ABSTRACT
The study of international relations remains a reflection of a discipline that was self-consciously centred on North America and, to a lesser degree, the UK and Western Europe. The issue of whether international relations remains ‘an American social science’ or an international discipline and the implications of one’s answer to that question is becoming more critical as we seek to understand how to not only exit our current discontents but to better comprehend why we have done what we have done, and why we are where we are. International changes, whether labelled ‘the end of the Cold War’, ‘New World Order’ or the ‘War on Terror’, like other less significant events in the past have introduced a large measure of either disarray (if one was previously content) or effervescence (if one was not).
