International relations (IR) as a field of inquiry has been, until recent years, often engaged worldwide in unremitting struggle to apportion for itself a position as an independent or separate discipline. It was frequently asked whether IR is at all independent discipline. Like all other relatively new fields of inquiry and studies, finding a place for IR as a separate department had almost always been subject to conditions such as fund allocation and/or availability of resources or constraints such as opposition/academic jealousies from the related disciplines. In case of IR the difficulty must have been a little too intense, as there was a tendency to view the discipline as a 'bundle of subjects' rather than as an independent field of inquiry or discipline. In the mid-1930s when some of the universities in the western world started to offer IR the question was still whether the discipline is to address solely inter-state relations and/or diplomatic-strategic interaction between and among states. Equally it was asked whether the discipline is to include inter- personal relations, international social behavior, encompassing the very many different activities such as international communications, legal conventions, athletic events, business transactions, religious-missionary propagation, scientific- technological conferences, educational exchanges etc. (Dougherty and pfaltzgraff, Jr., 1971: 1-10). Despite raising this sort of questions there had been steady development of IR as an independent field of inquiry and many of the world's leading universities started to offer IR as a discipline.
The world has been changing swiftly since the Second World War and the global change from that time onward involving Cold War and Detente, post-Cold War events, scientific and technological developments have made the study of IR still more vast and complex in scope. The inception of the age of globalization and the huge networking impacts of the new technological innovations has their ramifications for the discipline. The paper appraises in sections II-IX the status of teaching of IR in Bangladesh since the last days of the British Raj and also offers in the concluding section some suggestions and thoughts for reflection for all those who feel concerned about the status of IR teaching in Bangladesh.