What Is International Relations? Research Areas, Funding, and Career Paths

International relations (IR) is the study of interactions between states and other actors across borders — war and peace, diplomacy, trade and finance, international law, and the institutions that govern a world with no single central authority. It is usually taught as a subfield of political science, though it draws heavily on economics, history, and law, and at many universities it exists as its own department or school of international affairs rather than sitting entirely inside a political science department. Where political science as a whole studies power and governance broadly — including how a single country governs itself — international relations narrows in specifically on what happens between and among political actors that answer to no common government.

The field’s defining puzzle is what scholars call the anarchic international system: unlike domestic politics, where a government has final authority to make and enforce binding decisions, no equivalent authority sits above sovereign states. IR asks how cooperation, order, and even durable rules nonetheless emerge — and how conflict happens — among actors that cannot be compelled by a higher power. Three long-standing theoretical traditions organize most of the field’s debates: realism (states are self-interested actors pursuing security and power in an anarchic system, and cooperation is fragile and self-interested); liberalism (international institutions, economic interdependence, and democratic governance can produce durable cooperation, not just temporary truces); and constructivism (state interests themselves are shaped by shared ideas, identities, and norms, not fixed in advance by material power alone). Most contemporary IR scholarship draws on more than one tradition rather than adopting a single one wholesale, and empirical research increasingly tests these traditions’ predictions against real cases and data rather than treating them purely as competing philosophies.

What International Relations Studies

IR scholarship organizes around a recurring set of questions:

• War, peace, and security. Why wars start and end, what makes deterrence and alliances hold or fail, how nuclear weapons and other capabilities shape strategic behavior, and what conditions make peace agreements durable rather than temporary pauses.
• Diplomacy and foreign policy. How states form and pursue their foreign-policy goals, the domestic political processes and bureaucracies behind a given foreign-policy decision, and the practice of negotiation and diplomatic representation between governments.
• International political economy. Trade policy, international finance, sanctions, foreign aid, and the politics behind global economic institutions — how economic interdependence shapes and is shaped by political relationships between states.
• International law and organizations. How treaties, international courts, and organizations such as the United Nations function without a global enforcement mechanism, why states comply with international law even when it is not directly enforceable against them, and what makes some international institutions more effective or durable than others.
• Non-state and transnational actors. International relations increasingly studies actors beyond states themselves — multinational corporations, non-governmental organizations, international institutions, non-state armed groups, and transnational networks — and how they shape outcomes states alone do not fully control.

How International Relations Relates to Political Science and Neighboring Fields

International relations is conventionally treated as one of political science’s core subfields, alongside comparative politics, domestic politics, political theory, and public policy. It shares political science’s core commitment to studying power and governance empirically, but its unit of analysis shifts outward, from a single political system to interactions among many. In practice, the two subfields overlap heavily: a scholar studying how domestic political institutions shape a country’s foreign policy, or how democratization affects a state’s likelihood of going to war, is doing work that belongs to both.

IR also sits close to several other disciplines. Economics supplies much of the theoretical and empirical toolkit for international political economy — trade theory, game-theoretic bargaining models, and quantitative methods for cross-national economic data. History is foundational to diplomatic history, the study of past wars and treaties, and case-based IR scholarship generally; much of the field’s classic theoretical work (the causes of the First World War, the Cold War’s bipolar structure) is inseparable from close historical analysis. Law underlies the study of international law, treaties, and institutions such as the International Court of Justice. And area/regional studies programs, which combine language training with deep knowledge of a specific country or region, frequently produce and employ IR scholars working on that region’s foreign relations.

