War and Power in the Twenty-First Century: The State, Military Power and the International SystemISBN: 978-0-7456-2520-1
Hardcover
176 pages
January 2002, Polity
Other Available Formats: Paperback
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New military technologies will alter how wars are fought and
will influence the balance of power. Changes in the global
environment will provide new causes of conflict and will change
economic priorities. As a result, the state will survive as the key
social institution and populations will look to it to acquire and
to distribute scarce resources like water, energy and land. Many of
the changes that seem transformatory today, like globalization, the
internet and mass consumerism, will be shown to be less significant
than we believe them to be.
Hirst puts such changes into perspective by comparing them with
the revolutionary changes in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries in Europe: the firepower revolution, the rise of the
sovereign territorial state and the parallel development of the
international system, and the creation of world trade. These basic
structures of the modern world are still with us and will remain,
despite major changes in twenty-first-century society.
This book will appeal to students of politics, political sociology & international relations as well as the interested general reader.