Heywood А. Global Politics

Palgrave Foundations, Palgrave McMillan 2011. — 448 pages.The aim of this book is to provide an up-to-date, integrated and forwardlooking introduction to international relations/global politics. It seeks to be genuinely global while not ignoring the international dimension of world affairs, accepting that ‘the global’ and ‘the international’ complement one another and are not rival or incompatible modes of understanding. In this view, global politics encompasses not just politics at the ‘global’ level – that is, worldwide
processes, systems and institutional frameworks – but politics at, and, crucially, across all levels – the worldwide, the regional, the national and the subnational.
Such an approach reflects the fact that while, over an increasing range of issues, states interact with one another in conditions of global interdependence, they nevertheless remain the key actors on the world stage.
The interconnectedness that such a global approach to politics implies nevertheless brought challenges in terms of how the topics and issues considered in this book should be organized and presented. It may be a platitude to suggest that everything in world affairs now influences everything else, but it is difficult to deny that it contains a germ of truth. One of the implications of this is that it serves to thwart any attempt to divide the book into meaningful parts, as such sub-divisions would impose a compartmentalization of knowledge that would
either be difficult to justify, or would constrain, rather than sharpen, understanding.
That said, the organization of chapters is certainly not random, but conforms to a logic that flows from a series of developing themes.
These are outlined in the final section of Chapter
1. A particular emphasis has been placed
on ensuring that topics and issues are fully and appropriately integrated, so that
readers can grasp the links between the events, concepts and perspectives under
discussion. This is done, in part, by extensive cross-referencing, which both
avoids needless repetition and shows readers how and where they can extend or
deepen their understanding. Theory and practice are also integrated in that,
although there is a separate chapter that introduces the major theories of global
politics, key theoretical approaches to major issues are flagged up in each
chapter, with a stress on combining the major traditions of international relations
theory with a more multidisciplinary approach. Finally, the book contains
a wide variety of pedagogical features, the nature and purpose of which are highlighted
in the following double-page spread.