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Until the early 1970s, the study of international relations was based on an intellectual consensus regarding the essential questions of the field: the causes of war and the conditions of peace. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, a number of theoretical projects had begun to argue that both the models and the research and teaching agendas of the past were inappropriate for understanding the contemporary interdependent system of states. They specified the need to develop entirely new visions of the world, and to jettison many of the concepts and approaches of the past-particularly those that went under the name of political "realism".

By the mid-1980s, teachers and researchers faced a wide array of theoretical perspectives in the field: international political economy, peace studies, dependency theory, world order models, peace research, strategic studies, and the like. The field, once unified in its fundamental assumptions, had become increasingly fragmented.

First published in 1985, The Dividing Discipline delineates the main strands of then-contemporary theoretical work and speculates about the possibilities of reintegrating the field and bringing some order to it. In addition, the book examines the development of the discipline in Australia, Canada, England, India, Japan, Korea, France, and the United States to measure the extent to which there existed a genuine international community of scholars. These chapters reveal such a degree of reliance on theoretical work produced in the United States that the relationship could be described as one of intellectual dependence.