Realism: From Thucydides to Neorealism

International Relations is often dated as an academic discipline to 1919, when the Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Politics was established at Aberystwyth University in Wales, the first dedicated university post in the field, founded in the aftermath of the First World War with an explicitly liberal, peace-oriented mission. The interwar period saw the discipline dominated by what E. H. Carr, in his 1939 book The Twenty Years' Crisis, later labeled "utopian" scholarship, optimistic about collective security and the League of Nations. Carr's own critique, alongside the catastrophic failure of the League to prevent the Second World War, opened the way for realism to become the field's dominant paradigm from the late 1940s onward, particularly in the United States, where IR consolidated as a distinct discipline separate from history, law, and political theory.