International Relations Theory And The Consequences Of Unipolarity

The end of the Cold War and subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union resulted in a new unipolar international system that presented fresh challenges to international relations theory. Since the Enlightenment, scholars have speculated that patterns of cooperation and conflict might be systematically related to the manner in which power is distributed among states. Most of what we know about this relationship, however, is based on European experiences between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, when five or more powerful states dominated international relations, and the latter twentieth century, when two superpowers did so. Building on a highly successful special issue of the leading journal World Politics, this book seeks to determine whether what we think we know about power and patterns of state behaviour applies to the current 'unipolar' setting and, if not, how core theoretical propositions about interstate interactions need to be revised.

Discusses the concept of unipolarity and the political implications of US primacy for the patterns of international politics.

Theory of Unipolar Politics studies the durability and peacefulness of the post-Cold War international system.

This new book offers a coherent model of a unipolar world order. Unipolarity is usually described either as a ‘brief moment’ or as something historically insignificant. However, we have already seen nearly twenty years of virtual unipolarity and this period has been of great significance for world politics. Two issues have been crucial since the end of the Cold War: How to theorize the distinctiveness and exceptional character of a unipolar international system? And what is it like to conduct state business in a unipolar world? Until now, a comprehensive model for unipolarity has been lacking. This volume provides a theoretical framework for analysis of the current world order and identifies the patterns of outcomes and systematic variations to be expected. Terrorism and attempts by small states to achieve a nuclear capability are not new phenomena or exclusive to the current world order, but in the case of unipolarity these have become attached to the fear of marginalization and the struggle against a powerful centre without the possibility of allying with an alternative superpower. Supplying a coherent theoretical model for unipolarity, which can provide explanations of trends and patterns in the turbulent post-Cold War era, this book will be of interest to students of IR theory, international security and foreign policy.

The end of the Cold War profoundly affected Middle Eastern politics. In "Unipolarity and the Middle East," a neorealist model for unipolarity is put forward in order to explain the effects of the end of the Cold War as well as the subsequent international dynamics. The new international dynamics are analyzed as "unipolar" and the theoretical model conceptualizes these dynamics and their implications for international politics. The model is applied to Middle Eastern politics from 1989 to 1996, examining the series of international political events which took place during this period. Besides launching the first model of unipolarity, the book thus provides both a survey and an explanation of the changes in the Middle East since 1989, and the emergence of the new, unipolar world order.

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.