Prospects for International Relations

This volume, the first in a joint project of the International Studies Association and Blackwell Publishers, addresses the long run future of international relations as seen from the perspectives of leading scholars of basic patterns which have characterized its extended past and its present. Emphasis goes to fundamental features of polarity, governance, prevailing identities, the role of state and non-state actors, and patterns of aggregation and disaggregation as they bear on security and political economy prospects. The conjectures are placed in the context of major constraints on our ability to forecast international relations futures and the policy usefulness of highly general expectations.