Major Subfields of International Relations

• Security studies. The causes and conduct of war, deterrence and coercion, arms control and nuclear strategy, alliance politics, and — in its newer strategic-studies form — cyber conflict and other emerging domains of state competition.
• International political economy (IPE). Trade policy and trade agreements, international finance and monetary relations, foreign direct investment, economic sanctions, and the politics of international economic institutions such as the World Trade Organization, IMF, and World Bank.
• Foreign policy analysis. How individual states form and execute foreign policy — the role of leaders, bureaucracies, domestic political pressure, and public opinion in shaping decisions that are conventionally analyzed as if a state acted as a single rational actor.
• International law and international organizations. How treaties and customary international law function, why and when states comply with legal obligations they cannot be directly forced to honor, and how bodies such as the United Nations, regional organizations, and international courts operate and evolve.
• Peace and conflict studies. Civil war and its resolution, peacekeeping and peacebuilding, negotiation and mediation, and the conditions under which post-conflict societies do or do not return to violence.
• Global governance and international environmental politics. How states and international institutions coordinate on transnational problems — climate change, pandemic response, migration — that no single government can address alone.

The Research-Funding Landscape for International Relations

Because IR is organized as a subfield of political science, its federal and private funding landscape overlaps substantially with political science’s, with a few funders whose mission specifically targets security- and international-affairs research:

• National Science Foundation (NSF). IR research is eligible for the same NSF Political Science Program that funds the rest of political science, housed in the Division of Social and Economic Sciences (SES) within the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). Proposals are evaluated against NSF’s standard Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts criteria, and the program explicitly supports international-relations research alongside American politics, comparative politics, and political methodology.
• Department of Defense — Minerva Research Initiative. A DoD-funded, university-administered basic-research program supporting social-science scholarship relevant to national security — conflict, deterrence, and state stability are core Minerva topics, making it one of the most directly relevant funding channels for security-studies and conflict-focused IR research specifically, distinct from NSF’s general political-science support.
• United States Institute of Peace (USIP). A federally funded, congressionally established institution focused specifically on international conflict analysis and peacebuilding; it supports research fellowships and grants relevant to scholars working on conflict resolution, mediation, and post-conflict stabilization — territory that overlaps closely with the peace-and-conflict-studies subfield above.
• State Department and Title VI area-studies funding. The State Department funds targeted international-affairs and public-diplomacy research programs, and Title VI of the Higher Education Act, administered through the Department of Education, funds university National Resource Centers for language and area studies — a significant funding channel for IR scholars whose work is grounded in a specific region or requires foreign-language training.
• Private foundations. The Carnegie Corporation of New York, founded with an explicit historical mission around international peace and security, remains a notable funder of international-affairs and security-policy research. The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) administers international and area-studies dissertation and research fellowships that have long supported IR doctoral research specifically. Researchers should verify each foundation’s current program priorities directly before applying, since thematic foundation funding shifts more often than federal program structures do.

For research offices building a funding strategy, subfield matters as much as discipline: a security- or conflict-focused proposal has a genuine case for Minerva or USIP in addition to NSF, while a broader theoretical or comparative IR project is more likely to fit best within NSF’s general Political Science Program.

Research Methods and Tools

IR methodology spans the same broad quantitative-qualitative-formal range as political science generally, applied to cross-national and historical evidence:

• Case study and process tracing. Deep, structured analysis of a single conflict, negotiation, or diplomatic episode, tracing the causal mechanism connecting cause to outcome in detail — a central method for testing theory against complex, historically contingent events where large-sample statistics are infeasible.
• Comparative case analysis. Systematic comparison across a small number of carefully selected cases (wars, crises, alliances) designed to isolate the factors that explain why similar situations produced different outcomes.
• Quantitative and large-N analysis. Statistical analysis of cross-national and event-level datasets — conflict-onset data, alliance and trade data, and event datasets tracking political and violent events over time — used to test theories about the correlates of war, trade, and cooperation across many cases at once.
• Formal and game-theoretic modeling. Mathematical models of strategic interaction between rational actors — bargaining models of war, deterrence models, and coalition-formation models — used to generate testable predictions about conflict and cooperation.
• Archival and historical research. Primary-source diplomatic and government archives remain central to security studies, diplomatic history, and foreign-policy analysis, especially for questions about decision-making processes that data alone cannot reconstruct.
• Elite interviews and fieldwork. Direct interviews with diplomats, policymakers, and conflict participants, along with fieldwork in conflict or post-conflict settings, provide evidence that documentary and statistical sources cannot fully substitute for.
• Text-as-data and computational methods. Computational analysis of diplomatic communications, treaty text, UN voting records, and news and social-media data, applying natural-language-processing techniques to extract patterns at a scale manual coding cannot match.

