ABSTRACT
IR is usually characterized as a separate and discrete academic discipline. You will find separate departments of ‘International Relations’ or ‘International Politics’ in many universities. You will find separate curricula and degree schemes, and professors and lecturers of IR. However, in an important sense this separateness is artificial. On the one hand it seems intuitively simple to say that IR is a distinct entity. It is at the most basic level, the study of something that exists out there. Inter – National – Relations, the study of relations between nations. When we say ‘nations’ here we usually intend to refer to the interactions of nation-states – sovereign,
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much about our subject. Taking a brief glance at the world around us we find that some of the principal actors in world politics, the agents of international relations that make up the political landscape of our subject area, are not nations at all. When we look at the world of global politics we inevitably see international or trans-national governmental organizations (IGOs) such as the United Nations (UN) or the International Monetary Fund (IMF). We see regional organizations, such as the European Union (EU) or the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), important non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as the Red Cross (and Red Crescent) or Amnesty International, and powerful multinational corporations (MNCs) with bigger annual turnovers than the gross national product (GNP) of many countries. We also find that many issues that we associate with IR transcend this basic description. Are our concerns about an HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa, or human rights reducible to IR in this narrow sense? There is clearly much more to IR than inter-national relations.
