Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist

The End of History and the Last Man

Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace

Why is there no post-Westphalian world polity today, despite the globalism of recent decades? Is the construction of a world polity an impossible utopia? If it is possible, under what conditions, by what processes, and in what necessary social form? Available visions of a world polity form a debate and world polity formation theories offer limited explanations. In response, this study argues the emergence of a world polity is possible, but is an unlikely and fragile outcome in a late modern context. Two contributions are made to support this argument. First, a new world polity formation theory is developed that explains how systems of polities become single polities. A second contribution advances an account of the historically specific transcivilizational and planetary social form a world polity must necessarily attain if it were to be practically constructed in a late modern context

Searching for a world polity : the world after international anarchy question


 This article contributes a step towards the consolidation of the wide-ranging intellectual history and rapidly growing literature of international order theory. It traces the development of international order theory across three eras: 1919 and the interwar era; 1945 and the Cold War era; and 1989–1991, the post-Cold War era and rise of the “liberal” order debate. Gathering this history finds that critics in contemporary debates are deploying arguments with a quasi-polemical style similar to those used by E.H. Carr and others in past international order debates. These polemical qualities, it is suggested, may likely make contemporary debates difficult to assess and persistently controversial, even after the contemporary crisis of international order has run its course in practice.

Order without Victory: International Order Theory Before and After Liberal Hegemony

Why are international politics seemingly marked by increasing disorder today? Is this condition novel, and will it persist, improve or worsen? Jason Pack argues that the Libyan intervention and its aftermath offer an important case-study for understanding how contemporary international politics are defined by a novel form of global disorder that is deliberate and persistent. Pack's main explanatory discussion is found in the introduction and preface. He leans heavily on the idea of the stabilizing effects of an imposed hegemonic order, and the destabilization that results from its absence. He claims that ‘human history is characterized by periods of disorder punctuated by those of occasional hegemonic order’ (p. 11), although he does not clearly define the concept of ‘disorder’, global or otherwise, and also does not analytically distinguish its different manifestations and sources. On these somewhat ambiguous premises, Pack suggests that global disorder will endure because US decline is not... 

Aaron McKeil

Papers

Searching for a world polity : the world after international anarchy question

Order without Victory: International Order Theory Before and After Liberal Hegemony

Libya and the global enduring disorder