International Relations (IR) are the interactions among sovereign states. The scientific study of those interactions is called international studies, international politics, or international affairs. In a broader sense, it 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). There are several schools of thought within IR, of which the most prominent are realism, liberalism, and constructivism.
The Trilateral Commission is a nongovernmental international organization aimed at fostering closer cooperation between Japan, Western Europe and North America. It was founded in July 1973 principally by American banker and philanthropist David Rockefeller, an internationalist who sought to address the challenges posed by the growing economic and political interdependence between the U.S. and its allies in North America, Western Europe, and Japan.
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 four most prominent schools of thought are realism, liberalism, constructivism, and rational choice. 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.
Michael W. Doyle is an American international relations scholar who is a theorist of the liberal "democratic peace" and author of Liberalism and World Politics. He has also written on the comparative history of empires and the evaluation of UN peace-keeping. He is a University professor of International Affairs, Law and Political Science at Columbia University - School of International and Public Affairs. He is the former director of Columbia Global Policy Initiative. He co-directs the Center on Global Governance at Columbia Law School.
Graham Tillett Allison Jr. is an American political scientist and the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is known for his contributions in the late 1960s and early 1970s to the bureaucratic analysis of decision making, especially during times of crisis. His book Remaking Foreign Policy: The Organizational Connection, co-written with Peter Szanton, was published in 1976 and influenced the foreign policy of the Carter administration. Since the 1970s, Allison has also been a leading analyst of U.S. national security and defense policy, with a special interest in nuclear weapons and terrorism.
Stephen David Krasner is an American academic and former diplomat. Krasner has been a professor of international relations at Stanford University since 1981, and served as the Director of Policy Planning from 2005 to April 2007 while on leave from Stanford.
Robert Owen Keohane is an American academic working within the fields of international relations and international political economy. Following the publication of his influential book After Hegemony (1984), he has become widely associated with the theory of neoliberal institutionalism in international relations, as well as transnational relations and world politics in international relations in the 1970s.
Peter Joachim Katzenstein FBA is a German-American political scientist. He is the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies at Cornell University. Katzenstein has made influential contributions to the fields of comparative politics, international relations, and international political economy.
Helen V. Milner is an American political scientist and the B. C. Forbes Professor of Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, where she is also the Director of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance. She has written extensively on issues related to international political economy like international trade, the connections between domestic politics and foreign policy, globalization and regionalism, and the relationship between democracy and trade policy.
Robert Gilpin was an American political scientist. He was Professor of Politics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University where he held the Eisenhower professorship.
John Gerard Ruggie was the Berthold Beitz Research Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University and an affiliated professor in international legal studies at Harvard Law School.
Andrew Maitland Moravcsik is professor of politics and international affairs, director of the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination, and founding director of both the European Union Program and the International Relations Faculty Colloquium at Princeton University. He holds a lifetime appointment as distinguished affiliated professor at the Technische Universität München, in Munich, Germany, where he is affiliated with its Hochschule für Politik.
In political science, the concept high politics covers all matters that are vital to the very survival of the state: namely national and international security concerns. It is often used in opposition to low politics, which often designates economic, cultural or social affairs.
Complex interdependence in international relations and international political economy is a concept put forth by Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye in the 1970s to describe the emerging nature of the global political economy. The concept entails that relations between states are becoming increasingly deep and complex. These increasingly complex webs of economic interdependence undermine state power and elevate the influence of transnational non-state actors. These complex relationships can be explored through both the liberal and realism lenses and can later explain the debate of power from complex interdependence.
In international relations, the term smart power refers to the combination of hard power and soft power strategies. It is defined by the Center for Strategic and International Studies as "an approach that underscores the necessity of a strong military, but also invests heavily in alliances, partnerships, and institutions of all levels to expand one's influence and establish legitimacy of one's action."
Liberal institutionalism is a theory of international relations that holds that international cooperation between states is feasible and sustainable, and that such cooperation can reduce conflict and competition. Neoliberalism is a revised version of liberalism. Alongside neorealism, liberal institutionalism is one of the two most influential contemporary approaches to international relations.
Shannon K. O'Neil is the vice president, deputy director of Studies, and Nelson and David Rockefeller senior fellow for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a nonpartisan foreign-policy think tank and membership organization. She is an expert on Latin America, global trade, U.S.-Mexico relations, corruption, democracy, and immigration.
Military globalization is defined by David Held as "the process which embodies the growing extensity and intensity of military relations among the political units of the world-system. Understood as such, it reflects both the expanding network of worldwide military ties and relations, as well as the impact of key military technological innovations, which over time, have reconstituted the world into a single geostrategic space". For Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, military globalization entails 'long-distance networks of interdependence in which force, and the threat or promise of force, are employed".
The Foreign Affairs Policy Board is an advisory board that provides independent advice and opinion to the Secretary of State, the Deputy Secretary of State, and the Director of Policy Planning on matters concerning U.S. foreign policy. The Board reviews and assesses global threats and opportunities, trends that implicate core national security interests, tools and capacities of the civilian foreign affairs agencies, and priorities and strategic frameworks for U.S. foreign policy. The Board meets in a plenary session several times a year at the U.S. Department of State in the Harry S. Truman Building.
Jonathan Finer is an American journalist and diplomat who serves as Deputy National Security Advisor under National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, in the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden. He previously served as the Chief of Staff and Director of Policy Planning for former Secretary John Kerry at the U.S. Department of State.
