International Relations (IR) - PDF

# Introduction International relations (IR) today refers to both an academic discipline and the field of activity that deals as much with relations between and among states as with transnational global actors, problems and issues. As an activity, diplomacy is as old as recorded history, but as an a...

# Introduction International relations (IR) today refers to both an academic discipline and the field of activity that deals as much with relations between and among states as with transnational global actors, problems and issues. As an activity, diplomacy is as old as recorded history, but as an academic field of enquiry, IR's lineage can be traced to 1919 when the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth in England, created its Department of International Politics, followed by the establishment of a Department of International Relations in early 1920 at the London School of Economics. As an activity, IR refers to the sum total of relations (cooperative and conflictual) among states based on the principles of foreign polices of nations. As an academic discipline, IR initially focused on the study of political and diplomatic, much later commercial, relations among sovereign states. As an academic field, IR—an offspring of political science and history-was denied the status of an independent discipline till almost the advent of the Second World War. During the interwar period, studies in IR were largely devoted to the 'normative' and the 'Utopian' pursuit of preserving order and the rule of law in what was considered a largely anarchical and self-regulated international system of sovereign states. A distinction between the two terms, international relations and international politics, came to be made increasingly in the post-Second World War period. Hans Morgenthau, the great Realist thinker, believed that the core of IR lies in the study of politics between and among nations. It is the study of the continuous processes by which states adjust their national interests to accommodate those of other states. Power is the means through which nations promote their national interest; therefore, international politics is a struggle for power. IR covers wider ground, inclusive of varied relationships between sovereign states. The study of international politics is narrower in scope, dealing with conflict and cooperation among nations, essentially at the political level. ## The nature of IR underwent tremendous changes in the post-Second World War Period - Traditionally, the universe of IR had been Eurocentric with interstate relations being conducted by diplomats with a great deal of secrecy. Diplomatic negotiations, or even their outcomes, were not treated as knowledge for the public domain. - Since the post-Second World War period, there has been a democratization of the foreign-policy-making processes, with public opinion playing an increasing role in governmental decision-making. With the revolution in modern communications, travel and connectivity, the nature of diplomacy has also changed. Today, heads of state and foreign ministers personally establish contact with each other, marginalizing the role of diplomats and ambassadors to a great extent. - Second, in the post-1945 era, Europe ceased to be the hub of international politics, with its economies in shambles and most of the countries having succumbed to war fatigue. The nature of war changed with the beginning of the nuclear proliferation. The erstwhile 'balance of power' concept was replaced by the notion of 'balance of terror', referring to the uneasy peace being maintained by both the superpowers, the USA and the USSR, with the knowledge that nuclear confrontation would mean complete destruction. - Being the first country in the world to possess nuclear weapons, the USA emerged supremely confident from the Second World War, ready to shed its earlier isolationism and assume a leadership role in global politics. The Soviet Union, despite its severe war losses and dented economic conditions, was no less determined to retain and extend its role in world affairs, especially in Eastern Europe. - It was the emerging mistrust, arms race, hostility and competition for power between the two emerging superpowers that quickly produced an ongoing bipolar power struggle, which remained the central issue in international politics for the next 30 years and was referred to as the 'Cold War'. - This Cold War was led by the two superpowers representing ideologically and militarily two power blocs heading rival military alliances. - While Western Europe, including the UK, joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), headed by the USA, the East European countries were bound by the Warsaw Pact. - There were a group of non-aligned countries, led by India, Egypt and Yugoslavia, who were not aligned to either of the two rival blocs. They remained the 'third force' in world politics, and the majority of these countries were the newly independent developing countries referred to as the 'Third World'. ## Another very important development of the second half of the 20th century was the phenomenon of decolonization. - This resulted in a large number of former colonies of European powers attaining independence; decolonization was a continuing process in world politics from the 1950s to the 1980s. - The former colonies of the European powers, including India, have now become part of a multipolar world of nations on the global stage. - The United Nations was created in 1945, envisioning that it would truly become a global organization where every independent state in the world would be represented. - The total number of UN members has gone up from 51 in 1945 to 193 at present. This makes world politics truly global in its nature and scope. ## With the development of military alliances, a number of regional organizations also came into being, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) and Organization of African Unity (OAU), with the sole purpose of enhancing the development of trade, security and political cooperation at the regional level. - For instance, efforts towards the integration and emergence of a more unified Europe started with