A Simple Review Guide for L2201
Narisong Huhe
I prefer to use the term of a review guide rather than a guide for final exam. The reason is that we should
not treat exams as the ultimate goal of studying. Rather, exams are just “means” or instruments that help
us achieve the real “ends,” that is, a better understanding of international relations (IR) and global politics.1
My purposes in this review guide, therefore, is to offer suggestions about how to review our ten-week
lectures.
1 Major themes in IR
L2201 is an introductory course and IR is a complex subject. Therefore, it is simply impossible for us to
cover every single topic in IR. Instead, we focus on five major themes of IR, that is,
1. foundational theories
2. foreign policy analysis
3. international security (i.e., war and peace)
4. international political economy (i.e., trade and investment)
5. contemporary challenges
These five themes represent the most important subfields of IR. They speak to different phenomena in IR
and thus requires different sets of concepts and theories. Before diving into specific concepts and
theories, it would be better if we can take several minutes and think about the differences across these
themes, or, put it differently, why we need different concepts and theories under different themes.
2 Concepts
Concepts are the building blocks of IR theories, and they are the first step of the “simplification” process
(recall our 1st week lecture). Different theories require different conceptualizations (i.e., simplifications) of
the same reality. Therefore, it is imperative to develop a concrete understanding of key concepts in
different themes.
For example, in the theme of international security (more specifically, war), we introduced Waltz’s
“structural realism,” which suggests the structural distribution of power (i.e., polarity) is the key to our
1Some of you may find this is similar to Weber’s argument of instrumental vs. value rationality. Yes, it is.
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