The essays collected here relate the writings of Antonio Gramsci and others to the contemporary reconstruction of historical materialist theories of international relations. The contributors analyze the contradiction between globalizing and territorially based social and political forces in the context of past, present, and future world orders, and view the emerging world order as undergoing a structural transformation, a "triple crisis" involving economic, political and "socio-cultural" change. The prevailing trend of the 1980s and early 1990s toward the marketization and commodification of...

This book provides an intellectual history of international relations theory from 1919 to the present, examining the dominance of realist theories, and their limited ability to explain world politics accurately. The volume presents the original text of John Vasquez's classic 1983 volume, The Power of Power Politics, analyzing classical realism and quantitative international politics, plus six new chapters covering the most important intellectual currents relevant to the debate on realism. This book is a major contribution to debates over realism in international relations, of interest to...

Robert Jackson examines the birth and survival of Third World nations since the end of the Second World War. He describes these countries as "quasi-states," arguing that they exist more by the support and indulgence of the international community than by the abilities and efforts of their own governments and peoples. He investigates the international normative framework that upholds sovereign statehood in the Third World. This he calls "negative sovereignty" and contrasts it with what he sees as the "positive sovereignty" that emerged in Europe along with the modern state. Within this...

Personal Identity, National Identity and International Relations is the first psychological study of nation-building, nationalism, mass mobilisation and foreign policy processes. In a bold exposition of identification theory, William Bloom relates mass psychological processes to international relations. He draws on Freud, Mead, Erikson, Parsons and Habermas to provide a rigorously argued answer to the longstanding theoretical problem of how to aggregate from individual attitudes to mass behaviour. With a detailed analysis of the nation-building experience of preindustrial France and England,...

In Simulating Sovereignty Cynthia Weber presents a critical analysis of the concept of sovereignty. Examining the justifications for intervention offered by the Concert of Europe, President Wilson's administration, and the Reagan-Bush administrations, the author combines critical international relations theory and foreign policy analysis to offer an original and important contribution to the understanding of sovereignty, the state and intervention in international relations theory.

This book argues that the identities and activities commonly associated with women have been eliminated from the theories formulated about international relations. The author points out that these theories often rely on the hidden activities of women and their assigned tasks in life to establish a sphere of politics that is for men only. Using case studies of the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp in the UK, and of Zimbabwean women's efforts to secure international funding for producer cooperatives, the book explores the possibility of undermining the masculine identity politics of...

Why do some international crises lead to war, while others are resolved peacefully? Does the outcome depend mainly on underlying structural causes, or on decision makers' choices and diplomacy? In this book James Richardson examines nine major international crises from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to explain the differing outcomes of each. The author evaluates the main theories that have served to explain crisis behavior, emphasizing the conflict between theories based on an assumption of rationality, and those which emphasize the nonrational.

This book asks why weaker powers so often engage in wars against stronger opponents. It examines six cases where this occurred in this century, including the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982. The key argument of deterrence theory is that the military superiority of a relatively strong power, coupled with a credible retaliatory threat, will prevent attack by challengers. This book seriously challenges this assumption, and has wide implications for the study of war, deterrence, diplomacy and strategy.

In this book Bradley Klein draws on recent debates in international relations theory to raise important questions about the nature of strategic studies and nuclear deterrence. In clear and uncluttered language, he explores the links among modernity, state-building and strategic violence, and argues that American foreign policy, and NATO, undertook a set of dynamic political practices to make and remake world order in the image of Western identity. The book will be of interest to students of international relations theory, strategic studies, peace studies, and US foreign policy.

Mark Rupert traces the relationship between American global power and the rise of mass production. The United States was propelled to the apex of the global division of labor, ensuring victory in World War II and enabling postwar reconstruction under American leadership. Through a study of Ford Motor Company between 1914 and 1952, he examines the political and ideological struggles through which industrial labor was incorporated into the coalition of statesmen and capitalists that constructed the postwar world order.