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another hand – to contrive a three-armed metaphor – Britain's strategic and broader political context is such that there is no common understanding of what ‘polarity’ actually means . So, while the term has recently found a place in official documents and discourse that it did not previously enjoy, it is also deployed as a political speech-act: to mean different things by different actors depending on their policies, preferences, and proclivities. The chapter proceeds as follows. First, it surveys the strategic backdrop, in the form of a brief
In the International Relations (IR) literature, polarity analysis has had many critics but few serious rivals. 1 As one author has noted, it ‘offers a stunningly bold way of simplifying the horrendous day-to-day complexities of world politics’, by teasing out and pinpointing the fundamental outlines and features of the distribution of power in the inter-state order. 2 One does not need to be a dyed-in-the-wool structural realist to concede that
With the rise of new powers and the decline of seemingly unchallenged US dominance, a conventional wisdom is gaining ground in contemporary discourse about world politics that a new multipolar order is taking shape. Yet ‘multipolarity’ – an order with multiple centres of power – is variously used as a description of the current distribution of power, of the likely shape of a future global order, or even as a prescription for how power ‘should’ be distributed in the international system. This book explores how the concept of a multipolar order is being used for different purposes in different national contexts. From rising powers to established powers, contemporary policy debates are analysed by a set of leading scholars in order to provide an in-depth insight into the use and abuse of a widely used but rarely explored concept.
comfortable debating the theoretical effects of changes in the polarity of the international system. Yet the theoretical polarity analysis literature provides only limited guidance on debates in policy circles over the actual distribution of power itself. It is one thing for analysts to disagree over the implications of a return to multipolarity; it is something else to disagree about whether the system is in fact returning to a multipolar configuration or not. The previous chapters clearly demonstrate that the certitude that characterises much political
Introduction In this chapter, I explore the use of the concept of multipolarity in the Brazilian foreign policy debate from 2000 to 2015. To do so, I draw on four sources. First, I analyse documents from Brazilian government agencies to reconstruct how polarity was thought of and what impact this had on actual policy. Second, I rely on a series of in-depth interviews conducted in June 2017 with academics and Brazilian public officials to help unravel their understanding of the term and the interests of different actors. Third, I systematically review the
has had the circular effect of prompting a greater focus on mummies in museums. A vast literature has built up exploring this seemingly self-sustaining obsession, frequently concluding in the tautology that Egyptian mummies fascinate us because they are so intrinsically fascinating. 1 Basic polarities in attitudes to mummies – rapture versus revulsion – remain the same today as when Petrie excavated at Hawara in the 1880s, when Pietro della Valle visited Saqqara in the early 1600s, and even when the Greeks and Romans
. And this prolonged, fiery exchange is the first of only two encounters between the play's philosophical polarities; when they cross paths again (in the tragedy's crescendo) their conflict swerves violently into bloodshed. I have argued elsewhere that Webster's play is animated by a deliberate jarring of Calvinist and Montaignian models of introspection. 42 And while Webster undoubtedly derived much of his interest in and knowledge of Epicureanism through Montaigne, earlier works might also have piqued his interest. In 1573, for instance, James
innovations are considered by Washington to be strategically vital, and how (and to what end) the US responds to the perceived challenge posed by China to its technological hegemony. The chapter uses the International Relations (IR) concept of ‘polarity’ (the nature and distribution of power within the international system) as a lens to view the shifting great-power dynamics in AI-related strategic technology (e.g. microchips, semiconductors, big-data analytics, and 5G data transmission networks). 2 The chapter argues
the Communist Party’s loyalty to Moscow and the Labour Party’s support for an Atlanticist foreign policy, at renewing socialism by mapping a third way beyond the polarities of the Cold War. Within eighteen months of this ideological break with Stalinism and social democracy, New Left activists began to test their ideas in a new mass movement: the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). It is difficult to imagine a more propitious encounter, for from early 1958 CND organised a series of marches that brought thousands of disaffected youth into conflict not only with
AS THE INTRODUCTION to one of the more recent human rights readers notes, the effort to establish or assert ‘ “some particular ground” upon which right-holders can justify their claim to rights … has framed the dominant discourse on human rights’ (Dunne and Wheeler, 1999: 4). Indeed, any discussion of the broader issues raised by human rights seems condemned to endlessly patrol the beat mapped out by the polarities of universal and communitarian or relative grounds for rights and, as Dunne and Wheeler make clear, the associated