What International Relations is: its definition, its scope and how it became a subject

What this chapter is for

International Relations is the study of how the world’s states, and the other groups that act across borders, deal with one another. It asks why they fight and why they trade, why they make treaties and break them, and what all this does to the lives of ordinary people. This first chapter teaches what the subject is, what it covers, and how it grew into a subject that universities teach and FPSC examines. By the end you should be able to define International Relations in your own words and tell it apart from the words that sound like it. You should be able to describe how it was born in 1919 and grew, and to set out its scope. Above all, you should be able to look at any event the way the subject does, at the level of the person, the state and the whole system.

The chapter has four parts. The first says what the subject is, which ideas it is built on, and how it differs from foreign policy and international politics. The second tells how it was born after the First World War and how it grew, in the West and in Pakistan. The third sets out its scope, which means who acts in world politics, what the subject studies, and how it looks at an event. The last weighs its critics and shows how far its scope reaches today, with the Ukraine war and the war in Gaza, before the exam sections.

Paper I has asked about this ground in five of the eleven years since 2016, more than any other topic in head I. CE-2018 and CE-2025 asked how the subject became a university discipline. CE-2021, CE-2024 and CE-2026 asked for its definition and its changing scope, and CE-2021 also asked about the non-state actors who now share the stage with states.¹

Before you start

The words

• International Relations. The study of relations across state borders: between states, and between the other groups that act across borders. Written with capital letters when it means the subject, and in small letters (“international relations”) when it means the relations themselves.
• State. A body of people living on a fixed territory under a government that is not ruled by any other government. Pakistan, China and Brazil are states.
• Sovereign. Answering to no higher authority. A sovereign state makes its own laws and decisions inside its borders.
• Actor. Anyone whose decisions change what happens in world politics: a state, an organisation, a company, a group or a person.
• Non-state actor. An actor that is not a state, such as the Red Cross, a multinational company or a terrorist group.
• International organisation. A body that states set up by treaty to work together, such as the United Nations or the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
• Foreign policy. The aims a state pursues towards the outside world, and the means it uses to reach them.
• Diplomacy. The work of managing relations between states by talking and bargaining, done by ambassadors, foreign ministers and leaders.
• Discipline. A field of study with its own subject, questions and methods, taught in universities.
• Theory. A general explanation that tells you why things happen, so that you can understand many cases with one idea.
• Level of analysis. The place where you look for the cause of an event: in a person, in a state, or in the system of states as a whole.
• Think tank. An institute of experts that studies public questions and gives advice, such as the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs in Karachi.

The places

• Aberystwyth. A small university town on the west coast of Wales, in the United Kingdom, where the subject was first taught under its own name in 1919.
• Chatham House. A house in London that gave its name to the Royal Institute of International Affairs, founded after the First World War.
• Karachi. Pakistan’s first capital, where the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs began in 1947 and Karachi University’s department of International Relations opened in 1958.
• Sharm el-Sheikh. A resort town in Egypt on the Red Sea, where the world’s climate conference of November 2022 (COP27) met.
• The Black Sea. The sea between Ukraine, Russia and Türkiye, through which Ukraine sends its grain to the world.
• The Hague. A city in the Netherlands, home of the International Court of Justice, the United Nations’ court.

The story in plain words

1. People have always dealt with neighbours beyond their own rulers: they traded, married, made treaties and fought wars.
2. For centuries these dealings were left to kings, diplomats and generals, and nobody studied them as a subject of their own.
3. The First World War killed millions, and many people decided that war was too important to leave to the professionals.
4. In 1919 a Welsh family paid for the first university chair of International Politics, at Aberystwyth, to study how such a war could be prevented.
5. Institutes and university departments followed in Britain, the United States and, after 1947, Pakistan.
6. Scholars argued about how to study the world: as a struggle for power, as a place that law and trade could make peaceful, or as a science of measured facts.
7. At first the subject studied mostly war and peace between states.
8. Slowly it widened to trade, money, the environment, human rights, terrorism, disease and the internet, and to actors other than states.
9. Today it asks how all these forces shape the world, including the lives of people in Pakistan.