the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community and culminated into today's European Union (EU). - The European experiment went through a laborious process of deepening and broadening to include more countries and functions from 1951 to 2004. - The EU is an interesting experiment in terms of conventional sovereignty rules. Its member states have created supranational institutions (the European Court of Justice, the European Commission and the Council of Ministers), which have decision-making powers that can undermine the juridical autonomy of its individual members. - The European Economic and Monetary Union created a central bank that now controls monetary affairs for three of the union's four largest states. - The EU has emerged as a colossus, next only to the USA, in terms of economic power and status. -During the Cold War period, both the superpowers, which never ever faced each other's armies directly in the battlefield, began a relentless arms race, claiming that 'security'-both national and global-lies in military power and that rearming was necessary to balance the other's stockpile of armaments which posed a threat to world peace. - The military standoff between the nuclear powers brought about a truce between them-balance of terror-when they fought proxy wars on Third World territory. - No part of the world, therefore, was a conflict-free zone and at least more than 150 local wars have been fought (though geographically contained and limited to conventional weapons) by small and medium-level powers on diverse issues. ## Another legacy of the pre-globalization period is the growing gulf between the world's rich and the poor; both interstate and intrastate disparities having widened during the Cold War period. - In the world's southern hemisphere often referred to as the Third World-one finds the world's lowest human development indices, poverty, disease and low standards of living. - The governments of these underdeveloped and developing countries struggle to raise their countries from debt, poverty and poor governance, all of which make them politically volatile and vulnerable to foreign intervention and militarization. - Nearly every war fought since the Second World War was fought in the Third World, with weapons supplied by industrialized countries. # The International System: A Profile of States The history of IR is often traced back to the treaty of Westphalia of 1648, through which the modern state system evolved gradually. States are the most important actors in IR. Westphalia encouraged the development of the nation state and the institutionalization of diplomacy and militarization. The modern international system was finally consolidated in the post-Second World War period with the decolonization of a large number Asian, African and Latin American countries in the Cold War era. It is only in the last 200 years that the idea of nationalism evolved-which has come to mean that a group of people sharing a sense of national identity, including a language and culture, can claim a state of their own. Most large states today are nation states. But since the Second World War, as the decolonization process unfolded, much of Asia and Africa disintegrated into many new states, not all of which can be considered nation states. A major source of regional conflict since the Second World War has been the frequent mismatch between emotionally perceived nationhood and actual state borders. When people identify with a nationality their parent state government does not represent, they may have to fight to form their own sovereign state. Sub-state nationalism is only one of several destabilizing trends in the present international system. The independence of former colonies and, more recently in the post-1990s period, the breakup of large multinational states (the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia) into smaller states have increased the number of new states in the world system. There were 193 member states of the UN in 2011. The international system is the sum total of relationships among the world's member states structured according to certain set rules and patterns of interaction. The rules include terms of membership of the system, rights and responsibilities members have and actions and responses that occur between states. International institutions and international law form a vital part of contemporary IR. A lot of interaction at the system level is governed by the rules made by the UN and its agencies. Apart from the UN, there are a number of international legal bodies such as the International Court of Justice (ICJ), International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR); regional organizations such as the Organization of American States (OAS), EU, SAARC and ASEAN; and international economic organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which influence the making of rules in the international arena. Who are the actors in IR? The actors in IR are the world's governments. They are decisions and acts of governments in the international arena (e.g. foreign policies) that are included in the study of IR. However, in today's age, state actors would include individual leaders, citizens and bureaucratic agencies in foreign ministries of different states. Non-state actors have also proliferated in number with specific areas of concern and activity. Sub-national actors with a base in one state can develop activities which profoundly affect the policies of that state in other states or which bypass the state machinery completely. Supranational actors (of which the European Union is the best example) can in particular functional areas override the authority of the state to implement policies which may curtail state sovereignty in those spheres. Transnational actors, headed by the multinational corporations (MNCs) can establish operations with a multinational base, acquiring the ability to carry on their activities across state boundaries on a large scale. Therefore, the international system has 'mixed actors', creating the potential for a multitude of coalitions and balances. In International Politics, the words 'state', 'nation' and 'country' are used interchangeably, usually to refer to the policies and actions of governments. In