A Genealogy of IR Scholarship

This page reorganizes a semester of foundational IR readings into a single genealogy. The course had five aims: to grasp the field’s major concepts and debates, to read classic texts against one another, to learn the basics of theory-building and research design, to apply theory to real-world problems, and to find openings for one’s own research. Reading week by week, those aims kept pointing back to one structure underneath, a family tree of paradigms that keep answering, and re-answering, the same few questions.

The story runs from classical realism’s focus on human nature (Thucydides, Carr, Morgenthau), through Waltz’s move to structure, to the liberal and institutionalist reply that cooperation can survive anarchy, to constructivism’s claim that anarchy and interest are made rather than given, with critical voices hanging off the trunk to ask what each paradigm cannot see. The lower band is where these paradigms meet real fights: the causes of war, alliances, institutions, and power transition. Click any node to read the week behind it: the readings, my notes on the discussion questions, the weekly exercise, and how the theory lands in current events.