International politics is the study of the patterns of political relations among nation-states. It has a broad base and draws upon other disciplines such as sociology, history, economics, geography, anthropology, law and political theory. It also interacts with other fields that have traditionally been the focus of political science research, such as international law and diplomatic history.
In the past century scholars have developed a variety of approaches to this subject. They include studies of the evolution of the state system and its underlying principles; analyses of the emergence of international institutions such as the League of Nations; various kinds of “devil” theories, with capitalists and imperialists variously cast as the enemy; realism (with its stress on power drives and its emphasis on the role of the balance of forces); liberalism; psychological approaches to foreign policy and national security policy; bargaining and game theory; systems analysis and a number of other analytical methods.
In addition, the discipline has spawned a large number of journals and academic departments dedicated to it. The first was Foreign Affairs, founded in 1922 by the Council on Foreign Relations to serve as a journal for the foreign policy establishment; others included World Politics, which began in 1948, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, which has been influential in bridging peace research and IR, in 1957 and the International Studies Quarterly, more oriented toward work using quantitative and behavioral methodology, in 1962. Other publications in the field have come from the United States, France, Germany, Japan and other nations.