Since World War I, when the movement toward a comprehensive and systematic examination of international relations began, two intensive debates about the nature and methodology of the discipline have helped shape the field. The first was between the realist and the idealist schools; the second, between the traditionalists and the behavioralists. Now, a third debate has emerged, pitting state-centric conceptualizations against the globalist focus on interdependence. At issue is the nature of the international system. Is it still one in which the sovereign nation-state constitutes the dominant actor? Or has a process of global political, economic, and even social integration transformed the world into a "global village"? This text presents seminal works that define and illuminate the third debate, focused by the editors' comments prefacing each chapter and their synthesizing introductory and concluding chapters. It is designed to allow students and scholars to compare and contrast the contending approaches in order to better understand and develop the discipline of international relations. Given the consensus among both realists and globalists that our assumptions about world affairs affect how we construct theories to explain events and that the model we impose on the world directly affects the policies we prescribe, it is difficult to overemphasize the importance of the subject.

This book provides an authoritative account of the controversy about the first great debate in the field of International Relations. Of all the self-images of International Relations, none is as pervasive and enduring as the notion that a great debate pitting idealists against realists took place in the 1940s. The story of the first great debate continues to structure the contemporary identity of International Relations, yet in recent years revisionist historians have challenged the conventional wisdom that the field experienced such a debate. Drawing on expert contributors working in Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States, this book includes key participants in the historiographical controversy. The book assembles the existing scholarship and provides a thorough analysis of the status of the first great debate in the history of International Relations. It is an invaluable examination of the causes and future direction of idealist and realist arguments. International Relations and the First Great Debate will be of interest to students and scholars concerned with the foundations of International Relations.

Invaluable to students and those approaching the subject for the first time, An Introduction to International Relations, Second Edition provides a comprehensive and stimulating introduction to international relations, its traditions and its changing nature in an era of globalisation. Thoroughly revised and updated, it features chapters written by a range of experts from around the world. It presents a global perspective on the theories, history, developments and debates that shape this dynamic discipline and contemporary world politics. Now in full-colour and accompanied by a password-protected companion website featuring additional chapters and case studies, this is the indispensable guide to the study of international relations.

This book evaluates the major debates around which the discipline of international relations has developed in the light of contemporary feminist theories.

Conflicts involving religion have returned to the forefront of international relations. And yet political scientists and policymakers have continued to assume that religion has long been privatized in the West. This secularist assumption ignores the contestation surrounding the category of the "secular" in international politics. The Politics of Secularism in International Relations shows why this thinking is flawed, and provides a powerful alternative. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd argues that secularist divisions between religion and politics are not fixed, as commonly assumed, but socially and historically constructed. Examining the philosophical and historical legacy of the secularist traditions that shape European and American approaches to global politics, she shows why this matters for contemporary international relations, and in particular for two critical relationships: the United States and Iran, and the European Union and Turkey. The Politics of Secularism in International Relations develops a new approach to religion and international relations that challenges realist, liberal, and constructivist assumptions that religion has been excluded from politics in the West. The first book to consider secularism as a form of political authority in its own right, it describes two forms of secularism and their far-reaching global consequences.