27 quotes
Cooperation is difficult in the absence of communication.
Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (2006)
The new world will not be neat, and you will have to live with that.
Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (2006)
Power, like love, is easier to experience than to define or measure.
Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (2006)
The territorial state has not always existed in the past, so it need not necessarily exist in the future.
Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (2006)
The best hope for the future is to ask what is being determined as well as who determines it.
Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (2006)
When words are both descriptive and prescriptive, thyey become political words used in struggles for power.
Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (2006)
Some say precipitating events are like buses - they come along every ten minutes.
Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (2006)
Power conversion is the capacity to convert potential power, as measured by resources, to realized power, as measured by the changed behavior of others.
Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (2006)
Systems can create consequences not intended by any other of their constituent actors.
Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (2006)
The cure to misunderstanding history is to read more, not less.
Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (2006)
No one can tell the whole story of anything.
Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (2006)
The world at the beginning of the twenty-first century is a strange cocktail of continuity and change. Some aspects of international politics have not changed since Thucydides.
Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (2006)
Humans sometimes make surprising choices, and human history is full of uncertainties.
Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (2006)
Attention rather than information becomes the scarce resource, and those who can distinguish valuable information from the background clutter gain power.
Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (2006)
Anarchy means without government, but it does not necessarily mean chaos or total disorder.
Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (2006)
Some observers feel it is harder to change public opinion in democracies than it is to change policies in totalitarian countries.
Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (2006)
In foreign policy, as in medicine, leaders must “first do no harm.”
Chamberlain's sins were not his intentions, but rather his ignorance and arrogance in failing to appraise the situation properly. And in that failure he was not alone.
Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (2006)
Just as gunpowder and infantry penetrated and destroyed the medieval castle, so have nuclear missiles and the internet made the nation-state obsolete.
Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (2006)
Governments now have to share the stage with actors who can use information to enhance their soft power and press governments directly, or indirectly by mobilizing their publics.
Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (2006)