ABSTRACT
Many of the questions we have about global politics are borne of a sense of dissatisfaction with the state of the world. We want to know why some people are better off than others because the unequal distribution of wealth seems to us unfair. More than that,
many of us will be appalled at widespread poverty and its very serious implications for people’s lives. Similarly, we want to know why politics turns to violence because it would be better, we think intuitively, if it did not. We are unsettled by the thought that so many should die, and often at a young age, due to such violence. If we ask whether we can move beyond conflict, we do so because we can think of many cases where this has not happened, often despite people trying very hard. So one question that seems to really vex many of us and that motivates us to study global politics is how to change what’s wrong with the world. Put differently,
we would like to know how to respond – and respond effectively – to the sorts of things that we object to: poverty, war, slavery, environmental degradation and so on.
