In the paper, the authors analyse the institutionalization of the discipline of international relations and security studies at the Faculty of Political Sciences, guided by the criteria of stability, identity and autonomy, which are tested through specific indicators of their manifestation. In doing so, the emphasis is on the development during the last thirty years, with a brief review of the ear-lier periods when international relations were primarily incorporated as one of the constitutive disciplines at the then new university institution, which eman-cipated political science in relation to the other, older scientific fields which it is rooted in. In addition, in order to gain insight into the parallel development of international relations and security studies since the mid-twentieth century, the paper examines the possible emancipation of security studies as a separate scientific discipline and tries to answer the question of whether it is possible or useful to separate them, considering the intertwining and overlapping of the conceptual-categorical apparatus, theories and phenomena they investigate. In particular, the development of the discipline of international relations and security studies in Croatia is compared with neighbouring countries (Serbia and Slovenia), which leads to conclusions about the relationship between se-curity studies and international relations. The paper argues that international relations and security studies, which have been developing more intensely since the second half of the 1990s in terms of scientific production and cur-ricula, represent a strongly institutionalized discipline.
