Claire Cutler's critical analysis of the role that international economic law plays in the creation and maintenance of global power relations examines the historical and contemporary evolution of merchant law. She concludes that private interests have governed global economic relations through practices that are little understood. Interdisciplinary in scope, this study draws upon international relations and law, international political economy and political and legal theories. It will be an important first step toward developing a critical understanding of the political foundations of...

Kalevi Holsti inquires as to how we identify "change" in international politics and distinguish between significant and unimportant changes. Do we really live in a new era or simply see more continuity than transformation in international politics? Combining theoretical and empirical arguments, Holsti investigates eight major international institutions, including sovereignty, international law and territoriality, and speculates on their consequences.

These contributions by international scholars reconsider the conceptualization of power in world politics. Arguing that the importance of power in international relations is underestimated, the book presents and employs a taxonomy of power that embraces agency, institutions, structure and discourse. It demonstrates how these different forms connect and intersect and how such an expanded concept can enrich our understanding of global governance.

The discipline of international relations is a fragmented one. In this book, Roger Spegele analyzes this fragmentation and suggests that the subject should be seen as engaged in a struggle among three competing conceptions: positivism-empiricism, emancipatory international relations, and political realism. He argues that scholars following these different conceptions have had different ways of understanding theory, practice and the relation between them. By focusing on this relation, Professor Spegele develops a new version of political realism, called "Evaluative Political Realism."

This book analyzes the underlying structure and dynamic forces that have shaped the international trade in arms from the development of military technologies in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the twentieth-century revolutions in weaponry. The author discusses the political, economic and military motivations that drive states to produce and export arms, and examines the different ways in which states respond to these motivations. By focusing on the processes of technological innovation and diffusion he is able to sketch an evolutionary picture of the diffusion of new military...

In this major study of the causes of war, David Welch argues that, contrary to the received wisdom in academic and policy circles, states are often motivated by sincere concern for the perceived demands of justice, not merely by self interest. By examining the outbreak of five Great Power wars (the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, World War I, World War II, and the Falklands War), Welch demonstrates the importance of the justice motive in state behavior, using both historical and philosophical analysis to shed new light on an old problem.

African independence launched into international politics a group of the world's poorest, weakest and most artificial states. How have such states managed to survive? To what extent is their survival now threatened? Christopher Clapham shows how an initially supportive international environment has become increasingly threatening to African rulers and the states over which they preside. The author reveals how international conventions designed to uphold state sovereignty have often been appropriated and subverted by rulers to enhance their domestic control, and how African states have been...

Why do we have Rwandas, Bosnias, and Somalias? This book explores the sources of such bitter, prolonged conflicts that result in immense human tragedies of civilian deaths and mass refugee flows. The author argues that such conflicts, and not wars between states, are the wars of the future. What can the United Nations and other international institutions do about them? Can organizations designed to manage conflicts between states successfully manage wars whose origins are domestic? The author develops some ideas about conflict resolution and peace derived from such recent experiences of war.

Seven original case studies show how the internationalization of environmental protection efforts is altering policy-making processes, policy outcomes, and the effectiveness of policy implementation. At the same time, the authors argue, the vital role of sub-state politics continues to influence the nature of national responses to international environmental problems. This book represents an important contribution to the debate on international environmental cooperation for students of international relations, comparative politics and environmental studies.

This ambitious book rewrites the terms of debate about globalization. Focusing on two major new concepts--the unfinished global-democratic revolution and the global-Western state--Martin Shaw evaluates global change, considering the radical implications for social, political and international theory, and offering a fundamental critique of modern social thought and mainstream global theory. Required reading for sociology, politics and international relations, Theory of the Global State offers a historical, theoretical and political framework for understanding state and society in the emerging...