Post- Cold War Predictions examines how the international order evolved after the collapse of the Soviet Union (and before the attacks on 9/11) by focusing on the ways we study and understand major powers’ security behavior within the evolving multipolar order. Beginning with an overview of Post-Cold War literature, Kassab summarizes and evaluates influential Post-Cold War texts to better understand scholarship’s need to predict. First, he discusses the central importance of power in international relations and drives home the central focus of international structures, linking findings to the broader structure-agent problem. He then reinterprets the purpose of theory, preferring explanatory theories to those that aim to predict outcomes. To understand the context by which political ideas were developed and followed as if they were political ideologies, Hanna Samir Kassab makes explicit the links between historicism and historiography, forwarding a new methodology for studying political science: Politicist analysis. Using simple jargon and defining terms where necessary, this succinct and enlightening text is required reading for all those interested in international politics.
1. Introduction 2. The Evolution of the International System: From the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century 3. Politicism in Action: Post-Cold War Literature 4. Politicism in Action II: What Happened? 5. Exploring the Unknown Future 6. Conclusions
Biography
Hanna Samir Kassab is Assistant Professor of political science and security studies at East Carolina University, USA.
Every so often a book comes across our desks that contests what we have accepted to be the thinking and practice of Political Science. This book does precisely that as it sets a courageous tone that challenges as it clarifies. This is what Kassab has done with this important text. As students, practitioners, and academics we are tasked with making sense of how we got to this point in international affairs. We do not stop there, but rather also set out to both predict and try to shape the coming future. Kassab takes issue with this accepted approach by methodically showing its shortcomings and failures. A must read, this book presents both a challenge to the way we think about the field and a necessary way forward.
Dr. Hasmet Uluorta, Chair of the Department of Political Studies, Trent University
