Mezhdunarodni otnosheniya [International Relations]

Defining the breadth and content of the discipline of International Relations (IR) has been one of the most elusive conceptual, theoretical, and methodological tasks social scientists have been facing over the past century. The bulging literature on the subject has contributed surprisingly little to clarify the understanding of the boundaries of the field, and recent historic, paradigm-shifting events further rekindled old debates by pouring old wine into new glasses. Fittingly, Nadia Boyadjieva's account skillfully glides across a wide band of theoretical considerations, remaining truthful to its mission of offering a rich palette of analytical approaches (cf. p. 10) in tracing the permutations of what she consistently terms the “system of international relations” from the Westphalian Peace Treaties until the end of the Cold War. In itself, the book's title “International Relations” is as incomplete as it is overreaching. This is a book whose intellectual merit lives in a series of...