Political science is the scientific study of politics. It is a social science dealing with systems of governance and power, and the analysis of political activities, political thought, political behavior, and associated constitutions and laws.
International relations (IR), are the interactions among sovereign states. The scientific study of those interactions is also referred to as international studies, international politics, or international affairs. In a broader sense, the study of IR, in addition to multilateral relations, concerns all activities among states—such as war, diplomacy, trade, and foreign policy—as well as relations with and among other international actors, such as intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), international legal bodies, and multinational corporations (MNCs).
International relations theory is the study of international relations (IR) from a theoretical perspective. It seeks to explain behaviors and outcomes in international politics. The three most prominent schools of thought are realism, liberalism and constructivism. Whereas realism and liberalism make broad and specific predictions about international relations, constructivism and rational choice are methodological approaches that focus on certain types of social explanation for phenomena.
National power is defined as the sum of all resources available to a nation in the pursuit of national objectives. Assessing the national power of political entities was already a matter of relevance during the classical antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and today. Classics Shang Yang, Guan Zhong and Chanakya, widely discussed the power of state. Many other classics, such as Mozi, Appian, Pliny the Elder, also concerned the subject. Herodotes described whence derives the power of Babylon. The considerations of Hannibal on the matter is found in Titus Livy.
Kenneth Neal Waltz was an American political scientist who was a member of the faculty at both the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University and one of the most prominent scholars in the field of international relations. He was a veteran of both World War II and the Korean War.
The Claremont Graduate University (CGU) is a private, all-graduate research university in Claremont, California. Founded in 1925, CGU is a member of the Claremont Colleges consortium which includes five undergraduate and two graduate institutions of higher education.
Peace and conflict studies or conflict analysis and resolution is a social science field that identifies and analyzes violent and nonviolent behaviors as well as the structural mechanisms attending conflicts, to understand those processes which lead to a more desirable human condition. A variation on this, peace studies, is an interdisciplinary effort aiming at the prevention, de-escalation, and solution of conflicts by peaceful means, based on achieving conflict resolution and dispute resolution at the international and domestic levels based on positive sum, rather than negative sum, solutions.
Power transition theory is a theory about the nature of war, in relation to the power in international relations. The theory was first published in 1958 by its creator, A.F.K. Organski, in his textbook, World Politics (1958).
Abramo Fimo Kenneth Organski was Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, the founder of Power transition theory and a co-founder of Decision Insights, Inc. His pioneering work spanned several decades, and focused on specific aspects of world politics, including: political demography; political development; and grand strategy. He was the author of World Politics, The Stages of Political Development, The War Ledger, Birth, Death and Taxes, and The $36 Billion Bargain. Other publications are available in scholarly journals.
William Thornton Rickert Fox, generally known as William T. R. Fox, was an American foreign policy professor and international relations theoretician at the Columbia University. He is perhaps mostly known as the coiner of the term "superpower" in 1944. He wrote several books about the foreign policy of the United States of America and the United Kingdom. He was a pioneer in establishing international relations, and the systematic study of statecraft and war, as a major academic discipline. National security policy and an examination of civil-military relations were also focuses of his interests and career. He was the founding director of Columbia's Institute of War and Peace Studies and held the position from 1951–1976.
Scott Gates is an American political scientist and economist based in Norway. He was director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO)'s Centre for the Study of Civil War (CSCW), which was a Norwegian Center of Excellence funded by the Research Council of Norway for a twelve-year period 2002-2013. He is currently a Research Professor at PRIO, a Guest Researcher at ESOP in the Department of Economics at the University in Oslo and also holds a professorship in the Department of Political science at the University of Oslo. He used to work at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and Michigan State University (MSU).
Ronald Frank Lehman II is currently Director of the Center for Global Security Research at the United States Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He is also Chair of the Governing Board of International Science and Technology Center, an intergovernmental organization headquartered in Moscow and is a member of the Department of Defense Threat Reduction Advisory Committee.
William Robert Van Cleave was a former advisor to President Ronald Reagan, the United States Department of Defense, and Department of State as well as Emeritus Professor, former head, and the founder of Missouri State University's Department of Defense and Strategic Studies (DSS). The DSS program is now located in Fairfax, Virginia, 10 miles from Washington D.C. He was also advisory council member of the Center for Security Policy, board advisor of the American Center for Democracy, and National Institute for Public Policy. As a strategic thinker, he is remembered as a leading Cold Warrior and long-standing hawkish policy advocate.
James D. Morrow is the A.F.K. Organski Collegiate Professor of World Politics at the University of Michigan and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, best known for his pioneering work in noncooperative game theory and selectorate theory.
The Mortara Center for International Studies is an academic research center at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. As part of Georgetown's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, the Mortara Center organizes and co-sponsors lectures, seminars, and conferences and provides support for research and publications on international affairs. The Mortara Center was established through a gift from the Michael and Virginia Mortara Foundation.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to politics and political science:
Monica Duffy Toft is an American international relations scholar. Her research interests include international security and strategy, ethnic and religious violence, civil wars, and the relationship between demography and national security. Among her researches, her theory of indivisible territory explains how certain conflicts turn violent while others not, and when it is likely for a conflict to become a violent. Since 2017 she holds the position of Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University, and Director of the Fletcher School's Center for Strategic Studies.
Walter Carl Clemens, Jr. is an American political scientist known for advancing complexity science as an approach to the study of international relations and for arms control and U.S. relations with communist and post-communist countries Some observers call him a "cold warrior for peace."
Kelly M. Kadera is an American political scientist, currently a professor at the University of Iowa. She studies international conflict, democratic survival, and gender in academia using formal theory, dynamic modeling, and empirical methods.
