Models of International Relations and Foreign Policy

Universities and professional associations usually are organized in ways that tend to separate scholars in adjoining disciplines and perhaps even to promote stereotypes of each other and their scholarly endeavors. The seemingly natural areas of scholarly convergence between diplomatic historians and political scientists who focus on international relations have been underexploited, but there are also a few welcome signs that this may be changing. These include recent essays suggesting ways in which the two disciplines can contribute to each other; a number of prize-winning dissertations, later turned into books, by political scientists during the past decade that effectively combine political science theories and historical research and materials; collaborative efforts among scholars in the two disciplines; and the appearance of such interdisciplinary journals as International Security that provide an outlet for historians and political scientists with common interests.1 This essay is an effort to contribute further to an exchange of ideas between the two disciplines by describing some of the theories, approaches, and “models” that political scientists have used in their research on international relations during recent decades. A brief essay cannot do justice to the entire range of models that may be found in the current literature, if only because the period has witnessed a proliferation of approaches. But perhaps the models described here, when combined with citations to some representative works, will provide diplomatic historians with a useful, if sketchy, road map toward some of the more prominent landmarks in a neighboring discipline.