International relations (IR) or international affairs, depending on academic institution, is either a field of political science, an interdisciplinary academic field similar to global studies, or an entirely independent academic discipline in which students take a variety of internationally focused courses in social science and humanities disciplines. In both cases, the field studies relationships between political entities (polities) such as states, sovereign states, empires, inter-governmental organizations (IGOs), international non-governmental organizations (INs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and multinational corporations (MNCs) and the wider world-systems produced by this interaction. International relations is an academic and a public policy field and so can be positive and normative, because it analyzes and formulates the foreign policy of a given State.