ABSTRACT
Huge and hugely unexpected trends and events burst into the landscape of world politics. The ending of the East-West Cold War without a commensurate East-West hot war was the most prominent; it defined the framework of the years of the ‘interregnum’. The preceding chapters have taken three principal facets of those times – the peculiar effects of Cold War thinking; uncivil war in the poor world and uncivil war, seen as terrorism, in the rich world – and examined them in relation to each other, and in turn. The purpose of this chapter is rather different. Its subject is the patterns of explanation which the academic study of security has offered. Four phases are described and its principal purpose follows from that: to propose some modification both to the substance and shape of academic security studies as they recover from a severe crisis of identity and confidence. The chapter suggests that, following the collapse of Classical Realism, the neo-realist versus idealist tussle can be seen to have been miscast. A modified form of power-political analysis is now required: one which can grasp and use the continuing underlying strengths of pragmatic realist description of an international system principally driven by the balance of power between states, while simultaneously accommodating the equally real presence of cosmopolitan values and of non-state actors, who believe in and promote them through campaigns for debt relief, for example, and structurally through the revived regime of human rights law and procedure.
