Andrew Linklater's The Problem of Harm in World Politics (Cambridge, 2011) created a new agenda for the sociology of states-systems. Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems builds on the author's attempts to combine the process-sociological investigation of civilizing processes and the English School analysis of international society in a higher synthesis. Adopting Martin Wight's comparative approach to states-systems and drawing on the sociological work of Norbert Elias, Linklater asks how modern Europeans came to believe themselves to be more 'civilized' than their medieval forebears. He investigates novel combinations of violence and civilization through a broad historical scope from classical antiquity, Latin Christendom and Renaissance Italy to the post-Second World War era. This book will interest all students with an interdisciplinary commitment to investigating long-term patterns of change in world politics.
The classic study of post-Cold War international relations, more relevant than ever in the post-9/11 world, with a new foreword by Zbigniew Brzezinski. Since its initial publication, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order has become a classic work of international relations and one of the most influential books ever written about foreign affairs. An insightful and powerful analysis of the forces driving global politics, it is as indispensable to our understanding of American foreign policy today as the day it was published. As former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski says in his new foreword to the book, it “has earned a place on the shelf of only about a dozen or so truly enduring works that provide the quintessential insights necessary for a broad understanding of world affairs in our time.” Samuel Huntington explains how clashes between civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace but also how an international order based on civilizations is the best safeguard against war. Events since the publication of the book have proved the wisdom of that analysis. The 9/11 attacks and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated the threat of civilizations but have also shown how vital international cross-civilization cooperation is to restoring peace. As ideological distinctions among nations have been replaced by cultural differences, world politics has been reconfigured. Across the globe, new conflicts—and new cooperation—have replaced the old order of the Cold War era. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order explains how the population explosion in Muslim countries and the economic rise of East Asia are changing global politics. These developments challenge Western dominance, promote opposition to supposedly “universal” Western ideals, and intensify intercivilization conflict over such issues as nuclear proliferation, immigration, human rights, and democracy. The Muslim population surge has led to many small wars throughout Eurasia, and the rise of China could lead to a global war of civilizations. Huntington offers a strategy for the West to preserve its unique culture and emphasizes the need for people everywhere to learn to coexist in a complex, multipolar, muliticivilizational world.
Critically evaluates how international relations theories have conceived culture, and advances a new account of cultural diversity and international order.
This book explores the role that states might play in promoting a cosmopolitan condition as an agent of cosmopolitanism rather than an obstacle to it. In doing so the book seeks to develop recent arguments in favour of locating cosmopolitan moral and political responsibility at the state level as either an alternative to, or a corollary of, cosmopolitanism as it is more commonly understood qua requiring transnational or global bearers of responsibility. As a result, the contributions in this volume see an on-going role for the state, but also its transformation, perhaps only partially, into a more cosmopolitan-minded institution -- instead of a purely 'national' or particularistic one. It therefore makes the case that the state as a form of political community can be reconciled with various form of cosmopolitan responsibility. In this way the book will address the question of how states, in the present, and in the future, can be better bearers of cosmopolitan responsibilities?
Critical international theory has the task of providing orientation to human beings in better understanding their conditions of existence, how those conditions came to assume their contemporary characteristics, and what immanent potential they might hold for emancipatory transformation. The argument in this book is that this task of orientation is indissociable from a reliance on grand narratives that capture the main features of the long-term process of human development. And yet, many of these grand narratives also tend to reproduce Eurocentric worldviews that undermine critical international theory’s reliability as a means of orientation. In this book, André Saramago provides an innovative answer to the problem of orientation with which critical international theory is confronted. Through an indepth engagement with the work of Jürgen Habermas, Karl Marx, and Norbert Elias, he recovers a historical-sociological approach to grand narratives that avoids a reproduction of their Eurocentric shortcomings. In the process, he improves critical international theory’s role as a means of orientation by making it better theoretically equipped to capture the interweaving of the historical development of the human capacity for self-determination in the four key dimensions of human existence: people’s relations with themselves as individuals; social relations at both the intra- and inter-societal levels; and people’s relations with non-human nature. This book will appeal to all students and researchers interested in interdisciplinary and critical approaches to the study of world politics, long-term processes of social change, and human-nature relations, working within or across the fields of International Relations, Sociology, Political Theory, and related areas of inquiry.
The need to control violent and non-violent harm has been central to human existence since societies first emerged. This book analyses the problem of harm in world politics which stems from the fact that societies require the power to harm in order to defend themselves from internal and external threats, but must also control the capacity to harm so that people cannot kill, injure, humiliate or exploit others as they please. Andrew Linklater analyses writings in moral and legal philosophy that define and classify forms of harm, and discusses the ways in which different theories of international relations suggest the power to harm can be controlled so that societies can co-exist with the minimum of violent and non-violent harm. Linklater argues for new connections between the English School study of international society and Norbert Elias' analysis of civilizing processes in order to advance the study of harm in world politics.
Efforts to moderate conflict are as old as conflict itself. Throughout the ages, restraint in warfare has been informed by religious and ethical considerations, chivalry and class, and, increasingly since the mid-19th century, a body of customary and treaty law variously referred to as the laws of war, the law of armed conflict (LOAC) or international humanitarian law (IHL). As they evolved from the mid-19th century, these laws were increasingly underpinned by humanitarianism, then in the mid-20th century, were assumed to be universal. But violations of these restraints are also as old as conflict itself. The history of conflict is replete with examples of exclusions from protections designed to moderate warfare. This edited volume explores the degree to which protections in modern warfare might be informed by notions of 'civility' and 'barbarism', or, to put it another way, asks if only those deemed to be civilised are afforded protections prescribed by the laws of war?
This collection of essays begins with the premise that violence, in its relationship to order, is a central element of history. Taking a broad definition of violence, including structural and symbolic violence, the contributions move beyond the problematic of civilization’s mitigating or foundational role, instead seeing violence as inherently social, and, perhaps, socially inherent (if variable). The question then becomes what forms of harm are authorized or banned in which social orders and how they change over time. Beginning with a theoretical introduction, this interdisciplinary volume includes seven papers representing cultural anthropology, history, archaeology and international relations. The papers range from China to the Americas and from the 2nd millennium BCE to the 21st century CE. Some deal with long-term developments while others focus on a single time and place. Many treat the issue of the visibility/invisibility of violence, while all in one way or another deal with the role of violence in the re-production of community. Together, the volume aims to paint, with a few strokes, the outlines of a deep historical anthropology of social violence. The volume is based on the proceedings of a symposium hosted at Brown University.
The "clash of civilizations" focuses on conflict and cooperation between and within states. Dealing with the clash is essential for a peaceful and harmonious world. The "clash of civilizations" is a topic of great interest around the world and constitutes an important dimension of religion and international relations. In the quarter century since Huntington first aired his controversial framework, inter-civilizational "clash" and "dialogue" have become mainstream issues both in international relations and in many Western countries' domestic concerns. The book examines a key question: how does Samuel Huntington’s "clash of civilizations" "paradigm" help explain current Western governments" responses to Muslim migration and related security issues? Understanding relations between the West/Westerners and Muslim-majority societies/Muslims is impossible without being aware that right-wing populist politicians in the West, as well as some policy makers and commentators, seem to view all Muslims in a malign way. This indicates a lack of willingness to make a distinction between, on the one hand, the mass of "moderate," "ordinary," and "peaceful" Muslims and, on the other hand, a small minority of Islamist extremists and even smaller number of Islamist terrorists. The result is a crucial topic of our times: how do different civilizations coexist in a small and increasingly congested planet without conflict? The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of The Review of Faith & International Affairs.
