WEB SITES
Political Science/International Relations
RESOURCES FOR RESEARCH PAPER WRITING

• Search Engines
• General News Sources
• U.S. Government -- Foreign Policy
• International Organizations Home Pages
• International Law
• Nationalism Links
• Country Home Pages
• Academic Journals: International Relations
• Miscellaneous

In your search, you should pay attention to retrieving primary sources of information, if possible: that is, original documents, letters, journals or memoranda from figures and/or organizations associated with the topic that interests you.

For help in how to make citations and references for what you find on the web:
<http://www.wisc.edu/writing/Handbook/DocAPSA.html>.

Warnings:

• WWW is about as unregulated a source of information as exists in our society. Virtually anybody with or without an agenda can put out information and disguise it as fact. This may be especially true in the fields of politics and international relations. Be discriminating in your approach to the information you find. For help in evaluating websites, go to the KSU library main page at <http://www.library.kent.edu/>. Look for "web tools" under the "Ready Reference" section and go to that page. In addition to the information you will find at "Criteria for Evaluating Web Resources" there is a handy evaluation form that you can download.
• Put these websites into the Bookmarks function of your computer so that it will be easy to return to them in the future. But back up your bookmarks regularly.

GENERAL NEWS SOURCES
 (back to index)

The New York Times <http://www.nytimes.com/> is still one of the most respected news sources out there. If you want to get a take on an international event and include the information in your research paper, try to use a source such as the New York Times rather than the Daily Kent Stater or the Akron Beacon Journal. It's a question of completeness and accuracy. An added advantage of hitting the NYT's website: if you become a subscriber on-line (it's free, you just have to register), you can get news articles updated every ten minutes.

Related website:

- New York Times Book Review<http://www.nytimes.com/books/> includes the complete New York Times Sunday Book Review, daily book reviews and news, and a searchable archive of New York Times Book Reviews, bestseller lists, etc.
 

Other good news sources:

• The Washington Post <http://www.washingtonpost.com/>
• The Wall Street Journal <http://www.wsj.com/>
• The Christian Science Monitor <http://www.csmonitor.com/>

LEXIS/NEXIS <http://www.lexis-nexis.com/> is the world's leading provider of enhanced information services in on-line form, containing approximately one billion documents in more than 7,000 databases. They add 9.5 million documents (!) each week. This means that with Lexis-Nexis you can enter a keyword and it will search through thousands of information sources (magazines, journals, newspapers, news wires, etc.) to list all the articles that address that topic. Their databases also include company, country, financial, demographic, market research and industry reports. An excellent source of information.
 
 
 

The Department of State <http://www.state.gov/> is responsible for implementing the President's foreign policies. The DOS website has a searchable index, and includes information on everything from the structure of the department to services, news releases, and the Secretary's travel schedule, among other things.
 

Related websites of possible interest:

• <http://careers.state.gov/student/> offers information on careers in the Foreign and Civil Service and student employment opportunities;
• <http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/> Background Notes, prepared by US embassies overseas on basic information for virtually any country of the world;
• <http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/tw/tw_1764.html> Travel Warnings offers travel warnings and counselor information sheets: official recommendations of places in the world to avoid;
• <http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/index.html> publishes briefs on foreign policy issues that offer recommendations for a "more responsible and visionary" U.S. foreign policy.

The National Security Agency website <http://www.nsa.gov/> has information on this important agency involved in everything from intelligence gathering to foreign policy formulation and implementation. Links include but are not limited to: mission statement, history, Information Systems Security and, among others, the National Cryptolgic Museum.

Related websites:

• The National Security Agency Model Site <http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/index.html> bills itself as a site that "includes all the interesting stuff the official NSA site should have but doesn't."
• The National Security Website <http://www.nationalsecurity.org> of the Heritage Foundation is that conservative think tank's "clearinghouse for reporters, researchers and concerned Americans to publications, policy experts and weblinks on a wide spectrum of national security issues."
• The Central Intelligence Agency <https://www.cia.gov/> has all the CIA will let you know about its operations (please note its warning about unauthorized entry). An interesting if incongruous link: <https://www.cia.gov/cia/ciakids/index.shtml>: "games for kids, historical insights about famous Americans, a world geography quiz."

INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS HOME PAGES
 

The United Nations home page <http://www.un.org> has a lot of what you need to know about the UN, including a sizable subdirectory on primary documents. These include speeches, press briefings, General Assembly and Security Council resolutions, and the latest documents issued by the UN (one of the recent texts available is on "Financing of the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces in the Middle East") as well as historical documents such as the UN Charter. More than 3,000 documents related to the Arab-Israeli conflict are located on a UN website called UNISPAL, the UN Information System on the Question of Palestine <http://domino.un.org/>.
 

The home page for the European Union <http://europa.eu.int> provides a comprehensive view of the EU, including general information, descriptions of important institutions, news releases, key treaties, and current issues among other things.

 Other Interesting IOs:

• NATO <http://www.nato.int/>
• International Monetary Fund <http://www.imf.org/>
• World Trade Organization <http://www.wto.org/>
• International Court of Justice <http://www.icj-cij.org/>. A site maintained by Cornell University on the ICJ may be a little more accessible: <http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/library/International_Resources/icj.htm>.

... And INGOs:

Google has over 54,000 sites in one of its categorized database (key search words: "non governmental organizations") that in turn link into thousands of NGOs around the world. This is a useful starting point.

