2. IR as an Academic Subject

2021 ◽  
pp. 33-64
Author(s):  
Georg Sørensen ◽  
Jørgen Møller ◽  
Robert Jackson

This chapter examines how thinking about international relations (IR) has evolved since IR became an academic subject around the time of the First World War. The focus is on four established IR traditions: realism, liberalism, International Society, and International Political Economy (IPE). The chapter first considers three major debates that have arisen since IR became an academic subject at the end of the First World War: the first was between utopian liberalism and realism; the second between traditional approaches and behaviouralism; the third between neorealism/neoliberalism and neo-Marxism. There is an emerging fourth debate, that between established traditions and post-positivist alternatives. The chapter concludes with an analysis of alternative approaches that challenge the established traditions of IR, and with a discussion about criteria for good theory in IR.

Author(s):  
Robert Jackson ◽  
Georg Sørensen ◽  
Jørgen Møller

This chapter examines how thinking about international relations (IR) has evolved since IR became an academic subject around the time of the First World War. The focus is on four established IR traditions: realism, liberalism, International Society, and International Political Economy (IPE). The chapter first considers three major debates that have arisen since IR became an academic subject at the end of the First World War: the first was between utopian liberalism and realism; the second between traditional approaches and behaviouralism; the third between neorealism/neoliberalism and neo-Marxism. There is an emerging fourth debate, that between established traditions and post-positivist alternatives. The chapter concludes with an analysis of alternative approaches that challenge the established traditions of IR, and with a discussion about criteria for good theory in IR.


Author(s):  
Robert Jackson ◽  
Georg Sørensen

This chapter examines how thinking about international relations (IR) has evolved since IR became an academic subject around the time of the First World War. The focus is on four established IR traditions: realism, liberalism, International Society, and International Political Economy (IPE). The chapter first considers three major debates that have arisen since IR became an academic subject at the end of the First World War: the first was between utopian liberalism and realism; the second between traditional approaches and behaviouralism; the third between neorealism/neoliberalism and neo-Marxism. There is an emerging fourth debate, that between established traditions and post-positivist alternatives. The chapter concludes with an analysis of alternative approaches that challenge the established traditions of IR.


Author(s):  
Bernard Vere

The third chapter deals with the wholesale importation of a British team sport, rugby, into France. Led by Baron de Coubertin, the founder of the Olympics, who was the referee in the first French championship, its adoption by the French was a self-conscious response to defeat in the Franco–Prussian War. Choosing rugby over the more proletarian soccer, an haute-bourgeois and aristocratic elite played rugby at Paris’ most exclusive clubs, a moment reimagined by Henri Rousseau. But rugby could not be confined to these environs for long, and by the time of Delaunay’s The Cardiff Team, with its press photograph source, the sport was included alongside aeroplanes, the Eiffel Tower and advertising as a cipher of all that was modern in the Paris of 1913. Also on view at that year’s Salon des Indépendants was another picture of rugby, The Football Players, cementing the sport as a theme for salon cubism. During the First World War, rugby was celebrated by French nationalists as a sport that had trained its participants to become heroes on the battlefield. This, I surmise, is what led André Lhote to produce his cubist paintings of rugby during and after the conflict.


1988 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 871-897 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Adonis

Politicians in the 1880s believed they were introducing ‘democracy’ into Britain and many feared the – possibly revolutionary – challenge it posed to the existing social and political orders. Historians have for some time recognized that the aristocracy continued to play a significant role in each until at least the First World War. The peers' social hegemony, strong institutional position and relative economic security were a formidable combination. Few would now accept Ensor's view that the 1880s witnessed the beginning of ‘the economic dethronement of the landowners’, and that ‘political headship [could not] long survive economic defeat’. The durability of the late-Victorian aristocracy remains, however, a phenomenon more frequently asserted than examined. The peerage was the sum of its individual members; yet the few ‘micro’ studies hitherto published have concentrated on the ‘aristocracy of the aristocracy’ – the elite of wealth and power, mainly dukes, within the peerage. We know little of the mass of peers who were far less favourably placed, suffered real financial difficulties, but whose tenacity and continued sense of purpose were crucial to the peers' ability to survive.


2000 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 143-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Saunders

AbstractWERE tendencies in the direction of regional difference in the later Russian Empire outweighing tendencies in the direction of homogeneity? In view of the fact that the empire fell apart in 1917, it looks as if the emphasis ought to be on difference. A good case, however, can also be made for homogeneity. I shall therefore be proposing that the regions of the Russian Empire occupied a more or less constant position on an imaginary `divergence–coalescence spectrum'. Admittedly, the contest between divergence and coalescence ceased to be equal during the First World War and the empire collapsed. This imbalance, however, turned out to be temporary. The empire re-emerged under a new name at the end of 1922 and for sixty-nine years thereafter occupied more or less the same place on the divergence–coalescence spectrum that it had occupied before it collapsed. So I shall be arguing that, except under extreme duress, the empire was stable. It is this stability I wish to draw to your attention. One's natural inclination is to think of the later Russian Empire as a hotbed of change. I have argued in a recent article that the inclination should be resisted in analyses of work-patterns. I shall argue today that it should also be resisted in the field of regional diversity. To make the case, I shall divide what I have to say into three parts, the first on divergence, the second on coalescence and the third on the First World War.


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