Last Blog

As I’m writing my 20^th post, I went through the previous nineteen posts that I have written and made some judgments regarding them. Not only has my writing style and structure improved, but from the first few to my last few, the detail in which I have written the blogs has also greatly improved. This blog writing exercise even though seemed tedious and a lot of work at first, because of the fact that I had to write blogs for both the classes, it became a routine for me eventually.

The concepts we learned in this course and the debates we had have definitely knocked upon my ability to think. We started off with the history of International Relations, then we slowly crept into the different paradigms and theoretical frameworks to study the discipline. We started off with the most dominant theory of International Relations, I.e. Realism. Waltz, Morgenthau, Hobbes, Kant all made their presence time and again to explain this theory quite efficaciously. Throughout pre mid we studied Realism, which eventually became too much for many! Post mid we shifted our focus towards Liberalism and other conventional theories such as the much popular and positive Social Constructivism, we even had a few sessions on Feminism. Out of all these theories even though personally I leaned towards Social Constructivism, it was eventually very obvious that the entire game is mostly about Realism.

We learned about how states interact in the international system. We learned about how states function and carry out their activities in the international system. We learned to apply different theories to the various states and we got a better understanding of different historical incidents through the application of these theories. Every individual needs to understand how the international system works. Why is that? This is because that we can hope that many of us will eventually grow up to serve our country and make a positive mark of it in the international arena. To do that, we need to understand how things work, how states function and what enables them to work properly in the global arena.

Having previously taken Intro to International Relations, I must say this course definitely increased my knowledge and greatly broadened and strengthened my thought process regarding the concepts I was taught in that course. In that course I was just given a general over view about these theories, but it was because of this course that we dug deep into the roots of these theories and came out with efficient understanding of the complex concepts. Many might see international politics and relations as very general concepts, relations between states as positive or negative, but we have now learnt, that it is a very complex and convoluted system. International Relations needs to be looked at through various lenses, as no one theory completely explains its functioning efficiently. 

In conclusion, one thing I would definitely like to highlight is that this course definitely taught me how to think and use my mind about concepts and things which used to seem quite trivial to me earlier on.