ABSTRACT
Since the opening of the Berlin wall during the night of 9 November 1989 and the destruction wrought by al-Qaida on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on the morning of 11 September 2001, international relations have undergone far-reaching changes. With the first event, the previously dominant conflict formation in world politics, the Cold War, disintegrated, transforming relations among major powers; the second set of events woke the world to the reality and depth of new types of ‘planetary’ security challenges facing states from non-state actors and, more broadly, from the realm of transnational relations.2 Those changes have been driven by the processes of globalization which characteristically have involved rapid, often exponential growth of interactions of all kinds across national frontiers. The net result are international relations in ‘turbulence’,3 that is to say: world politics marked by discontinuities, fluidity, and disorder. The most recent manifestation of this turbulence has been the financial and economic crisis of 2008/9.
