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.

With a framework based on interests, interactions, and institutions, World Politics gives students an accessible analytical approach to understand international relations. In the Fifth Edition, two new guest contributorsÑStephanie Rickard and Susan HydeÑoffer cutting-edge analysis of current issues, including the global coronavirus pandemic and trade war between the United States and China. When assigned with InQuizitive and brand new News Analysis activities, students can apply the framework to global and current events.

Why are there wars? Why do countries struggle to cooperate to prevent genocides or to protect the environment? Why are some countries rich while others are poor? Organized around the puzzles that draw scholars and students alike to the study of international relations, World Politics gives students the tools they need to think analytically about the field's most compelling questions.

A contemporary analytical approach to international relations written at a level that introductory students can grasp.

"Constructive engagement" became a catchphrase under the Clinton administration for America's reinvigorated efforts to pull China firmly into the international community as a responsible player, one that abides by widely accepted norms. Skeptics questioned the effectiveness of this policy and those that followed. But how is such socialization supposed to work in the first place? This has never been all that clear, whether practiced by the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), Japan, or the United States. Social States is the first book to systematically test the effects of socialization in international relations--to help explain why players on the world stage may be moved to cooperate when doing so is not in their material power interests. Alastair Iain Johnston carries out his groundbreaking theoretical task through a richly detailed look at China's participation in international security institutions during two crucial decades of the "rise of China," from 1980 to 2000. Drawing on sociology and social psychology, this book examines three microprocesses of socialization--mimicking, social influence, and persuasion--as they have played out in the attitudes of Chinese diplomats active in the Conference on Disarmament, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban, the Convention on Conventional Weapons, and the ASEAN Regional Forum. Among the key conclusions: Chinese officials in the post-Mao era adopted more cooperative and more self-constraining commitments to arms control and disarmament treaties, thanks to their increasing social interactions in international security institutions.