1. What International Relations studies

Start with an ordinary day in Lahore. A young man buys petrol whose price depends on what oil-producing countries decide together about how much oil to pump. His mother receives money from his brother, who works in Riyadh. In the year to June 2026, Pakistanis working abroad sent home $41.6 billion this way, and Saudi Arabia, at $9.8 billion, was the largest single source, according to the State Bank of Pakistan.²⁷ His sister’s telephone was designed by a company in California whose sales in one year were larger than the whole of Pakistan’s economy, as the first figure shows.²⁵²⁶ None of these three things happened inside Pakistan alone, and none of them was decided by Pakistan’s government alone. International Relations is the subject that studies forces like these, the dealings across borders that shape what happens inside them.

The core of the subject is the relations between states. A state is the most powerful kind of group in the modern world, because it has an army, collects taxes and makes laws that nobody above it can overrule. The world today has 193 such states in the United Nations.²² There is no world government above them. That one fact, that states live side by side with no ruler over all of them, is the starting point of the whole subject. It explains why states arm themselves, why they make alliances, why they set up bodies such as the United Nations, and why they sometimes go to war.

The subject’s founding scholars defined it by its central concern. Hans Morgenthau, an American scholar whose textbook taught the subject to a generation of students, opened the second part of that book, “International Politics as a Struggle for Power”, with the sentence “International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power.”⁶ On his view, whatever states ultimately want, whether security, wealth or the spread of an idea, they must seek power to get it. Other scholars have defined the subject more widely, as the study of every relation across state borders, political, economic and social. Both definitions are useful in an answer. The narrow one tells the examiner what the subject has always been about. The wide one tells him how far it reaches now.

A working definition you can write in the hall puts the two together. International Relations is the study of the relations between states, and between states and the other actors that cross borders, in war and in peace. It covers politics, economics, law and culture, and the ideas that explain them. The rest of this chapter takes that definition apart, asking who the actors are, what the relations are, and how the subject explains them.

2. The ideas the whole subject is built on

Every chapter of this subject uses a small set of ideas. Each has a chapter of its own later, but you need a first picture of them now, because the definition above leans on all of them. They follow one from another, starting from the fact the last section ended on, that no government stands above the states.

The first idea is anarchy. In the subject this word does not mean chaos or disorder. It means only that there is no world government, no police and no court with the power to force states to obey. Inside Pakistan, a citizen whose land is seized can go to the police and the courts. A state whose territory is seized has no such place to go. The United Nations can debate and the International Court of Justice can rule, but neither has a standing army of its own to enforce what it decides. Anarchy is the condition every theory of the subject begins from, and the theories differ in how dangerous they think it is.

The second idea is sovereignty, the other side of anarchy. Because no one rules over states, each state rules itself. It makes its own laws inside its borders and answers to no outside authority, and in law every state is equal, whatever its size. The UN Charter says the organisation “is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members”, and gives each member one vote in the General Assembly, so Pakistan’s vote counts the same as that of the United States.²¹ The Charter even bars the UN itself from intervening “in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state”, except when the Security Council enforces peace.²¹ Sovereignty is also why a foreign drone strike on Pakistani soil is a question of law as well as of force. The chapter on sovereignty, in head III, teaches its kinds and its limits.

The third idea is power, the ability to get others to do what you want or to stop them doing what you do not want. In a world without a government above it, a state’s safety rests in the end on its own power and on the friends it can keep. Power comes from many things, from an army and an economy to a population, a position on the map and the respect of others. Pakistan’s place between South Asia, Central Asia, China and the Gulf is itself a source of power, because others need what passes through it.

The fourth idea is the national interest, what a state needs and wants for its people: survival first, then security, prosperity and standing in the world. Leaders explain their foreign policy in its name. The idea is simple to state and hard to pin down, because people disagree about what their country’s interest is. The chapter on the national interest, in head III, sets out how it is defined and who defines it.

The fifth idea is the security dilemma, which follows from the first four. When one state builds up its army to feel safe, its neighbour feels less safe and builds up its own. Neither need intend war, yet both end up poorer and more afraid. Much of the arms rivalry in South Asia and elsewhere can be read this way, and the chapters on deterrence and on the balance of power show how states try to manage it.

The last idea is order, the patterns that let states live together despite anarchy. Treaties, international law, diplomacy, trade, international organisations and the balance of power are all ways of making the world more predictable without a world government. The great question the subject asks, from its first year to this one, is how much order states can build among themselves, and at what cost.

3. Four words that sound alike

Students lose marks because they use four terms as though they meant the same thing. They overlap, but each has its own edge, and an answer that shows the edge reads as the work of someone who knows the subject.

