Introduction to This Page
This page is meant to supplement the syllabus and lectures for my undergraduate course "Introduction to International Relations" (PSCI 3810) at the University of North Texas. It is organized along the same outline as the reading list for the course, to help students who wish to go beyond the original assigned readings.
World Map Resources
An important part of studying or understanding international relations involves being able to place countries and events in a geographic context. (More to the point of self-interest, this course's three exams each require you to identify countries on a blank map, so it is a good idea to become familiar with countries' locations if you want to pass the class...) The following links cover several of the Web's best sites for maps, as well as several sources offering blank or outline maps that can be used to help prepare for map quizzes on exams:
Collections of Maps and Related Resources
- The Perry-Castaneda Map Library at the University of Texas is the supreme Web resource for online maps of countries, regions, or the world; they also offer links to many historical maps showing how the world looked previously.
- The CIA World Factbook is a useful source of both maps and information related to IR; besides maps of each country and territory (accessible from the country's web page) they also offer global and regional reference maps
- National Geographic's "XPeditions" Atlas allows the user to create good maps of individual countries, although their regional and global maps are generally too small to be of much scholarly use
- My web site's Maps and Interactive Geography Tools page includes many other useful links.
Blank/Outline Maps
The following maps are the ones that will be used on the actual exams in this course; please be aware that any country shown on each map is fair game for the exam.
- Exam 1: Europe
- Exam 2: North, Central, and South America
- Exam 3: Middle East
- Other blank outline maps are available from the Perry-Castaneda Map Library at the University of Texas.
World News Resources
Another important part of studying or understanding international relations involves being aware of what is going on around the world. The following links offer good coverage of international news; I try to visit most of these sites each day, to get a relatively broad picture of world politics from a variety of perspectives. Note that the point here isn't to endorse news from a particular national or political viewpoint, but to see how major news sources around the world are covering a topic; you will often find that the BBC or Xinhua (for example) are covering stories that aren't in any of the major American papers, and each of these news sources will often provide details that the others missed.
In most cases, these links are to the main news page on each site. Many of these sites offer regional or topical news pages, with many more news stories than they could fit on their main page, so you may want to explore these pages as well as the main headlines page. Many of these sites also offer RSS/Atom feeds, which makes it easy to follow news headlines automatically in your favorite feed reader/aggregator (like the free Google Reader).
World News Sites
These sources offer good coverage of events around the world (please note that I have tried to limit this to sources that provide original content, rather than sources that primarily repackage stories from the major news agencies):
Newspapers and Similar Sources
- Al Jazeera America (the American affiliate of the network based in Doha, Qatar)
- BBC News (the UK's public broadcast service, which in my opinion is the best single online source of world news)
- Christian Science Monitor
- Deutsche Welle (English-language news from Germany)
- New York Times (they charge for access to most of their site, but they offer academic discounts, and they offer the best U.S.-based coverage of world events)
- Washington Post (now a pay site, but free access is provided for users accessing their site from academic addresses like UNT's campus)
- Xinhua (English-language news from China)
News Agencies
- Agence France-Presse/AFP (this feed of AFP news provided by France24)
- Associated Press/AP (this feed of AP news provided by the New York Times)
- Reuters
- United Press International/UPI
Regional News Sites
These sources may include some coverage of events across the world, but they are best at covering certain regions, offering news or details that the more global sites listed above may miss:
- The Arab Weekly (published in London; good coverage of events in the Middle East and North Africa)
- B92 (from Belgrade, Serbia; good coverage of events in the Balkans)
- Der Spiegel (Germany's leading weekly news magazine, published in Hamburg; good coverage of events in Europe)
- The East African (from Nairobi, Kenya; good coverage of events in eastern Africa)
- Independent Online (from South Africa; good coverage of events in southern Africa)
- Jerusalem Post (from Jerusalem, Israel; good coverage of Middle East news)
- Latin American Herald-Tribune (from Caracas, Venezuela; good coverage of Latin American news, with separate news feeds for each country in the region)
- MercoPress South Atlantic News Agency (from Montevideo, Uruguay; good coverage of South America, particularly the countries in or near Mercosur)
- Radio Free Asia (funded by the U.S. Congress; good coverage of news in Asia and the Pacific)
- Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (funded by the U.S. Congress; good coverage of news in Eastern Europe and Central Asia)
Other News-Related Links on My Web Site
- Online News Sources
- U.S. and Canadian Newspapers
- Latin American Newspapers
- European Newspapers
- African and Middle Eastern Newspapers
- Asian and Oceanian Newspapers
Resources Related to Course Topics
These resources are meant to give students additional background on concepts or examples that are discussed in class. These include classic articles by political scientists, important historical speeches or documents, and major data sets or online research tools that can be used to follow up on the topics, among other resources.
