What is International Relations?

As a fourth year student, I originally set forth in the course to push my Political Science and Economics degree deeper into the world of International Relations.  I started this course (and still hold) an understanding of Political Science and Economics being heavily reliant upon one another and existing in union. I have less of a heavy dependence on the theoretical and therefore was interested in integrating theory further into my current education.  To reiterate, I have really engaged with the quantitative aspects of UBC’s Political Science program and further into the economic realm of its applications. However, I was interested in discovering a more comprehensive theoretical vessel to apply learned theory to real world concepts.

I was immediately struck with the understanding that our disciplines understanding of theory and the world was much more complex than I had ever expected.  Skimming through the textbook and doing some background research into the discipline, I began to question how this course was going to piece together. Is this lecture hall simply a space to allow us to determine which theory we relate to most? Or will we be expected to follow the yellow brick road of realism so famously highlighted as classical international relations theory? How was I going to draw from a severely broad-based index of theorists and opinions and navigate my way through this course while keeping my feet on the ground?

So far I have been left with a question mark regarding not only the relationship of theory and real world phenomena but even so far as to say my discipline, Political Science. Retrospectively, POLI 367B has somewhat disembodied the ideologies that UBC’s Political Science department features and further divulged how other students across the country or world engage in the phenomena around us (or whether we should engage with phenomena at all). I am starting to see why I have always felt a HUGE disconnect between the quantitative aspects of my learning and the theory I was introduced to earlier in my degree. At this point I’m tightening my seatbelt on this rollercoaster and I’m interested to see what is to come.