International politics is the narrower term. It means the struggle for power and influence among states, carried on through alliances, rivalries, wars, negotiations and votes in the United Nations. Morgenthau’s book is called Politics Among Nations because politics in this sense was its subject.⁶ When a question asks about power, security or the balance of power, it is asking about international politics.

International Relations is the wider term. It takes in international politics and adds every other kind of relation across borders. Trade and investment belong to it, and so do money sent home by workers abroad, migration, the spread of ideas and religions, sport, tourism and the internet. The relations of a Pakistani textile exporter with a buyer in Germany are part of international relations, though no government need be involved. The subject’s name in the CSS syllabus is the wide one, and FPSC’s questions use it that way.

Foreign policy is one state’s side of the story. It is the set of aims Pakistan pursues towards the world, and the means it uses to reach them, from diplomacy, trade, aid and alliances to force in the last resort. The difference is one of standpoint. Foreign policy looks out from one capital. International Relations looks down at all the capitals together and asks what happens when their policies meet. Paper II has a whole head on the foreign policies of seven powers, Pakistan’s among them.

World politics and global politics are the newest terms. Scholars began to use them when they wanted to stress that much of what matters now is not “inter-national” at all. Climate change, a pandemic or a global financial crisis does not travel from one state to another. It hits all of them at once, and companies, charities and armed groups act in it as well as governments. You may use these terms when a question is about such forces, and say why you chose them.

4. Why the subject was born in 1919

Before 1914 nobody studied international relations as a subject of its own. The dealings between states were the business of kings, foreign ministers and diplomats, and the public was not thought fit to judge them. E. H. Carr, a British diplomat who became one of the subject’s first great writers and held the Woodrow Wilson Chair at Aberystwyth from 1936, put it plainly in his book of 1939: “The science of international politics is in its infancy. Down to 1914 the conduct of international relations was the concern of persons professionally engaged in it.”⁵ Universities taught diplomatic history and international law, but not the subject itself.

The First World War changed this. It lasted from 1914 to 1918, drew in the great powers of Europe and their empires, and killed soldiers and civilians in their millions. Many people blamed the old ways of the diplomats, with their secret treaties and their balance of alliances, for dragging the world into it. They wanted the causes of war studied openly, so that ordinary citizens could understand them and demand better. Carr wrote that the war of 1914 to 1918 “made an end of the view that war is a matter which affects only professional soldiers”, and with it the belief that international politics could be left to professional diplomats. The new subject, he said, had “come into being in response to a popular demand”.⁵

The first answer came from a Welsh family. Shortly after the armistice of 1918, David Davies and his sisters Gwendoline and Margaret offered the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth £20,000 to endow a chair. It was to be “in memory of the fallen students of our University”, for the study of the problems of law and politics, ethics and economics “which are raised by the prospect of a League of Nations”.² The chair was named after Woodrow Wilson, the American president who had championed the League. In 1919 the Department of International Politics opened, “the first of its kind in the world” in the university’s words. It had two teachers, Alfred Zimmern, the first holder of the Woodrow Wilson Chair, and one other lecturer.²

Other bodies followed within two years. On the sidelines of the peace conference in Paris in 1919, a British diplomat, Lionel Curtis, argued for an institute to study international affairs. The British Institute of International Affairs held its inaugural meeting on 5 July 1920. It later received a royal charter and is known as Chatham House, from its home in St James’s Square in London.³ Its American partner, the Council on Foreign Relations, was founded in 1921.⁴ So the subject began with a purpose, which was to study war in order to prevent it. That purpose shaped its first theories, which the second head of Paper I teaches.

5. How the subject grew: from Carr and Morgenthau to the great debates

The subject did not stand still after 1919. It grew through a series of arguments that scholars call the “great debates”. Each was a quarrel about what the subject should study and how. You do not need to know every scholar in them. You need to know what each debate was about, because together they explain why the subject today has so many theories, and Paper I’s head on theories is built on them.

The first debate was between idealists and realists, in the 1930s and 1940s. The idealists of the 1920s believed that law, trade, education and the League of Nations could make war a thing of the past. The 1930s seemed to prove them wrong. Japan, Italy and Germany broke the League’s rules, and a second world war began in 1939. Carr’s book of that year attacked what he called the “utopianism” of the idealists, who had ignored power. After the war Morgenthau built a full theory on the idea that politics among nations is a struggle for power.⁵⁶ Realism became the main school of the subject for a generation.

