What is International Relations?

Question 1

What is the study of the interactions among the various actors that participate in international politics.

Answer 1

International Relations

Question 2

What is the difference between International Relations and “international relations”

Answer 2

The capitalization “International Relations” suggests that an academic topic is being discussed while “international relations” refers to more generally to the actual interactions and relationships between countries and other international actors.

Question 3

What are the there main or more prominent perspectives in international relations?

Answer 3

1. Realism (and neorealism)
2. Liberalism (neoliberalism)
3. constructivism

Question 4

What is the perspective that posits that states exist in an anarchic international system and that each state bases its policies on an interpretation of its national interest defined in terms of power?

Answer 4

Realism

Question 5

What perspective is historically rooted in several philosophical traditions that posit that human nature is basically good and that states generally cooperate and follow international norms and procedures that they have agreed to support?

Answer 5

Liberalism

Question 6

What kind of perspective in international relations where in contrast to both realists and liberals, they argue that the key structures in the state system are not dependent ideas but rather malleable and ever-changing

Answer 6

Constructivism

Question 7

How do political scientists find information to assess the accuracy, relevancy, and potency of their theories?

Answer 7

1. History
2. Philosophy
3. The Scientific Method: Behavioralism
4. Alternative approaches

Question 8

What kind of method do political scientists when we want to decipher patterns from the past?

Answer 8

History

Question 9

What is the reason why students of history must be wary?

Answer 9

History must be wary because it is not always clear what history attempts to teach us.

Question 10

What approach do political scientists use when it wants supports it’s theory with basic building blocks of international relations?

Answer 10

Philosophy

Question 11

Who imagined a state of nature, a world without governmental authority or civil order, where men can rule by passions, living with constant uncertainty of their own security?

Answer 11

Thomas Hobbes

Question 12

What did Thomas Hobbes said about the state of nature

Answer 12

short, violent, and brutish

Question 13

For Thomas Hobbes, what did you have to do escape from the state of nature?

Answer 13

You cam escape from the state of nature through a unitary state.

Question 14

Who described the state of nature as an egocentric world, with man’s primary concern is self-preservation?

Answer 14

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Question 15

What was the solution for Jean-Jacques Rousseau when it came to escaping the state of nature?

Answer 15

You can escape the state of nature through the social contract, whereby individuals gather in small communities where “the general will” is realized.

Question 16

What was Immanuel Kant’s Universal History and Perpetual Peace proposed?

Answer 16

Advocated for a world federation of republics bound by the rule of law and as a means to achieve peace.

Question 17

What is the scientific study that international relations usually use?

Answer 17

Behavioralism

Question 18

What scientific study proposes that individuals, both alone and in groups, act in patterned ways?

Answer 18

Behavioralist

Question 19

An example of a behavioralist is ____________ and ___________ who investigated one of the fundamental questions in international relations: Why is there war?

Answer 19

J. David and Melvin Small

Question 20

Sociologist ________________ began with a hypothesis, unlike in the Correlates of War project, which began with data collection, that “noncompliance with international treaty obligations is neither willful or premeditated.” Rather, it depends on a state’s bureaucratic efficiency.

Answer 20

Wade M. Cole

Question 21

When the topic if the world was becoming more violent or more peaceful compared to the past, two academics named Pinker and Dempsey arrived at two different conclusions. What was the main difference?

Answer 21

Pinker argued that the world was much more violent over the past centuries including all types of violence-murder, tribal warfare, slavery, executions, and rape while Dempsey on the other hand saw a different reality and believes that the present is much more violent over the past. Citing the total number of armed conflicts of all types tripled from 1950s to the 1990s.

Question 22

What are the other alternative approaches that was highlighted in the readings?

Answer 22

Discourse Analysis

Question 23

Who usually uses discourse analysis?

Answer 23

Constructivists

Question 24

What does discourse analysis usually do?

Answer 24

Trace how ideas shape identities, constructivists analyze culture, norms, procedures and social practices