ABSTRACT
This is a textbook, but it is more than that. It is a guide for students to the questions about world politics that puzzle all of us. There are no easy answers to be had, and none of the chapters pretend that there are. There are only difficult and challenging questions – that lead to more difficult and more challenging questions. We think this is because the difficulties of global politics reflect the difficulties of ‘life, the universe and everything’. This makes this book in some sense a sort of hitch-hiker’s guide. We don’t give you answers, not even Douglas Adams’ (1979) answer – you will need to read his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (if you haven’t already) if you want to know his answer – but we do try to give you a guide to how other people have formulated questions and how they have attempted to respond to them. Many textbooks behave as if the ‘great minds’ have come up with the answers: they haven’t. The questions remain open and intractable, there for each new generation to formulate and tackle for
themselves. This section of the introduction explores what questions we address, and discusses how the approach this book takes relates to that taken by other textbooks of world politics or international relations.