reality, state decisions are the result of complex internal processes and the interplay of multiple domestic pressure groups and interests. The most important actors in the international system, however, are still states. The citizens inhabiting a state constitute civil society to the extent that it has developed participatory institutions of social life. The size and wealth of states vary enormously as do their political regimes. China is the world's most populated state on earth and there are microstates with populations less than a lakh. About 20 states hold three-quarters of the global wealth and these are important actors. States vary hugely in their national incomes and activities, from the $15 trillion US economy to the economies of some microstates which have an income of not more than $500 million. The US alone accounts for one-fifth of the world economy. The larger states possessing military, economic and nuclear strength are called 'great powers'. The current international system is often referred to as being multipolar, with a few great powers sharing similar degrees of power and status. Other IR critics refer to our international system as unipolar, considering the USA to be the world's only superpower in the post-Cold War period, with no other country having the countervailing economic, military or nuclear strength to match US power in the global arena. # Post-Cold War Developments By the late 1980s (between 1989 and 1999), the Soviet leader Gorbachev's perestroika ('opening up') eventually came to reject communism as an ideology, arriving at the conclusion that a fresh beginning was required if the Soviet Union was to keep pace with the economies of the West. All the communist parties in East Europe gave up their hold on power gradually, and 15 different nations emerged after 1991. The Soviet army withdrew from Eastern Europe, and a number of nuclear arms reduction agreements came to be signed between the USA and the USSR. Thereafter, a number of new members, such as India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea and Iran, joined the growing club of new 'nuclear' nations. Communist China opened up its economy to adopt many aspects of a capitalist system, playing a stronger role in East Asia as well as in the global economy. As the two superpowers made peace, their old antagonists of the Second World War began to reassert themselves. Germany did so after its reunification in 1990, becoming the largest economic power in Europe. Germany has now devoted itself to the integration of the nation into the European Union. Japan's reassertion into international politics was uneven after its disastrous defeat in the Second World War, when it abandoned militarism in favour of pacifism; the nation was happily pursuing economic growth under the US defensive and diplomatic umbrella during the Cold War period. In the post-Cold War period, Japan is playing a substantive role in the global economy, after funding a portion of the Gulf War and participating in the UN peacekeeping operations in Cambodia. Japan's initiatives in the global arena are largely restricted to economic activity. In the 1980s, Japan's economic miracle was imitated first by the East Asian Tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) and later in the 1990s by the Southeast Asian countries (Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia), which joined the list of the world's fastest-growing economies. China and later India registered high growth rates after their conversion to market economies in the 1990s. When the post-Cold War period led to paradigmatic changes, IR theorists started talking of a New World Order. In the post-globalization period, since the 1990s, power has come to be measured by new indices and top priority has been given to economic power, based on wealth, trade, technological innovation and influence in the international financial system. Although security and defence issues remain important, military power is now perceived as only one element among many sources of strength and influence. A new concept, that of 'human security', has emerged, shifting the notion of security from a state-centric vision to a citizen-centric one. National power is now measured not only in terms of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of a nation but also the general well-being of its citizens, measured by its human development. After the 1980s, the world witnessed a new stage in the industrial revolution, a shift away from the iron and steel-based 'core' industries to knowledge-intensive industries and the evolution of a global system of communications based on mass media, Internet and digital networks. This has resulted in an information revolution, which empowers groups and individuals to gain access to public information, facilitating public discourse and political activity among civil society groups. Diplomacy and transnational businesses have been completely transformed by the involvement of new communication technologies. MNCs as well as international banks and financiers have a massive impact on the world economic system. The world's largest economic enterprises are all corporations, with transnational operations and spatially dispersed production centres. Many of the organizations created at the end of the Second World War, such as the IMF and the World Bank, may no longer be able to regulate the world system as they once did. Thus, though economic output, energy, military and resource factors remain central in shaping power and foreign policy in the 21st century, they now operate in transnational theatres in the post-globalization era. In the post-globalized international system, new trade and communication links have created a new world where individuals, goods, services and ideas are moving across national boundaries, leading to a situation of complex interdependence and integrating people, societies and economies politically, economically and financially in an irrevocable manner. A whole range of new issues have emerged in the international arena, including: (a) environmental concerns, such as air pollution, global warming, fossil fuel depletion and climate change; (b) new communication technologies and their global