Contending Theories of International Relations Essay Example

Chapter 1: Theoretical Approaches to International Relations

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the tumult of the Central-Eastern European Theater there has been a major shift in the international community.

The social science community studied the international state based on a bipolar framework present during the Cold War. Movement from Bipolarity to Multipolarity, paradigm shift post CIS collapse. Michael Howard (Optimistic View): It is quite possible that war between highly developed societies may not recur, and that a stable framework for international order will become firmly established. Charles W. Kegley Jr. (Realist View): The disappearance of large-scale warfare concomitant with the ascendance of small-scale warfare has produced two systems, a stable ‘central system’ and an unstable ‘peripheral system’. Both were theories of the 1991 Gulf War period, who knows if either theory was right, perhaps we never will.

Samuel Huntington