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This book breaks new ground in the way we think about international relations theory.

Kees van der Pijl argues that by making the "nation-state" the focus of international relations, the discipline has become Euro-centric and a-historical. Theories of imperialism and historic civilisations, and their relation to world order, have been discarded. With more than half the world's population living in cities, with unprecedented levels of migration, global politics is present on every street corner. The "international" is no longer only a balance of power among states, but includes tribal relations making a comeback in various ways.

Outlining a new approach to IR theory, the book makes a case for a re-reading of world history in terms of foreign relations, and shows what it reveals about both our past and our future.

AbstractThe origins of contemporary supra‐national power go back to the second British Empire, which, unlike the first, faced organized labor as a potential revolutionary force. The formation of the Rhodes–Milner Group was meant to better manage the formation of the public mood, and the Boer War in South Africa demanded close integration of imperial affairs. A central figure in the Rhodes–Milner Group, Lord Esher, was also the architect of the Committee of Imperial Defense, created to take up the latter task. Esher's idea of a secretariat confidentially preparing solutions to issues of the day before they emerged in the public domain was introduced into the structure of international organizations after World War I and the Russian Revolution. Escher also laid the foundations of today's model of transnational politics in which groups such as Bilderberg or the Trilateral Commission and many others, shape certain areas of consensus before the public is allowed to make its voice heard. In this process, the circumvention of democracy has assumed the nature of an outright assault on it. In the process the World Economic Forum, formally joining forces with the United Nations, has become the most visible supranational body applying direct rule.

I advance an unusual view on the confrontation of the Western capitalism and Soviet–Russian socialism. I suggest to see this confrontation through the prism of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary ideologies. Today, almost one hundred years after the October Revolution 1917 in Russia, there are few reasons to celebrate the success of revolutionary ideology. Indeed, the Soviet Union, the socialist country built as a result of the Revolution, demised thirty years ago, while its economy was pillaged and devastated by the new Russian oligarchy. Simultaneously NATO advanced to the East and the EU approached the very Russian borders (e.g., Baltic countries). However, such achievement of revolutionary ideology as planned economy may be regarded as a useful instrument for developing eco-socialism and especially repairing Western capitalism and corporate liberalism that were seriously threatened by the incessant financial, economic and mental crises of the last decades. During these decades, the ruling political elites were able to keep status quo by means of injecting additional capital to the breeches using sovereign debt, inflation and corporate debt. The great financial crisis of 2007-2008 put an end to this. Retrospectively, what Marx named the transition from capitalism to socialism may seem to be repeatedly stifled by the Western capitalism. I name it permanent counterrevolution. The modern version of the Western counterrevolutionary ideology is economically based upon supply chains that combine the cheapest workforce in Asia with Western markets but dampen the overall demand in the global sense. The financial crisis led to narrowing the class compromise, as the income division of the global society strengthened. The Western counterrevolutionary strategy is focussed on protecting the global supply chains ("globalisation") and modern analogues of debt collection and it uses economic wars and real wars for regime change in different parts of the world. None the less, the increase in financing the US military ...

Starting in the late 1960s, the development of the productive forces of society entered a new stage: the Information Revolution, an era focused on the application of information theories such as cybernetics combined with advances in computer technology and digital communication networks, culminating in the Internet. Under capitalist conditions, this has already resulted in a knowledge economy, but the social, auto-regulatory possibilities it opens up are bound to be incompatible with the private appropriation characteristic of capitalism.

In this piece I look at the BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) as rivals of the West, united more by circumstance than by intent. It emerged as a seemingly innocuous banker's gimmick referring to the 'emerging market' potential of the countries thus thrown together, but due to the aggressive Western response to independent policies, the BRICS have slowly moved towards solidifying their cohesion. Comprising half the world's population, the bloc on the eve of the financial crisis of 2008 was closing in on the West. In Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms, China's GDP was three-quarters the size of the US economy, and India no. 4 behind Japan, whilst Brazil and Russia were catching up with the main EU states (Armijo 2007: 12). The 2008 financial collapse in the West contracted China's export markets and speculation that the BRICS were passé, was rife (Sharma, 2012: 6). However, China and India soon recovered, surpassing the US and Japan, respectively, whilst Russia and Brazil are trailing just behind Germany (World Bank 2016).This (uneven) recovery of the BRICS bloc in turn has provoked an even less benevolent response, increasingly amounting to a straightforward confrontation policy. My argument is that once the crisis forcedChina, the bloc's locomotive, to slow down and the global commodity boom ended, a Western strategy of isolating it from the other BRICS ensued. This is most obvious in the case of the NATO siege on Russia.