Obviously, this page -- like any other page on the Web -- is a work in progress. I will do my best to keep it up-to-date throughout the semester. Unfortunately, many of these links may be redirected or even removed from the Web by the end of the semester (one semester I found that over one-third of all of the links on one of my pages broke between September and December). I would appreciate being informed via email if you find any broken links on this page, so that I can attempt to fix or delete the link in question.
Note that this page is in need of serious updating - I have not checked many of these resources for up to a decade, and only in 2018 have I merged them all into one place where I can start organizing them and verifying that they still exist.
I. BASIC CONCEPTS OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
A. Introduction
- Peace of Westphalia entry in Oxford Bibliography of International Relations (see also the full text of the Treaty of Westphalia)
B. Actors in International Relations
- States:
- UN Member States (see also an earlier list of League of Nations member states)
- COW Interstate System Membership data (list of states from the Correlates of War research project, the leading source of IR data)
- The Fund for Peace offers a list of failed states, which has been published in Foreign Policy; these are examples of legal states that don't have effective control over significant portions of their population of territory
- Foreign Governments (from the Northwestern University library)
- Lists of online embassies and consulates: EmbassyWorld and Yahoo)
- Permanent Missions to the UN
- Embassies to the U.S. are listed on Embassy.org and Project Visa
- U.S. embassies, consulates, and diplomatic missions abroad (from the U.S. State Department)
- Background Notes (notes about the history and politics of each country, from the U.S. Department of State)
- Country Studies/Area Handbooks (from the Research Division of the U.S. Library of Congress)
- Copies of national constitutions -- with amendments or revisions over time -- are available from Constitution Finder (at the University of Richmond's Law School), Constitution.org, the Law Library of Congress' Guide to Law Online, Richard Kimber's site at Keele (UK), and International Constitutional Law (from the University of Bern, Switzerland)
- International Data Base (from the U.S. Census Bureau; demographic and socio-economic data on each country)
- Social Indicators and Millennium Indicators (from the UN Statistics Division)
- Nations:
- The Minorities at Risk project collects and reports data on politically active minority groups around the world, including risk assessments and chronologies for hundreds of groups.
- Ethnologue: Languages of the World offers information on languages in each country, among many other useful resources, for nearly 7000 world languages.
- Quasi-States and Other Non-State Actors:
- Dependencies and Areas of Special Sovereignty (from the U.S. Department of State)
- Fourth World Documentation Project
- League of Micronations
- League of Secessionist States (LOSS)
- The Micronations Page
- Institute of the Rights of Peoples (formerly the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization)
- Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs):
- My international organizations page includes links to numerous organizations, as well as to additional collections of IGO and NGO links
- The United Nations is a universal membership, general purpose IGO
- The Organization of American States is a restricted membership, general purpose IGO
- The International Monetary Fund and World Health Organization are universal membership, specific purpose IGOs
- NATO and Inter-American Development Bank are restricted membership, specific purpose IGOs
- Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs):
- Multinational Corporations (MNCs):
- Coca Cola has operations in nearly 200 countries, many with their own local web sites
- Nike offers several dozen web sites covering their operations in different languages and different geographic regions
- Toyota, headquartered in Japan, has separate web sites for its operations in more than forty countries
- Terrorist Groups:
- U.S. State Department lists of terrorist groups and state sponsors of terrorism, as well as more detailed country reports
- British Home Office list
- Australian government list
C. Studying IR
- The Scientific Method:
- International Relations as a Social Science entry in Oxford Bibliography of International Relations
- Political Science (handout from the UNC Writing Center)
- I have taught an undergraduate course in Political Science Research Methods (and I will probably teach this again every few years)
- Realism:
- Thucydides (431 BC), "The Melian Dialogue." From History of the Peloponnesian War.
