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A fundamental transformation is underway in the structure of the international political system, with changes in both the definition and the distribution of power in world politics. But the precise extent of those changes and their implications for the conduct of foreign affairs remain unclear. The contributors to this book draw upon a common data base to provide the most current assessment available of the relationships among power, alliance, polarity, and international conflict in today's emerging world system.
This book discusses the rise of polarity as a key concept in International Relations Theory. Since the end of the Cold War, until at least the end of 2010, there has been a wide consensus shared by American academics, political commentators and policy makers: the world was unipolar and would remain so for some time. By contrast, outside the US, a multipolar interpretation prevailed. This volume explores this contradiction and questions the Neorealist claim that polarity is the central structuring element of the international system. Here, the author analyses different historic eras through a polarity lens, compares the way polarity is used in the French and US public discourses, and through careful examination, reaches the conclusion that polarity terminology as a theoretical concept is highly influenced by the Cold War context in which it emerged. This volume is an important resource for students and researchers with a critical approach to Neorealism, and to those interested in the defining shifts the world went through during the last twenty five years.
A fundamental transformation is underway in the structure of the international political system, with changes in both the definition and the distribution of power in world politics. But the precise extent of those changes and their implications for the conduct of foreign affairs remain unclear. The contributors to this book draw upon a common data base to provide the most current assessment available of the relationships among power, alliance, polarity, and international conflict in today's emerging world system.
This book brings together a group of leading scholars on international relations to develop and apply the concept of polarity on past and present international relations and discuss its applicability and usefulness in the future. Despite a comprehensive debate on a global power shift, often discussed in terms of the decline of the United States, the crisis in the liberal international order, and the rise of China, IR ́s main concept of power, ‘polarity’, remains undertheorized and understudied. The great powers and their importance for dynamics and processes in the international system are central to current debates on international order, but these debates too often suffer from a combination of politicized empirical analysis and reliance on old theoretical debates and conceptualizations, typically originating in the Cold War security environment. In order to meet these challenges, this book updates, conceptualizes, applies and critically debates the concepts of unipolarity, bipolarity, multipolarity and non-polarity in order to understand the current world order.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the international system has been unipolar, centered on the United States. But the rise of China foreshadows a change in the distribution of power. Øystein Tunsjø shows that the international system is moving toward a U.S.-China standoff, bringing us back to bipolarity—a system in which no third power can challenge the top two. The Return of Bipolarity in World Politics surveys the new era of superpowers to argue that the combined effects of the narrowing power gap between China and the United States and the widening power gap between China and any third-ranking power portend a new bipolar system that will differ in crucial ways from that of the last century. Tunsjø expands Kenneth N. Waltz’s structural-realist theory to examine the new bipolarity within the context of geopolitics, which he calls “geostructural realism.” He considers how a new bipolar system will affect balancing and stability in U.S.-China relations, predicting that the new bipolarity will not be as prone to arms races as the previous era’s; that the risk of limited war between the two superpowers is likely to be higher in the coming bipolarity, especially since the two powers are primarily rivals at sea rather than on land; and that the superpowers are likely to be preoccupied with rivalry and conflict in East Asia instead of globally. Tunsjø presents a major challenge to how international relations understands superpowers in the twenty-first century.
Works on the relationship between polarity and war in the past produce inconsistent, sometimes, self-conflicting conclusions. This is caused by the lack of a comparable way of conceptualizing and defining polarity and the lack of a common gauge for estimating that relationship. This research addresses these methodological shortcomings and explores the linkage between the international system of the major powers and dyadic conflict by conducting a comparative study of polarity and war. It tests the targeted relationship using: 1) a number of quantifiable polarity concepts proposed by several representative scholars, including John Mearsheimer, Jack Levy, Charles Kegley and Gregory Raymond, and George Modelski; 2) a common research design that has incorporated the Kantian variables and has drawn the essence from the latest progress in this discipline, and 3) an objective method of calculating a continuous measure of the polarity among the great powers. Such a research design can compare the impact of various types of polarity on the onset of wars while controlling for both realist and Kantian influences. It provides a broad prospective on the connection between polarity and war. This study confirms the existence of a connection between polarity and war of unipolarity> bipolarity> multipolarity in order of peacefulness.
This volume analyzes the decisions that major powers have made since the Cold War to adapt to a rapidly changing economic and security environment. The authors acknowledge that, while great power wars are now unlikely, positional conflicts over resources and markets still remain.
This volume analyzes the extent of ongoing power shifts among the leading powers, exploring the portents for their future growth, and seeking indicators of their relative commitment to the existing international order.