Polarity In International Relations

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.

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.

This book seeks to help shape the debate surrounding power and polarity in the twenty-first century, both by assessing the likelihood of US decline and by analysing what each of the so-called 'rising powers' can do. As the twenty-first century moves out of its first decade, American supremacy continues to generate intense debate about the nature, quality and sustainability of US power. At the same time, significant developments in four rising powers - China, Russia, India and the European Union – have provoked analysts to ask whether multipolarity is a realistic prospect. Multipolarity in the 21st Century assesses the likelihood of a multipolar world developing, either by a marked US decline and or by the ability of these putative ‘rivals’ to continue to rise to the level necessary to be credibly considered a superpower. Written by a combination of emerging scholars and recognised experts, this volume will provide a timely and authoritative analysis of one of the most controversial and compelling security debates of the twenty-first century. This book will be of much interest to students of Security Studies, Foreign Policy and International Relations in general.

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.

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 examines the emerging trends of international relations in 21st century. It explains how the emerging countries may replace the U.S hegemony over the world. In Past, the order of polarity shifted from bipolar to uni-polar as considered the transition of Power in international World. The emerging trends depend on these three factors: 1.The end of US hegemony. 2. The peaceful rise of China and other emerging states. 3. The shifting nature of power structure from Uni-polarity to Multi-polarity. The book provides insight into emerging trends in the future global politics.

Arguing that we live in a world where great powers - such as China and the EU - are not helpless in the face of the United States, this text contends that the other major nations of the world must work alongside the US in order to counter-balance America's current dominance of the international political scene.

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.