International Relations

Approaches to international relations

Realism starts from anarchy and the primacy of power. States, as the main actors, seek survival in a self-help system where no authority can guarantee their safety. Classical realism stresses human nature and the drive for power; structural realism stresses the distribution of capabilities in the system — whether unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar — as the key constraint on state behaviour. From these premises follow the security dilemma: measures one state takes to increase its own security, such as building arms or alliances, make others feel less secure, producing arms races and spirals even among states that do not seek war. Offensive realists argue that states seek hegemony when they can, while defensive realists argue that states seek only security and that conquest is often costly and counterproductive. Realism's strength is its account of why cooperation is fragile and why great-power competition recurs; its weakness is its difficulty explaining durable cooperation, European integration, or the influence of norms and domestic politics.

Liberalism offers a different account. It argues that anarchy can be mitigated by institutions, interdependence, democracy, and law. Democratic peace theory claims that democracies rarely fight each other, whether because of norms of peaceful conflict resolution, institutional constraints, or shared interests. Commercial liberalism argues that trade raises the costs of war and creates constituencies for peace. Institutional liberalism argues that international organisations reduce transaction costs, provide information, monitor compliance, and lengthen the shadow of the future, making cooperation rational even for self-interested states. Neoliberal institutionalism accepts realist premises about anarchy and self-interest but shows that institutions still matter. Critics reply that institutions often reflect great-power interests, that democratic peace may be an artefact of alliances or wealth, and that interdependence can create vulnerability and conflict as well as peace.

Constructivism argues that anarchy is what states make of it: the system has no fixed logic independent of the norms, identities, and practices that constitute it. Enemies, rivals, and friends are not natural kinds but relationships produced by interaction, history, and discourse. Norms — such as the prohibition on conquest, the norm of non-intervention, or the emerging responsibility to protect — can change state interests themselves, not merely constrain them. Constructivism therefore explains change that realism and liberalism struggle with: why slavery, colonialism, and apartheid lost legitimacy, why nuclear weapons are treated differently from other weapons, and why new actors such as transnational movements matter. Critical approaches go further, drawing on Marxism, feminism, and postcolonial theory to argue that international order is structured by capitalism, patriarchy, and imperial legacies, and that mainstream theories universalise the experience of powerful Western states while marginalising the global South, women, and non-state peoples. A complete answer states what each approach explains best and where it is weakest, rather than declaring one approach victorious in general.

IR concepts: state, power, sovereignty, security

The state in international relations is conventionally defined by territory, population, government, and capacity to enter relations with other states, but this legal definition hides variation. Failed or fragile states may lack control over territory, while powerful states project authority beyond their borders. Sovereignty is the claim to supreme authority within a territory and equality among states in law, but in practice sovereignty is pooled in regional organisations, qualified by international law and human rights norms, and violated by intervention, sanctions, and great-power pressure. The tension between sovereignty as non-intervention and sovereignty as responsibility — the idea that sovereignty entails protection of populations — is central to debates about humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect. Students should distinguish legal sovereignty, which is a status, from effective sovereignty, which is a capacity, and from popular sovereignty, which locates authority in the people.

Power in international relations is broader than military capability. Hard power coerces through force or payment; soft power attracts through culture, values, and legitimacy; smart power combines them strategically. Structural power shapes the rules of the game itself — who sets trade rules, financial standards, or technological norms — and may matter more than winning a single bargaining round. Relational power is exercised in a specific interaction, while structural power is embedded in institutions and markets. Measuring power by counting weapons or gross domestic product alone therefore misleads: a state can be militarily strong but unable to achieve its goals because it lacks legitimacy, allies, or economic leverage. Security has similarly expanded beyond military defence of territory. Traditional security focuses on states and armed attack; human security focuses on individuals and freedom from fear and want, including food, health, and environmental security; non-traditional security covers pandemics, climate change, cyberattacks, and transnational crime. Securitisation theory adds that an issue becomes a security issue when political actors successfully present it as an existential threat requiring emergency measures, a move that can mobilise resources but also bypass democratic debate.

Conflict and peace

Conflict arises from multiple causes operating together. Systemic causes include power transitions, where a rising power challenges a dominant power and war becomes more likely through miscalculation and fear; alliance dynamics, where commitments entangle states in others' disputes; and the security dilemma, where defensive measures spiral. Domestic causes include diversionary war, where leaders externalise internal crises; nationalist mobilisation; and regime type, with debates about whether democracies, autocracies, or transitional regimes are most war-prone. Individual causes include misperception, cognitive bias, and leader personality, which can turn a manageable crisis into war when information is incomplete and time is short. Bargaining theories of war add a crucial insight: war is costly, so rational states should prefer a negotiated settlement to fighting, unless commitment problems, private information, or indivisible stakes prevent agreement. A state cannot credibly promise not to exploit a future advantage, and it may hide its true strength, making bargaining fail.

Peace is more than the absence of war. Negative peace is the absence of direct violence; positive peace is the presence of justice, equity, and institutions that address root causes. Peace processes typically move through conflict prevention, peacemaking through negotiation and mediation, peacekeeping by impartial forces monitoring agreements, and peacebuilding that addresses governance, disarmament, reconciliation, and development. Deterrence seeks to prevent attack by threatening unacceptable retaliation, and it depends on capability, credibility, and communication; it can fail when threats are not believed or when an adversary values the stake more than the threatened cost. Arms control, confidence-building measures, and diplomacy aim to reduce the security dilemma by increasing transparency and predictability. Feminist and critical peace research adds that peace agreements that exclude women and marginalised groups, or that ignore economic justice, are less durable, because they leave the structures that produced conflict intact.

