The future of international relations

Fears and hopes

Bibliographic Data

ID23206337
AuthorsFred Halliday (corresponding author)
Year1996
Pages318-327
Publication date1996-06-13
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueInternational Theory (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/cbo9780511660054.018
OpenAlexW1637152597
ISBN9780511660054
LanguageEN
Citations received10

No crisis, no academic discipline. As E. H. Carr himself stressed, IR like all academic subjects emerged as a distinct academic discipline because of a particular crisis in modern society, in this case that of relations between states (Carr, 1981, pp. 8–9). If there had been no need for a distinct discipline during the period of the long peace between great powers of the nineteenth century, there was certainly one from August 1914 onwards: IR responded, as much as did economics, sociology or geography to particular contemporary needs. This did not mean that ‘international relations’, as reality or as a set of ideas, originated with the First World War, but rather that it was at that historical point that a particular kind of reflection upon it was institutionalised: the subsequent development of theory and the use of history, be it that of inter-state relations or of ideas about such relations, have served to illuminate present concerns.

Aesthetics · Carr · Discipline · Epistemology · International relations · International relations theory · Period (music) · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science) · International Relations and Foreign Policy · Law · Philosophy

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