ABSTRACT
This chapter describes international relations (IR) in the twenty-first century. It reviews the evolution of the international system, tracing the roots of the contemporary, post–Cold War system and delineating its main features. That is a real challenge for the contemporary student of IR. IR as a field of study can be traced at least as far back as ancient Greece and Thucydides' accounts of the Peloponnesian War, although it is considered to have arrived as a distinct academic field in the twentieth century, following First World War. In the twentieth century the idealist paradigm was most closely associated with Woodrow Wilson and other thinkers who were prominent in the interwar period between the end of First World War in 1918 and the beginning of Second World War in 1939, when idealism dominated the study of IR. The realist paradigm has continued to exercise a strong hold on many observers of IR.
