page_title: International relations
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: International relations / Study of international relations / History
caption_attribution_description: English: First two petals of the Maison de la paix in Geneva (Switzerland). These two petals opened September 2013.
context_page_description: International relations or international affairs —commonly also referred to as international studies, global studies, or global affairs —is the study of politics, economics and law on a global level. Depending on the academic institution, it is either a field of political science, an interdisciplinary academic field similar to global studies, or an independent academic discipline that examines social science and humanities in an international context.
  In all cases, international relations is concerned with the relationships between political entities such as sovereign states, inter-governmental organizations, international non-governmental organizations, other non-governmental organizations, and multinational corporations, and the wider world-systems produced by this interaction. International relations is an academic and a public policy field, and so can be positive and normative, because it analyses and formulates the foreign policy of a given state.
  As a political activity, international relations dates from at least the time of Greek historian Thucydides, but emerged as a discrete academic field within political science in the early 20th century.
context_section_description: International relations as a distinct field of study began in Britain. IR emerged as a formal academic discipline in 1919 with the founding of the first IR professorship: the Woodrow Wilson Chair at Aberystwyth, University of Wales (now Aberystwyth University), held by Alfred Eckhard Zimmern and endowed by David Davies. Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service is the oldest international relations faculty in the United States, founded in 1919. In the early 1920s, the London School of Economics' department of international relations was founded at the behest of Nobel Peace Prize winner Philip Noel-Baker: this was the first institute to offer a wide range of degrees in the field. This was rapidly followed by establishment of IR at universities in the US and in Geneva, Switzerland. The creation of the posts of Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at LSE and at Oxford gave further impetus to the academic study of international relations. Furthermore, the International History department at LSE developed a focus on the history of IR in the early modern, colonial and Cold War periods.
  
  The first university entirely dedicated to the study of IR was the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, which was founded in 1927 to form diplomats associated to the League of Nations. The Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago was the first to offer a graduate degree, in 1928. The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, a collaboration between Tufts University and Harvard, opened its doors in 1933 as the first graduate-only school of international affairs in the United States. In 1965, Glendon College and the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs were the first institutions in Canada to offer an undergraduate and a graduate program in international studies and affairs, respectively.
caption: Maison de la Paix, home to the Graduate Institute Geneva
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