Contending images of World politics / edited by Greg Fry and Jacinta O'Hagan

With the passing of the seemingly comfortable certainties of the Cold War, the end of the twentieth century and dawn of the twenty-first have been marked by wide-ranging new debates about the nature of world politics. A wide range of dramatic and arresting images have been put forward-most famously Francis Fukuyama's End of History and Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations- each claiming to capture the essence and spirit of the emerging global order.

Contending Images of World Politics takes as its starting-point these competing images that have shaped much media and public discussion of world politics and influenced the terms of the policy debate. Fukuyama's and Huntington's images, as well as such others as the borderless world, the coming anarchy, the coming age of regionalism and Islam versus the West, all represent different assumptions about what entities and forces matter in global politics, about the possibilities of peace and war, and about whether the world should be seen as one polity, or two, or many. What is more, each of these images has different normative underpinnings and poses different ethical questions about the changing location of community, rights and responsibilities in global society.

Written to a carefully conceived common brief by a truly international cast of authoritative contributors, the specially commissioned chapters in Contending Images of World Politics provide a critical review of the nature and implications of the central debates of our time and a novel Introduction to the study of international relations in the twenty-first century.