The Rise of International Relations Theory, 1945-1955

International Workshop
September 24-25, 2007
Tarrytown, NY

The Rockefeller Archive Center in Tarrytown, NY, will host a two-day workshop on "The Rise of International Relations Theory, 1945-1955" on Monday and Tuesday, 24-25 September. This event is sponsored by the Rockefeller Archive Center and the Social Science Research Council.

In recent years, there has been a surprising surge of interest in the history of international relations theory. Less surprisingly, this interest has overlapped with a sense of uncertainty about the current identity of this academic field and its future direction. The purpose of this workshop is to take a fresh look at this discipline by turning to some unpublished archival material that provides new insights into the making of IR -- in particular, transcripts of discussions about the core features of the new discipline, led by various officers of the Rockefeller foundation and attended by scholars such as Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Nitze. These discussions, which took place in the 1950s, shed some light on the assumptions, the worldviews and the interests that shaped this disciplinary program. As the documents reveal, the founding fathers of the discipline explicitly debated questions such as:

• Why did the study of international relations have to be based on a distinctive theory?
• How would the new discipline relate to policy-makers?
• What did it say about the way foreign policy decisions should be made?

Over the duration of the workshop, scholars from a variety of fields will comment upon these documents and provide different perspectives on the historical development of a theoretical discourse that turned out to be an influential policy science and that remains one of the dominant lexicons for making sense of international affairs. The contributors include: * Robjert Jervis * Philip Mirowski * Inderjeet Parmar * Brian Schmidt * Jack Snyder * Anders Stephanson * Ole Waever.

Contact: Nicolas Guilhot (Guilhot@ssrc.org)