The discipline of international relations is a fragmented one. In this book, Roger Spegele analyzes this fragmentation and suggests that the subject should be seen as engaged in a struggle among three competing conceptions: positivism-empiricism, emancipatory international relations, and political realism. He argues that scholars following these different conceptions have had different ways of understanding theory, practice and the relation between them. By focusing on this relation, Professor Spegele develops a new version of political realism, called Evaluative Political Realism .