International Relations as a field of academic study

Shaukat Afsar

This article may be read by Barack Obama, David Cameron and even Ban ki Moon! If the world community gets some sort of solutions to all these conflicts, global challenges. Because it’s the discussion of International Relations, only where you can find the total solutions! This is the real image interactions beyond our reach, it’s the interconnected integrated global thinking, whatever happens in USA is more or less influential in domestic decision making in Bangladesh.

International Relations are such a field which predominantly discusses domestic politics in a global context. Students of International Relations study wide variety of subjects along with Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Security Studies, Human rights, Gender Studies, Development Studies, International Law, History, Statistics, Research methodology, public administration, comparative politics and so forth. Literally a unique combination of global solutions study!

Indeed International Relations are so dynamic that today’s a Bangladeshi International Relations students will find next five years’ International Relations as totally different from that previous one. So to be honestly speaking, it’s pretty unlikely that we will justify International Relations study relevance in a conventional sense. It’s very dynamic like globalization!

Theory and Practice are the primary things to be taken into account. And to discuss political happenings we use levels of analysis which basically explore within state, sub-state and individual levels all the people are scholars, thinkers and intellectuals. It’s quite clear that we draw upon specific worldviews to go forward in our individual to state level decision making process. Theorists like realists, liberals and constructivists, Marxists or radicals and neo realists and neo liberals everyone takes world affairs into their consciousness through specific sunglasses. It’s like watching the world from that specific viewpoints and trying to make a sweeping conclusion to predict the outcomes of events. IR theorists predominantly are from USA, and that’s why in spite of its LSE based academic ongoing it hardly can go out of this very fence which is American political science. Hans J. Morgenthau supposed to be the author of IR Bible “Politics among nations: the struggle of power and peace”( 1948) to John Mearsheimeiher of Chicago University everyone have US backed academic roots. Primarily they were Nazi German fled Jews scholars in Post-World WarII era, like Kenneth waltz, Andrew linklater and so on .Linguist turned anarchist scholar and a staunch US foreign policy critic Noam Chomsky has similar origins. Today’s Asian discipline having few recognized theorists just continue to march forward with Arundhati roy,M.J. Akbar,Kuldip nayar and some others. These few peoples are writing on these regional issues comparing with int’l circumstances. In the West, Middle East and the rest part of the world we find many more crucial thinkers on newly adopted and invented theories, ideological debates and such other IR discourses. For instance, global politics implies state to non state actor level discussion while international politics discusses interstate interactions. Many people conflate between International politics and IR, this very mistake was done by Morgenthau kind of scholar as well. International Relations have discussion points ranging from politics to economics, history and so many other issues, but international politics only discusses Politics from an inter-state perspective.

Due to intense pressing concerns across the globe it’s literally impossible for common people to predict those facts predicted by Stratfor kind of prediction institute. We will overlook the academic historical development of IR because it has in fact lost appeal due to growing popularity of International Relations beyond its academic grounds. Today we find a wide range other professionals giving pretty better anticipation regarding world affairs. But unfortunately in Bangladesh we have got to be concerned concerning growing ignorance of our Foreign ministers “buffer state definition problem “.These happens from state level due to conventional misunderstanding towards academics. The author desires to establish “School of International Relations” in Bangladesh which is already over there in Iran, Russia, China, Switzerland and many more countries. International Relations academics should be given more priority in foreign policy decision making process. Many of us are unaware that UN Secretary General Ban ki moon, US president Barack Obama, Iranian foreign minister Mohamad Jawad Jarif and present UN Secretary General candidates Irina Bokova, Miroslav Lajčák are all International Relations academic background students. In terms of Obama he’s predominantly known as constitutional lawyer indeed he finished his Colombia University through International Relations postgraduate degree. So, there is a lot of demand of International Relations scholar in Govt. , Non Govt. and International Organizations. It’s high time we need to pay concentration on the significance of International Relations.

Dedicated to: Noman Chowdhory, who left the world, a brilliant student of International Relations, University of Chittagong.  Let’s everybody pray his departed soul.

Shaukat Afsar

student, International Relations,

University of Chittagong.