International relations (IR) (occasionally referred to as international studies, (IS) although the two terms are not perfectly synonymous) is the study of relationships between countries, including the roles of states, inter-governmental organizations (IGOs), international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and multinational corporations (MNCs). It is both an academic and public policy field, and can be either positive or normative as it both seeks to analyze as well as formulate the foreign policy of particular states. It is often considered a branch of political science (especially after 1988 UNESCO nomenclature), but an important sector of academia prefer to treat it as an interdisciplinary field of study. Aspects of international relations have been studied for thousands of years, since the time of Thucydides, but IR became a separate and definable discipline in the early 20th century.

Apart from political science, IR draws upon such diverse fields as economics, history, international law, philosophy, geography, social work, sociology, anthropology, criminology, psychology, women's studies/gender studies, and cultural studies / culturology. It involves a diverse range of issues including but not limited to: globalization, state sovereignty, international security, ecological sustainability, nuclear proliferation, nationalism, economic development, global finance, terrorism, organized crime, human security, foreign interventionism and human rights.

IR theories can be roughly divided into one of two epistemological camps: "positivist" and "post-positivist". Positivist theories aim to replicate the methods of the natural sciences by analysing the impact of material forces. They typically focus on features of international relations such as state interactions, size of military forces, balance of powers etc. Post-positivist epistemology rejects the idea that the social world can be studied in an objective and value-free way. It rejects the central ideas of neo-realism/liberalism, such as rational choice theory, on the grounds that the scientific method cannot be applied to the social world and that a 'science' of IR is impossible.

A key difference between the two positions is that while positivist theories, such as neo-realism, offer causal explanations (such as why and how power is exercised), post-positivist theories focus instead on constitutive questions, for instance what is meant by 'power'; what makes it up, how it is experienced and how it is reproduced. Often, post-positivist theories explicitly promote a normative approach to IR, by considering ethics. This is something which has often been ignored under 'traditional' IR as positivist theories make a distinction between 'facts' and normative judgments, or 'values'.

Regional Studies is a leading international journal in theoretical development, empirical analysis and policy debate in the multi- and inter-disciplinary field of regional studies. The journal invites established and upcoming scholars to submit agenda-setting work focusing on economic, environmental, political,and social change aspects of regional (subnational) development and policy-making. Regional Studies is a central forum for debating the most recent results from research on regional development and policy-making from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Realism focuses on state security and power above all else. Early realists such as E.H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau argued that states are self-interested, power-seeking rational actors, who seek to maximize their security and chances of survival. Cooperation between states is a way to maximize each individual state's security (as opposed to more idealistic reasons). Similarly, any act of war must be based on self-interest, rather than on idealism. Many realists saw World War II as the vindication of their theory.

It should be noted that classical writers such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Theodore Roosevelt, are often cited as "founding fathers" of realism by contemporary self-described realists. However, while their work may support realist doctrine, it is not likely that they would have classified themselves as realists (in this sense of the term). Realists are often split up into two groups: Classical or Human Nature Realists (as described here) and Structural or Neorealists (below).

Political realism believes that politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature. To improve society, it is first necessary to understand the laws by which society lives. The operation of these laws being impervious to our preferences, persons will challenge them only at the risk of failure. Realism, believing as it does in the objectivity of the laws of politics, must also believe in the possibility of developing a rational theory that reflects, however imperfectly and one-sidedly, these objective laws. It believes also, then, in the possibility of distinguishing in politics between truth and opinion-between what is true objectively and rationally, supported by evidence and illuminated by reason, and what is only a subjective judgment, divorced from the facts as they are and informed by prejudice and wishful thinking.

The placement of Realism under positivism is far from unproblematic however. E.H. Carr's 'What is History' was a deliberate critique of positivism, and Hans Morgenthau's aim in 'Scientific Man vs Power Politics' - as the title implies - was to demolish any conception that international politics/power politics can be studied scientifically.

Liberal international relations theory arose after World War I in response to the inability of states to control and limit war in their international relations. Early adherents include Woodrow Wilson and Norman Angell, who argued vigorously that states mutually gained from cooperation and that war was so destructive to be essentially futile.

Liberalism was not recognized as a coherent theory as such until it was collectively and derisively termed idealism by E. H. Carr. A new version of "idealism" that focused on human rights as the basis of the legitimacy of international law was advanced by Hans Köchler.

Neoliberalism seeks to update liberalism by accepting the neorealist presumption that states are the key actors in international relations, but still maintains that non-state actors (NSAs) and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) matter. Proponents such as Maria Chattha argue that states will cooperate irrespective of relative gains, and are thus concerned with absolute gains. This also means that nations are, in essence, free to make their own choices as to how they will go about conducting policy without any international organizations blocking a nation's right to sovereignty.