impact; (c) new patterns of dialogue between the economically advanced North and the 'poor' South group of developing countries; and (d) international terrorism and the illegal trade in arms and drugs. These are problems which cannot be tackled by nations acting alone. Global or regional instabilities in stock markets, currency markets and international financial system are due to the absence of a substantially self-regulating equilibrium, further leading to recessionary cycles in spite of the activities of the IMF and the secondary role of the World Bank. Apart from some reforms in the IMF, no major new system of financial governance has been put in place. Global affairs at all levels are affected not only by the actions of states, governments and international organizations such as the UN, but also by the actions non-governmental groups. These include international non-government organizations (INGOs)—about 20,000 of them which are now not only internationally recognized as observers and participants in the creation and implementation of international treaties by the UN, but are also known for internationalizing their activities, acting as 'pressure groups' in the global arena. Other disquieting developments are ethnic conflicts (e.g. in erstwhile Yugoslavia, Chechnya and Rwanda), genocidal forms of war and the rise of international terrorism. The late 1970s saw the appearance of militant Islam as a global ideology, challenging the Liberal ideology of the West. The most dramatic manifestation of militant Islam was the emergence of Al Qaeda under the leadership of Osama Bin Laden. What had started as a civil war within Arab Islamic societies-militants challenging corrupt Westernised dictators (notably in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Algeria) was transformed into direct attacks against the visible symbols of Western power and influence in the non-Muslim world. Countries distancing themselves from bipolar camps was a trend visible since the days of the Cold War. Even at the height of the Cold War, France detached itself from the NATO; Nehruvian India did not want to be part of either bloc, choosing to be part of the 'non-aligned group of nations'. Many communist nations—China, Vietnam, Romania, Albania and Cuba-tended to guard their independence against both Washington and Moscow. This fragmentation only increased after the end of the Cold War. The Soviet Union's East European bloc ceased to exist, and the United States could no longer count on a number of its allies. Most middle-level powers had asserted their 'independence' in world affairs despite globalization-induced integration of world economies. During the late 1990s, two conflicting global trends became visible. On the one hand, the 'global village' was becoming smaller and many of its citizens began to view themselves as members of one planet with a common destiny. On the other hand, the world was becoming increasingly fragmented as 'sub-nationalisms' asserted their claims to independence from 'mother' countries. Rapid economic and technological changes were the precursors to globalization, better known as the trend towards 'borderless economies'. However, an opposing trend seemed to be emerging in various parts of the developing world: a trend to preserve identities and cultures from the invasion of the 'global'. Localization is reflected in trends towards a demand for autonomy among small regions or communities within a state. It is found in trends towards ethnic nationalism in parts of Europe, Asia and Africa where small communities (such as in Yugoslavia and the USSR) sought to secede and retain their own identity. These trends have created 15 nations from erstwhile USSR and a pending demand for statehood in Chechnya. Sub-nationalisms have proved to be equally divisive in India, for example, in Kashmir and in the northeast. Globalization and localization are often coterminous trends. INGOs make local issues a global affair. This process is dubbed as 'glocal'. Key players in the nexus between local, national, regional and global affairs are not just states, intergovernmental organizations and corporations, but also INGOs. Thousands of NGOs and civil society organizations have been influencing UN policies, human rights and environmental agendas. The international system has undergone rapid and dramatic changes since the last decade of the 20th century. It has thrown up new challenges which no nation state can deal with alone. The end of the Second World War had triggered off landmark changes in world politics-it began the nuclear age, the Cold War, the beginning of decolonization and the emergence of the 'Third World'. The period of the 1990s have started yet another landmark era in world politics-communism collapsed in the Soviet Union and East Europe and with it sunk the Cold War antagonisms. The world simultaneously became both unipolar and multipolar as China and India, the two largest economic powers in Asia, integrated into the world economy. After the Cold War, military power is being replaced by economic power; state actors coexist with non-state actors; and issues of 'low politics', for example, environmental and human rights concerns, have come to occupy international space and deliberative time. Policy coordination will remain important for the promotion of these issues and concerns. # Current Developments in the Discipline IR as a discipline focuses on the study of interstate relations, essentially in the political and economic domains. It also includes the study of interstate conflict and cooperation. Today, in the era of globalization with the gradual integration of world economies, interstate diplomatic cultural or trade relations have developed into subfields of knowledge. These are intimately connected with other global actors (such as INGOs or MNCs), social structures (domestic politics, economies or culture), geographical influences and historical legacies. As a subfield of political science, IR essentially embraced the study of International Politics, covering the entire ambit of interstate political relations and foreign policies of governments. Political relations among nations cover a range of activities from diplomacy, war, trade relations and military