World War forced scholars and policymakers to confront an uncomfortable conclusion: that idealistic faith in institutions alone hadn’t been enough, and that only a genuine balance of power between states offered any realistic hope of avoiding a repeat catastrophe. It’s this third phase, running from the late 1940s to the present, that produced the deep, systematic body of theoretical work the field is now built on – and it’s this turn toward realism and power politics, more than anything else, that shaped international relations into the rigorous academic discipline it has since become.
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