Tarih ve Uluslararas li kiler: Yap c Bir Diyalog a r s /// History and International Relations: An Appeal for a Constructive Dialogue

This paper studies and discusses the role and place of history in International Relations theory, theory building, and methodology. In the early years of the discipline, history had played a crucial role. However, after WWII and until the end of the Cold War a distanced approach had been adopted in the field, due to adoption of a strict positivistic social science methodology during that period. After the Cold War students of International Relations practiced a more constructive dialog with historical researches/historiography. Within the process of theory building and research, diverse approaches of International Relations have given varied importance to the roles of history. It has been observed that the selected methods of social sciences to be taken into account have varied the multitude of the part of history. In this study firstly, the role of history in IR has been debated in general. In the following sections some significant International Relations theories have been reviewed and analyzed in order to show how much importance they have given to historical studies and historiography in their approaches. This paper concludes with a call for a constructive dialog between Turkish scientific discipline of International Relations, history, and Turkish historiography.