1.1 The subject of international relations

Every academic discipline has a main focus, or purpose. For instance:

• geography as an academic subject focuses on space: how the place where things happen (the natural or built environment) matters
• history as an academic subject focuses on time and how things change or don’t across time
• economics as an academic subject focuses on the distribution of resources.

Regarding IR, the core focus is ‘the international’, meaning the challenges and dynamics that arise from having multiple societies coexisting and interacting with each other. These interactions are often between states, but they also involve other actors such as organisations, corporations, and even individuals who impact global affairs.

Thus, IR is an academic discipline that aims to understand the interactions among societies, or what some scholars refer to as ‘societal multiplicity’. This simply means that the world consists of many separate societies or states. Though human societies have taken many forms – nation state, kingdom, empire – there has always been more than one of them and they have always had other societies to deal with. No other academic subject (which often look at issues within a single society or state) takes this as its core purpose – to analyse the consequences of the international.

In practical terms, the coexistence of multiple societies can lead to various challenges and consequences, including conflict, cooperation and competition. IR seeks to understand and explain these challenges by addressing different questions. For example, how do states protect their security? To answer this question, IR examines how states manage their sovereignty, form alliances and collaborations with other states or other actors such as international organisations and try to ensure the safety of their citizens against internal and external threats.

Overall, the field of IR is essential for understanding and interpreting our increasingly interconnected world. IR examines the causes and effects of global interactions, offering insights into how societies manage conflict, work together on global challenges, and shape one another’s internal and external realities. Whether dealing with peace, economic development or human rights, IR provides the framework to make sense of the world’s complexities. For anyone looking to understand the forces shaping our world, IR is an invaluable field of study that clarifies how and why global interactions matter at both the societal and individual levels. In the next activity you will be asked to reflect how international politics may affect you on an individual level, on your day-to-day life.