Ken Booth

Everybody these days needs to know about international relations, because their workings shape all our lives. This book, explaining the particular significance of the international level of world politics, offers a comprehensive, accessible, and challenging overview of what is at stake, and what you need to know. World politics can be understood, simply, as Who Gets What, Where and How? (globally) to borrow a title from a famous old book by Harold Lasswell. International relations are a critical level in that business of determining who gets what across the world. Decisive things take place at the international level, and they directly or indirectly affect all our lives: war, trade, and the provision (or not) of human rights for example. This is why the practice of international relations matter. The reason academic International Relations matter is because it is the subject that asks the most fundamental questions about the politics of who gets what and how, and in the biggest political arena of all.

International Relations: All That Matters

What is real? What can we know? How might we act? This book sets out to answer these fundamental philosophical questions in a radical and original theory of security for our times. Arguing that the concept of security in world politics has long been imprisoned by conservative thinking, Ken Booth explores security as a precious instrumental value which gives individuals and groups the opportunity to pursue the invention of humanity rather than live determined and diminished lives. Booth suggests that human society globally is facing a set of converging historical crises. He looks to critical social theory and radical international theory to develop a comprehensive framework for understanding the historical challenges facing global business-as-usual and for planning to reconstruct a more cosmopolitan future. Theory of World Security is a challenge both to well-established ways of thinking about security and alternative approaches within critical security studies.

Theory of World Security

The 1999 conflict in Kosovo is seen as being as significant for international affairs as the pulling down of the Berlin Wall, because of the centrality of human rights in the build-up, conduct and aftermath of the war. This volume is an attempt to explore this human rights tragedy.

The Human Rights Dimensions

The Kosovo Tragedy

This book contributes to the rethinking of realism through multiple analyses of the keys works of Kenneth Waltz, arguing that a sophisticated appreciation of realism is needed to truly understand world politics and International Relations. Bringing together a theoretically varied group of leading scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, this book is an outstanding appreciation of the work of realismâe(tm)s most important theorist since the Second World War, and the persistent themes thrown up by his work over a half-century. The contributors do not engage with Waltzâe(tm)s work as slavish disciples, but rather as positive critics, recognising its decisive significance in International Relations, while using the process of critical engagement to search for new or renewed understandings of unfolding global situations and new insights into long-standing problems of theory-building. The book will be of great interest to students of IR, foreign policy, security studies and politics.

Realism and World Politics

Bringing together a theoretically varied group of leading scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, this book is an outstanding appreciation of the work of realism's most important theorist since the Second World War, and the persistent themes thrown up by his work over a half-century. The contributors do not engage with Waltz's work as slavish disciples, but rather as positive critics, recognising its decisive significance in International Relations, while using the process of critical engagement to search for new or renewed understandings of unfolding global situations and new insights into long-standing problems of theory-building. --

Steve Smith

International Relations (IR) theorists speak with conviction, and often passion, to the global condition of human society. The result is an important, dynamic and often deeply divided field. This long-awaited new edition of International Relations Theory Today offers undergraduate and postgraduate students an essential guide to the complex terrain of IR theory and the key questions on its agenda. With chapters by 25 prominent and provocative IR theorists, the book reveals the intellectual excitement - and turmoil - of theorizing world politics. It reflects the conflicts and tensions around the profound challenges facing the contemporary world, such as climate change, globalization, nuclear proliferation, and economic and political injustice and conflict, while also expressing hope that we can better understand, and respond to, these challenges. Above all, this book demonstrates the significance of thinking theoretically about international relations and developing the tools not merely to describe but also to explain, analyse, prescribe and possibly re-imagine the global political landscape. As the world comes face-to-face with historic challenges over the coming decades, International Relations Theory Today will help its readers to participate more effectively in debates about the most important global political dilemmas of our time.

International Relations Theory Today

T. Dunne

Bringing together an outstanding group of thinkers, Worlds in Collision is the essential book for understanding the debate about the future of global order in the wake of international terrorism and the war in Afghanistan. For years to come, if not decades, the 'war on terrorism' will be the defining paradigm in the struggle for global order. When the victim of such horrific terror attacks happens to be the world's only superpower, the agenda is set for the future global order. This book, offering a comprehensive and provocative collection of viewpoints from leading intellectuals from a number of countries, will help readers understand the ways in which our worlds collided on September 11, 2001. Not only does it comprehensively address the first phase of the war against international terrorism, the book also looks at the wider regional and global ramifications. Worlds in Collision is ultimately about more than the war on terrorism, it concerns itself with the possibilities for re-shaping global order on the basis of new kinds of politics.

Terror and the Future of Global Order

Worlds in Collision

University E H Carr Professor of International Relations Ken Booth

A comparative analysis of international security issues in the post-Cold War era.

The Cold War and Beyond

Statecraft and Security

First published in 1977, this study offers a comprehensive, systematic and integrated survey of the important relationship between navies and the making and execution of foreign policy. Ken Booth explains the functions navies can perform in both war and peace, the influence they have on particular situations, and how the relevant organisations can affect the character of naval actions. Ultimately, navies are regarded as indispensable instruments of the state by a number of countries, whilst all countries with a coast find some need to threaten a degree of force at sea. This book provides students and academics with the intellectual framework with which to assess the changing character of the navy.

Navies and Foreign Policy (Routledge Revivals)

Nicholas Wheeler

This major new contribution to the study of internatioal politics provides the first comprehensive analysis of the concept of the "security dilemma," the phrase used to describe the mistrust and fear which is often thought to be the inevitable consequence of living in a world of sovereign states. By exploring the theory and practice of the security dilemma through the prisms of fear, cooperation and trust, it considers whether the security dilemma can be mitigated or even transcended analyzing a wide range of historical and contemporary cases

Fear, Cooperation and Trust in World Politics

The Security Dilemma

Moorhead Wright

To find more information about Rowman and Littlefield titles, please visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

American Thinking about Peace and War

Law, Force and Diplomacy at Sea, first published in 1985, is one of the few comprehensive treatments on the subject from a strategic perspective. It offers a detailed strategic analysis of the background and outcome of the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea, and its naval implications. The interplay between the interest of the naval powers in freedom of navigation and the interest of coastal states in control provides the setting for the strategic problems. The sea is taking on more properties of the land: it is becoming ‘territorialised’, and this is presenting fresh challenges and opportunities to which navies and their national governments have to respond. This study is designed for students of naval strategy, for international lawyers and for students of international affairs who wish to think about the important security questions in the maritime environment.

Law, Force and Diplomacy at Sea (Routledge Revivals)

Stephen Anthony Smith

Marysia Zalewski

Stephen Murray Smith

Key figures who have made leading contributions to the development of international theory provide a major survey of the state of the subject.

Ken Booth

Books

Your next favorite book is out there