Mezhdunarodni otnosheniya [International Relations] by Nadia Boyadjieva (review)

Defining the breadth and content of the discipline of International Relations (IR) has been one of the most elusive conceptual, theoretical, and methodological tasks social scientists have been facing over the past century. The bulging literature on the subject has contributed surprisingly little to clarify the understanding of the boundaries of the field, and recent historic, paradigm-shifting events further rekindled old debates by pouring old wine into new glasses. Fittingly, Nadia Boyadjieva's account skillfully glides across a wide band of theoretical considerations, remaining truthful to its mission of offering a rich palette of analytical approaches (cf. p. 10) in tracing the permutations of what she consistently terms the "system of international relations" from the Westphalian Peace Treaties until the end of the Cold War. In itself, the book's title "International Relations" is as incomplete as it is overreaching. This is a book whose intellectual merit lives in a series of almost obligatory caveats, which do not detract from its conceptual contribution and instead accentuate its rich nuances. One the one hand, it provides a historical narrative of IR, covering the period from the mid-seventeenth century to the early 1990s (p. 5); on the other hand, it offers a careful selection of events by rightfully avoiding any claims for factual and geographic completeness.

Boyadjieva's 659-page opus arrives at the right place, even if a little late for this reviewer. I remember the time when I struggled with the vestiges of the so-called old thinking during my years as an undergraduate student of political science at Sofia University in the early 2000s. The dearth of literature in the Bulgarian language on the subject that was in accord with the time of change brought about a noticeable epistemological dissonance. Back then, professors based their arguments on shaky grounds. Even though they were free from the shackles of dialectical materialism, their newfound intellectual emancipation and the core of their teaching were hindered by their apparent inability to overcome the inertia of the theoretical dogmatism of yesteryear. Thus, what was left for us, the students, was to sift through a host of semi-apocryphal collections of handwritten lecture courses, spliced up with a modest helping of selected photocopied chapters of Western academic books and journal articles. Things have since changed. Boyadjieva's work is not the first example of this growing scholarship, but is among the most comprehensive now available for students of this elusive discipline in that part of the world.

The monograph presents itself as a study of IR through the theoretical understanding of their historic evolution from the mid-seventeenth century until the end of the period of bipolar opposition in the international system in the early 1990s (p. 11). However, the author's ambitious approach leads to what are, in effect, three books in one.

The first substantial part of the monograph (pp. 33–159) offers a stand-alone treatment of the theoretical and disciplinary underpinnings of the field of IR, which strikes the reader with its evenhanded discussion of the origins of the subject in Western, Russian, and Bulgarian literatures. Those coming from the West or from the social sciences might contest some of the terminology used here. They, however, might wish to refer to Boyadjieva's legal background, where the "system" of IR offers the functional bridges, binding interstate exchanges at the highest analytical levels through mutually recognizable legal norms. This part of the book, which discusses the theoretical underpinnings of the "international relations science" is particularly apt in describing the oscillating nature of the discipline, which is rich on methods and theories but notably poor on systemic predictability. Boyadjieva meticulously organizes and presents a handful of theoretical approaches without the pretense of providing exhaustive coverage. By using a wide range of sources, she therefore manages to provide a well-rounded description of the discipline's current state of affairs. Quite a helpful feature in this aspect is her review of the contributions made by Bulgarian academics over the past...