During my summer co-op, I sat in the lunchroom one day reading descriptions of the 300-level Political Science courses available. As I am in my fourth year and have limited time until graduation, I decided it was now or never to enrol in a Political Science course teaching solid theory while fulfilling an International Relations major requirement. I have to be honest (and Professor Crawford did advise us of this in the first lecture), it ended up taking a lot of persistence to get into this course.

I took POLI 260 in second year and I was introduced to the existing and developing schools of thought and their relevance to global politics. It was in this course that I first discovered the complicated, conflicting, and often overlapping nature of what constitutes International Relations and surrounding theoretical beliefs. I had examined (for example), how the security dilemma applies within the ideological frameworks of realism and liberalism, and whether IR emphasizes a constant power struggle or possible cooperation between states. By the end of it all, I have to admit that I was still trying to understand distinctions and limitations between the various IR theories, which is why I saw POLI 367B as an opportunity to expand on that level of understanding. On another note, in a history class, I remember my classmates and I discussing the difficulties in defining something as broad and largely relevant as intrastate wars (I was reminded of this after the discussion on IR as a divided discipline with changing interpretations). After all, the definition of civil war has changed over time following critical debates on what constitutes an end to such a war, or the minimum amount of bloody casualties before a war is declared “civil.”  I wonder then, (and I’m referencing what was discussed in the previous lecture), can defining a civil war also be categorized as an “Elusive Quest” based on how Ferguson and Mansbach chose to frame it?

This brings me back to the present and what I’m about to learn in this course titled “International Relations Theory and the International System.” With the help of the readings, I have a better understanding of what was demonstrated in class with glasses – theory can be a pair of glasses to see the world and there are the key proponents (like Hobbes and Rousseau) along the way with their own views. It can also lead an individual to understand and represent contemporary issues in our world in one (perhaps incomplete) way and therefore, it can be a limitation.

After attending the first few lectures, I confirmed what I initially thought – this is going to be a challenging course for all the right reasons. Certainly I will be puzzled and bewildered after one lecture or more, but I am excited to compare what I know now in September to the knowledge that I will have gained by the end of term in December. I realize that I will progressively get more familiar with the wide range of terminology used by Professor Crawford and my peers in this course. This is something I look forward to because of my interest in the etymology of words, for example, last lecture we were already introduced to one that will be used often – epistemology. And this begins what I predict will be an engaging course where I will learn to appreciate the complicated intensity of IR.