Customer Reviews

International Systems in World History: Remaking the Study of International Relations

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As the two authors recognize, this work is an International Relations [”IR”] textbook, and written as such; but they hope “to attract interest and comment from historical sociologists, archeologists, world historians and anyone trying to understand humankind as a whole” [precisely, with the purpose of understanding as much as possible of our world,...The authors, after researching what world history has to offer to IR theory, also examine what IR theory has to offer world history: “The most obvious answer to that questions is the idea of international system itself. As we hope we have demonstrated, this idea, and its associated concepts of dominant units, scale, interaction capacity, process, and structure, provide an extraordinarily useful theoretical framework for studying world history. These concepts can produce a “thick” conception of international system that has the potential to provide a rich and distinctive account of world history that captures main features that are missed or obscured by existing approaches. The concept in our toolkit are well suited to the broad-brush approach that world history requires and offers as much as, if not more than, any of the available alternatives”.

I have rated it four starts. Considering its content, I think it should be five; considering its readability, two (sometimes falling to one, sometimes raising to three).

P.S. I think that reproducing a Synopsis of this book (that may be found in the web page corresponding to the same book offered by Amazon.co.uk) is worth it: “This text tells the 60,000 year story of how humankind evolved from a scattering of hunter-gatherer bands to highly integrated global international political economy. It traces the evolution of ever-wider economic, societal and military-political international systems, and the interplay between these systems and the tribes, city states, empires, and modern states into which humans have organised themselves. Buzan and Little marry a wide range of mainstream International Relations theories to a world historical perspective. They mount a stinging attack on International Relations as a discipline, arguing that its Eurocentrism, historical narrowness, and theoretical fragmentation have reduced almost to nothing both its cross-disclipinary influence and its ability to think coherently about either the past or the future. Seeking to emulate and challenge the cross-disciplinary influence of the world systems model, the book recasts the study of International Relations into a macro-historical perspective, shows how its core concepts work across time, and sets out a new theoretical agenda and a new intellectual role for the discipline”.

I have used this book several times when teaching at my university in Denmark with stunning success among the students. Nowadays young people lack knowledge about history - some times they don't know much about the most basic of issues - but many of them are quite aware of their shortcomings and for students of political science with some training in theories of international relations (=IR) this book really gives them a highly organized, coherent view of historical development.

One caveat: This is not a book for beginners! The authors are political scientists both notoriously strong on issues of theory, not historians, and their reasoning correspondingly abstract, at times dry as a bone to read.

Nevertheless, following the thorough introduction to the methodology and approach of the book - the English school beefed up with economics and other issue-areas placed into a most structured, Buzantine (ha,ha) analytical framework - the book does offer a sweeping empirical world history, dividing history into three basic eras: prehistory, antiquity and modernity. The core concept of the book is that of international system which the authors claim is of relevance beyond political science. Indeed, they want the other social sciences including history itself to embrace this concept as the mother-concept of all social science macroanalysis. Even if they may fail to convince scholars outside the IR community I personally consider the book one of the most important macroanalytical works on international relations - a diachronic perspective on all of empiricall IR. It deals a heavy blow to Eurocentric, ahistorical neorealism although it has a very Waltzian systemic outlook.

This book was about a hundred dollars at my college bookstore but found it here for less than half even with shipping. Will buy again in the future foir sure.