Another useful starting point is a large directory of weblinks to INGOs. One of the best is <http://www.philanthropyjournal.org/>, organized by the Philanthropy Journal. This well-organized site provides annotated links to activists, human rights groups, civil liberties and politics groups, relief and development groups, environmental and animal rights activists, and other lists of nonprofit organizations.
 

Some interesting INGO's:

For human rights:

• Amnesty International <http://www.amnesty.org/>
• The International Rescue Committee <http://www.theirc.org/>
• Human Rights Watch <http://www.hrw.org/home.html>

For environmental issues:

• Site for links to environmental INGOs: Center for Environmental Research and Conservation, Columbia University <http://cerc.columbia.edu/>
• Environmental Law Alliance <http://www.elaw.org/>: this useful, well-organized site provides links to worldwide sites relating to environmental law.

INTERNATIONAL LAW

• American Society of International Law <http://www.asil.org/>: Excellent jumping-off point to the field of international law. Many links to web and other resources pertaining to international law, human rights, other related topics. Well organized.
• Foreign and International Law Web <http://www.washlaw.edu/>: Maintained by Washburn University School of Law, site offers links to foreign countries, international treaties, the UN, topical material, listserv archives, electronic journals, IOs, and embassies around the world. Foreign laws by subject include links to constitutions from around the world, criminal justice, and environmental laws. Site also has well-developed links by region. Excellent, though unannotated, starting point for the basics of domestic and international laws around the world.

There are a number of interesting websites that center on nationalism. These are by no means exhaustive.  Besides those listed below, be sure and survey general topics such as "nationalism," "national identity," or "nation-states" when you look at the section on "Academic Journals: International Relations" below.

• The Nationalism Project <http://www.nationalismproject.org/> is a resource intended to help forward the study of nationalism using the World Wide Web. This site contains essays, articles, dissertations, book abstracts and reviews, a book list containing over 200 titles, a bibliography of over 1000 journal articles, and links to nationalism-related resources.
•  Nationalism links <http://www.socresonline.org.uk/2/1/natlinks.html>: Sociological Research Online, Guildford, United Kingdom.  Easily the best list of nationalism-related links on the Internet.  Links are arranged in an easy-to-locate fashion and a wide range of sub-topics are included. The site is done by Paul Treanor, an independent scholar and political scientist. The emphasis is illustrative rather than theoretical.
• CEREN (Centre for Research on Ethnic Relations and Nationalism) <http://sockom.helsinki.fi/ceren>: CEREN is a centre for research and documentation in the field of ethnic relations and nationalism. It is based at the Swedish School of Social Science at the University of Helsinki, Finland. (Note: hit the "In English" link to get the copy in English.)

COUNTRY HOME PAGES

You likely will be able to find more information on the Web than you may want or need on any country in the world. A good place to start: a search engine such as Yahoo <http://www.yahoo.com/>, and put as a key search word the name of the country of your interest. Some that I have visited and recommend:

• Iraq: <http://www.iraqigovernment.org/>
• Canada: <http://www.canada.com/>
• China: <http://www.yahoo.com/Regional/Countries/China/>
• Cuba: <http://www.usembassy.org.uk/cuba.html>
• France: <http://www.france.com/>
• Germany:<http://www.germany-info.org/>
• Russia: <http://www.gov.ru/>
• United Kingdom:<http://www.britain-info.org/>

In addition, these websites might be helpful:

• A comprehensive guide to any country of the world: The Library of Congress Country Studies: <http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/cshome.html>
• Very good resource and jumping-off point for Arab country information: ArabNet <http://www.arab.net/>.
• Extremely good jumping-off point for information on any country in Asia: Asian Studies WWW Virtual Library <http://coombs.anu.edu.au/WWWVL-AsianStudies.html>.
• Megadirectory to links and information on African studies: H-Africa Homepage <http://www.h-net.org/~africa/>.
• Large megadirectory of links to other sites, with information and resources related to European integration and European countries in general: EuroInternet <http://eiop.or.at/euroint/>.

ACADEMIC JOURNALS: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

A partial list of journals that regularly publish scholarly articles on international politics and with which you should therefore become familiar includes the following:

American Political Science Review (APSR)
*Journal of Conflict Resolution (JCR)
*Foreign Affairs<http://www.foreignaffairs.org/>
Foreign Policy
*Millennium
International Affairs
New Left Review (NLR)
*International Organization (IO)
*Review of International Studies (RIS)
*International Security
*International Studies Quarterly (ISQ)
*World Politics <http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/world_politics/index.html>

NOTE: Those journals marked with an * are the most prominent and/or especially useful.

MISCELLANEOUS
 

Take the "World's Smallest Political Quiz" <http://www.self-gov.org/quiz.html> to find your political identity. And watch for some hard sell from the group that puts this quiz out, the Libertarians.

To encourage your interest in things global, I suggest you visit The Global Ideas Bank <http://newciv.org/GIB/>, a rather far-out site of the Institute for Social Inventions, which bills itself as a "international suggestion box for socially innovative non-technological ideas and projects." Some of the latest ideas posted there by concerned citizens of all kinds (not only scholars and politicians): confederating a divided Ireland and UK; avoiding civil wars--new constitutions for emerging democracies; unrepresented nations and peoples organizations; reinventing democracy; identities in crisis--decentralization in democracies; dividing Italy into two countries; stop Los Angeles from growing.
 

@ Richard Robyn 2006