A World of Polities Essays on Global Politics

Part 1: Introduction: The Principal Puzzle  Part 2: Making the Quest Less Elusive: Theory and Global Politics  1. Between Celebration and Despair; Constructive Suggestions for Future International Theory (1991)  2. Values and Paradigm Change (1988) 3. Reconstructing Theory in Global Politics: Beyond the Postmodern Challenge (2002)  4. Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Global Politics: Promise and Pitfalls (2007)  Part 3: The Complex Universe of Actors in Global Politics  5. The Web of World Politics (1976)  6. Italy After Rome: Complexity at the Nexus of the Ancient and Modern Worlds (1996)  7. Islam: The Evolution of a Messianic Movement  8. The Past as Prelude to the Future? Identities and Loyalties in Global Politics (1996)  Part 4: Toward a Postinternational World  9. Beyond International Relations to Global Politics: Overlapping Political Space, Shifting Boundaries, and Revised Authority Structures (2007)  10. War and Innocent Victims: The Paradox of Westphalia (2007)  11. Superpower, Hegemony, Empire (2007)  12. Postinternationalism and IR Theory (2007)

Biography

Yale H. Ferguson is Co-Director and Professor, Division of Global Affairs, Rutgers University-Newark.and Honorary Professor, University of Salzburg, Austria. He is a Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts and has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge, the Norwegian Nobel Institute, and the University of Padova, as well as Fulbright Professor at Salzburg.

Richard W. Mansbach served as political science chair at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and Iowa State University and is currently Professor of Political Science at ISU. Formerly a Marshall Scholar, he has received three Fulbright fellowships – to Singapore, Seoul, and Vienna.

Books Ferguson and Mansbach have co-authored are The Web of Global
Politics: Nonstate Actors in the Global System (1976), The Elusive Quest:
Theory and International Politics (1989), The State, Conceptual Chaos, and the Future of International Relations Theory (1989), Polities: Authority, Identities, and Change (1996), The Elusive Quest Continues: Theory and Global Politics (2003), and Remapping Global Politics: History’s Revenge and Future Shock (2004).

Here is a first-rate collection of essays, by two of our most insightful and best informed scholars, reflecting on their career-long collaborative efforts to provide prescient corrections to the IR theory enterprise.  A must for those of us who feel that the search for better theories of international relations and global politics is far from being over.

Yosef Lapid, Professor of Government, New Mexico State University, USA

Ferguson and Mansbach are, without question, two of the leading theorists in the field. Their previously published essays are insightful and deeply scholarly, and I have used many of them in courses. I welcome this excellent book that places them, and the authors reflections on a post 9/11 world, in a single place.

Craig N. Murphy, M. Margaret Ball Professor of International Relations, Wellesley College, USA

The authors have been critical to the development of global politics as a novel field of inquiry in political science. Here they bring together some of their key contributions to this pathbreaking effort. Connecting these diverse inquiries is the search for the actual sources of effective influence. This book takes us beyond the traditional answers to this question and uncovers polities, identities and loyalties shaping political outcomes in today’s world.

Saskia Sassen is the Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and author of Territory, Authority, Rights.

Ferguson-Mansbach's work is way ahead of the mainstream, always theoretically provocative as well as reflective of sound scholarship and deeply grounded in historical materials. Their standing in the field is extremely high. This is a collaboration that works and that has endured across a long period of time.

James N. Rosenau, University Professor of International Relations, George Washington University, USA