Analysis

Social Interaction Overload and Political Participation

Social interaction overload describes a condition in which the volume of mediated communication a person receives exceeds the capacity to process it, and in which the obligations attached to a large network of contacts become a source of strain rather than connection. Applied to politics, the term carries a further proposition: that saturation of this...

The Concept of Genocide: Definition, Debate and Application

Few terms carry the weight of genocide. It names what is widely regarded as the gravest crime in international law, and its application to a set of events changes how those events are understood, remembered and acted upon. That weight is also the source of persistent difficulty: a term that determines legal liability, shapes political...

The Free Trade Agreement: How It Functions and What It Does

A free trade agreement (hereinafter: FTA) is a treaty between two or more parties that reduces or removes barriers to commerce between them while leaving each party free to set its own trade policy towards everyone else. Several hundred such agreements are now in force, and the great majority of world commerce takes place between...

The Fragile Human: Why It Is So Difficult To Maintain Stable Human Organisation.

Political scientists, historians and also laymen interested in these fields have been puzzled as to why so many great civilisations rose to glory but also vanished just as often. When we look at the past years of our own times, whenever this might have been, we found history to be quite linear, or, at least,...

The Industrial Revolution: History and Interpretations

The industrial revolution refers to the transformation of production, work and social organisation that began in Great Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century and spread over the following century to continental Europe, North America and beyond. Its central features were the application of mechanical power to manufacturing, the concentration of work in...

Realism and Liberalism in International Relations

Realism and liberalism are the two theoretical traditions that have shaped the academic study of international relations more than any others. Each offers an account of why states behave as they do, what makes conflict and cooperation more or less likely and what can reasonably be expected of the international system. They are taught as...