Introduces non-Western IR traditions to a Western IR audience, and challenges the dominance of Western theory. This book challenges criticisms that IR theory is Western-focused and therefore misrepresents much of world history by introducing the reader to non-Western traditions, literature and histories relevant to how IR is conceptualised.
This book provides an alternative perspective of International Relations from Hiroshima to 9/11. Both its diplomacy and mainstream scholarship are linked by realpolitic, in a vicious circle of retrogressive symbiosis. It simultaneously undermined the UN system of collective security from its origin and the scientific credential of its scholarship. The Cold War that it spawned restricted economic propsperity, political stability and democratic freedom within its narrow core-area of the United States and Europe at the cost of its vast periphery in the Third World. Its unpredicted collapse extended insecurity across the entire globalised system, including its core area, as evnts since 9/11 forcefully underscores. While the new hegemonic system has become globally more insecure for all its citizens, its scholarship is still clueless about the collapse of teh bipolar system it created in the midst of the massive confidence-building exercise to stabilise it; it is even less able to creatively respond to its orderly transition.
After the Enlightenment is the first attempt at understanding modern political realism as a historical phenomenon. Realism is not an eternal wisdom inherited from Thucydides, Machiavelli or Hobbes, but a twentieth-century phenomenon rooted in the interwar years, the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the transfer of ideas between Continental Europe and the United States. The book provides the first intellectual history of the rise of realism in America, as it informed policy and academic circles after 1945. It breaks through the narrow confines of the discipline of international relations and resituates realism within the crisis of American liberalism. Realism provided a new framework for foreign policy thinking and transformed the nature of American democracy. This book sheds light on the emergence of 'rational choice' as a new paradigm for political decision-making and speaks to the current revival in realism in international affairs.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the concept of power has not always been central to international relations theory. During the 1920s and 30s, power was often ignored or vilified by international relations scholars—especially in America. Power and International Relations explores how this changed in later decades by tracing how power emerged as an important social science concept in American scholarship after World War I. Combining intellectual history and conceptual analysis, David Baldwin examines power's increased presence in the study of international relations and looks at how the three dominant approaches of realism, neoliberalism, and constructivism treat power. The clarity and precision of thinking about power increased greatly during the last half of the twentieth century, due to efforts by political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, philosophers, mathematicians, and geographers who contributed to "social power literature." Baldwin brings the insights of this literature to bear on the three principal theoretical traditions in international relations theory. He discusses controversial issues in power analysis, and shows the relevance of older works frequently underappreciated today. Focusing on the social power perspective in international relations, this book sheds light on how power has been considered during the last half century and how it should be approached in future research.
This book provides an alternative perspective of International Relations from Hiroshima to 9/11, both its diplomacy and mainstream scholarship are linked by realpolitik, in a vicious circle of retrogressive symbiosis. It simultaneously undermined the UN system of collective security from its origin and the scientific credential for its scholarship. The Cold War that it spawned restricted economic prosperity, political stability, and democratic freedom within its narrow core-area of the United States and Europe at the cost of its vast periphery in the Third World. Its unpredicted collapse extended insecurity across the entire globalised system, including its core-are as events since 9/11 forcefully underscores. While the new hegemonic system has become globally more insecure for all its citizens, its scholarship is still clueless about the collapse of the bipolar system it created in the midst of the massive confidence-building exercise to stabilize it; it is even less able to creatively respond to its orderly transition. This book pleads for democracy among the states as a component of justice, as a substitute for power, as the organizing principle of the global system, within a reformed UN system as the 'centre for harmonizing the actions of humanity', as envisaged in the Charter. In this task, scholarship must be inspired to be the catalytic agent by reversing its present role as a policy-science of power policies to perpetuate domination and servitude, and legitimizing it as 'interdependence' of the 'global village'. It must liberate itself to become the harbinger of human emancipation, as in other fields of creative scholarship
This is the first comprehensive study of how different ethical traditions deal with the central moral problems of international affairs. Using the organizing concept of a tradition, it shows that ethics offers many different languages for moral debate rather than a set of unified doctrines. Each chapter describes the central concepts, premises, vocabulary, and history of a particular tradition and explains how that tradition has dealt with a set of recurring ethical issues in international relations. Such issues include national self-determination, the use of force in armed intervention or nuclear deterrence, and global distributive justice.
Forfatterens mål med denne bog er: 1) Analyse af de gældende teorier for international politik og hvad der heri er lagt størst vægt på. 2) Konstruktion af en teori for international politik som kan kan råde bod på de mangler, der er i de nu gældende. 3) Afprøvning af den rekonstruerede teori på faktiske hændelsesforløb.
The 1954 Conference on Theory, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, featured a 'who's who' of scholars and practitioners debating what would become the foundations of international relations theory. Assembling his own team of experts, the editor revisits a seminal event in the discipline.