United Nations and international law

The United Nations is the central universal organisation of the international system, but its structure reflects the power politics of its founding. The General Assembly gives all members a voice, with resolutions that are largely recommendatory except on budgetary and organisational matters. The Security Council bears primary responsibility for peace and security, and its permanent members hold veto power, which can block action even when a large majority supports it. This design was intended to keep great powers inside the system rather than outside it, but it also means the Council's effectiveness depends on great-power consensus. Peacekeeping, not originally detailed in the Charter, evolved as a practice of deploying lightly armed forces with host consent, impartiality, and limited use of force, later expanding to multidimensional missions covering elections, human rights, and state-building. The Secretariat, specialised agencies, and programmes extend UN work to development, health, refugees, and food, often with more consensus than security politics allows.

International law binds states through treaties, customary practice accepted as law, and general principles, but it lacks a centralised enforcement system comparable to domestic law. Compliance often rests on reciprocity, reputation, and the desire to sustain cooperative regimes, rather than on coercion alone. International courts adjudicate disputes when states accept jurisdiction, and international humanitarian law and human rights law constrain conduct in war and in peacetime. Critics argue that international law is merely the will of the powerful dressed as universality, pointing to selective enforcement and the veto. Defenders reply that even powerful states invoke law to justify themselves, which shows that law shapes what counts as legitimate action, and that small states and movements use law strategically to constrain the powerful. A balanced answer therefore treats law as both a constraint and a resource in power politics, not as either pure morality or pure fiction.

Political economy of IR and globalisation

International political economy studies how politics and markets interact across borders. Trade theory in economics emphasises comparative advantage, but political economy asks who gains and who loses from openness, and how losers organise politically. Mercantilist approaches treat trade as a tool of state power; liberal approaches treat openness as mutually beneficial; structuralist and dependency approaches argue that the global division of labour locks poorer countries into exporting raw materials while richer countries capture high-value production, reproducing inequality. Institutions such as the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank govern trade, finance, and development, but their governance, voting weights, and conditionality are contested, with critics arguing that they reflect the interests of wealthy states and creditors. Financial globalisation adds volatility: capital flows can fund development but can also flee rapidly, producing crises that domestic policy alone cannot manage.

Globalisation is multidimensional: economic integration through trade and investment, political integration through institutions and law, and cultural integration through media, migration, and ideas. Hyperglobalist claims that globalisation makes the state obsolete are overstated: states still tax, regulate, wage war, and manage borders, and they created the rules that enabled globalisation. Sceptics argue that current integration is historically not unprecedented and remains concentrated among wealthy regions. Transformationalists argue that globalisation qualitatively changes statehood, sovereignty, and citizenship without abolishing the state. For developing countries, globalisation offers access to markets, technology, and capital, but also exposure to competition, financial instability, and rules negotiated elsewhere. The politics of globalisation therefore centres on who writes the rules, who can opt out, and how domestic welfare states cushion or fail to cushion global shocks.

Regional organisations

Regional organisations vary in depth and purpose. Some are primarily security alliances or forums, others are free-trade areas, customs unions, common markets, or full political unions. The European Union is the deepest case: a supranational organisation with a common market, shared currency for many members, a parliament, a court, and common policies, though member states retain sovereignty in foreign and security policy and the union faces democratic and legitimacy debates. Other regions have looser, sovereignty-preserving models: associations that emphasise non-interference, consensus, and incremental cooperation rather than supranational authority. These models reflect different histories and political cultures, not merely lesser development towards a European endpoint.

Regionalism serves multiple functions: managing interdependence, building trust after conflict, amplifying the voice of small states in global negotiations, and providing public goods such as infrastructure and disease surveillance. Regional organisations can also entrench hegemony, when a dominant regional power shapes rules in its favour, or become forums for rivalry rather than cooperation. Their effectiveness depends on institutional design, political will, economic complementarity, and the management of asymmetries between large and small members. Comparative study should therefore avoid ranking regions on a single European scale. Instead, ask what problem a regional organisation was created to solve, what authority members were willing to delegate, and whether it has delivered on that problem. A trade bloc that increases commerce but fails at security is not simply a failed union; it may be a successful trade arrangement with limited ambitions.

Contemporary challenges in IR

Climate change is the paradigmatic collective-action problem: emissions are global, benefits of mitigation are shared, and costs fall unevenly, so each state has an incentive to free-ride while fearing that others will do the same. Negotiations therefore turn on principles of responsibility — who caused the problem, who can pay, and who is most vulnerable — and on the design of agreements that are ambitious, verifiable, and politically acceptable. Pandemics reveal a similar logic, with health security depending on surveillance, vaccine access, and trust, all of which are undermined by nationalism and inequality. Terrorism, especially transnational terrorism, challenges state-centric security because networks operate across borders, use digital tools, and seek political effects disproportionate to their military strength; counter-terrorism raises dilemmas about liberty, surveillance, and the causes that generate recruitment.

Migration, forced displacement, and refugees test the tension between sovereignty and human rights, as states assert border control while international norms demand protection for those fleeing persecution and war. Digital power adds a new domain: cyberattacks can disrupt infrastructure without traditional war, disinformation can undermine elections, and control over data, platforms, and semiconductors becomes a source of structural power. Artificial intelligence, space, and biotechnology create governance gaps, because technology outpaces law and institutions. Across all these challenges, the key comparative question is institutional: can existing organisations adapt, can new norms emerge, and can great-power rivalry be managed enough to allow cooperation on shared threats. Pessimists stress rivalry and free-riding; optimists stress that shared vulnerability has historically generated new institutions, from public health regimes to climate frameworks, even if slowly and imperfectly.

Approaches to IR compared

Security concepts