Neoliberalism also contains an economic theory that is based on the use of open and free markets with little, if any, government intervention to prevent monopolies and other conglomerates from forming. The growing interdependence throughout and after the Cold War through international institutions led to neo-liberalism being defined as institutionalism, this new part of the theory being fronted by Robert Keohane and also Joseph Nye.

Most classical IR theory (i.e., realism, liberalism and world systems theory) considers that the actors (main participants/decision makers) in the international sphere are the states. That means that decisions are considered as being aggregated at state level and that the international system is the creation of the states.

Constructivists and structuralists (as well as a few neorealists and neoliberals) add other actors, such as non-national entities (multi-national corporations, large NGOs), subnational entities (such as structures of government competing for ideological dominance, federal regions, lobby and pressure groups and even individuals in power) and transnational entities (such as international organizations in themselves as opposed to being just expression arenas for states) as well as ideatic structures (such as securitization complexes, social constructs, social norms and laws, ideologies etc.). In these schools, defining what an actor is is left to the author, so it is best to read carefully so that you can understand what the actor considers.

International security consists of the measures taken by nations and international organizations, such as the United Nations, to ensure mutual survival and safety. These measures include military action and diplomatic agreements such as treaties and conventions. International and national security are invariably linked. International security is national security or state security in the global arena.

With the end of World War II, a new subject of study focusing on international security emerged. It began as an independent field of study, but was absorbed as a sub-field of international relations. Since it took hold in the 1950s, the study of international security has been at the heart of international relations studies. It covers labels like “security studies”, “strategic studies”, “peace studies”, and others.

There is no universal definition of the concept of security, but concepts in international security studies have been defined, such as sovereignty, war, anarchy, security dilemma, etc. The meaning of "security" is often treated as a common sense term that can be understood by "unacknowledged consensus".As there is no universal concept, the content of international security has expanded over the years. Today it covers a variety of interconnected issues in the world that have an impact on survival. It ranges from the traditional or conventional modes of military power, the causes and consequences of war between states, economic strength, to ethnic, religious and ideological conflicts, trade and economic conflicts, energy supplies, science and technology, food, as well as threats to human security and the stability of states from environmental degradation, infectious diseases, climate change and the activities of non-state actors.

Soft security usually refers to security which protects something from harm in quiet and unobtrusive ways, often invisibly and after the fact, rather than with visible barriers before the fact. Soft security can refer to immediate security measures, such as silent burglar alarms or motion detectors, but often refers to more elaborate social security systems such as the moral network in a tightly-knit community—for example, a cluster of friends on a busy city street.

The term has gained widespread use in wiki communities, notably MeatballWiki. A quote from their page on SoftSecurity:

“ The idea is to protect the system and its users from harm, in gentle and unobtrusive ways. The opposite of HardSecurity. It follows NonViolence. Instead of using violence, it works architecturally in defense to convince people against attacking and to LimitDamage. It works socially in offense to convince people to be friendly and to get out of the way of people adding value. ”

The differentiation between soft security and hard security was first made by Rasmusson and Jansson[1] who used the term hard security for traditional mechanisms like authentication and access control, and soft security for social control mechanisms.

Observation is either an activity of a living being, such as a human, consisting of receiving knowledge of the outside world through the senses, or the recording of data using scientific instruments. The term may also refer to any data collected during this activity. An observation can also be the way you look at things or when you look at something.

An experiment is a methodical trial and error procedure carried out with the goal of verifying, falsifying, or establishing the validity of a hypothesis. Experiments vary greatly in their goal and scale, but always rely on repeatable procedure and logical analysis of the results. A child may carry out basic experiments to understand the nature of gravity, while teams of scientists may take years of systematic investigation to advance the understanding of a phenomenon.

An experiment is a method of testing - with the goal of explaining - the nature of reality. Experiments can vary from personal and informal (e.g. tasting a range of chocolates to find a favourite), to highly controlled (e.g. tests requiring complex apparatus overseen by many scientists hoping to discover information about subatomic particles).

In the design of comparative experiments, two or more "treatments" are applied to estimate the difference between the mean responses for the treatments. For example, an experiment on baking bread could estimate the difference in the responses associated with quantitative variables, such as the ratio of water to flour, and with qualitative variables, such as strains of yeast. Experimentation is the step in the scientific method that helps people decide between two or more competing explanations – or hypotheses. These hypotheses suggest reasons to explain a phenomenon, or predict the results of an action. An example might be the hypothesis that "if I release this ball, it will fall to the floor": this suggestion can then be tested by carrying out the experiment of letting go of the ball, and observing the results. Formally, a hypothesis is compared against its opposite or null hypothesis ("if I release this ball, it will not fall to the floor"). The null hypothesis is that there is no explanation or predictive power of the phenomenon through the reasoning that is being investigated. Once hypotheses are defined, an experiment can be carried out - and the results analysed - in order to confirm, refute, or define the accuracy of the hypotheses.

