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"Realism and constructivism, two key contemporary theoretical approaches to the study of international relations, are commonly taught as mutually exclusive ways of understanding the subject. Realist Constructivism explores the common ground between the two, and demonstrates that, rather than being in simple opposition, they have areas of both tension and overlap. There is indeed space to engage in a realist constructivism. But at the same time, there are important distinctions between them, and there remains a need for a constructivism that is not realist, and a realism that is not constructivist. Samuel Barkin argues more broadly for a different way of thinking about theories of international relations, that focuses on the corresponding elements within various approaches rather than on a small set of mutually exclusive paradigms. Realist Constructivism provides an interesting new way for scholars and students to think about international relations theory"--Provided by publisher

Offers an introduction to the study of international organizations in the field of International Relations directed toward students in the discipline. This book looks at the different ways in which IOs are studied and then applies these different modes of study to a variety of specific case studies

A review essay on books by Kelly Sims Gallagher, China Shifts Gears: Automakers, Oil, Pollution and Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006) & (2) Matthew Patterson, Automobile Politics: Ecology and Cultural Political Economy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

As a tool for making decisions about long-term environmental policy, environmental economics does not work on its own terms. It works well as a tool for analyzing environmental policy given clear, exogenously defined costs and benefits. As such, environmental economics can work well as a tool for analyzing policy in the short term. But many of the most salient issues in international environmental politics are salient specifically because they have a fundamental long-term component. Economic tools have trouble pricing environmental goods, and the farther the cost element of cost/benefit analysis is projected into the future, particularly through the analytical tool of the discount rate, the less reliable estimates are likely to be. At a certain point, the compounding of this decreasing reliability makes the cost estimates analytically counterproductive. As such, this paper concludes that fundamental decisions about the relationship between economic activity and the natural environment in the long term need to be informed by ecocentric rather than economic thinking.