Anarchy and anarchism: Towards a theory of complex international systems

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 39, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 399-416

  Cudworth, Erika ^a   Hobden, Stephen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EAST LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Anarchy; Bookchin; Complexity theory; International systems; Intersectionality; Kropotkin; Social domination; Waltz

Indexed keywords

EID: 78650207394     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0305829810384677     Document Type: Article

References (101)

1. Colin Ward, cited in Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (London: Harper Collins, 1992), 42.
2. Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: Freedom Press, 1987 [1902]).
3. Martin Wight, 'Why is There no International Theory?' in Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics, eds Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966), 33.
4. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979), 88.
5. Ibid., 79.
6. Ibid., 102.
7. Ibid., 111.
8. Friedrich Kratochwil, 'The Embarrassment of Changes: Neo-Realism as the Science of Realpolitik without Politics', Review of International Studies 19, no. 1 (1993): 63-80
9. William C. Wohlforth, 'Realism and the End of the Cold War', International Security 19, no. 3 (1994-95): 92.
10. Helen Milner, 'The Assumption of Anarchy in International Relations', Review of International Studies 17, no. 1 (1991): 69-71.
11. Ibid., 71, 74.
12. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1977), 25.
13. Ibid., 46.
14. Martin Wight, Systems of States (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1977)
15. Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society: A Comparative Historical Analysis (London: Routledge, 1992).
16. Watson, Evolution of International Society, 13.
17. Ibid., 324.
18. David Lake, Hierarchy in International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 16, 10-12.
19. For a discussion of the varying ways that complexity thinking has been applied in the social sciences see, Erika Cudworth and Stephen Hobden, 'More Than a Metaphor? Complexity in the Social Sciences', International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences 4, no. 4 (2009): 59-70.
20. Frijtof Capra, The Web of Life: A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 34-5
21. The Web of Life: A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 34-5.
22. C. S. Holling, Lance H. Gunderson and Garry D. Peterson, 'Sustainability and Panarchies', in Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, eds Lance H. Gunderson and C. S. Holling (Washington: Island Press, 2002), 68-9.
23. Capra, The Web of Life.
24. Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1980), 109.
25. James Lovelock, Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 15.
26. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Microcosmos (New York: Summit, 1986), 119.
27. Roger Beaumont, The Nazis' March to Chaos: The Hitler Era Through the Lenses of Chaos-Complexity Theory (Westport, CO: Praeger, 2000), 9.
28. Lorenz's original paper, 'Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?' presented to the 139th Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science is reprinted in Edward Lorenz
29. The Essence of Chaos (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1993), 181-4.
30. Ilya Prigogine, 'The Philosophy of Instability', Futures 21, no. 4 (1989): 396-400.
31. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam, 1984), 146.
32. C. S. Holling, Lance H. Gunderson and Donald Ludwig, 'In Quest of a Theory of Adaptive Change', in Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, eds Lance H. Gunderson and C. S. Holling (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002), 14.
33. Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self-organization and Selection in Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)
34. Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self- organization and Complexity (London: Viking, 1995).
35. Emilian Kavalski, 'The Fifth Debate and the Emergence of Complex International Relations Theory: Notes on the Application of Complexity Theory to the Study of International Life', Cambridge Review of International Affairs 20, no. 3 (2007): 435-54.
36. James Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990).
37. Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997)
38. Lars-Erik Cederman, Emergent Actors in World Politics: How States and Nations Develop and Dissolve (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
39. John L. Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
40. Neil E. Harrison, ed., Complexity in World Politics: Concepts and Methods of a New Paradigm (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006).
41. For example, Ravi Bhavnani, 'Agent-Based Models in the Study of Ethnic Norms', in Complexity in World Politics: Concepts and Methods of a New Paradigm, ed. Neil Harrison (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006).
42. Especially Sylvia Walby, Globalization and Inequalities: Complexity and Contested Modernities (London: Sage Publications, 2009).
43. Such an analysis is developed in Erika Cudworth and Stephen Hobden, Posthuman International Relations: The Politics of Complex Ecologism (London: Zed, forthcoming).
44. David Earnest and James Rosenau, 'Signifying Nothing? What Complex Systems Can and Cannot Tell Us About Global Politics', in Complexity in World Politics: Concepts and Methods of a New Paradigm, ed. Neil Harrison (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006), 144.
45. See, for example, John Urry, Global Complexity (Oxford: Polity, 2002).
46. See Walby, Globalization and Inequalities.
47. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, 24.
48. Ibid., 72.
49. Ibid., 74.
50. Peter Kropotkin, The State: Its Historic Role (London, Freedom Press, 1987).
51. In Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: Murray, 1871).
52. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, 154.
53. Ibid., 234.
54. Roel van Duyn, Message of a Wise Kabouter (London: Duckworth, 1969), 21.
55. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 205
56. Kauffman, At Home in the Universe. For a critique of Margulis and a rather different version of co-evolution
57. Scott F. Gilbert, 'The Genome in its Ecological Context: Philosophical Perspectives on Interspecies Epigenesis', Annals of the New York Academy of Science 981 (2002): 202-18.
58. For an introduction to some of this literature, see Erika Cudworth and Stephen Hobden, 'The Foundations of Complexity, the Complexity of Foundations', Philosophy of the Social Sciences (forthcoming).
59. Marshall, Demanding the Impossible, 13.
60. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, 75.
61. Miller, Anarchism, 182.
62. Kropotkin, The State, 17-21.
63. Ibid., 33.
64. Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (Edinburgh: A. K. Press, 2005 [1991, 1982]).
65. Ibid., 191-200.
66. Murray Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990), 162.
67. Bookchin, Ecology of Freedom, 24.
68. Ibid., 26.
69. Andrew Light, 'Bookchin and/as Social Ecology', in Social Ecology After Bookchin, ed. Andrew Light (New York/London: The Guilford Press, 1998), 7.
70. Bookchin, The Modern Crisis, 26.
71. See, for example, Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis, MN/London: University of Minnesota Press), 42.
72. Bookchin, Ecology of Freedom, 458.
73. Lynn Margulis's Symbiosis in Cell Evolution (San Francisco, CA: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1981) was then current.
74. Bookchin, Philosophy of Social Ecology, 151.
75. Ibid., 192 n. 15.
76. For an account of the use of 'chaos'-oriented approaches in complexity science and its use in the development of postmodern theory, see Katharine N. Hayles, ed., Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1991).
77. Sylvia Walby, 'Complexity Theory, Systems Theory and Multiple Intersecting Social Inequalities'. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 37, no. 4 (2007): 449-70.
78. We have described this as 'differentiated complexity'. See Cudworth and Hobden, 'More Than a Metaphor', 67-8.
79. C. S. Holling et al., 'Sustainability and Panarchies'.
80. Ibid., 72-87.
81. C. S. Holling, Stephen R. Carpenter, William A. Brock and Lance H. Gunderson, 'Discoveries for Sustainable Futures', in Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, eds Lance H. Gunderson and C. S. Holling (Washington: Island Press, 2002), 411.
82. Frances Westley, Stephen R. Carpenter, William A. Brock, C. S. Holling and Lance H. Gunderson, 'Why Systems of People and Nature Are Not Just Social and Ecological Systems', in Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, eds Lance H. Gunderson and C. S. Holling (Washington: Island Press, 2002), 104-5.
83. Kevin Mihata, 'The Persistence of "Emergence"', in Chaos, Complexity, and Sociology: Myths, Models, and Theories, eds Raymond A. Eve, Sara Horsfall and Mary E. Lee (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 31.
84. The classic account of this process is Inis Claud, Swords Into Plowshares: The Problems and Progress of International Organization (New York: Random House, 1956).
85. For a more recent discussion, influenced by complexity theory, see Joseph Camilleri and Jim Falk, Worlds in Transition: Evolving Governance Across a Stressed Planet (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2009).
86. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
87. Alexander Wendt, 'Why a World State is Inevitable', European Journal of International Relations 9, no. 4 (2003): 491-542.
88. Patrick L. Baker, 'Chaos, Order and Sociological Theory', Sociological Inquiry 63, no. 2 (1993): 123-49
89. Patrick L. Baker, Centring the Periphery: Chaos, Order and the Ethnohistory of Dominica (Jamaica: The Press - University of the West Indies, 1994).
90. Baker, 'Chaos, Order and Sociological Theory', 136.
91. Beaumont, The Nazis' March to Chaos, 9.
92. Fritjof Capra, 'Complexity and Life', in Reframing Complexity: Perspectives from North and South, eds Fritjof Capra, Alicia Juarrero and Pedro Sotolongo (Mansfield, MA: ISCE Publishing, 2007), 13.
93. David Byrne, Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences (London: Routledge, 1998), 170.
94. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Uncertainties of Knowledge (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2004), 104.
95. Jervis, System Effects, 125.
96. Waltz, Theory, 116-23
97. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th edn (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), 186.
98. According to Chalmers Johnson, the term blowback, in this sense, was first used by the CIA to indicate 'unintended and unexpected negative consequences of covert special operations'. In Johnson's view 'the attacks of September 11 are blowback in a direct line of descent from 1979'. See Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (London: Time Warner, 2002), xi-xii.
99. Martin Heimann and Markus Reichstein, 'Terrestrial Ecosystem Carbon Dynamics and Climate Feedbacks', Nature 451 (17 January 2008): 289-92.
100. Euel Elliott and L. Douglas Kiel, 'Nonlinear Dynamics, Complexity and Public Policy: Use, Misuse, and Applicability', in Chaos, Complexity and Sociology: Myths, Models, and Theories, eds Raymond A. Eve, Sara Horsfall and Mary E. Lee (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 68.
101. Capra, 'Complexity and Life', 13.