International Relations and Foreign Policy

International relations research examines how states, international organizations, and other actors compete, cooperate, and negotiate across borders—analyzing the forces that shape decisions about war, trade, diplomacy, and collective governance. Scholars in this area draw on concepts like power distribution, international law, and the construction of shared norms to explain why countries sometimes form stable institutions and why they sometimes descend into conflict despite mutual interest in avoiding it. A persistent puzzle is the security dilemma: the way one state's effort to protect itself can inadvertently threaten others, triggering spirals that no party intended. Active research is pressing further into how softer forms of influence—reputation, cultural appeal, multilateral legitimacy—interact with hard military and economic power in an era where global challenges like climate change and pandemics strain the capacity of existing governance structures.

Works

79,827

Total citations

772,306

Keywords

PowerInternational InstitutionsGlobal GovernanceNormsSoft PowerSecurity Dilemma