Abstract
In recent attempts to analyse world affairs and tease out its central tendencies, it is increasingly necessary to call attention to contradictions, to discrepancies, to opposites, as if the prime central tendency consists of divergent paths, as if everything regresses to a mean that is bimodal and better grasped as two separate means. And this chapter is no exception. In an effort to identify the challenges that the United Nations faces in the years ahead, it may be useful to focus on both huge similarities and big differences — what I once called patterned chaos,1 then referred to as distant proximities,2 and now viewed simply as contradictory patterns which may feed off each other and as such, are the central tendency of our time.
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Notes
James N. Rosenau, “Patterned Chaos in Global Life: Structure and Process in the Two Worlds of World Polities’, International Political Science Review 9 (October 1988), pp. 357–94.
James N. Rosenau, ‘Distant Proximities: The Dynamics and Dialectics of Globalization’, in Björne Hettne (ed.), International Political Economy: Understanding Global Disorder, London: Zed Books, 1995, pp. 46–64.
An effort to outline an answer is provided in James N. Rosenau, ‘Powerful Tendencies, Startling Discrepancies and Elusive Dynamics: The Challenge of Studying World Politics in a Turbulent Era’, Australian Journal of International Affairs 50 (April 1996), pp. 23–30.
James N. Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 249–53.
This concept was first developed in James N. Rosenau, ‘“Fragmegrative” Challenges to National Security’, in Terry Heyns (ed.), Understanding U.S. Strategy: A Reader, Washington, D.C.: National Defense University, 1983, pp. 65–82
For written expressions of this ambivalent perspective, see Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 7
Alan James and Robert H. Jackson, ‘The Character of Independent Statehood’, in A. James and R.H. Jackson (eds.), States in a Changing World: A Contemporary Analysis, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, pp. 5–8
Eugene B. Skolnikoff, The Elusive Transformation: Science, Technology and the Evolution of International Politics, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, p. 7
Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979, p. 94.
James N. Rosenau and Michael Fagen, ‘Domestic Elections as International Events’, in Carl Kaysen, Robert A. Pastor and Laura W. Reed (eds.), Collective Responses to Regional Problems: The Case of Latin America and the Caribbean, Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1994, pp. 29–69.
For an elaboration of the contrast between these two orientations, see James N. Rosenau, The United Nations in a Turbulent World, Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992, pp. 38–9.
The concept of sovereignty as a variable is developed in James N. Rosenau, ‘Sovereignty in a Turbulent World’, in Michael Mastanduno and Gene Lyons (eds.), Beyond Westphalia: National Sovereignty and International Intervention, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, pp. 191–227.
For another, more extensive effort that suggests ways in which the institutions of anarchy are adjusting to the world’s needs for collective action, see Barry Buzan, Charles Jones and Richard Little, The Logic of Anarchy: Neorealism to Structural Realism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, sec. II.
Peter J. Spiro, ‘New Global Communities: Nongovernmental Organizations in International Decision-Making Institutions’, The Washington Quarterly Vol. 18 (Winter 1995), pp. 45–6.
Stephen Toulmin, ‘The Role of NGOs in Global Affairs’, Los Angeles: xerox, October 1994, p. 8.
Union of International Organizations, 1992/1993 Yearbook of Interna-tional Organizations, Munich: K.G. Saur Verlag, 1992, p. 1668.
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Rosenau, J.N. (1998). Powerful Tendencies, Enduring Tensions and Glaring Contradictions: The United Nations in a Turbulent World. In: Paolini, A.J., Jarvis, A.P., Reus-Smit, C. (eds) Between Sovereignty and Global Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14342-9_12
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