Tell me what to read so I can understand international relations.

The Oxford "very short introduction" series is very good. I'm familiar with the Globalization one more than the International Relations, but it might be good to check out. I think other publishers also use this format, if I'm not mistaken. Here's one for http://www.amazon.co.uk/International-Relations-Short-Introduction-Introductions/dp/0192801570

I recommend the first third of Buzan and Little, International Systems in World History.

Most anything by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandana_Shiva is interesting from an international perspective. She concerns herself with agricultural patents and free trade, and gives a grassroots perspective on the consequences of global policy. Water Wars is a good example of how scarcity of water has affected India. Chomsky is maybe too obvious to mention, but still excellent to read parallel with current news. Both Kropotkins and Goldmans memoirs give insights into historical events that still shape how we understand the western world, especially looking at labour struggle and reasons given for war. Except Shiva, the books above offer an anarchist analysis of international relations and are good to have read since the ideological debate today is exceptionally narrow. The memoirs are also beautifully written.

I did a degree in international relations a few years ago and I can't think of any text that really explains this stuff very well. With any of these introductory texts it's difficult to translate from descriptions of different ways of thinking about IR to what the actual practice looks like. So I'd suggest forgetting about finding a primer and just reading a selection of papers on things that interest you in various international relations journals. You'll get a great feel for the kind of things each school of thought is concerned with. If you do a literature search for international relations journals (it's a very balkanised subject so there's plenty). Take a look at the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_relations for some terms you might want to throw into your searches.

I'd suggest that the two key schools of thought to understand are (1) realism, the main US foreign policy tradition since the end of the Second World War; (2) neo-conservatism, a very different way of thinking about foreign policy (some might call it "crazy"), which has been put in practice by the George W. Bush administration, and which continues to be the dominant school of thought in today's Republican party. E. H. Carr defines realism in http://books.google.com/books?id=Gbz_EsWbioUC in contrast to utopianism, which sets goals (e.g. the prevention of war) without first determining whether they are feasible. Like other infant sciences, the science of international politics has been markedly and frankly utopian. It has been in the initial stage in which wishing prevails over thinking, generalisation over observation, and in which little attempt is made at a critical analysis of existing facts or available means. In this stage, attention is concentrated almost exclusively on the end to be achieved. The end has seemed so important that analytical criticism of the means proposed has too often been branded as destructive and unhelpful. When President Wilson, on his way to the Peace Conference, was asked by some of his advisers whether he thought his plan of a League of Nations would work, he replied briefly: "If it won't work, it must be made to work." In contrast, realism emphasizes constraints on foreign policy: the limited availability of means, the power available to one's opponents, the difficulty of intervening in other countries' affairs, the impossibility of controlling outcomes. The focus tends to be on maintaining a stable balance of power, similar to the European historical tradition of foreign policy. Given the American tendency towards optimism, and the belief that any problem can be solved, realists tend to spend a lot of time explaining why certain goals are unachievable. For a more in-depth description of political realism than Carr's, see Hans Morgenthau's classic http://books.google.com/books?id=M9IlAAAAMAAJ. http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/morg6.htm. http://web.archive.org/web/20010618012217/http://csf.colorado.edu/isa/isn/24-1/cover24-1.html. For political realism in practice, see http://www.geocities.com/rwvong/future/kennan.html. Kennan was a U.S. policymaker during the early Cold War. From a realist point of view, neo-conservatism is a particular form of utopianism. Neo-conservatism includes "moral clarity", i.e. a good guys vs. bad guys view of the world; a belief in the ultimate effectiveness of force, e.g. to bring about sweeping change in the Middle East through war, and a corresponding disdain for diplomacy; a visceral opposition to constraints on U.S. power, whether it's the UN or the Geneva Conventions; and finally, a fair amount of populist chauvinism (Jonah Goldberg's "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" is a good example). Note that this strongly resembles the world-view of a typical Hollywood action movie. Indeed, neo-conservative opponents of arms control often use the analogy that you don't make disarmament agreements between cops and robbers. There are several recent books about the neo-conservatives, their way of thinking, and the Bush administration's disastrous foreign policy. http://books.google.com/books?id=RU21HQAACAAJ, by James Mann; http://books.google.com/books?id=PNoQTLrfjfYC, by Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke; http://books.google.com/books?id=g3hBKBRovXQC, by Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay.

Wow! These answers are fantastic! Thank you so much, everybody!