International Relations: An Introduction

international relations is actually a pretty new field um there's a lot of debate over when it started but it's pretty much came about in the early 20th century at after the end of World War I more or less but it only really started being studied in most universities after World War II so international relations is always trying to justify its existence why isn't it politics why isn't it history the LSC is one of the few places in the country where we have a separate Department for international relations in most other departments it's in politics what

I scholarship or IR as a subfield of legal science brings to the study of international politics is the application of Concepts theories and methods I don't think there's one view of the subject there are different people working in the field and they have different approaches and I think this is a good thing I think it is good that there is a diversity of approaches diversity um of methods to be used in understanding the world but what unites them is that we're not talking about solely domestic contexts within a particular territory uh but much more on

how that territory be it a state or a region or whatever links in with other territories and then more globally um with sort of uh the the community the the International Community but as those relations have become more complex as um transnational relations have involved multinational companies Smugglers refugees international relations then focuses on everything that is above the state that flows above the territorial extent of one government's jurisdiction but also then Dynamics and Trends and factors which could affect those relationships or which could affect particular States but do not stem from the states themselves anything

from say international migration to uh pollution International you know pollution which goes across borders uh to war so international relations looks at those crucial decisions when to go to war how Wars are waged why we should or shouldn't go to war war is the bread and butter of ir but um I think it's better to talk in terms of violence because War reduces you to looking at one state fighting another state but when you look at V vience you can look at conflict within a state or trans transnational conflict or these non-state wars kind of

terrorism that sort of thing and I think that's a much broader and more useful way of studying uh International politics and international relations I think what unites us then is trying to to identify uh you might say at least a large part of the discipline is trying to identify causes of why certain things happen and when you start to do that you're going much deeper into um events into developments into longer term Trends than you can could understand from a newspaper article most international relations is about foreign policy and most foreign policy is about what

a state thinks it should do in the world there is always this tension between domestic political objectives I politicians wanting to get reelected or stay in power and therefore they focus on their more parochial local interests and they neglect the broader International cooperation that is necessary if an international economy is going to remain stable now what is interesting about IR is how in the past 30 years or so people have question this state Centric not notion of ir so rather than just accepting that international relations is just foreign policy studies a lot of us especially

in the IR department at the lsse are looking at reac ction to this and who is left out now you and I ultimately give our allegiance to our country and our country can ask us in extreme situations to die for it to go and fight to defend it so the the the benefit for the community that we live in is understanding how we interact with other communities other states but also examining the moral uh and behavior behavioral dynamics that structure that interaction so international relations Scholars don't just study war and atrocities we also uh study

processes of cooperation um and end integration French and Germans had murdered each other for uh you know for at least 100 years you know leading up to World War uh one and then the process of European integration has meant that the prospect of war between France and Germany is obsolete I mean it is simply inconceivable that is phenomenal I mean that in and of itself is an extraordinary achievement and accomplishment there is a tension between thinking about the world as it is and the world as it should be I think it's impossible to to take

out all your own sort of normative approaches Etc and simply make the study of the world a mechanical study but there is a good case for trying to be very clear about what your own proclivities are when you do the study in order to be able to dig deeper um and to consider questions out of context as well and to Sid step the emotion and the morality that often attaches to issues such as uh crisis in Syria or crisis in Ukraine and so forth you will have to come clean on the moral stuff where you

stand and you would also have to try and suspend it when you're doing your studies and this kind of Detachment um delivered U from or on the foundation of broad scholarship uh is probably something that can inform and can improve and Advance uh journalistic debates and debates in society more generally and that is one of the big differences between the pub conversation about international relations and the academic conversation about with international relations that you can't start with outrage I mean that can be the impetus for you to study something but you will have to do

the argument and it's interesting to see that um it takes a couple of weeks or even months for students to get that when they come to the department that this is not simply about sort of yelling at the top of your voice about what you think is right it's about understanding and underpinning that I think there are two distinct groups of students the first I think which are the most interesting are those who just want to understand to to use the LC's motto to understand the causes of things so why uh across this broad sweep

of global politics why are these things happening and that's pure intellectual inquiry there's another group of students equally as large who want to go into diplomacy uh international relations International economic relations and they want to understand how how the world functions how international relations functions how Interstate relations functions so they can get involved and do it better so you have a pure intellectual pursuit of understanding and also uh the the desire to become a States person to become a decision maker and do the job better than their peers when people watch Star Treck they are

presented with a world that has a number of systemic factors of how States should interact and that leaves a mark on people viewing the show because when we say that something is a Utopia it doesn't mean that people who make it and people who watch it are simply transporting themselves to a no place it means that we are presented with a mirror of our own world where certain things are different but certain things are similar so you know you could study that Star Trek indeed there is a a division straight down the middle of international

relations between what would be called realists and idealists between the pessimists who think international relations Interstate relations are set in a certain way that leads directly obviously and repeatedly to State conflict and all they're trying to do then on that basis is to manage and minimize that conflict on the other side there is a great deal of idealists who believe that the world can and is moving towards WS a better place that you have greater democracy greater education greater understanding of the ordinary people of what their leaders are doing in their name so restraining them

and demanding collaboration and cooperation between states and not conflict there used to be this strand of ir Theory called idealists or idealism which came out of World War I and it's about we should all get along we should have collective security where uh we rely on each other rather than uh building alliances against each other but some people ask are there any idealist anymore the future is I think in principle open so you know you can't rule out that at some point the world will be politically United but that's definitely not on the card in

the near future it would be great if IR became irrelevant because everybody got along I don't see that happening so I see difference as one of the main themes coming up in international relations which means that it's unlikely there's going to be some Universal Human Society [Music]