Critical Review:

Compare and contrast different approaches to the study of international politics.

This means that you will review the key features of some of the theories of
International Relations. There are different ways to understand the world we live in,
and different theoretical approaches provide different ways of identifying and
exploring the subject matter of international politics.

The first four weeks of class will have presented you with various pictures of the
state- as an autonomous entity, as a collection of interests, as a series of processes,
as an organized crime syndicate, as a protector of populations and so on. Each of
these pictures has told you something about the idea of power- power as an interest
in an anarchical system, and power as a cooperative or collective understanding of
how the world is.

This assignment ask you to answer the following question and to defend your
answer in the context of the course readings to date:

Is the international system a system governed primarily by anarchy or

primarily by law and cooperation?

You can also explore the limitations to this question and go beyond the binary.

Answer should be 3 pages double-spaced. You must think very carefully about what
elements/arguments you deem to be important. Do not just throw anything and
everything in your paper. You have to choose what you think are most important
points. Your answer does not have to be comprehensive but rather coherent.

Review different theories learned in class (take two different approaches and try
and assess it and explain how it relates to power)

- No additional research, only course material needed.

Textbooks:

Global Politics: A new introduction (2nd editionby Jenny Edkins and Maja Zehfuss
chapter 11

Introduction to International Relations (6th edition) by Robert Jackson and Georg

Sorensen

Readings did so far: Please refer to the following for the approaches for the paper

 Jackson & Sorensen Chapter 1

 Edkins and Zehfuss Chapter 11
 Jackson & Sorensen Chapter 3
 Charles Tilly: War Making and State Making as Organized Crime (pp. 169-
186)
 Jackson & Sorensen Chapter 4
Edkins, Jenny, and Maja Zehfuss. Global politics: a new introduction. Routledge, 2013.
Print.

Jackson, Robert, and Georg Sørensen. Introduction to international relations: theories

and approaches. Oxford University Press, 2016. Print.

Tilly, Charles, Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol. War
Making and State Making As Organized Crime. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985. Print.