The Iranian Revolution of 1979 is considered a defining moment because the Islamic Republic replaced an authoritarian monarchy that was friendly to the West. The revolution, moreover, linked religion to politics in an unprecedented way. The books reviewed herein demonstrate that the idea of a “monolithic Islam” is not only wrong, it is dangerous.
When thinking about anarchy in international relations, we have to consider world order and how it is organised. Can an anarchical system be ordered? The cause of war is not only systemic, but via the fact that states can generate conflicts by their own choice, mainly because of self-interest and a thirst for power.
In discussions of U.S. hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region, China looms large. The United States—along with many of China’s neighbors—have cautiously embraced China’s rise. However tensions in the region have been on the rise and the potential for strategic rivalry in the long run remains high.
Both the enormous diversity within Sudan in combination with the lack of a substantial “Sudanese” identity accounts for the prevalence of conflict. This absence of a widely accepted and omnipresent state identity also explains how identity is formed in relation to hegemony.
America’s great power and wealth tempts some to advocate its intervention when civil wars in weakly or ungoverned lands threaten to become humanitarian disasters or when tyrants refuse to surrender their thrones. Our aid for victims should be readily offered in these cases, but very rarely should our troops. America must avoid becoming the global policeman, self-designated or not
All Greeks have to understand, before it is too late, that from now on we have to co-exist and live together with immigrants, illegal or not (but mostly the former). Therefore, this new reality has raised important questions regarding acceptance or marginalization, legalization, multiculturalism, and national security, or even sovereignty.
Terrorist organizations have become more effective in delivering fear to global populations. It is not only globalization that has helped terrorist groups operate more efficiently, but also their inherited nature of a constant process of adaptation, ingenuity, and incrementalism when faced with new grand strategies.
The mushroom cloud has retrospectively obscured the context in which American leaders took the decision to build and use the atomic bomb. The principle rationale behind the intensification of the Manhattan Project in the first half of 1945 was the desire of the US bureaucracy to end the war in the Pacific before the planned invasion of the Japanese mainland in November 1945.
The Maastricht Treaty did not only reform the structure of the European Community (EC) through the establishment of a political union, and strengthen economic integration with the creation of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), but it also enabled the stabilisation of political tensions within Europe at the end of the Cold War, and integrated a unified Germany into the EU.
There are lessons to be learnt for future Asian architects when studying some of the ways and means (if not the entire recipe) of the Helsinki process. The frequently heard argument that Asian states are supposedly too different for anything like ‘Helsinki’ to work simply won’t wash. Yes, there might well be a ‘right’ Asian security architecture; it’s our common task to find it because the alternative is worse.
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