The guide

International relations

Humanities & Social Sciences · Law

The study of how states, international organisations and companies deal with each other across borders: trade, conflict, treaties and diplomacy. Plus the theories used to explain why they cooperate, or fail to.

This suits you if…

You can hold several countries' conflicting interests in your head at once, without collapsing them into a single right answer. A career built on relationship and reputation over many years, rather than one visible early win, sounds acceptable rather than frustrating.

Look elsewhere if…

You are an international student specifically aiming at your host country's diplomatic service. That service is closed or heavily restricted to non-citizens almost everywhere we cover. Political science stays closer to domestic institutions if that is the real interest. Rights-focused legal work reaches cross-border issues through a more concrete route than general international relations does.

What this subject actually is

You will also see it called

International Studies · International AffairsThe same subject, under a different department in a different country. Search for all of them.

What the first year is really made of

Model UN prepared you to argue a country's position. The actual degree spends its first months making you defend competing theories about why states behave as they do at all. That's a more abstract register than the debate itself, and some strong debaters find it surprisingly dry. International law and international economics both arrive early as compulsory strands. Realising how much of the subject is law and economics, rather than history and diplomacy, is what changes some people's minds about it.

The catch

In nearly every country we cover, diplomatic services are closed or heavily restricted for non-citizens. That quietly removes the most obviously named career from the table for a large share of international students, before they have even applied. The field's other destinations are real: international organisations, NGOs, trade and compliance work. They're also far more competitive to enter, and usually expect a further degree.

What to do about it now

The school subjects that actually matter

History
English
A second language

What admissions screens on, and what the first year assumes you already have. The only thing on this page you can start today.

Where it leads

Kinds of work this opens

A list, not a prediction. Most people in these jobs did not study exactly this, and most people who study this end up doing something the list does not name.