Regional studies within the discipline of international relations to 1989

The aim of the article is to analyse the genesis and evolution of regional studies from the interwar period to the end of the Cold War. It is based on the research assumption that regional studies throughout this period developed in close association with the study of international relations, reaching the status of a sub-discipline of international relations. Regional studies are a sub-discipline of studies of international relations because their subject matter is international relations in a given region (regional system), which, according to the adopted systematics of the discipline’s research area, is an intermediate level of analysis between the state and the global system. Therefore, it is natural to ask what premises and assumptions were the basis for the interdependent development of research on regionalism and international relations, which led to the formation of regional studies as a sub-discipline of international relations? Trying to answer this research question, the following hypothesis can be formulated: regional studies as a sub-discipline of international relations was created through the efforts of international relations researchers to find an optimal level of research and theorizing that could combine the perspective of the state and its foreign policy with the perspective of the entire international system. It was also a manifestation of the desire to deepen research understood as the formulation of fully verifiable theories based on more available empirical data at the regional subsystem level.

Profile of Andrzej Wędzki (1927–2017), a Slavist, regionalist, and collector. This article analyses the directions of Andrzej Wędzki’s scholarly activities, his contribution to the study of early Slavic history, settlement, and the formation of cities in Central Europe.

The aim of this article is to analyse the ontological and epistemological dimensions of the main stages of the development of regional studies as a sub-discipline of international relations. The research problem of the article focuses on the interdependence and significance of regional studies as a sub-discipline within the scholarly discipline of international relations. The issue of regionalism and the region arose in the period of the establishment of international relations as a scholarly discipline during the interwar years, and was further conceptualized in the 1950s and 1960s during the Cold War period. The status of regional studies was then marginalized in methodological, ontological and epistemological discourse by the main theoretical trends of international relations. As a result, it was only after the end of the Cold War that we witnessed a gradual, systemic process of reintegration of regional studies within the discipline. This article argues that the reintegration of regional studies into the discipline of international relations is a function of two parallel processes that are interrelated: the transformation of the liberal international order after the end of the Cold War and increased pluralism in scholarly discourse within the discipline of international relations. These developments and their associated academic implications have contributed to the consolidation and strengthening of regional studies as a major subdiscipline of international relations.