Conflict among nations for forty-five years after World War II was dominated by the major bipolar struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. With the end of the Cold War; states in differing legions of the world are taking their affairs more into their own hands and working out new arrangements for security that best suit their needs. This trend toward new "regional orders" is the subject of this book, which seeks both to document the emergence and strengthening of these new regional arrangements and to show how international relations theory needs to be modified to take...

The wave of ethnic conflict that has recently swept across parts of Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Africa has led many political observers to fear that these conflicts are contagious. Initial outbreaks in such places as Bosnia, Chechnya, and Rwanda, if not contained, appear capable of setting off epidemics of catastrophic proportions. In this volume, David Lake and Donald Rothchild have organized an ambitious, sophisticated exploration of both the origins and spread of ethnic conflict, one that will be useful to policymakers and theorists alike.

The editors and...

The strategic-choice approach has a long pedigree in international relations. In an area often rent by competing methodologies, editors David A. Lake and Robert Powell take the best of accepted and contested knowledge among many theories. With the contributors to this volume, they offer a unifying perspective, which begins with a simple insight: students of international relations want to explain the choices actors make--whether these actors be states, parties, ethnic groups, companies, leaders, or individuals.

This synthesis offers three new benefits: first, the strategic...

Critics of globalization claim that economic integration drains political authority from states: devolving authority to newly empowered regions, delegating it to supranational organizations, and transferring it to multinational firms and nongovernmental organizations. Globalization is also attacked for forcing convergence of state institutions and policies and threatening the ability of societies to chart their own democratically determined courses. In Governance in a Global Economy, Miles Kahler and David Lake assemble the contributions of seventeen leading scholars who have...

International relations are generally understood as a realm of anarchy in which countries lack any superior authority and interact within a Hobbesian state of nature. In Hierarchy in International Relations, David A. Lake challenges this traditional view, demonstrating that states exercise authority over one another in international hierarchies that vary historically but are still pervasive today.

Revisiting the concepts of authority and sovereignty, Lake offers a novel view of international relations in which states form social contracts that bind both dominant and...

The Great Recession and its aftershocks, including the Eurozone banking and debt crisis, add up to the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although economic explanations for the Great Recession have proliferated, the political causes and consequences of the crisis have received less systematic attention. Politics in the New Hard Times is the first book to focus on the Great Recession as a political crisis, one with both political sources and political consequences.

The authors examine variation in crises over time and across countries,...

The Great Recession and its aftershocks, including the Eurozone banking and debt crisis, add up to the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although economic explanations for the Great Recession have proliferated, the political causes and consequences of the crisis have received less systematic attention. Politics in the New Hard Times is the first book to focus on the Great Recession as a political crisis, one with both political sources and political consequences.

The authors examine variation in crises over time and across countries,...