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Mind the gap: IR and the challenge of international politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 May 2015

Sonia Lucarelli*
Affiliation:
Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
Francesco N. Moro
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milan-Bicocca, Milan, Italy
Daniela Sicurelli
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Trento, Italy
Carla Monteleone
Affiliation:
Department of European Studies and International Integration (DEMS), University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy
Eugenia Baroncelli
Affiliation:
Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
*
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Abstract

The discipline of International Relations (IR) for a long time of its history has developed in the form of Great Debates that involved competing paradigms and schools. More recently, it has been described as a cacophony of voices unable to communicate among themselves, but also incapable to provide keys to understand an ever more complex reality. This collection aims at evaluating the heuristic value of a selection of traditional paradigms (realism and liberalism), schools (constructivism), and subdisciplines (security studies and international political economy) so as to assess the challenges before IR theory today and the ability of the discipline to provide tools to make the changed world still intelligible.

Type
Debate
Copyright
© Societá Italiana di Scienza Politica 2015 

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Footnotes

Editor of the roundtable was Sonia Lucarelli.

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