alliances to cultural exchanges. The study of contemporary IR covers comprehensive ground, embracing the whole gamut of diplomatic history, the study of international politics, international organizations, international law and area studies. The focus is still on the nation state system and interstate relations, but the actions and interactions of many groups, international bodies and non-state actors are now included in the scope of the discipline. The scope of the field of IR may also be defined by the subfields it encompasses. Traditionally, the study of IR has focused on questions of war and peace-this subfield is now known as International Security Studies. While the study of armies, war and weapons continue to be the core concern of International Security Studies, conflict and peace studies programmes also emerged in the 1980s as areas of research within the security studies programmes. In the 1970s and 1980s, international political economy (IPE) became an important subfield of IR. Scholars of IPE study trade and financial relations, international economic and financial institutions, North-South relations, economic dependency, debt, foreign aid and technology transfer. In the post-Cold War era, while the East-West confrontation has receded into history, North-South disparities and the global environmental debate between the developed and the developing countries have moved to centre stage. The study of the impact of human rights and the environment, non-state actors and terrorism on IR are other important areas of study. The wealth and poverty of nations and issues of international political economy concern all nations-big and small. The issue of nuclear weapons may seem to concern only their possessors or those who may become their potential victims, but the issue is effectively global because the resultant radioactive fallout and climate change would leave none unaffected. Therefore, many writers of IR would prefer to use the term 'world politics' to refer to the widening scope and nature of the academic discipline today. Understanding IR requires both descriptive and theoretical knowledge. It would be intellectually futile to merely generalize or draw lessons from current events. Nor would it do much good to formulate purely abstract theories and models without being able to link them with real-world practices. Perhaps, it is due to this complexity that scholars of IR do not agree on a single set of theories to explain the discipline or even on a single set of concepts with which to discuss the field. People have tried to make sense of world politics, especially since the separate academic discipline of International Politics was introduced in 1919 at Aberystwyth. David Davies-the founder of the department and a Welsh industrialist-saw its purpose as being to help prevent war and conflict. For the next 20 years, during the normative phase of the growth of the discipline, it was marked by a commitment to global institutional reform and change. This initial utopian phase of the study of world politics, known as 'idealism', was developed during the late 1930s and 1940s, with a clear focus away from the politics of power and security. 'Realism', in contrast, looked at the world as it really 'is' rather than how we would like it to be. For Realists, human nature is essentially selfish and the main actors on the world stage are states. As a result, world politics represents a strength for power between states, with each trying to maximize their national interests. At the same time, the Marxist perspective, based on the politics of 'dominance and dependence', experienced a resurgence with the process of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s and was used to interpret the experience of nation-building and development in the newly independent decolonized states. The areas of divergence between these perspectives are not difficult to comprehend. Each perspective embodies a distinctive view of the relationship between the macro and the micro in the international arena. A view based on Realism (politics of power and security) postulates a constant tension between the interests of states and the dynamics of the state system, which creates an ambience of insecurity and possible war. An approach in terms of interdependence and transnational relations (Liberalism) enshrines a view of a world as a pluralistic political system within which there is a constant process of mutual and multilateral adaptation to events. The perspective of 'Marxism' centres upon a world in which the existing economic structure conditions all political action and in which the actions and interests of the parts are reflections of the relationships built into the international system as a whole. Social constructivism is a relatively new theory about world politics and has become increasingly influential since the mid-1990s. Constructivism argues that we create and recreate the social world and, therefore, there is much more autonomy for human agency than with the other theories which believe that the world is external to the people that live in it and is, therefore, not subject to easy transformations. The seemingly 'natural' structures, roles and identities of world politics could, in fact, be different from what they currently are, and implying otherwise is a political act. Thus, it is clear that each of the four theories focus on divergent aspects of world politics. Realism focuses on the power relations between states; Liberalism on a much wider set of interactions between states and non-state actors. Marxist theory stresses on the stratification patterns of the global political economy, and Constructivism on the ways in which we can develop alternative social structures and political processes. Different strands of feminist and post modernist theory also became popular from the 1990s and beyond in International Politics. # Emerging Patterns We remain in a period of transition. Today's post-Cold War and post-globalized generation of students face a world very different from what their parents did at their age. Issues of 'war and peace' are increasingly becoming complex as we witness the transformation of both war and the global security agenda. In today's world, terrorism and