International relations is actually a pretty new field. There's a lot of debate over when it started but it's pretty much came about in the early 20th century after the end of World War I more or less but it only really started being studied in most universities after World War II. So international relations is always trying to justify its existence. Why isn't it politics?
Why isn't it history? The LSE is one of the few places in the country where we have a separate department for international relations. It's in most other departments, it's in politics. What IR scholarship or IR as a subfield of political science brings to the study of international politics is the application of concepts, theories and methods. I don't think there's one view of the subject.
There are different people working in the field and they have different approaches. And I think this is a good thing. I think it is good that there is a diversity of approaches, diversity...
of methods to be used in understanding the world. But what unites them is that we're not talking about solely domestic contexts within a particular territory, but much more on how that territory, be it a state or a region or whatever, links in with other territories and then more globally with the community, the international community. But as those relations have become more complex, as transnational and more international. relations have involved multinational companies, smugglers, refugees. International relations then focuses on everything that is above the state, that flows above the territorial extent of one government's jurisdiction.
But also then dynamics and trends and factors which could affect those relationships or which could affect particular states but do not stem from the states themselves. Anything from say international migration to... Pollution, international, you know, pollution which goes across borders to war. So international relations looks at those crucial decisions when to go to war, how wars are waged, why we should or shouldn't go to war.
War is the bread and butter of IR, but I think it's better to talk in terms of violence, because war reduces you to looking at one state fighting another state. But when you look at violence, you can look at conflict within a state or a transnational conflict or these non-state wars, kind of terrorism, that sort of thing. And I think that's a much broader and more useful way of studying international politics and international relations. I think what unites us then is trying to identify, you might say, at least a large part of the discipline is trying to identify causes of why certain things happen.
And when you start to do that, you're going much deeper into events, into developments, into longer-term trends than you could understand from a newspaper article. Most international relations is about foreign policy, and most foreign policy is about what a state thinks it should do in the world. There is always this tension between domestic political objectives, i.e. politicians wanting to get re-elected or stay in power.
And therefore they focus on their more parochial local interests and they neglect the broader international cooperation that is necessary if an international economy is going to remain stable. Now what is interesting about IR is how in the past 30 years or so people have questioned this state-centric notion of IR. So rather than just accepting that international relations is just foreign policy studies...
A lot of us, especially in the IR department at the LSE, are looking at reactions to this and who is left out. Now, you and I ultimately give our allegiance to our country, and our country can ask us in extreme situations to die for it, to go and fight to defend it. So the benefit for the community that we live in is understanding how we interact with other communities, other states.
but also examining the moral and behavioral dynamics that structure that interaction. So international relations scholars don't just study war and atrocities, we also study processes of cooperation and integration. The French and Germans had murdered each other for, you know, for at least 100 years, you know, leading up to World War I, and then the process of European integration. has meant that the prospect of war between France and Germany is obsolete. I mean it is Simply inconceivable.
That is phenomenal. I mean that in and of itself is an extraordinary achievement, an accomplishment. There is a tension between thinking about the world as it is and the world as it should be.
I think it's impossible to take out all your own normative approaches, etc. and simply make the study of the world a mechanical study. But... there is a good case for trying to be very clear about what your own proclivities are when you do the study.
In order to be able to dig deeper and to consider questions out of context as well. and to sidestep the emotion and the morality that often attaches to issues such as a crisis in Syria or crisis in Ukraine and so forth. You will have to come clean on the moral stuff where you stand.
and you would also have to try and suspend it when you're doing your studies. And this kind of detachment delivered from or on the foundation of broad scholarship is probably something that can inform and can improve and advance journalistic debates and debates in society more generally. And that is one of the big differences between the pub conversation about international relations and the academic conversation about international relations that you can't start with outrage. I mean that can be the impetus for you to study something but you will have to do the argument and it's interesting to see that it takes a couple of weeks or even months for students to get that when they come to the department that this is not simply about sort of yelling at the top of your voice about what you think is right.
It's about understanding and underpinning that. I think there are two distinct groups of students. The first, I think, which are the most interesting, are those who just want to understand, to use the LSE's motto, to understand the causes of things.
So why, across this broad sweep of global politics, why are these things happening? And that's pure intellectual inquiry. There's another group of students, equally as large, who want to go into it.
diplomacy, international relations, international economic relations, and they want to understand how the world functions, how international relations functions, how interstate relations functions, so they can get involved and do it better. So you have a pure intellectual pursuit of understanding and also the desire to become a statesperson, to become a decision maker, and do the job better than their peers. When people watch Star Trek, they are presented with a world that has a number of systemic factors of how states should interact. And that leaves a mark on people viewing the show. Because when we say that something is a utopia, it doesn't mean that people who make it and people who watch it are simply transporting themselves.
To a no place, it means that we are presented with a mirror of our own world where certain things are different, but certain things are similar. So, you know, you could study that. Star Trek, indeed, there is a division straight down the middle of international relations between what would be called realists and idealists, between the pessimists who think international relations, interstate relations are set in a certain way that leads directly, obviously and repeatedly to state conflict.
And all they're trying to do then on that basis is to manage and minimize that conflict. On the other side there is a great deal of idealists who believe that the world can and is moving towards a better place. That you have greater democracy, greater education, greater understanding of the ordinary people, of what their leaders are doing in their name.
So restraining them and demanding collaboration and cooperation between states and not conflict. There used to be this strand of IR theory called idealists or idealism which came out of World War One and it's about we should all get along we should have collective security where we rely on each other rather than building alliances against each other but some people ask are there any idealists anymore. The future is I think in principle open so you know you can't rule out that at some point the world will be politically united but that's definitely not on the card in the near future.
It would be great if IR became irrelevant because everybody got along. I don't see that happening, so I see difference as one of the main themes coming up in international relations, which means that it's unlikely there's going to be some universal human society.