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

By Ken Dark

Since the end of the Cold War, analysts of international politics have given much greater attention to issues of change. It has become increasingly clear to specialists from many fields that any understanding of large-scale political change must encompass far longer timescales than has been usual in the study of world politics, and must incorporate multi-disciplinary perspectives.

This book evaluates and draws on relevant theoretical approaches from other disciplines such as sociology, economics, geography, history, anthropology and archaeology, as well as evolutionary theory and the mathematical study of complexity. Using an epistemological framework, Dark sets out a theory of long-term world political change: the theory of 'Macrodynamics'. This is then applied to historical, anthropological and archaeological data to explain the changing forms of political organization, from the earliest human societies to the late twentieth century. The resulting analysis is a reinterpretation of the processes of global political change in the past and present. This, in turn, opens new areas of enquiry in the study of international relations and has profound implications for how we understand the changing world of today.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1474288308
• ISBN13: 9781474288309
• Release Date: October 2016
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A proposed multi-disciplinary synthesis solution to IR

A proposed multi-disciplinary syntesis solution to IR theory of large scale historical change and development, incorporating the hegemonic and the Long Wave theories. Well researched and written on the whole, providing a Macrodynamic structural model consistent with Synthesis Theories of Structural Analysis (STSA). For the price should be in two larger volumes. Essentially prohibitive to students in price, because a course can not be built around it, but will still become a standard reference text for IR.