International affairs is a multidiscipline field of political science whose research is driven by global concerns including human rights, development, foreign policy and diplomacy, international security, environmental issues, terrorism, war and peace and the role of media. The discipline has long drawn from other fields such as sociology, anthropology and history and has several schools of thought. These include realism, liberalism and constructivism.
The earliest international relations theories centered around the concept of sovereignty. These argued that sovereign states should have complete control over their internal affairs, but that they must not be encroaching on the sovereignty of other states or nations. This view of sovereignty has since become more nuanced. The idea of states balancing one another for stability is central to many IR theories and was the driving force behind Kenneth Waltz’s neo-realist perspective.
A more recent approach is to examine international politics at various levels of analysis. Those who take this view look at how the international system is shaped by different levels of organization and cooperation between states. For example, international economic actors are organized into distinct norms and structures and interact to shape an international milieu characterized by power and anarchy.
Other scholars look at the interaction between domestic and international dynamics, examining how political institutions like parliaments or NGOs influence a state’s policies. Some scholars even go so far as to argue that states are able to change their behaviors through the use of “naming and shaming” at the international level, a practice used by organizations such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch to expose countries for their treatment of their own citizens.