International Relations: The Key Concepts
by Martin Griffiths
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
~ George Bernard Shaw
International Relations: The Key Concepts is the essential guide for anyone interested in international affairs:
Comprehensive and up-to-date, it introduces the most important themes in international relations, with an emphasis on contemporary issues.
Entries include:
• diplomacy
• global warming
• terrorism
• human rights
• rogue state
• loose nukes
• United Nations
• security
• arms control
• ethnic cleansing
International Relations is a very broad discipline.
It includes a variety of sub-fields such as diplomatic statecraft and foreign policy analysis, comparative politics, historical sociology, international political economy, international history, strategic studies, military affairs, ethics, and international political theory.
If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.
~Lao Tzu
History is perceived as a continuous process of change.
Human development is a process of enlarging people’s choices.
The most critical of these wide-ranging choices are to live a long and healthy life, to be educated, and to have access to resources needed for a decent standard of living.
Development enables people to have these choices.
The process of development should at least create a conducive environment for people, individually and collectively, to develop their full potential and to have a reasonable chance of leading productive and creative lives in accordance with their needs and interests.
Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.
~John F. Kennedy
In a broad sense, diplomacy is the entire process through which states conduct their foreign relations. It is the means for allies to cooperate and for adversaries to resolve conflicts without force. States communicate, bargain, influence one another, and adjust their differences through diplomacy.
Facts do not speak for themselves; they must be interpreted.
Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.
~ Barack Obama