Globalization and its effect on Western Civilization
Essay - 3 pages - International relations
Western Civilization has been shaped by the many people and events that have witnessed its transformation from the dawn of the early modern period in 1500 up to the present day. The present word view has been formed by many events including the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and the...
How does the "English School" of international relations differ from American approaches?
Essay - 3 pages - International relations
According to Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time, "a theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model which contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the...
A Just Cause
Essay - 3 pages - International relations
As Michael Walzer frequently states, “war is hell”; however, that has not stopped people from engaging in it for thousands of years. There are a variety of reasons nations have entered war, among them are: territorial expansion, the spread of democracy, self-defense, and humanitarian...
Is the United Nations an effective organisation?
Essay - 3 pages - International relations
The United Nations is not the first international organisation to be established to help settle conflict peacefully and to prevent future conflicts from arising. In 1899, the Hague Convention for the Settlement of International Disputes was established. “The conference was convened at the...
Kenneth Waltz's on nuclear weapons
Essay - 3 pages - International relations
Do you agree with Waltz's recommendation to spread nuclear weapons? On Sunday, April 9, 2006, the Washington Post announced that “the Bush administration is studying options for military strikes against Iran as part of a broader strategy of coercive diplomacy to pressure Tehran to abandon...
The Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society: a comparative study
Essay - 4 pages - International relations
The Jeffersonian idea that liberty and equality would be best achieved by everyman pursuing his own interest and a federal government with greatly constrained powers is often seen as America's traditional political philosophy. During the 20th century, three periods of government activism...
The United States and international religious freedom
Essay - 4 pages - International relations
In 1998, the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) created both the International Religious Freedom Office in the Department of State and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). Since this date, a report has been produced every year within the United States,...
The causes of resurgence of Islamism
Essay - 4 pages - International relations
Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in 2001, Islamism is perceived as the major international threat of our time. The subject is broadly under studies, in universities as well as in the media, which often provide a biased vision of the phenomenon. Islamism can be defined by the use of the sacred...
Is the environment an international security issue?
Essay - 4 pages - International relations
The last half of the 20th Century has been exclusively dominated by the Cold war conflict. There was little space in the analysis of the scholars in International relations for other minor issues of “low politics”, while the questions of the nuclear war and balance of terror dominated...
What explains the disintegration of Yugoslavia?
Essay - 8 pages - International relations
The Second Yugoslavia created in 1943, under the name of Democratic Federation of Yugoslavia, was a federal state consisting of six republics -Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia- and two autonomous provinces - Kosovo and Vojvodina. It became the Federal...
Psychological approaches to International Politics. The case of Cyprus
Essay - 11 pages - International relations
Located at a strategic position in the eastern Mediterranean sea, Cyprus, in the course of its history has frequently switched hands in-between powers which maintained an interest in the region. The list of its successive rulers includes the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Byzantines,...
The Fog of War: Lessons One and Two
Essay - 7 pages - International relations
Through the process of critical oral history, Robert McNamara has re-evaluated his experience as the Secretary of Defense under the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies. Filmmaker Errol Morris shaped his documentary The Fog of War around eleven lessons from the life of McNamara. The first two...
The US and Guantanamo Bay
Essay - 7 pages - International relations
In 1898, the United States intervened in the Caribbean and Pacific to fight against Spanish imperialism. In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, the United States occupied Cuba from January 1899 to May 1902. On February 25, 1901, Senator Orville H. Platt introduced in Congress “the...
The case of the Czech republic and the Slovak republic
Essay - 11 pages - International relations
The Czech and the Slovak nations had a similar history for more than a century, and the attempt to coexist in just one common state definitely failed in autumn 1992, when the Czech Prime Minister Václav Klaus and the leader of the main Slovak party HZDS, Vladimír Meèiar, came to the conclusion...
Is NATO still relevant ?
Essay - 7 pages - International relations
General De Gaulle once said that all alliances are like roses: they wither and decay. NATO might be a counter-example or it might not. While during the Munich Conference, the US Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, claimed “As an alliance we have never been stronger. We have never...
Can we have a world government?
Essay - 5 pages - International relations
To answer the question “Can we have world government”, we must understand two questions: one is “What would be the use and necessity of a world government”; the other one is “In what extent would it be possible?” “A government is a system, form or organization...
What is the role of the state in international Politics?
Essay - 4 pages - International relations
International Politics are based upon two main theories, Realism and Liberalism, which are conventionally opposed, and therefore give two different interpretations of world politics. This essay will focus on the stances of these theories upon the role of the state. But before assessing their...
Is there a 'responsibility to protect'? Is the UN capable of protecting the victims of internal conflicts?
Essay - 6 pages - International relations
Civil wars are, today, since the end of the Cold War, the dominant form of conflicts all around the world. For instance, as Stephen John Stedman explains, 'all thirty-five of the wars in 1997 were primarily internal' . Massive violence, destruction and killing tend, so, nowadays, to...
Is the United Nations running the same risk as its predecessor the League of Nations of being made marginal or even irrelevant? Why or why not?
Essay - 5 pages - International relations
'The League is dead, long live the United Nations!' This is with these words that Lord Robert Cecil, one of the architects of the League of Nations, commented on the dissolution of the organization, in the spring 1946, expressing the apparent readiness to write the League off as a failure...
Why has the UN Charter remained a central plank of international order, even though it was formulated in wartime by only a few of the victorious powers?
Essay - 6 pages - International relations
'If we had had this Charter a few years ago-and above all, the will to use it- millions now dead would be alive. If we should falter in the future in our will to use it, millions now living will surely die.' (Truman) This quotation shows the ambition the Charter has and the hope its...
Is each age blessed or doomed with the presence of an empire?
Essay - 5 pages - International relations
“Veni, vidi, vici...”[I came, I saw, I conquered] Julius Caesar. This quote from one of the most famous Roman generals reflects the principle of a major phenomenon in international relations: empires, a phenomenon which dates back as far as 2334 BC with the reign of Sargon of Akkad, and...
Is capitalism a positive or negative force in International Relations?
Essay - 5 pages - International relations
In 1995, the 200 most powerful multi-national corporations controlled approximately one third of the world GNP The turnover of these companies sometimes exceeds the GNP of some countries: one example is General Motors which with a turnover of 132 billion dollars surpasses the GNP of Indonesia....
Iran's nuclear program
Essay - 9 pages - International relations
As diplomats from the 190 signatory countries gather in New York this week for the five-yearly review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran will surely be present in many minds. Although some warning signs had been issued by various intelligence services during the previous decade,...
Does Realism still provide a convincing analysis of international relationships ?
Essay - 3 pages - International relations
Realism arose as a theory after World War II because of the perceived failure of a world guided by Liberal Internationalist principles. The tension fraught era of the Cold War were ideal conditions for the stark, suspicious pragmaticism espoused by the likes of E.H. Carr and Hans J. Morgenthau....
What is human security?
Essay - 6 pages - International relations
The end of Cold War brought new global challenges to the security field. The arousal of new forms of conflict, such as internal wars and terrorism made it important to rethink civilian protection as the centre of this new perspective of security. Threats to security are no longer restricted to...
'Washington bears a considerable amount of the responsibility for the radicalism of the Iranian Revolution and the resultant deterioration in US-Iranian relations'
Essay - 3 pages - International relations
'When examining the policies that the United States conducted toward Iran from 1945 to 1979, one cannot help but realize that Washington bears a considerable amount of the responsibility for the radicalism of the Iranian Revolution and the resultant deterioration in US-Iranian relations.'...