crime, economic growth and human development, human rights and environmental protection are no longer necessarily 'national' problems, amenable to domestic policy solutions. They may require transnational cooperation and policy coordination for effective remedial action. Therefore, we are witnessing new forms of cooperation, as states develop regional and global institutions and practices to address a widening agenda of transnational threats to survival, besides working together to derive benefits from the interconnected networks of globalization. The growing authority of economic institutions like the WTO and the EU reflects a major process in global politics, that is, delegation of power by states to global and regional actors in selected financial areas. While the end of the Cold War may mean increasing 'peace dividends' in terms of long periods of peace, prosperity, democracy and protection of human rights around the globe, other developments may be irksome. Globalization has led to rising inter-state or intra-state inequalities, uncontrolled migration, environmental degradation and increase in the illegal arms trade. Fear of a nuclear holocaust, a Third World War or a 'Hot War' between the two erstwhile Cold Warriors no longer seems a possibility, but low-intensity conflicts in Asia, Africa or Latin America are an ongoing reality of world politics. Identity politics is central to another major global process: fragmentation of states. Ethnic, tribal, religious and racial cleavages have exploded in countries such as Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda, turning them into virtually 'failed states'. Several scholars have opined that the term 'international relations' seems obsolete, for it reminds us that 'international' matters may no longer be the dominant paradigm of global life; other dimensions have emerged to challenge or offset the interactions of nation states. Whether changes in world politics in the post-Cold War, post-globalized era are seminal enough to bring about transformative changes, comparable to the other 'big shifts' in world politics mentioned earlier, is being debated. We may live in an era of diminishing state authority and capacity in which sovereignty is being nibbled at in various ways, nevertheless, it is important to see that the state-centric international system coexists with a decentralized multi-centric system where global power and authority often gets shared with non-state collectivities. Second, wars are now not necessarily inter-state or global or nuclear, but low-intensity conflicts-inter-state or intra-state-which dot various parts of the globe. Finally, citizens may participate more actively in 'global decision-making' today as they are more educated and exposed to new technologies which are informative and distance reducing in nature. As a result, they can understand their own interests and can participate directly in global politics, rather than remaining mute observers on the world arena. Security now extends beyond guarding state territorial frontiers to protecting the citizen from physical and material threats to his well-being. Security has come to mean 'human security', as national development is now measured as much by the average well-being of a citizen-human development as by the gross national product of a nation. James N. Rosenau, the eminent scholar of International Politics, insists that these changes can be labelled as a movement towards 'post-international politics' because they clearly suggest the decline of long-standing patterns, and at the same time they do not indicate where the changes may be leading. It is these complexities and uncertainties that make the study of global politics so interesting, fascinating and unpredictable today. Despite paradigmatic changes, the globalized state still remains the key politico-legal institution recognized by international law in global politics and the physical boundaries between nation states still remain the critical lines of demarcation in our post-industrial, post-globalized international system. The book is thematically organized into four parts. Part A looks at some concepts of International Politics and their current application in IR. The state system, national interest, diplomacy, Neocolonialism, disarmament and arms control are old concepts which continue to be part of the new vocabulary of post-Cold War international politics and, therefore, need to be contextually analysed. This has been done in five chapters. Part B is a critical overview of the major theories of International Politics, providing the students with a roadmap of the entire intellectual discourse in the academic discipline of international politics in the post-1945 period. Liberalism and Neo liberalism, Realism and Neo realism, Marxism, Feminism, Postmodernism and Constructivism are important theories which have been introduced in undergraduate courses very recently. Part B outlines these theories, their major strands and exponents, with their contribution and relevance to the understanding of world politics today. Part C examines contemporary globalization and other issues like terrorism, human rights and the changing parameters of the global discourse on development, security, international organization and the environment. Part D is the only India-specific section that attempts to review the continuity and change in India's foreign policy and bilateral relations in the contemporary era. Each chapter is preceded by an abstract which introduces the article by a short summary of content. Every chapter provides an analytical overview of the issues addressed, identifies the central actors and perspectives, and outlines past progress and future prospects. Model questions and suggestions for future reading additionally enrich the text. Every effort has been made to understand the 'new' vocabulary debates and discourses in IR and global politics today. In a textbook, some amount of selective presentation of data becomes inevitable. Obviously, not every political development or international event that occurred since 1945 can come between the covers of this book; the themes chosen have relevance to currently taught courses of IR and world politics in Indian universities.