Conflict and collaboration: developing Theories of worldwide RelationS

Conflict and Cooperation: Evolving Theories of International Relations

Text book: Conflict and Cooperation: Evolving Theories of International Relations

Introduction

There is a big question in the book in international relations and foreign policy: Why do states behave the way they do in the international system? Some people contend that this is a question of international relatives idea and others state it is a question of foreign principle theory. For our reasons, we can address them the same issue.Why do states act the way they do is the inquiry that ideas of worldwide relations and ideas of foreign principle are endeavouring to answer. The seek for theory is a seek for directions to interpret communal science occurrence (in this case foreign principle behavior). Many authors in this field are evolving a idea to explain the behavior of all states, not just one state. That is the knack here. Can you find universal patterns of activity, universal directions that can be utilised to interpret how any state acts? The usual way is to develop a theory (a rule about state behavior) and then test it with case studies.

Don't be confused by scientific jargon of these theories.  Just remember that theories are statements about cause and effect.  When I heat up a liquid, it will boil.  That's cause and effect.  To become a scientist, you start to experiment - you heat up different liquids to see if they all boil at the same temperature, then you try to make rules about the different types of liquids you heat up, say types of juices vs. types of oil. That's science. Now, since this is social research and we're considering with nations, we can't run experiments. You can't invade some nations to see what their different reactions to attack might be. So you use historical data to check your theories—how well does an contention (a theoretical proposition) hold up when tested against the chronicled data?

The following overview of the book will provide a brief introduction to some of the key ideas in international relations, which will give you a starting point and a quick reference for dealing with the theoretical issues.  Views of different authors might be slightly different from the way the theories are described here, because they take some of these basic notions and redevelop them in their own way. Theories evolve and below you are being given the basic starting points for each theory.

 

Levels of Analysis

One of the key inquiries in international relations and foreign principle is the inquiry of how you analyze state behavior. This is the grade of analysis problem. Scholars glimpse several levels of analysis through which state demeanour can be examined. 

System grade analysis examines state demeanour by looking at the worldwide system. In this level of analysis, the worldwide system is the origin and state demeanour is the effect. Characteristics of the international system cause states to behave the way they do. Change in the worldwide system will origin change in state ...