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This article considers whether political science should abandon the subfields of American politics, comparative politics, and international relations (IR), for new subfields of conflict, political economy, institutions, and behavior. The focus here is whether the field should abandon IR. The article lays out the arguments in favor of abandoning IR, describing scholarly trends that cross conventional subfield lines and are pushing to dissolve IR. Next, it argues that the costs of abandoning IR exceed the benefits, as new subfield divisions would remove some artificial walls but create new ones. Abandoning IR might undermine objective theory testing, would disadvantage the study of international system and structure, and would undermine the ability of political science to inform foreign policy debates. The article concludes by recommending that the field keep IR and its current subfield boundaries but that the walls between subfields should be kept low and porous. Adapted from the source document.

Up until about 2000, most of the work on gender and international relations (IR) was nonpositivist in nature. Since 2000, there has been a burst of positivist gender/IR scholarship, much of it quantitative. This work has addressed several important areas in IR, including terrorism, interstate war, human rights, civil war, violence against civilians, public opinion, international norms, globalization, and others. Much of this work has developed new data, advanced theory, and employed rigorous empirical methods. This article surveys this positivist scholarship. It discusses how positivist and nonpositivist gender/IR work complement each other. This article makes recommendations about directions for future scholarship on gender and IR.

This article develops a theory connecting security commitments and the decision to acquire nuclear weapons. In a threatening environment, third party security commitments can reduce a state's fear of abandonment in the event of war and its motive for acquiring nuclear weapons. However, a threatened state may reject at least some kinds of security commitments, such as foreign deployed nuclear weapons, if it fears that such commitments increase the risks of entrapment, the possibility that the threatened state will be dragged into a war it would like to avoid. The article looks at three kinds of security commitments, alliances, foreign deployed nuclear weapons, and foreign deployed troops. In quantitative tests, it finds strong evidence that foreign deployed nuclear weapons reduce proliferation motives, only very limited evidence that alliances reduce proliferation motives, and no evidence that foreign deployed troops reduce proliferation motives. It also presents several qualitative evidence, which supports the quantitative evidence, and in particular helps explain why alliance ties sometimes do not prevent proliferation. Adapted from the source document.

The bargaining model of war envisions the initiation, prosecution, termination, and consequences of war as part of a single bargaining process. This article focuses on the most recent works on this topic, many of which employ formal techniques, and it applies the model to the different phases of war. It also discusses the state of empirical work on the bargaining model. Finally, the article considers how the bargaining model meshes with other theories of war and international relations, including cognitive psychology, organization theory, domestic politics, and constructivism.(Übernahme aus DE, SWP-Wdr)