Este artículo sostiene que las Relaciones Internacionales como disciplina académica (RRII) han entrado a formar parte de una creciente preocupación con la "seguridad" tras el 11 de septiembre. Esto no siempre ha sido así, e incluso actualmente existen también teorías alternativas dentro de la corriente principal de la disciplina. Sin embargo, la perspectiva de la seguridad estuvo determinada por dos momentos concretos en los que el miedo a un ataque inminente sobre Estados Unidos y sus aliados se articuló de manera muy dramática. El primero tuvo lugar entre la constitución original de la disciplina durante los años de entreguerras y el asedio de posguerra hacia la URSS. Aquí el papel de las RRII fue definir como racional la asunción de un ataque nuclear sorpresa, equiparando a la URSS como estado "totalitario" similar a las potencias del Eje, una de las cuales atacó Pearl Harbour. El segundo puede situarse en la década de los setenta cuando la amenaza de la revuelta del Tercer Mundo bajo el estandarte de la liberación nacional fue rebautizada como "terrorismo internacional" promovido por la extrema derecha y los militaristas israelíes en Estados Unidos, creando de esta manera una continuidad entre la supuesta amenaza soviética y los casos pos-soviéticos de revuelta antioccidental. De todo ello el artículo concluye que las RRII han servido para colocar a políticos y líderes de opinión bajo una "disciplina de miedo" que es insuficientemente reconocida, y menos aún retada por parte de investigadores de RRII ; This paper argues that International Relations as an academic discipline (IR) since 9/11 has become part of a growing preoccupation with 'security'. This has not always been the case, and still today there are alternative theorisations also within the mainstream of the discipline. The security perspective however was shaped by two particular junctures in which the fear of impending attack on the USA and its allies was articulated at its most dramatic. The first occurred between the original establishment of the discipline in the interwar years and the postwar siege laid on the USSR. Here the role of IR was to define as rational the assumption of a nuclear surprise attack, equating the USSR as a 'totalitarian' state similar to the Axis Powers, one of which did attack Pearl Harbour. The second can be traced back to the 1970s when the threat of Third World revolt under the banner of national liberation was re-baptised 'international terrorism' at the instigation of the Israeli Far Right and militarists in the US, thus creating a continuity between the supposed Soviet threat and post-Soviet instances of anti-Western revolt. From this the paper concludes that IR has functioned to place policy-makers and opinion leaders under a 'discipline of fear' which is insufficiently recognized, let alone challenged by IR scholars

In this piece I look at the BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) as rivals of the West, united more by circumstance than by intent. It emerged as a seemingly innocuous banker's gimmick referring to the 'emerging market' potential of the countries thus thrown together, but due to the aggressive Western response to independent policies, the BRICS have slowly moved towards solidifying their cohesion. Comprising half the world's population, the bloc on the eve of the financial crisis of 2008 was closing in on the West. In Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms, China's GDP was three-quarters the size of the US economy, and India no. 4 behind Japan, whilst Brazil and Russia were catching up with the main EU states (Armijo 2007: 12). The 2008 financial collapse in the West contracted China's export markets and speculation that the BRICS were passé, was rife (Sharma, 2012: 6). However, China and India soon recovered, surpassing the US and Japan, respectively, whilst Russia and Brazil are trailing just behind Germany (World Bank 2016).This (uneven) recovery of the BRICS bloc in turn has provoked an even less benevolent response, increasingly amounting to a straightforward confrontation policy. My argument is that once the crisis forcedChina, the bloc's locomotive, to slow down and the global commodity boom ended, a Western strategy of isolating it from the other BRICS ensued. This is most obvious in the case of the NATO siege on Russia.

Este artículo sostiene que las Relaciones Internacionales como disciplina académica (RRII) han entrado a formar parte de una creciente preocupación con la "seguridad" tras el 11 de septiembre. Esto no siempre ha sido así, e incluso actualmente existen también teorías alternativas dentro de la corriente principal de la disciplina. Sin embargo, la perspectiva de la seguridad estuvo determinada por dos momentos concretos en los que el miedo a un ataque inminente sobre Estados Unidos y sus aliados se articuló de manera muy dramática. El primero tuvo lugar entre la constitución original de la disciplina durante los años de entreguerras y el asedio de posguerra hacia la URSS. Aquí el papel de las RRII fue definir como racional la asunción de un ataque nuclear sorpresa, equiparando a la URSS como estado "totalitario" similar a las potencias del Eje, una de las cuales atacó Pearl Harbour. El segundo puede situarse en la década de los setenta cuando la amenaza de la revuelta del Tercer Mundo bajo el estandarte de la liberación nacional fue rebautizada como "terrorismo internacional" promovido por la extrema derecha y los militaristas israelíes en Estados Unidos, creando de esta manera una continuidad entre la supuesta amenaza soviética y los casos pos-soviéticos de revuelta antioccidental. De todo ello el artículo concluye que las RRII han servido para colocar a políticos y líderes de opinión bajo una "disciplina de miedo" que es insuficientemente reconocida, y menos aún retada por parte de investigadores de RRII.