International relations became a university subject only in 1919, and in Wales
People have analysed rivalries between states since Thucydides, yet the academic discipline dates only to 1919. That year Aberystwyth, then part of the University of Wales, created the Woodrow Wilson Chair, the first professorship in international relations, endowed by David Davies and first held by Alfred Zimmern in the aftermath of the First World War.
Precursors existed. Paul Samuel Reinsch had taught international politics courses at the University of Wisconsin from 1899, and Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service, also founded in 1919, is the oldest continuously running school of international affairs in the United States. Georgetown awarded its first master's degrees in foreign service in 1922. In 1927 the London School of Economics opened a department at the urging of the Nobel peace laureate Philip Noel-Baker, and the Graduate Institute in Geneva was founded to train diplomats for the League of Nations.
Scholars trace the subject matter much further back. Barry Buzan and Richard Little treat the Sumerian city-states of around 3500 BC as the first complete international system. Thucydides dissected the causes of the war between Athens and Sparta, Sun Tzu wrote on strategy in the sixth century BC, and Machiavelli's The Prince, published in 1532, analysed the foreign policy of Florence. Kant's writing is often cited as the earliest version of the theory that democracies avoid fighting one another.
A popular story says the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 created the modern sovereign state. In fact Westphalia left layered sovereignty in place, especially inside the Holy Roman Empire, and many historians see the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 as a clearer sign of the new norm that rulers had no equals at home and no superiors abroad. The French Revolution then relocated sovereignty from the monarch to the nation, and colonialism later exported the European model of equal states to other continents.
Today the field covers war, trade, diplomacy and foreign policy, along with intergovernmental bodies, nongovernmental groups and multinational companies. Realism, liberalism and constructivism are its main schools. Writers capitalise International Relations to separate the discipline from the events it studies, and those events keep multiplying: in 2024 the United Nations Office at Geneva hosted 8,505 meetings at the Palais des Nations.
Source: International relations
