Relation a

Apuntes

Relation and Organisation International 1) ORIGIN OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS The academic discipline of International Relations (IR) began to institutionalize after World War I, when universities in Europe created the first formal IR chairs and programs (e.g. Aberystwyth, 1919). The war revealed the structural vulnerability of a system based on sovereign states acting independently without any supranational authority to prevent escalation. The political response to this shock was the creation of the League of Nations, and the intellectual response was the foundation of IR as a field dedicated to understanding and preventing systemic conflict. Although IR became a discipline only in the 20th century, its intellectual roots are older. Classical thinkers such as Grotius (law and international order), Hobbes (anarchy and self-help), and Kant (peace through republicanism and law) already addressed core questions of world politics. The European “Concert system” of the 19th century, which attempted to stabilize the continent through diplomatic balance, also served as a historical precursor of institutionalized order. The foundational research problem of IR can be summarized as the tension...