Introduction

This book faces an intractable audience problem. The issues it deals with are relevant to a number of social science disciplines (e.g. anthropology, archaeology and sociology) but it is written from the vantage point of International Relations (IR). This is so partly because IR was where the argument originated, and it would be disingenuous to present it in another way, and partly because IR scholars remain my core audience. Therefore, for readers not familiar with the debates in this particular discipline, some of the discussion may seem foreign, banal or perhaps even inspiring. Yet, I ask them to endure it nonetheless. The theorisation of what I refer to below as the second-order dimension of society is important regardless of disciplinary background.