Power Politics And Moral Order

Christian realism is undergoing a renaissance in both American Christianity and around the world. Caught between globalist liberalism, on the one hand, and pragmatic realism on the other, Christians are in search of international ethics, a standard and tradition in foreign policy, that takes the two great books of life, the Christian Scriptures and the world we live in, seriously. This book is an extended, edited collection that mines the tradition of Christian realism in international relations and finds in it voices and mentors urgently fresh for a new age. With classic authors like Reinhold Niebuhr, Herbert Butterfield, Paul Ramsey, and Jean Bethke Elshtain, and contemporaries like Marc LiVecche, Rebecca Heinrichs, and others, this collection offers for the first time an organization, periodization, and collection of primary Christian realist sources for the initiate and the expert in foreign relations.

Christian realism is undergoing a renaissance in both American Christianity and around the world. Caught between globalist liberalism, on the one hand, and pragmatic realism on the other, Christians are in search of international ethics, a standard and tradition in foreign policy, that takes the two great books of life, the Christian Scriptures and the world we live in, seriously. This book is an extended, edited collection that mines the tradition of Christian realism in international relations and finds in it voices and mentors urgently fresh for a new age. With classic authors like Reinhold Niebuhr, Herbert Butterfield, Paul Ramsey, and Jean Bethke Elshtain, and contemporaries like Marc LiVecche, Rebecca Heinrichs, and others, this collection offers for the first time an organization, periodization, and collection of primary Christian realist sources for the initiate and the expert in foreign relations.

This volume aims to reconstruct and debate a contemporary Christian realist framework, while also applying such a perspective to the issues of contemporary politics such as the Bush Doctrine, the laws of war, democracy and democratization, U.S. participation in international institutions, and apocalyptic terrorism.

In clear and jargon-free style, A Primer in Power Politics explains the concept of power politics and provides an introduction to the principles of humanistic political realism. This book answers the questions: When and why do states resort to the use of force, and what are the uses and limits of force in conflicts among nations? What can we realistically expect from the United Nations, the World Court, arbitration panels, and other peaceful settlement techniques? What role do morality, ethics, and world public opinion play in the international interactions of nations? The first contemporary work in international politics to address power politics, this text is ideal for courses in international relations, U.S. foreign policy, comparative foreign politics, international conflict, and national security.

This exciting new book offers a fundamental reappraisal of political realism - one of the dominant schools of international relations theory - and of the place of morality within it. Conventional opinion has always held that realism is an amoral or even immoral approach to international politics. Recent revisionist readings have sought to move beyond this simplistic view, taking account of the concern with morality evidenced in realist work. However, unable to reconcile this theme with the realist concern for power politics, they have tended to treat it as either incoherent or inconsequential. Alastair Murray argues that the entire debate about the theory has been misframed and that by using the insights to be gained from the study of historical texts, the different strands of realist thought can be related to one another, and understood to represent equally essential parts of the theory. In a challenging and detailed analysis, Murray reconstructs the theory of realism as a coherent and unified tradition of political ethics, highlighting its cosmopolitan moral discourse and demonstrating how, once reconstructed as a coherent tradition of thought, realism can contribute to contemporary debates in normative international theory.

Appealing to just war thinkers, international relations scholars, policymakers, and the public, this book claims that the historical Christian, Islamic, and Hindu just war traditions reflect political concerns with domestic and international order. This underlying realism serves to counterbalance the overly optimistic approach of contemporary liberal just war approaches.

Globalization promised to bring about a golden age of liberal individualism, breaking down hierarchies of kinship, caste, and gender around the world and freeing people to express their true, authentic agency. But in some places globalization has spurred the emergence of new forms of hierarchy—or the reemergence of old forms—as people try to reconstitute an imagined past of stable moral order. This is evident from the Islamic revival in the Middle East to visions of the 1950s family among conservatives in the United States. Why does this happen and how do we make sense of this phenomenon? Why do some communities see hierarchy as desireable? In this book, leading anthropologists draw on insightful ethnographic case studies from around the world to address these trends. Together, they develop a theory of hierarchy that treats it both as a relational form and a framework for organizing ideas about the social good.