Evaluating IR’s Crystal Balls: How Predictions of the Future Have Withstood Fourteen Years of Unipolarity
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Date
2003-11-04
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Publisher
Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies
Abstract
The fall of the Berlin Wall inspired a variety of scholars to speculate about why
the Cold War came to such an abrupt and shocking end, why no school of
thought anticipated its demise, and what the event meant for international
relations theory. A set of articles simultaneously emerged purporting to
identify the most salient aspects of the new system, structural and otherwise,
and to anticipate the direction in which it was heading. This paper begins a
re-examination of some of those predictions, using the evidence that has
accumulated over the decade and a half since the collapse of bipolarity to
evaluate how early visions of the post-Cold War international system matched
events that followed. In all the main areas of contention between neorealist
and constructivist predictions – over balancing, the rise of multipolarity, and
conflict – constructivism, with its emphasis on the role of ideas and norms in
state behavior, has proven more prescient.
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The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.
Keywords
international relations, future