71 results for "History"

Counterfactual thought experiments in world politics: logical, methodological, and psychological perspectives

Philip Eyrikson Tetlock,Aaron Belkin
Political scientists often ask themselves what might have been if history had unfolded differently: if Stalin had been ousted as General Party Secretary or if the United States had not dropped the bomb on Japan. Although scholars sometimes scoff at applying hypothetical reasoning to world politics, the contributors to this volume--including James Fearon, Richard Lebow, Margaret Levi, Bruce Russett, and Barry Weingast--find such counterfactual conjectures not only useful, but necessary for drawing causal inferences from historical data. Given the importance of counterfactuals, it is perhaps surprising that we lack standards for evaluating them. To fill this gap, Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin propose a set of criteria for distinguishing plausible from implausible counterfactual conjectures across a wide range of applications. The contributors to this volume make use of these and other criteria to evaluate counterfactuals that emerge in diverse methodological contexts including comparative case studies, game theory, and statistical analysis. Taken together, these essays go a long way toward establishing a more nuanced and rigorous framework for assessing counterfactual arguments about world politics in particular and about the social sciences more broadly.
Princeton University Press 1996 344 pages

Humanitarian intervention and legitimacy wars: seeking peace and justice in the 21st century

Falk, Richard A.
"In the aftermath of the Cold War there has been a dramatic shift in thinking about the maintenance of peace and security on a global level. This shift is away from a preoccupation with how to prevent major wars between sovereign states to a preoccupation about non-state transnational warfare and violence and strife within states in a world order that continues to be juridically and politically delimited by spatial ideas of national sovereignty and national independence as signified by international boundaries. In this book, Richard Falk draws upon these changes to examine the ethics and politics of humanitarian intervention in the 21st Century. As well as analysing the theoretical and conceptual basis of the responsibility to protect, the book also contains a number of case studies looking at Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Syria. The final section explores when humanitarian intervention can succeed and the changing nature of international political legitimacy in countries such as India, Tibet, South Africa and Palestine.This book will be of interest to students of International Relations theory, Peace Studies and Global Politics. "--
Routledge 2015 223 pages

The encyclopedia of revolutions and revolutionaries: from anarchism to Zhou Enlai

Van Creveld, Martin
Throughout history, revolutions have been a potent force of social, economic and political change. The Encyclopedia of Revolutions and Revolutionaries: From Anarchism to Zhou Enlai is the first single-volume encyclopedia devoted to this significant historical phenomenon. Written by a team of international scholars, the book's more than 500 entries cover periods of unrest and change from antiquity to the present, including the Spartacus RevoEncompassing history and the world, The Encyclopedia of Revolutions and Revolutionaries brings to life the forms of revolutions and resistance movements undertaken to effect fundamental societal change; the non-violent and passive demonstrations that have transformed the world; and the intellectual and economic upheavals that have shaped human thought and institutions.
Facts on File 1996 494 pages