The second debate was about method, in the 1960s. A new generation, mostly in American universities, wanted to study world politics the way scientists study nature, with data, measurement and testable laws. The older scholars answered that the subject is about choices, history and judgment, which cannot be measured. The two sides were put most sharply by Hedley Bull, who wrote “The Case for a Classical Approach” in 1966, and Morton Kaplan, who replied with “The New Great Debate: Traditionalism vs. Science in International Relations”.⁹¹⁰ Kenneth Waltz’s work, which sorted the causes of war into three levels, belongs to this effort to make the subject systematic.⁷

The later debates came in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. One was between the realists and newer liberal scholars who argued that trade and institutions bind states together. Another, which Yosef Lapid called “the third debate” in 1989, set two camps against each other.¹¹ One believed the subject could find objective facts. The other argued that every theory reflects the position and interests of the person who holds it. The second group gave the subject feminism, critical theory, post-modernism and constructivism, the four approaches that close Paper I’s head on theories.

6. Who acts in world politics

The scope of a subject is how far it reaches. The scope of International Relations has two parts. One is who acts in world politics, and the other is what they act about. This section takes the first part.

States are still the main actors. Only a state can declare war, sign a treaty in its own right, become a member of the United Nations or issue a passport. The subject began by studying states alone, and many of its theories still treat them as the units that matter most. When Pakistan and India sign an agreement on the Indus waters, or when Pakistan votes in the Security Council, it is a state acting.

The world is also full of actors that are not states, and the subject has had to make room for them. The table sorts them into kinds, with an example of each.

Some of these actors are as large as states. Apple’s sales in its year to 27 September 2025 were $416.2 billion; the World Bank puts Pakistan’s whole economy in 2025 at $407.3 billion.²⁵²⁶ That does not make Apple more powerful than Pakistan. It has no army, cannot make laws and can be taxed and regulated by the states where it works. What the comparison shows is that a company’s decisions about where to build factories or what to sell can move jobs and money between countries as surely as a treaty. The examiner wants to see that you know both halves. Non-state actors matter, and states still hold powers no one else has.

Individuals act too. A leader’s beliefs, a negotiator’s skill or a soldier’s mistake can change events. Pakistan’s foreign policy was set at its birth by the principles of its founder. In February 1948 the Quaid-e-Azam told the people of the United States in a broadcast, “Our foreign policy is one of friendliness and goodwill towards all the nations of the world.”¹⁷ He added that Pakistan “will never be found lacking in extending its material and moral support to the oppressed and suppressed peoples of the world”, and in upholding the UN Charter.¹⁷ One man’s words became the standing principles of a state.

7. What the subject studies, and the subjects it borrows from

The second part of the scope is what the actors deal with. For its first decades the subject studied war, peace, diplomacy and the balance of power almost alone. Its agenda has widened in rings, each new ring added to the old ones rather than replacing them, as the animated figure shows.

After 1945 the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the arrival of nuclear weapons, made strategy and deterrence central. In the 1970s and 1980s sharp rises in oil prices, a debt crisis in poor countries and the growth of world trade brought economics into the subject, as International Political Economy. After the Cold War ended in 1991, human rights, the environment, refugees, gender and terrorism joined the agenda. The idea of security itself widened, from the safety of the state to the safety of people. In the 2020s pandemics, attacks over the internet, climate change and the safety of food supplies have joined it. Each ring has a chapter of its own in this subject, from the chapter on security in the twenty-first century to the chapters on globalization and on terrorism.

Because its agenda is so wide, International Relations borrows from many other subjects. It takes its ideas of power, the state and government from political science, and its cases from history. It needs economics to explain trade, aid and the IMF, and law to explain treaties, the UN Charter and the International Court of Justice. Geography explains why a state’s position matters, which is why Pakistan’s place between South Asia, Central Asia, China and the Gulf runs through its foreign policy. Sociology and psychology explain identity, nationalism and how leaders decide.

Whether all this makes International Relations a separate discipline has been argued since it began. One side says it is only a branch of political science, the part that deals with politics beyond the state. The other side says it has its own central question, which is why states and peoples fight and cooperate with no government above them. It also has its own theories, university departments, journals and examinations, and these are what make a discipline. The second view has won in practice. Most writers today treat International Relations as a discipline in its own right that borrows freely from others. Take that view in an answer, and name and answer the first.

