International Relations of Social Change

Social change has become very obviously internationalized during the current historical epoch. Democratization, industrialization, the growth of capitalism, the emergence of nationalism, the rise and fall of communism, the advent of various types of religious revivalism: most of the key developments in the social life of our times have unfolded on a world scale. Indeed, the most fundamental transformation in recent history has perhaps been the process of globalization itself. This book aims to equip students of international relations and other fields to analyse social change from a global perspective. The author addresses such core problems as what we mean by 'international relations'; the relationship between international and domestic aspects of the process of social transformation; the role of politics, economics, culture, psychology and ecology in the dynamics of change; the relationship between structure and agency in producing social change; and links between theory and practice in the transformation process. In the course of this discussion he critically reviews existing treatments of the international dimension of social change, such as those found in modernization theory, Marxism, world-system theory, the recent revival of historical sociology, and notions of postmodernism. International Relations of Social Change has been written primarily with advanced undergraduates in mind, but it will also appeal to international relations specialists, sociologists and historians at all levels who see a need for reconstructed theory in order to understand more fully the problems of social transformation. A wide-ranging cross-disciplinary bibliography will aid readers further to that end.