- Hans J. Morgenthau (1978),"Six Principles of Political Realism." From Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace.
- Realism entry and Neorealism entry in Oxford Bibliography of International Relations
- Idealism/Liberalism/Institutionalism:
- Woodrow Wilson (1/18/1918). "Fourteen Points" Speech to Joint Session of Congress.
- George H. W. Bush (9/11/1990). "New World Order" Speech to Joint Session of Congress
- Liberalism entry and Interstate Cooperation Theory and International Institutions in Oxford Bibliography of International Relations
- Marxism/Radicalism:
- Marxism entry in Oxford Bibliography of International Relations
- Constructivism:
- Constructivism entry in Oxford Bibliography of International Relations
- Feminism:
- Feminist Theories of International Relations entry in Oxford Bibliography of International Relations
D. Power
- Economic resources: The World Bank offers national rankings based on population and economic measures
- IMF influence: The International Monetary Fund divides up voting power (and thus control over economic decisions) based largely on economic resources.
- Nuclear weapons: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists offers a great deal of information on nuclear stockpiles since 1945
- Oil: The BP Annual Energy Review offers data on proven oil reserves, oil production, and oil consumption. (The US Energy Information Administration also offers lists of the top oil producers/exporters and oil consumers/importers.)
- Other elements of power: The CIA World Factbook ranks states (and some non-state entities) on a variety of demographic, economic, military, and social indicators.
D. Foreign Policy Making
- Theories of Foreign Policy entry in Oxford Bibliography of International Relations
- Some of the more prominent lobbying groups that seek to influence U.S. foreign policy include the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (pro-Israel), Cuban-American National Foundation (anti-Castro), and Armenian National Committee of America (pro-Armenia)
- President Eisenhower's 1961 military-industrial complex speech describes what many see as an informal lobbying group with a great deal of influence on certain aspects of U.S. military and economic policy
II. CONFLICT AND COOPERATION
A. Anarchy and the Security Dilemma
- John H. Herz (1950), "Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma." World Politics 2, 2: 157-180. [the article that introduced the modern concept of the security dilemma]
- Robert Jervis (1978), "Cooperation under the Security Dilemma." World Politics 30, 2: 167-214. [a very influential article about the difficulties that states face in cooperation because of the security dilemma]
B. Armed Conflict
- My International Conflict and Cooperation Data page gives access to a variety of databases and lists of current and historical conflicts; see especially the following resources:
- The Center for Systemic Peace at the University of Maryland offers analyses of global conflict trends since 1946 and the current status of major armed conflicts
- The Uppsala/PRIO Armed Conflicts Data Project from researchers in Norway and Sweden has collected a compilation of data on conflicts since 1946
- The Center for Defense Information (CDI) publishes an annual report called the World at War, assessing recent trends in armed conflict as well as examining ongoing conflicts. Earlier versions of this report can be found on their web site.