8. How the subject looks at an event, level by level

An event in world politics usually has many causes, and a student who lists them at random writes a weak answer. The subject has a tool for sorting them. You ask where each cause lies, in a person, in a state, or in the system of states as a whole. These are called the levels of analysis, and they are the most useful single tool this chapter gives you.

The tool comes from two scholars. Kenneth Waltz, in Man, the State, and War (1959), asked, “Where are the major causes of war to be found?” He sorted the answers that thinkers had given under three headings, “within man, within the structure of the separate states, within the state system”, and called them the three “images” of international relations.⁷ Two years later J. David Singer named “the level-of-analysis problem” in the journal World Politics.⁸ He argued that a scholar must choose the level at which to explain an event, and say which it is.

Take one event and look at it three times. In November 2022 the world’s climate conference at Sharm el-Sheikh agreed to set up a fund to pay for the “loss and damage” that climate disasters cause in poor countries.¹⁹ Pakistan then chaired the Group of 77 and China, the developing countries’ bloc. Its Foreign Office said that Pakistan “galvanized support for establishment of the Fund”, “first by having it placed on the Agenda of the Conference, and then pushing for a consensus agreement”.¹⁸

• At the level of the individual, you ask who made the difference. The ministers and diplomats who spoke for the developing countries had to hold a large and varied bloc together through the bargaining. How well they did it is part of the explanation.
• At the level of the state, you ask what the state needed and why. The Foreign Office said the floods in Pakistan earlier that year “resulted in losses and damages of over US$ 30 billion”.¹⁸ A state that had just suffered such losses had every reason to press for the fund, and the floods gave its case a force the world could see.
• At the level of the system, you ask how power was spread among states. The Group of 77, now 134 developing countries, bargained as one bloc.²⁰ Alone, few of them could move the rich states; together they could stop a conference ending without a deal.

Each level explains a part, and none explains the whole. That is the lesson to carry into the hall. A good answer on any event, from the Kashmir dispute to the war in Ukraine, looks at it from more than one level and says which level explains most.

Now do the next one with the steps beside you. Ukraine and Russia were at war in 2022, and Ukraine’s grain could not leave its Black Sea ports. In July 2022 the United Nations and Türkiye set up the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which let ships carry grain out through a safe sea lane. It was run from a centre in Istanbul staffed by Ukraine, Russia, Türkiye and the UN. Before it ended on 17 July 2023, it moved over 32 million tonnes of grain and food to 45 countries.²³ Before you open the answer, write one cause at each level.

9. International Relations in Pakistan

Pakistan came to the subject early. Its first institute arrived with independence. The Indian Institute of International Affairs had been set up in Delhi in 1936, and on the eve of Partition its members voted to move it to Pakistan. Its secretary, Khwaja Sarwar Hasan, moved its library and its assets to Karachi in August 1947, where it became the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs.¹⁴ Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan formally opened it on 26 March 1948, and it has published its journal, Pakistan Horizon, since 1948.¹⁴ It calls itself the oldest think tank in Pakistan.

University teaching followed. Karachi University’s Department of International Relations was established in 1958, after first working under the department of history, with Professor Mahmud Hussain as its founding chairman. It describes itself as the oldest department of the subject in Pakistan.¹⁵ The University of Sindh opened its department in 1972, under the direction of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, “in order to infuse fresh blood in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the country”.¹⁶ That reason tells you why the subject mattered to the new state. It needed people who understood the world to serve it abroad.

Pakistan had good reason to study the world closely. It was born in 1947 beside a much larger neighbour with which it at once had disputes over Kashmir and over the waters of the Indus. It sat between South Asia, Central Asia, Iran and China, and the great powers of the Cold War sought its friendship. Its security, its economy and much of its politics have always depended on relations across its borders. For a Pakistani officer, International Relations is not a foreign subject. It is the study of the forces that decide the country’s safety and prosperity.

The state’s own principles give the Pakistani study of the subject its starting point. They begin with the Quaid-e-Azam’s broadcast of 1948, quoted in the section on who acts in world politics. It promised friendship with all nations, no aggressive designs, honesty and fair play, and support for oppressed peoples and for the UN Charter.¹⁷ A candidate writing as a future officer argues from these principles and from Pakistan’s national interest, while showing that he knows the theories and the views of others.

10. The subject at work on two events

The subject earns its place by explaining real events. Two recent ones show how much ground it now covers, and how a single event pulls in several of its parts at once.

