Suchergebnisse

"The worst moment in a war was my fear I would not be sent to it." So wrote the young Michael Nicholson, a reporter whose astonishing career has covered eighteen major conflicts. Published to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the Falklands War, A State of War Exists sees the veteran journalist pondering what made him want to risk life and limb travelling to the most dangerous parts of the world, at the most dangerous times - over 200 journalists have been killed in the last three years alone. Was it machismo or masochism that encouraged him so compulsively and repeatedly to risk his l

In this book, Professor Nicholson outlines social scientific approaches to international relations and then describes the problems of rational decision-making in conflict situations. He shows how rationality is in many strategic situations hard to define and often leads to paradoxes such as the prisoners' dilemma. In the following part the author explores rational beliefs about the international system. He examines theories of arms races, alliances and the international problems of ecology. Here he is critical of the classical school of international relations for a lack of rigour in dealing with the problems of evidence and belief. Finally, Michael Nicholson discusses the philosophy of science, policy and ethics. This book is both an exposition and a defence of a social scientific approach to international relations. With its emphasis on social scientific approaches, theory building and testing - and above all its clarity and accessibility - it provides students with a key to understanding the complex field of conflict analysis

This article discusses some controversies over the relations of the academic discipline of International Relations to policy. The article argues that, while our ultimate goal may be to have some impact on the world, the immediate goals can be more abstract. International Relations consists, and should consist, of a set of Lakatosian Research Programmes, some conflicting, some complementary, which range from the abstract to the directly policy-relevant. Effective intervention in social systems depends on analyses in more than commonsense terms. The article looks sceptically on recent disciplinary history, doubting both the supposed positivist hegemony and the supposed novelty of normative debate.

Lewis Fry Richardson (1881–1953) was one of the most original thinkers ever to apply their minds to the study of war and its causes. In a strict sense he was an amateur in that he held no position of profit dedicated to the pursuit of these researches. He was always employed to do something else and did the research at week-ends and in his retirement. He never taught in the field or anything close to it. Nevertheless he was a prolific publisher on a very wide range of topics, as the two volumes of his collected papers published by Cambridge University Press testify, though his work rarely reached the international relations or political science community at the time. It was after his death that his work had its impact.