Career and Training Pathways

Doctoral training in international relations typically follows the standard political-science and social-science PhD model: several years of graduate coursework covering IR theory and methods (often alongside coursework in a second subfield, such as comparative politics), comprehensive or qualifying examinations, and an original dissertation, generally taking five to seven years in the US system. Many programs also expect or require regional expertise and foreign-language training, particularly for students whose research is grounded in a specific country or region.

Career paths for IR-trained graduates extend well beyond a traditional faculty position:

• Academic research and teaching at universities, in political science departments or dedicated schools of international affairs and public policy.
• The foreign service and diplomacy, including the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Service and equivalent diplomatic corps in other countries.
• Intelligence and national-security analysis, applying IR training to assess foreign-policy developments and security threats within government agencies.
• International organizations such as the United Nations, World Bank, and regional bodies, where IR expertise directly informs policy and program work.
• Think tanks and policy research institutions, producing applied foreign-policy and security analysis for policymakers and the public.
• NGOs and humanitarian organizations, particularly for graduates with training in conflict resolution, peacebuilding, or development.
• Political risk consulting, applying IR analysis commercially to assess international business and investment risk.

The International Studies Association (ISA), founded in 1959, is the field’s principal dedicated professional society, publishing International Studies Quarterly and organizing specialized sections across the subfields above; its annual convention is one of the discipline’s primary venues for presenting new research. IR scholars are also active within the broader American Political Science Association (APSA), which maintains dedicated sections for international security, foreign policy, and international collaboration, reflecting the field’s position as both its own professional community and a core subfield of political science.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the simplest definition of international relations?

International relations is the study of interactions between states and other cross-border actors — war and peace, diplomacy, trade, international law, and global governance — in a system with no central authority above individual states.

Is international relations the same as political science?

International relations is a subfield within political science, focused specifically on interactions between states and other international actors. Political science as a whole also includes comparative politics, domestic politics, political theory, and public policy and administration, most of which center on politics within a single political system rather than between them.

What jobs can you get with an international relations degree?

At the undergraduate level, common paths include the foreign service, government and intelligence agencies, international organizations, nonprofit and humanitarian work, journalism, and the private sector. At the doctoral level, common paths include academic research and teaching, foreign-policy and intelligence analysis, think tanks, and international organizations.

Who funds international relations research?

In the United States, the National Science Foundation’s Political Science Program is the main federal funder of basic IR research. The Department of Defense’s Minerva Research Initiative and the United States Institute of Peace fund security- and conflict-focused IR work specifically, and the State Department and Title VI area-studies programs fund regionally focused research. Private funders include the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Social Science Research Council.

What are the main theories in international relations?

The three major traditions are realism (states as self-interested actors pursuing security and power under anarchy), liberalism (institutions and interdependence can produce durable cooperation), and constructivism (shared ideas, identities, and norms shape state interests, not material power alone). Most contemporary research draws on more than one tradition rather than treating them as mutually exclusive.

Related CASRAI Guides

This guide is part of a series covering major academic and scientific disciplines for researchers and research administrators. See the overview of the branches of science for how international relations fits alongside other fields, and the companion guide to political science, IR’s parent discipline. For adjacent fields covering strategic analysis and decision science relevant to security studies, and international communication and public diplomacy relevant to foreign-policy analysis, see the companion guides to operations research and communication studies.