Certainly no one who regularly follows current international affairs can help but be impressed by the speed and diversity of events and the difficulty of digesting their meaning and significance. The job of international relations scholars is to make this messy world a little more comprehensible. They attempt to do so by searching beneath the headlines for those fundamental forces which drive the rise and decline of nations or determine the prevalence of cooperation or conflict in world politics. It may be a theory about why wars occur. Or a theory about why economic cooperation among states characterizes some periods in history while conflict and competition seem to prevail during others.
Theories simplify our understanding by abstracting away from the complexities of the real world.
In other words, they leave out much of the detail of day to day events in an effort to locate the few essential factors that drive these events. We all have theories. When we speculate about why events occur, what their significance is, or what will happen next, we base our observations on some implicit theory which tells us which factors are most important in influencing events. The trouble is that most of us carry about theories which are often partial, inconsistant or contradictary. Moreover, we usually neglect to explicitly compare our theories with others or to test them against reality.