The Future of the Discipline of International Relations in the Wake of Putin Regime’s War in Ukraine – Birgül Demirtaş

---

The academic
discipline of International Relations (IR) will celebrate its 104th birthday in
2023 in the midst of ongoing conflicts, rising tensions and dangerous
ambiguities in global politics. As the civil war in Syria is still going on
after 11 years of its outbreak  and
Taliban regime is violating fundamental human rights in Afghanistan, Putin
regime has started an unjust war in the neighbouring Ukraine on 24 February
2022. As the invasion continues unabated, the international community’s efforts
are far from stopping the aggression of the Russian regime. In addition, the
Russian president Vladimir Putin is often threatening the world with starting a
nuclear war.

Then, it is the high time
to ask the question of why the academic field of IR has so far failed to
fulfill its most important task of preventing wars and establishing a peaceful
global order? This opinion piece will try to shed light on the reasons for the
current inability of the discipline to solve the fundamental problems in the
inter-state relations.

The discipline was
established in 1919 at the University of Aberystwyth in the United Kingdom.
20,000 Sterlin was donated to the University by a British family “in memory of the
fallen students of our University for the study of those related problems of
law and politics, of ethics and economics, which are raised by the prospect of
a League of Nations and for the truer understanding of civilisation other than
our own.” The Department of International Politics had just two
lecturers at the beginning: Alfred Zimmern as the Woodrow Wilson Chair of
International Politics and his fellow scholar Sydney Herbert. These scholars had
a fundamental aim in the wake of the tragedy of the First World War: How to
prevent the outbreak of new wars? How to establish a permanent peace? How to
convince states to solve their problems via civilian means? How to establish
international institutions to provide a diplomatic platform for states to have
dialogue with each other and create alternative and peaceful means of solving
their bilateral and multilateral problems? Though they were later called as ‘idealists’,
they perceived their goals as quite realistic and feasible at the time.

During more than a century
of IR history; many books, articles, reports, analyses were published all over
the world. As the discipline has spread to other parts of the world in the
following decades, there are now hundreds of IR departments all around the
globe. From the East to the West, from the North to the South, thousands of
scholars are working in IR departments at universities and think tanks. Many
indexed journals with high impact factor have become the shining stars of the
discipline as prestigious publishers are printing quality textbooks and
scientific analyses. However, at the end of the day, despite all these
flourishing publications and departments, the discipline could not yet fulfill
the raison d’être of its existence:
to prevent wars, conflicts and violence in global politics.

If we think of the
discipline of medicine, it has found the treatment for so many illnesses since
its emergence in the ancient period from plague to cholera, from tuberclosis to
spanish flu. If we remember the recent timeline of corona pandemic, an effective
vaccination (Biontech) was developed 1,5 years after the start of the pandemic.
As another example, if we think of the IT departments, their inventions changed
our daily lives completely. However, the IR department is still embedded in its
basic research question and could not come up with an effective solution yet.

Putin regime is
violating the very fundamental principles of international law and carrying out
an unjust war in which civilians are especially targeted. Basic infrastructure
of Ukrainian cities is being destroyed in front of our eyes. Putin aims to
fulfill his expansionist aims and consolidate its near abroad policy in the
ex-Soviet region by carrying out terrible massacres and destroying a country.
In addition, he threatens to use nuclear weapons whenever he deems it appropriate.
In April 2022 Putin stated that “If anyone sets out to intervene in
the current events from the outside and creates unacceptable threats for us
that are strategic in nature, they should know that our response … will be
lightning-fast… We have all the tools for this, that no one else can boast of
having. We won’t boast about it. We’ll use them, if needed. And I want everyone
to know that.”

 In September 2022 Putin once again threatened that
Russia will use all the means at its disposal to defend its territory. These statements
are a clear nuclear threat. It is so terrible that after more than a century
of IR, ‘a man’ has still power at his hand to destroy the whole world via
nuclear weapons.

Of course, it should
also be noted that Putin regime is not the first of its kind to violate basic
principles of the United Nations (UN) Charter and invade other countries. Some
of the other permanent members of the UN Security Council did also carry out
similar policies in the recent years. US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 is
another case from recent history of how the permanent members use violence in
their foreign policy for their so-called “national interests”.

The key question is
why the IR discipline could not become successful to end the wars and achieve
permanent peace.