The first is the loss and damage fund agreed at Sharm el-Sheikh on 20 November 2022, which the section on the levels of analysis used.¹⁹ It is a case in climate change, which the subject hardly studied before the 1990s. It is a case in international organisation, because the deal was struck inside a UN conference under a UN treaty. It is a case in diplomacy, because Pakistan used its chair of the Group of 77 to put the item on the agenda and then hold the bloc together.¹⁸ It is a case in international political economy, because the argument was over who pays whom. For Pakistan it shows a smaller state using an international body and a coalition to win something its own power alone could not.

The second is the Black Sea Grain Initiative of July 2022 to July 2023. It is a case in war, because it arose from Russia’s war in Ukraine. It is a case in economics and in human security, because grain from the Black Sea feeds people far from the war. The World Food Programme used the corridor to ship over 725,000 tonnes of Ukrainian wheat to its operations in Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and Yemen.²³ It is a case in diplomacy and in the role of a middle power, because Türkiye and the UN brokered what the two enemies could not agree directly. It shows the subject’s old core, war between states, joined to its newer rings, food, the economy and the people far away who pay the cost.

Put side by side, the two cases show what the subject’s scope means in practice. It is no longer a list of separate topics. One event now draws in war, law, economics, organisations and people, and an answer that shows those links is the answer the examiner wants.

11. The case that the subject is too Western

The strongest criticism of International Relations is about where it comes from. It was born in Britain, grew up in the United States, and for most of its life its theories were written by Western scholars about Western history. In 1977 Stanley Hoffmann, a professor at Harvard, called it “an American social science”. He argued that it took its form after 1945 from three things, America’s new role as a world power, the ideas its scholars brought with them, and the money and institutions American universities could offer.¹² A subject made in one place, critics say, tends to see the world as that place sees it.

The charge has weight. The subject’s founding date is 1919, as if no one had thought about relations between peoples before Europe did. Its idea of the state system begins with the European treaties of Westphalia in 1648. Yet the Muslim world had its own developed law of war, peace and treaties, the siyar, centuries earlier, and China, India and the Islamic empires all ran systems of relations between rulers. The chapter on how a society of states grew, in head I, sets out these older orders. A theory built only from Europe’s wars may also misread a country like Pakistan, whose story begins with colonial rule and partition rather than with the growth of a European great power.

Scholars outside the West, and many inside it, have answered with a call for a “Global IR”. In 2014 Amitav Acharya wrote that the subject “does not reflect the voices, experiences, knowledge claims, and contributions of the vast majority of the societies and states in the world”.¹³ He asked the subject to ground itself in world history, to build theories from societies it had ignored, and to take regions and their own ideas of order seriously.¹³ The chapter on critical theory, in head II, takes this further.

The defence is that the subject’s main ideas travel well. Power, security, the national interest, deterrence and the balance of power explain much of South Asia’s history, and Pakistani scholars and officials use them every day. The fairest judgment, and the one to write, is that the subject’s tools are useful everywhere but its examples and assumptions need widening, and that Pakistani and Muslim experience is part of that widening.

12. How far the scope reaches today

The subject’s scope has never been fixed, and it is still moving. Three changes mark where it stands in 2026.

First, the old core is back. For two decades after the Cold War many writers expected war between great powers to fade. Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine from 2022, the rivalry between the United States and China, and the clash between India and Pakistan in May 2025 have put power and deterrence back at the centre. The CE-2026 paper reflected this. It asked about the balance of power, about deterrence in the light of the May 2025 conflict, and whether a world of two great powers is more stable than a world of many.¹

Second, law and the courts have moved into the centre. On 29 December 2023 South Africa began a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice under the Genocide Convention, over Israel’s war in Gaza, and many states have since joined the proceedings.²⁴ A subject that once left law to the lawyers now has to explain how states use courts, and how far courts can restrain the strong. CE-2026 asked exactly this, about international law “where there is asymmetry in power dynamics with special reference to Israel-Gaza conflict”.¹

Third, the non-state actors keep growing. Technology companies hold data and platforms that governments depend on. Armed groups can take over states, as the Taliban did in Afghanistan in 2021. Information spreads across borders faster than any government can answer it. The CE-2025 paper asked how the Taliban’s change from a non-state actor to a ruling one challenges the idea of security. The CE-2026 paper asked how the subject’s scope has grown with the rise of non-state actors.¹ The answer to both, in one line, is that the subject now studies every actor whose decisions change what happens across borders, while recognising that states still hold powers that no one else has.

