An Independent Discipline? On the Separation/Connection between International Relations and Political Science

With every major shift in the world order, when political theory stops being able to account for realities of the day, the debate about the limits and intersections of international relations and political science is resurrected. Beginning with a comparison of the fields in terms of their stances on matters of accumulation, interpretation, and prediction, the study goes on to discuss how useful a separation of disciplines is at this juncture. It concludes that the complexity of international relations and the mixed and entangled nature of its subject matter raises doubts as to whether it is indeed an independent discipline.

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With every major shift in the world order, when political theory stops being able to account for realities of the day, the debate about the limits and intersections of international relations and political science is resurrected. Beginning with a comparison of the fields in terms of their stances on matters of accumulation, interpretation, and prediction, the study goes on to discuss how useful a separation of disciplines is at this juncture. It concludes that the complexity of international relations and the mixed and entangled nature of its subject matter raises doubts as to whether it is indeed an independent discipline.

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