Political Science

Provides nearly 6,000 A-Z entries that shed light on this complex institution. In addition to articles explaining essential concepts and philosophies, readers will find an all-new set of entries on peace-keeping activities, along with full coverage of every international treaty since the founding of the League of Nations, with generous quotations or full text for all key treaties, conventions, pacts, protocols, and declarations.

The rise of the Great Powers and the course of world civilizations, their formative wars and diplomatic, political and economic relations, are the primary focus. But tremendous steps are made to cover all of the smaller and less powerful regions, their local history, and how progressive inclusion into the modern state system affected them, both for good and for ill.

The Oxford Handbook of International Relations offers the most authoritative and comprehensive overview to date of the field of international relations. Arguably the most impressive collection of international relations scholars ever brought together within one volume, the Handbook debates the nature of the field itself, critically engages with the major theories, surveys a wide spectrum of methods, addresses the relationship between scholarship and policy making, and examines the field's relation with cognate disciplines. The Handbook takes as its central themes the interaction between empirical and normative inquiry that permeates all theorizing in the field and the way in which contending approaches have shaped one another. In doing so, the Handbook provides an authoritative and critical introduction to the subject and establishes a sense of the field as a dynamic realm of argument and inquiry. The Oxford Handbook of International Relations will be essential reading for all of those interested in the advanced study of global politics and international affairs.