ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in this book. The book shows that the debates over international security after the end of the Cold War can profitably be viewed as an evolving process of collective sense-making that occurred in transnational political communication, was triggered by the same events, and affected transnational identity-formation. After the end of the Cold War, many observers hoped for the establishment of a new world order based on the rule of law. The post-Cold War era saw an unexpected increase in intra-state violence against ethnic and religious groups, brutal civil wars and new, asymmetric conflicts. These phenomena seemed utterly anachronous: simultaneously old, resembling what Europe had experienced in the Thirty Years' War before the institutionalisation of the European state system in 1648, and new, such that, initially, observers lacked appropriate terms to describe observed events.
