International Relations: A Concise Introduction

by Michael Nicholson

Fully updated and revised, the second edition of International Relations: A Concise Introduction offers a clear and succinct overview of the forces that govern our world. Outlining key theories, traditional approaches, and controversies old and new, Michael Nicholson also importantly addresses the relationship and incongruities between abstract theories of International Relations and contemporary realities of the international system in an increasingly globalized post-Cold War world.

As international players-from vast and immensely diverse conglomerate corporations to the UN, and a host of other non-state actors-increasingly influence the world agenda, the question begs itself whether states and their interactions should still comprise the exclusive, or even primary, focus of any study of international relations. Accordingly, Nicholson provides an overview of such pressing concerns as global warming, the growing disparities between rich and poor, the resurgence of ethnic and nationalist conflict, and the health of the environment, and how these affect international relations. He further examines the moral problems inherent in any discussion of international relations, including questions of international law, terrorism and freedom fighters, and human rights. Crucial to any introduction to the field, the book serves up a brief history of the last century, focusing on the legacies of imperialism and the accelerating pace of globalization.

Genres: Nonfiction

228 pages, Paperback

First published May 18, 1998

About the author

Michael Nicholson OBE (born 9 January 1937) is an English journalist and former ITN Senior Foreign Correspondent.
Born in Romford, Essex, Nicholson attended the University of Leicester and is one of the world's most decorated and longest serving British television correspondents. Nicholson joined ITV in 1964 and over the ensuing forty years he reported from 18 war zones: Biafra, Israel, Vietnam, Cambodia, Congo, Cyprus, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Indo-Pakistan, Northern Ireland, Falklands, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, the Gulf Wars, 'Desert Storm' 1991 and 'Shock and Awe,' Baghdad 2003.
During the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in July 1974, Nicholson's car broke down just as Turkish paratroopers were landing over his head onto the island . Nicholson walked up to the first of them and greeted them with 'I'm Michael Nicholson. Welcome to Cyprus'. His film was flown back to London on an RAF plane and made the Evening News the next day. A world scoop.
Nicholson was ITN’s first bureau chief in South Africa, based in Johannesburg from 1976 to 1981 and the first television correspondent to be allowed to live in apartheid South Africa, a brief covering Africa from Cape Town to the Sahara. During this time Nicholson covered the Soweto riots, spent much time in UDI Rhodesia covering the war of independence and was the first foreign journalist to interview Robert Mugabe on his release from prison.
In 1978 he and his cameraman Tom Phillips and sound recordist Micky Doyle, were in Angola to interview the UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi. Pursued by Cuban mercaneries working for the communist MPLA government, they were trapped and spent for four and a half months in the bush, walking a total of 1,500 miles, trying to escape. They were eventually airlifted out in a dramatic escape.
In 1981 he returned to England, motoring overland through Africa and Europe with his wife Diana and two small sons, Tom and William, a six month journey of some twelve thousand miles, recorded in the book 'Across the Limpopo'.
Nicholson was on holiday in the Lake District when the Falklands War began. Flown by a chartered aircraft to Southampton he boarded the aircraft carrier 'HMS Hermes' for the six week journey to the South Atlantic. At 45 years old, Nicholson was more experienced than all his journalistic colleagues: "But this was the first war, other than Northern Ireland, where I was among my own people. It made it a very special war and the Falklands a very special place." Nicholson and BBC journalist Brian Hanrahan (on his first major foreign story)were regularly flown over to the Royal Fleet auxiliary ships to broadcast their phoned reports, as broadcasting from Royal Navy ships was forbidden. After the conflict, Nicholson was awarded the South Atlantic Medal

Reviews

[Aryan Prasad]

An interesting book, rather outdated though. The book achieves what the title claim to.

[Nathan Albright]

I imagine this book serves as a fairly familiar, if a bit outdated, primer for the IR field but for a variety of reasons this particular book fell short for me, mostly political in nature. I do happen to be very interested in international relations [1], but the field itself has strong political implications and this book does not quite manage to dodge all the minefields. There are some clear ways this book shows a political bias, as it would perhaps be unavoidable, but there are definitely some areas this book could have avoided if it was trying to appeal to an audience that didn't happen to be leftist, and it failed in those opportunities, particularly in its enthusiastic speculation on climate and on its picture of the earth as a closed system, albeit a somewhat anarchical one. One thing the author does well is to remind the reader that this book is an introduction to a debate, and so it is, and implicitly the author admits that International Relations is still very early as a field, given the fact that it seeks to tackle massive questions with a woefully inadequate theoretical framework. One cannot fault its ambition, only its execution.

The contents of this book are admittedly brief enough, at about 230 pages of main material, that they do not present too much of a challenge for the reader. Each of the book's twelve chapters, moreover, contains recommendations for further reading, which means that if the reader likes the approach the author takes as well as his perspective that there are plenty more books to read if one is so inclined. The chapters themselves are also organized in a thoughtful order, introducing aspects of anarchy in the international order, discussing states, nations, and governments, looking beyond the state to non-state actors in the modern world, providing a brief and mildly depressing history of the twentieth century, looking at imperialism and its general family of relationships, giving some of the theories of IR like realism, pluralism, and structuralism, giving post-positivist theories like Marxism, postmodernism, feminism, and constructivism, basically worthless theories, then moving on to issues of security, violence, and the military, before three chapters on global political economy, globalization, and the global environment before closing with a final chapter on the insoluble nature of moral problems in international relations. It is striking that a book which seeks to present International Relations as much as possible in a scientific light should end where it should have begun, with a recognition of the essential nature of morality to any discussion of what is and what ought to be.

In reading this book, many of the fundamental problems of International Relations become more clear. For example, the free rider problem, a difficult problem within societies, is even more difficult when one is dealing with states that do not really recognize any higher authority that does not agree with them or cannot be persuaded. Additionally, many of the theories of the field are basically full of smuggled moral assumptions that masquerade as scientific approaches. Related to this is the fact that much involving international diplomacy as well as the behavior of both state and non-state actors depends heavily on the psychology of the people involved. The general fuzziness of matters of history as well as psychology make International Relations a particularly dodgy field when it comes to its own theoretical base. A field is only as strong as its weakest link, and International Relations has plenty of weak links, and (perhaps unsurprisingly) plenty of people whose theories are a bit too close to home for more than loud yelling to happen in a world where alternative facts run rampant. Welcome to the debate, indeed.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2010...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

[John Yelverton]

It was an interesting book, but I really didn't feel it enhanced my knowledge on the subject very much.