Political Chaos: Essays in International Relations Theory

Have you ever asked yourself:

What is the international system was not anarchic?

What if, instead, it was incredibly complex or even chaotic?

What can we theorize such a system, and what implications does chaos and complexity have for understanding international politics?

How can we imagine non-anarchic international politics?

These questions and others are considered in this collection of three essays on the future of international relations theory. Written over the course of three years, these essays present the authors initial attraction and excitement about a potential chaotic theory of international politics, through the practical and theoretically challenging issues of operationalizing the assumption of a chaotic political system, and finally the search for ways in which notions of complexity and of complex systems theory might be applied in addition to, or in place of, notions of chaos.