| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
World War I has an important and complex relationship with international relations (IR) theory. The War was the catalyst for the emergence of IR as a discipline and helped to shape the liberal and realist paradigms. The War was also a principal focus of many IR theories. Realists and liberals based theories on it or justified them by arguing that they could account for its origins. Finally, the War influenced theory development in these and other paradigms through new understandings of it developed by historians. These interpretations in turn were often driven by contemporary political problems and projects. Theory, World War I, and the contemporary world are accordingly linked in direct and indirect ways. I cannot possibly unpack this relationship in a short essay. Rather, I want to illustrate with a few examples of the way in which contemporary political events and intellectual developments have encouraged new understandings of World War I. That conflict emerges as a resource, but one used in so many ways that it increasingly comes to resemble a Rorschach Test.
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