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Cover -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction. Navigating the Chaos of Contemporary World Politics: Network versus No-work -- 1 Understanding the Language of Energy: Why Entropy Does Not Herald Doomsday -- 2 Entropy as Metaphor: Pattern Recognition, Time's Arrow, and the Big Chill -- 3 The Multidimensions of Disorder: Thermodynamics and World Politics -- 4 The Role of Emerging Powers in the Age of Entropy -- or, What Happens When the Sheriff Leaves Town and Anonymous Moves In -- 5 How Power Diffusion Works to a State's Advantage: This Is Not Your Great-Grandfather's Multipolar World -- 6 Rising Entropy at the Macro Level: The World Is Not Flat in Purgatory -- 7 Rising Entropy at the Micro Level: Information Overload and the Advent of Truthiness -- 8 Maxwell's Demon and Angry Birds: Big Data to the Rescue? -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Y -- Z.

Just what exactly will follow the American century? This is the question Randall L. Schweller explores in his provocative assessment of international politics in the twenty-first century. Schweller considers the future of world politics, correlating our reliance on technology and our multitasking, distracted, disorganized lives with a fragmenting world order. He combines the Greek myth of the Golden Apple of Discord, which explains the start of the Trojan War, with a look at the second law of thermodynamics, or entropy. "In the coming age," Schweller writes, "disorder will reign supreme as the world succumbs to ... entropy, an irreversible process of disorganization that governs the direction of all physical changes taking place in the universe." Interweaving his theory of global disorder with issues on the world stage--coupled with a disquisition on board games and the cell phone app "Angry Birds"--Schweller's thesis yields astonishing insights. Maxwell's Demon and the Golden Apple will appeal to leaders of multinational corporations and government programs as well as instructors of undergraduate courses in international relations. --Provided by publisher.

Why have states throughout history regularly underestimated dangers to their survival? Why have some states been able to mobilize their material resources effectively to balance against threats, while others have not been able to do so? The phenomenon of "underbalancing" is a common but woefully underexamined behavior in international politics. Underbalancing occurs when states fail to recognize dangerous threats, choose not to react to them, or respond in paltry and imprudent ways. It is a response that directly contradicts the core prediction of structural realism's balance-of-power theory--that states motivated to survive as autonomous entities are coherent actors that, when confronted by dangerous threats, act to restore the disrupted balance by creating alliances or increasing their military capabilities, or, in some cases, a combination of both. Consistent with the new wave of neoclassical realist research, "Unanswered Threats" offers a theory of underbalancing based on four domestic-level variables--elite consensus, elite cohesion, social cohesion, and regime/government vulnerability--that channel, mediate, and redirect policy responses to external pressures and incentives. The theory yields five causal schemes for underbalancing behavior, which are tested against the cases of interwar Britain and France, France from 1877 to 1913, and the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) that pitted tiny Paraguay against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. Randall Schweller concludes that those most likely to underbalance are incoherent, fragmented states whose elites are constrained by political considerations

Why have states throughout history regularly underestimated dangers to their survival? Why have some states been able to mobilize their material resources effectively to balance against threats, while others have not been able to do so? The phenomenon of "underbalancing" is a common but woefully underexamined behavior in international politics. Underbalancing occurs when states fail to recognize dangerous threats, choose not to react to them, or respond in paltry and imprudent ways. It is a response that directly contradicts the core prediction of structural realism's balance-of-power theory--that states motivated to survive as autonomous entities are coherent actors that, when confronted by dangerous threats, act to restore the disrupted balance by creating alliances or increasing their military capabilities, or, in some cases, a combination of both. Consistent with the new wave of neoclassical realist research, "Unanswered Threats" offers a theory of underbalancing based on four domestic-level variables--elite consensus, elite cohesion, social cohesion, and regime/government vulnerability--that channel, mediate, and redirect policy responses to external pressures and incentives. The theory yields five causal schemes for underbalancing behavior, which are tested against the cases of interwar Britain and France, France from 1877 to 1913, and the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) that pitted tiny Paraguay against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. Randall Schweller concludes that those most likely to underbalance are incoherent, fragmented states whose elites are constrained by political considerations

"The Balance of Power in World Politics" published on by Oxford University Press.