The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 constituted a classic foreign policy dilemma between the United States and the Soviet Union and was one of the most dangerous confrontations of the Cold War. This essay gives an overview of the complexity of the thirteen-day crisis. It shows that the balance of power, the credibility of the two superpowers and the future of Berlin were at stake, and makes clear how close it actually came to a nuclear showdown.
Winner-takes-all multiparty democracy is not appropriate for Africa’s nation-states. Much of Africa today is under the control of “Vampire states”. It has become a pattern: a sitting president reluctantly holds an election; deludes himself into thinking he will win; no one would dare tell him he might lose.
Since the 1990s, the European Union has achieved various successes. A key example is the enlargement to include a large number of Central and Eastern European countries. During this time, the EU has also experienced some failures, such as in the case of energy relations with Russia.
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?
Viewed within the conceptual framework of Urbicide, which posits that cities have become the expressed target of military operations, the battle of Sadr City reveals the inherent objectives of counter-insurgency (COIN) theory — the annihilation of place.
A social contract implies an agreement by the people on the rules and laws by which they are governed. The state of nature is the starting point for most social contract theories, an abstract idea considering what human life would look like without a government or a form of organized society. The system Rousseau sees as the solution to overcome society, which has corrupted mankind, is both vague and unalterable.
The last global food crisis of 2007-08 should have jolted policymakers across the globe into examining more closely the root causes and consequences of such crises at the local, regional and global levels. In 2011, global food prices have once again returned to make alarming headlines and analysts far and wide are arguing that we stand at the threshold of yet another global food crisis.
Predictions of “water wars” have become an important and even customary part of global diplomatic discourse. In 1995, the World Bank’s vice president for environmentally sustainable development famously asserted “if the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water”. What is the truth about transboundary water and the potential for war?
In the “Changing Structure of International Law” Friedmann begins by considering the main changes that have taken place in international law: its vertical extension to new fields such as economic collaboration and welfare, its horizontal expansion to take in all the civilizations and cultures of the world as well as the influence of various ideologies.
IR – SO, WHO IS IT FOR? It is often said that the study of International Relations is either for the world’s people or for national politics. This cliché usefully explains the chasm between Harvey Sapolsky and myself. And anyone reading his Blogs and my own will recognise that we […]
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