Oliver J. Daddow - International Relations Theory

Third Edition

Third Edition

This book began life at the British International Studies Association Conference at St Andrews in December 2005. It was during a chat with David Mainwaring in the publishers exhibition that we spotted a potential gap in the market for a pedagogically inclined book aimed at students new not just to the study of IR in general but to the increasingly diverse field of IR theory in particular. I can safely say that had that conversation not taken place this book would certainly not have been written such are the fortuitous vagaries of academic life. This latest edition has been produced following further discussions with my editors at Sage, Amy Jarrold and Natalie Aguilera. Natalie was an equally inspirational editor on the second and this edition. My thanks to everyone at Sage who, as usual, worked on the manuscript on my behalf, especially Katie Forsythe, my diligent Senior Production Editor and David Rudeforth, my indexer for the book. A host of anonymous reviewers gave some excellent feedback on the second edition. They suggested refinements in the way I covered the existing material and proffered some novel ideas on new material that would aid student learning about each theory. I hope they will feel I have done their suggestions justice.

Adrian Gallagher read through some of my first stabs at trying to summarize these theories in a couple of thousand words and his astute comments were most helpful, particularly on the detail of English School theorizing. Thanks, finally, to all my various cohorts of students who have, over the years and probably to varying degrees, both enjoyed and suffered my sometimes clunky attempts to distil the complexity of this subject matter into manageable sized chunks for academic consumption. The lecture and seminar room is where one finds out what works to clarify things, and crucially what does not work, and this book is the product of that constructive and enjoyable process of teaching and learning. Many elements of both formal and informal feedback on my teaching have helped me refine this text enormously. Magnus Evjebraten, Matthew Breeds and Chris Hills were particularly helpful in the early stages.