{"id":3753,"date":"2010-09-29T21:53:25","date_gmt":"2010-09-29T20:53:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=3753"},"modified":"2010-09-29T21:53:25","modified_gmt":"2010-09-29T20:53:25","slug":"my-international-relations-course-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=3753","title":{"rendered":"My international relations course (2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

As explained last week, I’ve just\u00a0 started a course at the City Lit<\/a> in central London. The course – which will run for an evening each week for 12 weeks – is entitled “International Relations And World Conflict”<\/a> and our lecturer is an American called Dr Dale Mineshima-Lowe.<\/p>\n

Session two this evening was quite heavy because we were introduced to the notion of theories of international relations and the lecturer outlined four of these:<\/p>\n

1) Rationalism – states are assumed to act rationally in pursuit of their interests, assessing costs against benefits, and acting to maximise advantage and minimise losses<\/p>\n

2) Realism – states prioritise national interests and security over ideology and generally distrust long-term co-operation or alliances [more information here<\/a>]<\/p>\n

3) Liberalism – the prime determinant of state behaviour is assumed to be preferences rather than capabilities and interactions between states can be economic as well as political [more information here<\/a>]<\/p>\n

4) Constructivism – this theory is based on the idea that human association is determined primarily by shared ideas rather than material forces [more information here<\/a>]<\/p>\n

There’s a discussion of international relations theory on Wikipedia here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"