Throughout the 20th century, a scientifically oriented social science has dominated as the means for looking at society. Methods and Nations examines and critiques one of the primary deployments of these methods: an explanatory comparative politics whose major focus has been on nation-building in the Third World, often attempting to universalize and render self-evident its own practices. Methods and Nations is essentially saying that IR Theorists, operating within our dominant state, have allowed themselves to become colonized, unable to resist the cognitive imperialism of a state-centric...

What special vulnerabilities does the world of the 21st century have to terrorist attacks? What kind of role does the United States see itself playing as the world's only superpower in the coming decades? How should we now characterize the conduct of the US foreign policy? Answers to such questions are perhaps not much clearer now than they were immediately after the attacks, but one of the more positive effects of these attacks has been to stimulate much serious discussion about them, and thus about the place of violence about changing forms of warfare, about different forms of terror, and...