C. Realist Solutions to Conflict and Cooperation
- Conventional weapons:
- SIPRI Military Expenditures database provides data on military spending since 1988
- SIPRI Arms Transfers database and NISAT Small Arms Trade database
- GlobalFirepower.com provides detailed estimates and rankings of states' military capabilities
- Military alliances:
- Alliance Treaty Obligations and Provisions (ATOP) data set provides data on all military alliances since 1816
- Nuclear weapons:
- BAS Nuclear Notebook (research on nuclear capabilities around the world) and Doomsday Clock (their estimate of how close the world is to disaster)
- FAS Status of World Nuclear Forces and Nuclear Notebook
D. Liberal Solutions to Conflict and Cooperation
General International Law Resources
- American Society of International Law
- Foreign and International Law Resources (from the Willamette University College of Law Library)
- Guide to Foreign and International Legal Databases (from the NYU Library)
- International Law (from the UN)
- International Law Resources and Comparative and Foreign Law Resources (from the Fletcher School at Tufts University)
- Legal Research on International Law Issues Using the Internet (from the University of Chicago's D'Angelo Law Library)
- Research Guide to Foreign and International Law Sources on the Net (from the Cornell University Law Library)
- Surfing the International Law Net and Other Research Ventures: Key Resources on the Internet for International Law Research (from the University of Chicago's D'Angelo Law Library
- Yahoo! International Law Directory
International Courts
- Hague Justice Portal
- International Justice Tribune
- Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ)
- International Court of Justice (ICJ)
- Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA)
- Basic Documents and Rules of Procedure
- Cases
- PCA Awards (from the Hague Justice Portal)
League of Natons:
United Nations:
- United Nations (UN) web site
- UN History
- UN Charter and Member States
- Main UN bodies: Secretariat (and Secretary General), Security Council, and General Assembly
- UN organizational chart (with links to the web sites for each subsidiary UN agency)
- UN peacekeeping operations
- Related Organizations and Institutions:
- International Atomic Energy Agency
- International Court of Justice (ICJ, or World Court)
- International Telecommunication Union
- UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)
- UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)
- UN Development Program (UNDP)
- UN Environmental Program (UNEP)
- UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
- UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)funep
- UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
- UN Children's Fund (UNICEF)
- World Health Organization (WHO)
- World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)
- World Meteorological Organization (WMO)
Other international organizations:
- Primarily economic organizations:
- Bank for International Settlements
- G7/G8 Information Centre (from the University of Toronto)
- Group of 77
- International Coffee Organization
- International Monetary Fund (IMF)
- Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
- Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)
- World Bank
- World Trade Organization (WTO)
- Western Hemisphere organizations:
- European organizations:
- European Union:
- >Council of Europe
- North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
- Nordic Council and Nordic Council of Ministers
- Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE; formerly known as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, or CSCE)
- Western European Union
- African organizations:
- Middle Eastern organizations:
- Arab League (League of Arab States)
- Arab Maghreb Union
- Gulf Cooperation Council (Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf)
- Asian and Oceanian organizations:
- Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)
- Asian Development Bank
- Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) (see also the ASEAN Secretariat)
- Secretariat of the Pacific Community (formerly the South Pacific Commission)
- South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation
III. INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY
General Economic Resources
- A Comparative Chronology of Money from Ancient Times to the Present Day
- A Glossary of Political Economy Terms (from Paul Johnson at Auburn University)
- Institute for International Economics
- International Economics Study Center
- International Monetary Fund (IMF)
- Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
- Adam Smith Page (from Edward Harpham at the University of Texas-Dallas)
- World Bank
A. Trade and Protectionism
- World Trade Organization
- U.S. Harmonized Tariff Schedule (a detailed list of current U.S. tariffs; from the web site of the U.S. International Trade Commission)
- U.S. Trade Agreements (bilateral, regional, and global free trade agreements involving the U.S.; from the web site of the U.S. Trade Representative)
B. Globalization and Interdependence
- Cars.com's American Made Index (a ranking of the top 10 most "American" cars based on research and development, parts content, assembly location, and sales)
- American Made? (a database from a New York metalworkers union that lists assembly location, union/non-union assembly, and country of ownership for most current car models)
C. Dependence and Development
- World Development Reports (from the World Bank)
- Center for International Development (at Harvard University)
- Duke Center for International Development
- Economic Growth Resources (from the University of Bristol, in the UK)
- Data Sets and Working Papers on economic growth
- References and Surveys: Books and Articles on Economic Growth
- Researchers Studying Economic Growth
- Useful Growth-Related Links
- International Development Research Centre
- International Institute for Sustainable Development
- PRAXIS: Resources for Social and Economic Development (from Richard Estes at the University of Pennsylvania)
- UN Economic and Social Development Resources
D. Regionalism and Integration
- European Union (EU)
- North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other trade agreements involving the United States
- Regional Trade Agreements (from the World Trade Organization)
IV. LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
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Last updated: 25 January 2022
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