The Waves of Time: Long-Term Change and International Relations

Since the end of the Cold War, analysts of international politics have been focusing far greater attention on issues of change. In the course of these analyses, it has become increasingly clear to specialists - from many contrasting viewpoints - that any understanding of large-scale political change must encompass far longer timescales than has been usual in the study of world politics, and has to incorporate a multi-disciplinary perspective. This is the first book offering an overview of the whole range of long term analyses in international relations, it evaluates and draws on relevant theoretical approaches both in other humanities and social sciences - such as sociology, history, anthropology and archaeology - and recent progress in evolutionary theory and the mathematical study of complexity. Introducing new approaches and a new spistemological framework, a new theory of long-term world political change is set out, building on the strengths of previous studies. This is then applied to the latest available historical, archaeological and anthropological data for changing forms of political organizations, ranging from the earliest human societies to the fast-changing world of the late twentieth century. The resulting analysis is a reinterpretation of the process of global political change in the past and in the present, which both support and challenges perspectives based on other forms of analysis and opens new areas of enquiry for international relations.