Content analysis or textual analysis is a methodology in the social sciences for studying the content of communication. Earl Babbie defines it as "the study of recorded human communications, such as books, websites, paintings and laws."

According to Dr. Farooq Joubish, content analysis is considered a scholarly methodology in the humanities by which texts are studied as to authorship, authenticity, or meaning. This latter subject include philology, hermeneutics, and semiotics.

Harold Lasswell formulated the core questions of content analysis: "Who says what, to whom, why, to what extent and with what effect?." Ole Holsti (1969) offers a broad definition of content analysis as "any technique for making inferences by objectively and systematically identifying specified characteristics of messages." Kimberly A. Neuendorf (2002, p. 10) offers a six-part definition of content analysis:

"Content analysis is a summarising, quantitative analysis of messages that relies on the scientific method (including attention to objectivity, intersubjectivity, a priori design, reliability, validity, generalisability, replicability, and hypothesis testing) and is not limited as to the types of variables that may be measured or the context in which the messages are created or presented."

An Event study is a statistical method to assess the impact of an event on the value of a firm. For example, the announcement of a merger between two business entities can be analyzed to see whether investors believe the merger will create or destroy value. The basic idea is to find the abnormal return attributable to the event being studied by adjusting for the return that stems from the price fluctuation of the market as a whole.

Event studies have been used in a large variety of studies, including mergers and acquisitions, earnings announcements, debt or equity issues, corporate reorganisations, investment decisions and corporate social responsibility (MacKinlay 1997; McWilliams & Siegel, 1997).

Promoting Reliability

The principal goal of the Electric Reliability Organization (ERO) is to promote the reliability of the bulk power system (BPS) in North America. This goal is directly supported by evaluating BPS events, undertaking appropriate levels of analysis to determine the causes of the events, promptly assuring tracking of corrective actions to prevent recurrence, and providing lessons learned to the industry. The event analysis process also provides valuable input for training and education, reliability trend analysis efforts and reliability standards development, all of which support continued reliability improvement.

Developing a Culture of Reliability Excellence

Through the event analysis program, the ERO strives to develop a culture of reliability excellence that promotes and rewards aggressive self-critical review and analysis of operations, planning, and critical infrastructure protection processes. This self-critical focus must be ongoing, and the industry must recognize that registered entities are linked together by their individual and collective performances. This focus is the root of understanding the underlying cause of events and avoiding similar or repeated events through the timely identification and correction of event causes and through the sharing of lessons learned.

Collaboration

Successful event analysis depends on a collaborative approach in which registered entities, Regional Entities and NERC work together to achieve a common goal. The process requires clarity, certainty and consistent adherence to reliability principles by BPS owners, operators and users that perform a wide array of reliability functions.

Being a Learning Organization

As a learning organization, event analysis serves an integral function of providing insight and guidance by identifying and disseminating valuable information to owners, operators and users of the BPS who enable improved and more reliable operation. As such, event analysis is one of the pillars of a strong ERO.

In statistics, regression analysis includes many techniques for modeling and analyzing several variables, when the focus is on the relationship between a dependent variable and one or more independent variables. More specifically, regression analysis helps one understand how the typical value of the dependent variable changes when any one of the independent variables is varied, while the other independent variables are held fixed. Most commonly, regression analysis estimates the conditional expectation of the dependent variable given the independent variables — that is, the average value of the dependent variable when the independent variables are held fixed. Less commonly, the focus is on a quantile, or other location parameter of the conditional distribution of the dependent variable given the independent variables. In all cases, the estimation target is a function of the independent variables called the regression function. In regression analysis, it is also of interest to characterize the variation of the dependent variable around the regression function, which can be described by a probability distribution.

Regression analysis is widely used for prediction and forecasting, where its use has substantial overlap with the field of machine learning. Regression analysis is also used to understand which among the independent variables are related to the dependent variable, and to explore the forms of these relationships. In restricted circumstances, regression analysis can be used to infer causal relationships between the independent and dependent variables. However this can lead to illusions or false relationships, so caution is advisable:[1] see correlation does not imply causation.

A large body of techniques for carrying out regression analysis has been developed. Familiar methods such as linear regression and ordinary least squares regression are parametric, in that the regression function is defined in terms of a finite number of unknown parameters that are estimated from the data. Nonparametric regression refers to techniques that allow the regression function to lie in a specified set of functions, which may be infinite-dimensional.

