World politics and international relations. Major and minor actors in IR

Global politics is the discipline that studies the political and economical patterns of the world. It studies the relationships between cities, nation-states, shell-states, multinational corporations, non-governmental organizations and international organizations.

It has been argued that global politics should be distinguished from the field of international politics, which seeks to understand political relations between nation-states, and thus has a narrower scope. Similarly, international relations, which seeks to understand general economic and political relations between nation-states, is a narrower field than global politics.

Current areas of discussion include national and ethnic conflict regulation, democracy and the politics of national self-determination, globalization and its relationship to democracy, conflict and peace studies, comparative politics, political economy, and the international political economy of the environment.

International relations (IR) is the study of relationships among countries, the roles of sovereign states, inter-governmental organizations (IGO), international non-governmental organizations (INGO), non-governmental organizations (NGO), and multinational corporations (MNC). In the 1950s, the behavioral revolution in the social sciences and growing acceptance of political realism in international relations led scholars to conceptualize international politics as a system, using the language of systems theory.

A system is an set of units, objects, or parts united by some form of regular interaction.

In the international system interrelatedness can be hard to discover.

For example, if one looks at the two mini-states of Iceland and Guatemala, what real interaction exists between them?

The U.N. representatives of each might know each other, but they do not exchange ambassadors. Neither is there much trade between them.

If we follow a strict application of the definition of a system and assume that a change of any element in it system will affect all other elements, would Iceland and Guatemala qualify as elements of the same international system?

One possible answer is that these two small countries are not major elements.