2011 Books Published by DDMI Members
09 May 2011
Members of the DDMI are contributing to research and publishing in their chosen fields. This includes, in 2011, four new books. Two are parts of multi-volume examinations of specific concepts in international politics, the third is a timely examination of the war on terrorism ten years after the horrible events of 9/11, and the fourth is an appreciation of Kenneth Waltz, realism's most important theorist since the Second World War. These achievements are but an illustration of the impact scholars grouped under the DDMI umbrella continue to have on the direction of research in international relations.
Professor Andrew Linklater (DDMI Associate): During the last ten years, he has been working on a major three-volume work on harm in world politics. The first volume, The Problem of Harm in World Politics: Theoretical Investigations was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. The book discusses the challenges that arise as a result of the capacity to inflict more devastating forms of harm on more and more people over greater distances, a capability that has been central to the species’ dominant position on the planet but which is now a threat to human security and possibly to human survival. A second volume which analyses efforts to restrain violent and non-violent harm in the Western states-systems is nearing a completion. A final volume which analyses the problem of harm from the vantage-point of world history is in the early stages of development.
Professor Ian Clark (DDMI Associate): his Hegemony in International Society was published by Oxford University Press in 2011. It is the third volume of his international legitimacy trilogy. This study makes a sharp distinction between primacy, denoting merely a form of material power, and hegemony, understood as a legitimate practice, and as giving rise to a form of social power. Adopting an English School approach, he suggests hegemony be considered as one potential institution of international society, and hence as one possible mechanism of international order. The book reviews some historical cases (the Concert of Europe, Pax Britannica and Pax Americana) and argues that, instead of one model of hegemony, these represent several different variants: importantly, each displays its own distinctive legitimacy dynamics. The overall argument challenges the limited post-Cold War debate about primacy, and the equally simplistic projections about the future distribution of power to which it gives rise. In doing so, it offers a major re-thinking of the concept of hegemony in international relations.
Professor Ken Booth (DDMI Director): has jointly-authored a new book with Tim Dunne, a former colleague in Aberystwyth, now Professor in International Relations and Research Director of the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. The book, Terror in Our Time: 9/11 Plus Ten, is to be published by Routledge to coincide with the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Its starting point is that people are still dying as a result of 9/11, and that the atrocity, and the reactions to it, will continue to affect lives across the world for many years to come. The book seeks to helps its readers to learn from the past decade (what the authors call ‘9/11+10’) as a way of helping us to think about where we are now and where we should be heading.
Professor Ken Booth (DDMI Director): edited and contributed two chapters to Realism and World Politics. The book seeks to advance the rethinking of realism through re-assessing the work of Kenneth Waltz, in the view of many the leading theorist of International Relations over the past fifty-years. The book brings together a theoretically varied group of leading scholars from both sides of the Atlantic; they engage with Waltz’s work and the persistent themes of international politics thrown up by it not as slavish disciples, but as respectful critics. All recognise Waltz’s decisive significance, and they use the process of critical engagement to search for a better understanding of the unfolding global situation. It is expected that this book will become one of the standard works on realism for many years to come.
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