The discipline of international relations offers much insight into why violent power transitions occur, yet there have been few substantive examinations of why and how peaceful changes happen in world politics. This work is the first comprehensive treatment of that subject.
The Oxford Handbook of Peaceful Change in International Relations provides a thorough examination of research on the problem of change in the international arena and the reasons why change happens peacefully at times, and at others, violently. It contains over forty chapters, which examine the historical, theoretical, global, regional, and national foreign-policy dimensions of peaceful change. As the world enters a new round of power transition conflict, involving a rapidly rising China and a relatively declining United States, this Handbook provides a necessary resource for decisionmakers and scholars engaged in this vital area of research.This handbook examines one of the critical questions of international politics going back to Immanuel Kant: how to explain and promote peaceful change in the relations between states. This issue was a major concern of international relations scholars in the 1930s, but since the Cold War, it has been sidelined by other concerns. The editors have mobilized a group of international authors to explore the issue. Forty-one outstanding chapters address the problem from diverse theoretical, historical, and regional perspectives. This handbook should help restore the problem of peaceful change to the center of the discipline.