13. Mix-ups about the subject

• “International Relations and international politics are the same.” International politics is the struggle for power among states. International Relations is wider and takes in economic, social and cultural relations as well.
• “International Relations is the same as foreign policy.” Foreign policy is one state’s aims and means. International Relations studies what happens when all states’ policies meet.
• “The subject began with the United Nations in 1945.” It began in 1919, at Aberystwyth, out of the First World War and the hopes placed in the League of Nations.² It grew fastest in the United States after 1945.
• “Only states are actors.” States are the main actors, but intergovernmental bodies, companies, charities, armed groups and individuals also act. Equally wrong is the claim that states no longer matter.
• “The great debates were about real wars.” They were arguments among scholars about how to study the world, though real events, such as the Second World War, set them off.
• “The levels of analysis are three kinds of war.” They are three places to look for causes: the person, the state and the system.⁷
• “Waltz’s 1959 book is his theory of neo-realism.” Man, the State, and War (1959) sorted the causes of war into three images. His neo-realist theory came later, in Theory of International Politics (1979), which the chapter on neo-realism teaches.

14. What FPSC has asked

The questions are quoted as printed, slips included.¹ The CE-2024 Paper I question survives only in one retyped copy, so its wording (“What insights do these conflicts my, into”) may not be FPSC’s exact text. The MCQ’s answer is “None of these”: the first department was at Aberystwyth, in Wales.²

Two kinds of question come back. One asks how the subject became a discipline (CE-2018, CE-2025); the sections on 1919 and on the great debates answer it. The other asks for the definition and the changing scope, often tied to a current war or to non-state actors (CE-2021, CE-2024, CE-2026); the sections on what the subject studies, who acts, and how far the scope reaches today answer it.

15. Facts to carry into the hall

• First department and chair. Aberystwyth, Wales, 1919; the Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Politics; first holder Alfred Zimmern; E. H. Carr held it from 1936; endowed by David Davies and his sisters with £20,000.²
• Chatham House. Inaugural meeting of the British Institute of International Affairs, 5 July 1920.³
• Council on Foreign Relations. Founded 1921.⁴
• Carr. The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (1939): “The science of international politics is in its infancy.”⁵
• Morgenthau. Politics Among Nations (1948): “International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power.”⁶
• Waltz. Man, the State, and War (1959): three images, “within man, within the structure of the separate states, within the state system”.⁷
• Singer. “The Level-of-Analysis Problem in International Relations”, World Politics, 1961.⁸
• Second debate. Bull, “The Case for a Classical Approach” (1966), against Kaplan, “The New Great Debate”.⁹¹⁰
• Third debate. Named by Yosef Lapid, 1989.¹¹
• Hoffmann. “An American Social Science: International Relations” (1977).¹²
• Global IR. Amitav Acharya, 2014.¹³
• Pakistan. PIIA moved to Karachi August 1947, inaugurated by Liaquat Ali Khan 26 March 1948, Pakistan Horizon since 1948;¹⁴ Karachi University’s department 1958;¹⁵ University of Sindh’s 1972.¹⁶
• The Quaid, February 1948. “Our foreign policy is one of friendliness and goodwill towards all the nations of the world.”¹⁷
• States. 193 members of the United Nations.²²
• Scale. Apple’s sales in its year to 27 September 2025, $416.2 billion; Pakistan’s GDP in 2025, $407.3 billion (World Bank).²⁵²⁶
• COP27. Loss and damage fund agreed at Sharm el-Sheikh, 20 November 2022; Pakistan chaired the Group of 77 and China (134 members).¹⁹¹⁸²⁰

16. What loses marks

1. Defining the subject by one word. “International Relations is the study of power” is half a definition. Give the core (relations between states) and the scope (other actors, other relations).
2. Treating the four terms as one. Show the difference between International Relations, international politics and foreign policy in two lines; it costs little and the examiner notices.
3. Telling the history as a list of dates. Explain why the subject was born: the First World War and the wish to prevent the next one.
4. Listing non-state actors without weighing them. Say what each kind can and cannot do compared with a state.
5. Writing about scope with no current example. CE-2024 and CE-2026 tied scope to Ukraine, Gaza and non-state actors. Use a dated case.
6. Leaving Pakistan out. A Pakistani officer is expected to know how the subject came to Pakistan and why it matters to the country.
7. Mixing up Waltz’s three images with three kinds of war. They are three places to look for causes.

