IR affects daily life profoundly; we all participate in IR.
IR is a field of political science, concerned mainly with explaining political outcomes in international security affairs and international political economy.
Theories complement descriptive narratives in explaining international events and outcomes, but scholars do not agree on a single set of theories or methods to use in studying IR.
States are the most important actors in IR; the international system is based on the sovereignty of (about 200) independent territorial states.
States vary greatly in size of population and economy, from tiny microstates to great powers.
Nonstate actors such as multinational corporations (MNCs), nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) exert a growing influence on international relations.
The worldwide revolution in information technologies will profoundly reshape the capabilities and preferences of actors in IR, in ways that we do not yet understand.
Four levels of analysis—individual, domestic, interstate, and global—suggest multiple explanations (operating simultaneously) for outcomes observed in IR.
The global level of analysis—a recent addition—draws attention especially to technological change and the global gap in wealth between the industrialized North and the poor South.
A variety of world civilizations were conquered by Europeans over several centuries and forcefully absorbed into a single global international system initially centered in Europe.
The great-power system is made up of about half a dozen states (with membership changing over time as state power rises and falls).
Great powers have restructured world order through recurrent wars, alliances, and the reign of hegemons (states that temporarily gain a preponderance of power in the international system). The most important wars have been the Thirty Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, and World War II. Periods of hegemony include Britain in the nineteenth century and the United States after World War II.
European states colonized most of the rest of the world during the past five centuries. Latin American countries gained independence shortly after the United States did (about 200 years ago), while those in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East became independent states only in the decades after World War II.
Nationalism strongly influences IR; conflict often results from the perception of nationhood leading to demands for statehood or for the adjustment of state borders.
Democracy is a force of growing importance: more states are becoming democratically governed, and democracies rarely fight each other in wars.
The world economy has generated wealth at an accelerating pace in the past two centuries and is increasingly integrated on a global scale, although with huge inequalities.
World Wars I and II dominated the character of the twentieth century, yet they seem to offer contradictory lessons about the utility of hard-line or conciliatory foreign policies.
For most of the 50 years since World War II, world politics revolved around the East-West rivalry of the Cold War. This bipolar standoff created stability and avoided great-power wars, including nuclear war, but it had harmful consequences for third world states that became proxy battlegrounds.
The post-Cold War era that began in the 1990s holds hope of general great-power cooperation despite the appearance of new ethnic and regional conflicts.
A “war on terrorism”—with broad international support but uncertain scope and duration—began in 2001 after terrorist attacks on the United States.
The U.S. military campaign in Iraq overthrew a genocidal dictator, but divided the great powers and heightened anti-Americanism worldwide.
