What is it about?
This 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. We discuss the logics and consequences of unipolarity, bipolarity, multiploarity and nonpolarity and unpack how and why they matter to past, present and future international relations.
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Why is it important?
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.
Perspectives
This volume unpacks when, how, and why polarity - the number of great powers in the international system - matters to world politics. With a US world order in decline, understanding the polarity to come and how it will affect our security is highly important.
Dr. Anders Wivel
University of Copenhagen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Polarity in International Relations, January 2022, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-05505-8.
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