“For the first time in seven decades, we live in a world without global leadership,” Bremmer writes, unveiling a bleak portrait of a chaotic and ungoverned global order in which the G-7 countries are in decline.
Doyle is best known for his seminal essays on democratic peace theory, which have shaped debates about liberalism and war for an entire generation of scholars. Readers will not find a better guide to liberal internationalism and its theoretical rivals than this collection of his writings from the past three decades.
The unwinding of the Iraq war and the killing of Osama bin Laden have marked a symbolic end to the post-9/11 “war on terror.” What has not ended is the public debate over how the United States and other democracies can best square their commitment to civil liberties and the rule of law with protection against terrorism.
If fragile and failed states are the problem, nation-state building is the solution. But this important study led by Risse, a German political scientist, demonstrates that many parts of the world will not soon or easily be transformed into capable modern states.
In this provocative but carefully argued study, Parent makes the case that states create political unions only when they are imperiled by security threats.
This masterful treatise by Teitel, a law professor at New York University, offers one of the best explanations yet of the complex, shifting normative foundations of international law.
As Hyde notes, the practice of inviting foreign observers to monitor elections has become so widespread that it has turned into an international norm.
The book seeks to explain the bias in American foreign policy toward threats and punishments and argues that it is a legacy of the Cold War, which taught politicians to worry about charges of appeasement.
In this rendering, it was not containment that won the Cold War but the relentless efforts of activists, journalists, lawyers, minority-rights advocates, and diplomats who worked across borders to set the stage for the political earthquakes that followed.
Reiss’ important book offers some of the most lucid and sensible reflections yet on the topic.
This volume is an engaging survey of what is known and not known about the causes and consequences of democratization.
This book argues that war in general is on the decline.
Sikkink traces the evolution in the reigning orthodoxy about states and human right violations, the result of a series of shifts in international legal standards and practices.
This enjoyably sprawling history of “the rise of the West,” written for a general audience, follows in the footsteps of major works by such scholars as John Darwin, Jared Diamond, William NcNeill, and Douglass North.
Before complaining about China’s refusal to buy into the liberal world order, argues Amitai Etzioni, the West should stop moving the goalposts by developing new norms of intervention, such as “the responsibility to protect.” G. John Ikenberry responds that Beijing already has more than enough inducement to sign up.
This important collection brings together historians attempting to chronicle the contested path Enlightenment ideas about human rights took as they made their way across the centuries and into the heart of contemporary world politics.
Fisher’s main interest is in identifying the changing moral choices and circumstances that confront contemporary would-be war-makers.
Snyder argues that religion can alter the basic patterns of international relations: who the actors are, what they want, what capacities they have to attract support, and what rules they follow.
This little book by the late historian Diggins seeks to explain Niebuhr’s continuing appeal.
Barnett’s point is that humanitarianism is a “creature of the world it aspires to civilize,” rather than some sort of abstract ideal that unfolds amid the chaos and violence of world politics.
International orders guide how major powers interact with one another and with less powerful states: how they cooperate and compete in trade and security and when and why they respect one another’s sovereignty. Ikenberry’s important book tackles this complex subject, giving readers a deep understanding of the factors that determine the type of international order.
As the United States' relative power declines, will the open and rule-based liberal international order Washington has championed since the 1940s start to erode? Probably not. That order is alive and well. China and other emerging powers will not seek to undermine the system; instead, they will try to gain more leadership within it.
In this collection of essays, leading diplomatic historians and international relations theorists explore the limits of realist theory in explaining why great powers do what they do.
This important book presents fascinating empirical findings that explain why some countries have become democracies and others have not, and why some democratic breakthroughs have endured and others have slid backward.
