Emergent Actors in World Politics: How States and Nations Develop and DissolvePrinceton University Press, 2020 M09 1 - 290 pages The disappearance and formation of states and nations after the end of the Cold War have proved puzzling to both theorists and policymakers. Lars-Erik Cederman argues that this lack of conceptual preparation stems from two tendencies in conventional theorizing. First, the dominant focus on cohesive nation-states as the only actors of world politics obscures crucial differences between the state and the nation. Second, traditional theory usually treats these units as fixed. Cederman offers a fresh way of analyzing world politics: complex adaptive systems modeling. He provides a new series of models--not ones that rely on rational-choice, but rather computerized thought-experiments--that separate the state from the nation and incorporate these as emergent rather than preconceived actors. This theory of the emergent actor shifts attention away from the exclusively behavioral focus of conventional international relations theory toward a truly dynamic perspective that treats the actors of world politics as dependent rather than independent variables. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 60
... Europe experienced a trend toward unprecedented levels of political integration. Germany reunited, and despite certain delays associated with the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, Western European integration progressed toward a ...
... European history. This focus is natural since both nationalism and state formation, in their modern, territorial ... European state system can hardly be underestimated (Padgett and Ansell 1993). Likewise, more than the future of Europe ...
... European Union; it can even be argued that the future of the nation-state depends on European integration (see references in Mann 1993b). Furthermore, the end of the cold war depended to a large extent on the nationality question within ...
... Europe stems from lack of experience with and awareness of situations characterized by noncongruent states and nations; this lack has been reflected in the scholarship to date. The unsuccessful attempts to mediate the Yugoslav conflict ...
... Europe, and Eastern Europe. The last section provides an overview of the last two modeling chapters in terms of these historical processes. Chapter 7 also goes beyond the equilibrium methodology of traditional rational-choice models ...
Contents
14 | |
Toward Richer Models | 37 |
Emergent Polarity | 72 |
Extending the Emergent Polarity Model | 109 |
13b The sample system at time 1634 | 132 |
Modeling Nationalism | 136 |
Nationalist Mobilization | 151 |
Nationalist Coordination | 184 |
types | 201 |
Conclusions for Theory and Policy | 213 |
Bibliography | 233 |
Index | 255 |