International Relations

Explaining and Understanding International Relations

Explaining and Understanding International Relations

Introduction

There has been much written on the international relations and one can find any information on this subject but still, there are questions and problems that are fully or partially disclosed in the works of known scholars. Understanding and practicing international relations helps greatly in the work and the book by Martin Hollis and Steve Smith provides the information on this issue. This book review will demonstrate what has been published on a topic “international relations” by acknowledged scholars and scientists having scanned the literature effectively to identify a set of useful books in brief. The paper is divided into three parts. The second part will give the analysis of the book of a researcher on the given topic in order to convey what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic and what are their advantages and disadvantages.

Analysis

The book “Explaining and understanding in International Relations” by Martin Hollis and Steve Smith is a very useful and extremely accessible book for people who are involved in international relations. It tends to give a practical judgment in certain situations. The accuracy of the theories mentioned in this guide depends not so much on research tests, but most probably on their possibility to apply it while helping people to apply their knowledge in an intelligent and skillful way (Hollis and Steve, 1989).

The book mirrors the progress in technology and methodology and gives the necessary support to specialists in the new millennium. This is a marvelous guide for those who do not know where to start with their studying the topic. The book has a good grounding given the understandable summary of the material. In the book Martin Hollis and Steve Smith discover such important aspects of international relations as realism, liberalism, behaviorism and others. They examine the international system, the state, bureaucracies, and the individual (Hollis, Martin and Steve, 1989). Though it does not have any precise definition, it is according to the political dictionary as being the interaction between and among States within the international system. International relations are enrobed in many theories but according to realist thinkers States are the main actors of international relations. By “States” one means a country with a defined territory, a recognized government, a defined population as well as the monopoly of the use of force, which is the right to have an army to ensure its security (Jill, 2005).

The authors of “Explaining and understanding in International Relations” explain the material so that even those readers who have no prior knowledge of international relations or experience of the subject will get the success. The guide is written in simple words and it takes the reader little by little through all the stages of understanding in international relations. Diplomacy is a discrete human practice constituted by the explicit construction, representation, negotiation and manipulation of necessarily ambiguous identities (Hollis and Steve, 1989). Diplomacy is essentially a quest for power of spheres of ...