ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by taking stock of the state of our knowledge about IR, some five years after the appearance of two publications which revived interest in the field and have done much to shape the debate that subsequently developed: Brian C. Schmidt's The Political Discourse of Anarchy(1998) and Ole Wæver’s International Organization article, ‘The Sociology of a Not So International Discipline’ (1998). Schmidt's contribution has been to challenge some important elements of the story IR has traditionally narrated about itself, in particular the belief that there was a founding debate between idealists and realists in the inter-war period of the twentieth century. Wæver looked at the state of the discipline at the end of that century, and found that IR fell some way short of the ideal of a truly international field: IR was pursued differently in different places, and although ‘great debates’ conducted in the USA structured the discipline as a whole, there were signs that European and American IR were drifting apart due to differing attitudes to the role of rational choisce approaches in political science.
