THE INSTITUTIONAL APPROACH OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Following the efforts of the idealist at preventing war in the post world war era, the institutional approach emerged.  It was the general belief during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that international wars could be avoided if there were institutions  which could serve as a way for the peaceful resolution of disputes. This resulted to the establishment of the League of Nations in 1919 and the United Nations in 1945.

            So, the events that followed the twentieth century disregarded the institutional approach. The first thing is that the First World War occurred reason being that the balance of power collapsed.  the second thing is that the league of nations could not prevent the second world war,  and  third, UN failed to prevent the treacherous and  precarious cold war between the super powers, with the unbridled craze to acquire nuclear  weapons which  could return the world to perpetual  destruction, if a third world war  is  allowed to take  place, still, we should acknowledge that the  institutions are man-made and human beings are  full of crisis.   

The gulf crisis lead to a war situation is necessarily the inability of the UN or the Arab league to prevent it, but the Sadan Hussein. Again, the international courts inability to enforce her judgments against erring states could be traced to the behaviour of state leaders’ negligence of the international court rule or order and the structural body as well. Example UN invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. In summary here, the institutional approach is still important and what is needed is to carve out supranational institutions that can separately sanction misbehaved states.