There is no strategic theory that can, yet, fully replace the classical strategists Sun Tzu and Clausewitz. The information age and modern technology have not altered the fundamental nature of war. As long as the nature of war remains unchanged, it is the same phenomenon that Sun Tzu contemplated millennia ago and that Clausewitz studied in the nineteenth century.
Globalization has entrenched and encouraged liberal democracy where it resides but in isolation can take little credit for spreading democracy globally. Moreover, globalization has been found to have a more pivotal and detrimental role in undermining democracy by providing networks and resources for anti-democratic forces.
The English revolution in the middle of the 17th Century, the French revolution at the end of the 18th Century, and the Russian revolution at the beginning of the 20th Century— all were revolutions of the same nature.Similarly, there is no doubt that the 2011 Arab Spring has been provoked by a food crisis. But the food crisis does not only influence the Middle East. In India and Bangladesh revolution is inevitable.
Politically, the EU is far off from being a cosmopolitan polity. This comes down to the fact that political participation does not cross borders. State sovereignty still plays a crucial part in the make up of the EU. Yet, there is a fundamental issue here. Increased democratic functions would need to occur before ever the mildest of David Held’s proposals could become reality.
This essay argues that religion plays a crucial role in Hamas’ political behaviour. Hamas established its identity around Islam when the organisation was being created and today it places Islam in the centre of its political actions. Yet Hamas remains a political organisation at a relatively high level of development, and it uses selected religious elements depending on what it deems profitable in any given political situation.
This essay outlines some of the major constructivist promises and attempts to deduce their direct implications for North-South relations. It concludes that expansion of security communities represents the foundation of the constructivist promise in this area of study.
Despite being a state-centrist scholar of international politics, Wendt criticizes neorealists and neoliberals for reifying the structure of states system and taking for granted its ontological and ideational properties, which precludes us from considering and assessing the potentials for structural and institutional change.
The aim of this essay is to analyse the reasoning behind Martin Wight’s fears that International Relations, as an academic subject, does not contain a sufficiently large enough philosophical background, which he may have feared prevented the study of the subject from being taken seriously, and also, prevented IR as a discipline from sufficiently framing the philosophical nature of interactions that nation-states undertake on the international arena.
Postmodernism is “seeking out and challenging the endlessly unfolding relationship between knowledge and power, rejecting metanarratives and the Enlightenment project, and seeing ‘truth’ as a temporary social construction limited in time and space”. But do postmodernists have anything meaningful to say about the security challenges facing societies in the developing world?
Ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Islam has undergone a revival among Central Asian societies. The hitherto communist and atheist states with arbitrarily imposed constraints on the freedom of worship, started referring to their religious roots as a step in national identity formation.
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