17. A worked answer plan

The question is CE-2021 Paper I, Q.2: “Define International Relations. Discuss it’s changing/ evolving scope.”¹

The tasks. (1) Define the subject. (2) Show how its scope has changed over time. (3) Show where it stands now.

Introduction. International Relations is the study of relations across state borders, above all between sovereign states living with no government above them, and increasingly between states and the non-state actors that cross borders. Its scope has never been fixed: it began in 1919 as the study of war and peace and has widened ring by ring to economics, rights, the environment and technology. The answer will argue that the scope has widened without the core disappearing, because states still hold powers no other actor has.

The body, under headings.

1. Definitions. Morgenthau’s “struggle for power” as the narrow core; the wide definition of all relations across borders; the difference from international politics and foreign policy.
2. Birth of the subject. Aberystwyth in 1919, the Woodrow Wilson Chair, Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations; the aim of preventing war.
3. The first scope: war and peace. The League, idealism and Carr’s realist reply.
4. Widening after 1945. The Cold War, nuclear deterrence, decolonisation and many new states.
5. Widening in the 1970s. Oil, debt and trade bring political economy into the subject.
6. Widening after 1991. Human rights, environment, gender, terrorism and human security.
7. New actors. Intergovernmental bodies, companies, NGOs, armed groups and individuals, each with an example; the Apple and Pakistan comparison weighed.
8. New methods and voices. The great debates; the call for a Global IR.
9. The scope today. Ukraine, Gaza and the ICJ, the May 2025 India-Pakistan clash; climate and the COP27 fund with Pakistan’s role as chair of the Group of 77.
10. Why it matters for Pakistan. The PIIA and the first university departments; the Quaid’s principles.

A figure to draw. The rings of the agenda, from war and peace in 1919 to pandemics, cyber attack and climate in the 2020s.

Judgment. The scope has widened from the high politics of war between states to almost every relation across borders, and from states to many kinds of actor. Yet the return of great-power rivalry and of war in Europe and South Asia shows that the old core still decides the most. A good definition today keeps both.

A model opening sentence. International Relations was born at Aberystwyth in 1919 as the study of how to prevent another world war; a century later it studies everything that crosses a border, from remittances and pandemics to drones and climate finance, yet the struggle for power among sovereign states remains its centre of gravity.

Conclusion. The subject’s scope will keep growing because the world keeps producing new forces that cross borders. A candidate who can define it, trace its growth and apply its levels of analysis to a current event, from Pakistan’s point of view, has the base on which every other chapter of this paper builds.

What to remember from this chapter

• International Relations studies relations across state borders: between states, and between states and other actors, in politics, economics, law and culture.
• It is wider than international politics (the struggle for power among states) and different from foreign policy (one state’s aims and means).
• The subject was born at Aberystwyth in 1919, out of the First World War, to study how war could be prevented; Chatham House (1920) and the Council on Foreign Relations (1921) followed.
• It grew through great debates: idealists against realists, traditionalists against scientists, and positivists against post-positivists.
• States remain the main actors, but intergovernmental bodies, companies, NGOs, armed groups and individuals act too.
• Its agenda has widened in rings: war and peace, the Cold War and nuclear weapons, political economy, rights and environment, and now pandemics, cyber attack and climate.
• The levels of analysis sort the causes of an event into the individual, the state and the system.
• Pakistan’s study of the subject began with the PIIA in Karachi in 1947 and Karachi University’s department in 1958.
• The main criticism is that the subject is too Western; the call for a Global IR answers it.
• In 2026 the old core of power and war is back at the centre, beside courts, climate and non-state actors.

Check yourself

Answer each in your own words before you open the answer.

1. What is the difference between International Relations and international politics? (The section on four words that sound alike.)

2. Why was the first chair of International Politics set up in 1919, and where? (The section on why the subject was born.)

3. What were the two sides in the second great debate, and what did they argue about? (The section on how the subject grew.)

4. Name four kinds of non-state actor, with an example of each, and one thing a state can do that none of them can. (The section on who acts in world politics.)

5. Explain Pakistan’s role in the COP27 loss and damage fund at each of the three levels of analysis. (The section on how the subject looks at an event.)

6. When and how did the study of International Relations begin in Pakistan? (The section on International Relations in Pakistan.)

7. What is the case that International Relations is too Western, and how would you answer it? (The section on that case.)