Description
Book SynopsisThis 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.
Trade Review“Polarity in International Relations brings together a stellar line-up of scholars to present their analysis of polarity, a popular concept during the later stages of the Cold War. … the chapters are worth engaging with, and it is clear that the editors attempted to bring together different scholars working from varying perspectives. … the book is very thought-provoking. It is a great addition to the literature … .” (Lorenzo Cladi, International Affairs, Vol. 99 (2), 2023)
Table of ContentsI. Introduction: Understanding polarity in theory and history, description of the content of sections and chapters. (Bertel Heurlin, Nina Græger, Ole Wæver, Anders Wivel)
II. Polarity in the liberal international order (Charles Kupchan, Robert Lieber, Peter Kurrild Klitgaard, Andre Ken Jakobsen, Rasmus Gjedssø Bertelsen)
III. Polarity and the US-China problematique (Camilla Sørensen, Anders Forsby, Bertel Heurlin)
IV. Polarity, institutions and domestic politics (Jennifer Sterling-Folker, Eliza Gheorghe, Stuart Kaufman, Barbara Kunz)
V. Polarity and foreign policy (Kai He, Hans Mouritzen, Anders Wivel and Revecca Pedi, Henrik Larsen)
VI. Contextualizing polarity (Øystein Tunsjø, Peter Toft, Sten Rynning, Carsten Jensen, Georg Sørensen)
VII. The future of polarity (William Wohlforth, Randall Schweller)
VIII. Conclusion (Bertel Heurlin, Nina Græger, Ole Wæver, Anders Wivel)
