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.