The performance of regression analysis methods in practice depends on the form of the data generating process, and how it relates to the regression approach being used. Since the true form of the data-generating process is generally not known, regression analysis often depends to some extent on making assumptions about this process. These assumptions are sometimes testable if a large amount of data is available. Regression models for prediction are often useful even when the assumptions are moderately violated, although they may not perform optimally. However, in many applications, especially with small effects or questions of causality based on observational data, regression methods give misleading results.

Factor analysis is a statistical method used to describe variability among observed, correlated variables in terms of a potentially lower number of unobserved variables called factors. In other words, it is possible, for example, that variations in three or four observed variables mainly reflect the variations in fewer such unobserved variables. Factor analysis searches for such joint variations in response to unobserved latent variables. The observed variables are modeled as linear combinations of the potential factors, plus "error" terms. The information gained about the interdependencies between observed variables can be used later to reduce the set of variables in a dataset. Computationally this technique is equivalent to low rank approximation of the matrix of observed variables. Factor analysis originated in psychometrics, and is used in behavioral sciences, social sciences, marketing, product management, operations research, and other applied sciences that deal with large quantities of data.

Factor analysis is related to principal component analysis (PCA), but the two are not identical. Latent variable models, including factor analysis, use regression modelling techniques to test hypotheses producing error terms, while PCA is a descriptive statistical technique. There has been significant controversy in the field over the inequivocality of the two techniques (see Exploratory factor analysis versus principal components analysis).

Foreign Policy is a bimonthly American magazine founded in 1970 by Samuel P. Huntington and Warren Demian Manshel.

Originally, the magazine was a quarterly. Its most notable feature was its unusual physical format: pages printed in a narrow 4" x 11" size, with a durable yet not hardback cover.

Under editor-in-chief Moisés Naím (1996–2010), Foreign Policy changed from an academic quarterly in the 1990s to a bimonthly glossy, winning the 2009, 2007, and 2003 National Magazine Award for General Excellence. The topics it covers include global politics, economics, integration and ideas. On September 29, 2008, The Washington Post Company announced that they had purchased Foreign Policy from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.[1] It also has a website.[2]

Foreign Policy's contributors include: Pulitzer Prize-winning military reporter Tom Ricks, international bestseller Stephen Walt, blogger Daniel W. Drezner, Christian Brose (Condoleezza Rice's longtime chief speechwriter), 9/11 Commission director Philip Zelikow, ex-senior White House aide Peter Feaver, top Pentagon official Dov Zakheim, John McCain's foreign policy adviser Steve Biegun, and Josh Rogin (a Washington journalist specializing in investigative reports on national security and foreign affairs). Foreign Policy publishes the annual Globalization Index, and Failed State Index. Its report Inside the Ivory Tower provides an annual comprehensive ranking of professional schools in international relations.

A Spanish edition of Foreign Policy, named Foreign Policy en español is published by Fundación para las Relaciones Internacionales y el Diálogo Exterior (FRIDE) since 2004.

An international organization is an organization with an international membership, scope, or presence. There are two main types:

International non-governmental organizations (INGOs): non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that operate internationally. There are two types:

International non-profit organizations. Examples include the World Organization of the Scout Movement, International Committee of the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières. International corporations, referred to as multinational corporations. Examples include The Coca-Cola Company and Toyota.

Intergovernmental organizations, also known as international governmental organizations (IGOs): the type of organization most closely associated with the term 'international organization', these are organizations that are made up primarily of sovereign states (referred to as member states). Notable examples include the United Nations (UN), Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Council of Europe (CoE), European Union (EU; which is a prime example of a supranational organization), and World Trade Organization (WTO). The UN has used the term "intergovernmental organization" instead of "international organization" for clarity.

Regional integration is a process in which states enter into a regional agreement in order to enhance regional cooperation through regional institutions and rules. The objectives of the agreement could range from economic to political, although it has generally become a political economy initiative where commercial purposes are the means to achieve broader socio-political and security objectives. It could be organized either on a supranational or an intergovernmental decision-making institutional order, or a combination of both.

Past efforts at regional integration have often focused on removing barriers to free trade in the region, increasing the free movement of people, labour, goods, and capital across national borders, reducing the possibility of regional armed conflict (for example, through Confidence and Security-Building Measures), and adopting cohesive regional stances on policy issues, such as the environment, climate change and migration.

COLD WAR:

At the end of World War II, English author and journalist George Orwell used cold war, as a general term, in his essay “You and the Atomic Bomb”, published October 19, 1945, in the British newspaper Tribune. Contemplating a world living in the shadow of the threat of nuclear warfare, Orwell wrote:

"For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications—that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of "cold war" with its neighbors."