I think several
reasons can be accounted for the failures of the IR field. First of all, the
scholars have forgotten (or chosen to forget) that the basic aim of IR was to
achieve peace. The focus on establishment of peaceful global order was replaced
by works based on different kinds of realist understanding. There are
“scientific” articles published in indexed journals that consider invasions necessary
for national interests or they try to normalise the conflictual state of
affairs. In addition, it should also be noted how the IR professors as well as
journalists in discussion programs on TV channels all over the world try to
explain Russian military tactics without questioning the invasion at all. There
are abundant examples of these on Turkish TV channels as well. One example of
such statements can be as follows: A Turkish “scholar” on one of these programs
stated that Ukrainian people wanted to leave their country anyway and the
Russian war gave them an opportunity to do so! Hence, thanks to Putin, they
realised their aims! The normalisation of hard power politics and the
internalisation of realism by scholars can very well be observed during times
of conflict.

Second reason for the
failure is still the domination of Western-origin understanding and concepts in
the IR discipline. Although global IR is an emerging field, it still did not
permeate the mainstream works adequately. Publications on understanding and implementation of IR
in different regions of the world from Asia to Africa would provide us new frameworks
to think IR from different perspectives.

Third reason is
related to the linkage between scholarship and political hegemony. In some
countries, including Turkey, some scholars perceive academia as a step forward
for them to get different prizes in their future career, particularly in
politics. Some of them just adopt the politically correct view in line with
domestic Zeitgeist and forget about
the basic principles of academic ethics. These organic intellectuals do not aim
to come up with original scientific works at all. Therefore, the ethics of
academia should be brought back to the agenda of the IR. Offering courses and
seminars on academic ethics can be the first step.

Fourth, IR is still a
male-dominated discipline. All over the globe male scholars still constitute
the majority. Related with this fact, masculine understanding of global
politics still dominate most of the writings despite important achievements of
the feminist theory of international relations.

Despite this gloomy
picture of the IR discipline, we should highlight some achievements as well.
The statistical data show us that inter-state wars have a decreasing trend all
over the world and deaths in battle continue to decline as well. (Pevehouse,
Goldstein, 2017, s. 72-73) Therefore, although the wars did not come to an end
yet, we face fewer conflicts and that should be related to development of the
IR discipline in addition to some other factors as well.

Second achievement
can be the establishment of a suprantional organisation, the European Union
(EU), in which member states go beyond the Westphalian understanding of
sovereignty based on nation-state and achieve to share their decision-making
authority in different realms. An armed conflict among the EU members has just become
unthinkable. Hence, the Kantian permanent peace has already been achieved in
Europe and we should think about how to spillover the EU example to other parts
of the world.

In addition, it
should be noted that authoritarian states are more tempted to use violence in
their foreign policy. Therefore, if the authoritarian turn in global system can
be replaced by a new wave of democratisation, it should be expected to decrease
the number of conflicts as well.

In conclusion, the
new year can be seen as an opportunity to question and rethink about the IR
scholarship in its 104th year. We need to remember why the discipline came into
being in 1919. How we, as scholars, can contribute to change the war-ridden
global politics and establish a peaceful global order. Otherwise, the IR would
just be a derivative of global and domestic Zeitgeists
and lose its importance in the coming decades. We can contribute to change the
world, only if we, as scholars, wish to do so.

Bibliography

Bilgin Pınar and Zeynep Gülşah Çapan, Special Issue on Regional International Relations and Global Worlds: Globalising International Relations, Uluslararası İlişkiler, Vol. 18, No 70, 2021, https://uidergisi.com.tr/yazilar/cilt-18-sayi-70-2021
Pevehouse, John C. W. and Joshua S. Goldstein, International Relations, Boston, Pearson, 2017, p. 72-73.
Tharoor, Ishaan, “Russia pushes the panic button and raises risk of nuclear war”, Washington Post, 21 September 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/21/russia-referendums-ukraine-occupied-nuclear/
“Timeline of Events”, Aberystwyth University, https://www.aber.ac.uk/en/interpol/about/centenary/interpollegacy/timelineofevents/
Wolfgang, Ben, “Angry Putin wields energy, nuclear threats against West”, Washington Times, 27 April 2022, https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/apr/27/angry-putin-wields-energy-nuclear-threats-against-/

---

To cite this work: Birgül Demirtaş, “The Future of the Discipline of International Relations in the Wake of Putin Regime’s War in Ukraine” Panorama, Online, 06 January 2023, https://www.uikpanorama.com/blog/2023/01/06/bd

---

Copyright@UIKPanorama. All on-line and print rights reserved. Opinions expressed in works published by the Panorama belongs to the authors alone unless otherwise stated, and do not imply endorsement by the IRCT, Global Academy, or the Editors/Editorial Board of Panorama.