Product Description

This book tells the 60,000 year story of how humankind evolved from a scattering of hunter-gatherer bands to todays 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #347302 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 472 pages

About the Author
Barry Buzan is Research Professor of International Studies at the University of Westminster and Project Director of the European Security Group at the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute. Prior to this he was Professor of International Relations at the University of Warwick. He has been visiting professor at the International University of Japan and has also been an Olof Palme visiting professor and adviser on foreign affairs to the Swedish government. He is the
author of numerous books on International Relations and from 1988-90 was the Chairman of the British International Studies Association.

Richard Little is Professor of International Politics in the Department of Politics at the University of Bristol. Before this he was at the Open University and Lancaster University and has held fellowships at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and the Australian National University. He was editor of the Review of International Studies from 1990-94 and is currently Vice Chair of the B

Customer Reviews

IR contribution to the understanding of world history
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" . 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).