With a framework based on interests, interactions, and institutions, World Politics gives students the tools to understand international relations. In the thoroughly updated Fourth Edition, new Controversy units provide models for applying the concepts in each chapter to real-world issues and events. New InQuizitive activities—created and tested by instructors who teach with World Politics—then invite students to practice applying the analytical tools from the text to alternative examples and cases.

As we face new challenges from climate change and the rise of populism in Western politics and beyond, there is little doubt that we are entering a new configuration of world politics. Driven by nostalgia for past certainties or fear of what is coming next, references to normalcy have been creeping into political discourse, with people either vying for a return to a past normalcy or coping with the new normal. This book traces main discourses and practices associated with normalcy in world politics. Visoka and Lemay-Hébert mostly focus on how dominant states and international organizations try to manage global affairs through imposing normalcy over fragile states, restoring normalcy over disaster-affected states, and accepting normalcy over suppressive states. They show how discourses and practices come together in constituting normalization interventions and how in turn they play in shaping the dynamics of continuity and change in world politics.

rofessor Gilpin uses history, sociology, and economic theory to identify the forces causing change in the world order.

New insights into the interplay between conflict and cooperation, the impact of domestic political structures on foreign policy, the role of institutions, and the influence of worldviews and causal beliefs on decision-making.

The best-selling introduction to international relations offers the most comprehensive coverage of the key theories and global issues in world politics, written by the leading experts in the field.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the international system has been unipolar, centered on the United States. But the rise of China foreshadows a change in the distribution of power. Øystein Tunsjø shows that the international system is moving toward a U.S.-China standoff, bringing us back to bipolarity—a system in which no third power can challenge the top two. The Return of Bipolarity in World Politics surveys the new era of superpowers to argue that the combined effects of the narrowing power gap between China and the United States and the widening power gap between China and any third-ranking power portend a new bipolar system that will differ in crucial ways from that of the last century. Tunsjø expands Kenneth N. Waltz’s structural-realist theory to examine the new bipolarity within the context of geopolitics, which he calls “geostructural realism.” He considers how a new bipolar system will affect balancing and stability in U.S.-China relations, predicting that the new bipolarity will not be as prone to arms races as the previous era’s; that the risk of limited war between the two superpowers is likely to be higher in the coming bipolarity, especially since the two powers are primarily rivals at sea rather than on land; and that the superpowers are likely to be preoccupied with rivalry and conflict in East Asia instead of globally. Tunsjø presents a major challenge to how international relations understands superpowers in the twenty-first century.