anarchism
The doctrine associated with Godwin, Bakunin, Proudhon, and others, that human communities can and should flourish without government. Voluntary cooperation should replace the coercive machinery of ...
Arab-Israeli Conflict
Ongoing conflict between Arabs and Israel over Palestinian territory. The origins of the conflict lie in the Balfour Declaration (1917), which promised “a national home for the Jewish people,” and in ...
arms race
A competition between nations for superiority in the development and accumulation of weapons, especially between the U.S. and the former USSR during the Cold War.
Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation
(APEC)An association of nations around the Pacific rim aiming at the creation of a Pacific free‐trade area. APEC was set up in 1990; it has 21 members, including Australia, Canada, Chile, China, ...
balance of power
Probably the oldest concept in the study of International Relations going back at least to the work of Thucydides. It is closely associated with both diplomatic parlance and realist theory. Its logic ...
Bronfenbrenner's Mirror Image Perception
Urie Bronfenbrenner (1917–2005) was co-founder of the Head Start program for children in the United States and the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Human Development and Psychology at ...
capitulation
Commercial privileges granted by Muslim states, especially the Ottoman and Persian Empires, to Christian European states to conduct trade. Based on the principle of aman (safe conduct), capitulations ...
collective security
The centralized system of international rules, now embodied in the Charter of the United Nations, that governs the collective resort to force under the authority of the United Nations for the purpose ...
Comparative Politics
The term comparative politics refers to both a subject matter and a method of analysis. In principle, the two should complement each other; in practice, they frequently do not.As ...
conflict
[This entry contains four subentries: Distant Early Warnings; Phases; Social Theories; and Typologies.]Distant early warning systems are an outgrowth of research undertaken by international relations ...
containment
First articulated by President Truman in 1947, containment involved maintaining the US military presence around the world, as well as supporting ‘friendly’ regimes economically and militarily. It was ...
Correlates of War
Research project, established in 1963 by J. David Singer, which sought to examine the incidence and extent of armed conflict in the post‐Napoleonic period (1816 to the present). The data collected ...
crisis management
1 Management of a crisis: measures that are taken to identify, acquire, and plan the use of resources to anticipate, prevent, and/or resolve a threat (for example to public safety arising from ...
détente
Literally ‘loosening’. Détente was used to refer to periods of reduced tension in relations between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It was closely associated with the ...
deterrence
N.the prevention from action by fear of the consequences. Deterrence is a state of mind brought about by the existence of a credible threat of unacceptable counteraction.
Dewey, John, and the Outlawing of War
John Dewey (1918–1939) was the foremost philosopher of instrumentalism in the United States, and a developer of progressive education. He became a leading spokesperson for the Outlawry of War ...
diplomacy
N.the profession, activity, or skill of managing international relations, typically by a country's representatives abroad: an extensive round of diplomacy in the Middle East.
diplomatic immunity
The freedom from legal proceedings in the UK that is granted to members of diplomatic missions of foreign states by the Diplomatic Privileges Act 1964. This Act incorporates some of the provisions of ...
diplomatic mission
A body composed of government officers representing the interests and welfare of their state who have been posted abroad (by the sending state) and operate within the jurisdiction of another state ...
epistemic Communities
Compare imagined community; interpretive community; virtual community.1. A group of people with shared knowledge, expertise, beliefs, or ways of looking at the world: for example, ‘the scientific ...
