Author Description

International Relations has long been a core discipline within Political Science, one of vast importance for understanding social, cultural, economic and political exchanges across national boundaries. Every dimension of human experience falls within the scope of the field, making it applicable to psychologists, historians, anthropologists, and others across a wide swath of academia. The two-volume Oxford Companion to International Relations would be one of the first reference works to make this field clear and comprehensible to both specialists and non-specialists. Entries are mostly thematic in content, rather than site-specific, permitting the work to have value and currency for years to come. The numerous theories and applications of IR are comprehensively covered, as would controversies related to the field, prominent figures, and ways IR has shaped political history. There are revised & updated entries derived from the Oxford Companion to Politics of the World, while therest would be newly commissioned and authored by the foremost IR scholars around the world. New entries cover institutional developments (for instance, the creation and operation of the International Criminal Court, the governance of the Internet, and the various changes in the international monetary architecture since the beginning of the economic crisis); significant events that were not covered in the older volume (the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the challenges facing new democratic regimes in Eastern Europe and Africa); and advances in IR scholarship, especially in the fields of terrorism and international security. Fifteen interpretive essays are interspersed throughout the A-Z text, encouraging further scholarship and dialogue between readers.