Post-Cold War Predictions

Post-Cold War Predictions examines how the international order evolved after the collapse of the Soviet Union by focusing on the ways we study and understand major powers' security behavior within the evolving multipolar order. Kassab summarizes and evaluates influential Post-Cold War texts to better understand scholarship's need to predict.

Post- Cold War Predictions examines how the international order evolved after the collapse of the Soviet Union (and before the attacks on 9/11) by focusing on the ways we study and understand major powers' security behavior within the evolving multipolar order. Beginning with an overview of Post-Cold War literature, Kassab summarizes and evaluates influential Post-Cold War texts to better understand scholarship's need to predict. First, he discusses the central importance of power in international relations and drives home the central focus of international structures, linking findings to the broader structure-agent problem. He then reinterprets the purpose of theory, preferring explanatory theories to those that aim to predict outcomes. To understand the context by which political ideas were developed and followed as if they were political ideologies, Hanna Samir Kassab makes explicit the links between historicism and historiography, forwarding a new methodology for studying political science: Politicist analysis. Using simple jargon and defining terms where necessary, this succinct and enlightening text is required reading for all those interested in international politics.

Autorentext

Hanna Samir Kassab is Assistant Professor of political science and security studies at East Carolina University, USA.

Inhalt

1. Introduction 2. The Evolution of the International System: From the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century 3. Politicism in Action: Post-Cold War Literature 4. Politicism in Action II: What Happened? 5. Exploring the Unknown Future 6. Conclusions