Theorien der Internationalen Beziehungen

This textbook serves as an introductory reading in the theoretical field of international politics and systematically presents its most important theoretical approaches and methods in the study of International Relations. In an introductory section, the author first addresses the fundamental questions of theories of international relations – including theory and theory formation, theory classification, and theory history. Following this, the theoretical approaches are divided into four schools of thought and briefly yet concisely presented: the realist school, the liberal-institutionalist school, the behavioral school, and the alternative-oppositional school. Their categorization is based on their perspective on a fundamental problem of the state system: the anarchy in the sense of a lack of regulatory authority for interstate relations and its consequences for the nature of international politics. The third edition has been expanded to include newly published research findings in the field of International Relations.