The notion of a scholarly discipline requires a measure of accessible, assembled and systematic thinking, as well as academic institutions. This is why the organization of International Relations (IR) as an academic field of inquiry is often claimed to have started in 1919 with the establishment of the Chair of International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

Many scholars have criticized IR’s centennial anniversary as myth, usually arguing that the foundations of IR was set much earlier (e.g. Acharya and Buzan, 2019). In a sense, this criticism of IR’s “foundational myth” is like pushing at an open door. Most IR scholars are conscious about the fact that providing a single year for the birth of a scholarly discipline implies a simplified picture and that IR has a rich “pre-history” dating all the way back to Thucydides. The more interesting question concerns the broadness of the IR canon. What counts as IR and who belongs to it?

This special section uses the notion of IR’s centennial anniversary to reflect upon some of the disciplinary developments. IR did not just pop out of nowhere in 1919, but became organized around a preconceived understanding about the nature of the field, its epistemology and agenda. As the field matured, this early understanding was challenged and broadened, catalyzing the development of its different schools of thought with their often diverging epistemologies and ontologies. The field has now fragmented into often internally unrelated research programmes, some of which have little connection to the early canon of IR, while also vastly expanding its research agenda and connections to other academic disciplines. The result has been a more globalized IR, drawing in more non-Western IR thinking, but also blurring the borders of the field.

In their respective contributions, Kal Holsti and Torbjørn Knutsen look at the founding of IR’s first disciplinary institutions and how the legacy of the Great War and the core normative concerns about peace and war of the “classical tradition” catalyzed the early institutional development of IR as an academic field of study. As one of the pioneers of IR, Holsti goes on to provide a personal account on the dramatic proliferation of the field during the last fifty years, and his concern for the withering of the classical tradition. Its normative concerns with the questions of the causes of war and the conditions of peace have been pushed aside as the field have expanded to deal with international relations writ large.

Knutsen, on his part, critically examines the framing of the early development of IR as a series of “great debates”, and instead argues for a more institutional historiography that puts less emphasis on sharp dialectics and internal discussions, and more on institutional changes and external events. Based on his archival research in the UNESCO archives in Paris, Knutsen brings up many less known aspects of IR’s institutional evolution and why it first seemed to emerge as a strongly Anglo-Saxon discipline. Novel is also his focus on the way international conferences in the interwar period helped conceive of IR as a scholarly field of inquiry.

As for later developments within the field, Teija Tiilikainen looks at how European integration has represented a scholarly challenge to IR theory and how it has affected the study of IR. In particular, she discusses how European integration provided an important testing ground for liberal institutionalism. She also shows how the impact of EU studies on IR theorizing can be seen in the strengthening of constructivist trends. The EU’s institutionalization and international actorness have encouraged scholars to develop the scholarly instruments of IR and thus provided for many fruitful encounters between EU and general IR studies, particularly through the framework of social constructivism. Yet, as the EU is increasingly being studied as a normal political system, EU studies have started to distance itself from IR.

While this distancing will help establish EU studies as a discipline of its own, it may also help sharpen the boundaries of IR. Indeed, as Holsti discusses in his contribution, the many theoretical “turns” have signified a fragmentation of IR into different camps and the dissolution of the normative core of the discipline embodied by the classical tradition. Interestingly, he also asks whether current trends such as the return of power politics, while potentially catastrophic for global peace and security, will return IR to its roots and revive it as a more coherent discipline.

In the concluding contribution, Mikael Wigell and Tuomas Forsberg draw some conclusions from this special section and briefly looks at the development of Nordic IR. Ideationally, the roots of Nordic IR extends back well before 1919, connecting with the normative concerns of the classic tradition, though its institutionalization only began in earnest from the 1930 onwards. They show how Nordic IR has made valuable contributions to IR theory, particularly from the 1960s onwards with its strong focus on peace and conflict studies, but also affecting many of the later turns of the discipline. In conclusion, they call for a comprehensive historiography of Nordic IR.