Western realism and international relations: a non-western view

Abstract

Verlagsinfo: This book provides an alternative perspective of International Relations from Hiroshima to 9/11, both its diplomacy and mainstream scholarship are linked by realpolitik, in a vicious circle of retrogressive symbiosis. It simultaneously undermined the UN system of collective security from its origin and the scientific credential for its scholarship. The Cold War that it spawned restricted economic prosperity, political stability, and democratic freedom within its narrow core-area of the United States and Europe at the cost of its vast periphery in the Third World. Its unpredicted collapse extended insecurity across the entire globalised system, including its core-are as events since 9/11 forcefully underscores. While the new hegemonic system has become globally more insecure for all its citizens, its scholarship is still clueless about the collapse of the bipolar system it created in the midst of the massive confidence-building exercise to stabilize it; it is even less able to creatively respond to its orderly transition. This book pleads for democracy among the states as a component of justice, as a substitute for power, as the organizing principle of the global system, within a reformed UN system as the 'centre for harmonizing the actions of humanity', as envisaged in the Charter. In this task, scholarship must be inspired to be the catalytic agent by reversing its present role as a policy-science of power policies to perpetuate domination and servitude, and legitimizing it as 'interdependence' of the 'global village'. It must liberate itself to become the harbinger of human emancipation, as in other fields of creative scholarship