Paul Hirst 
War and Power in the Twenty-First Century 
The State, Military Power and the International System

Future developments in war, armed conflict and international
relations are central to our collective fate in this century. This
book looks forward by considering the forces that will drive
changes in military organizations, sources of conflict, the power
of states and the nature of the international system.

New military technologies will alter how wars are fought and
will influence the balance of power. Changes in the global
environment will provide new causes of conflict and will change
economic priorities. As a result, the state will survive as the key
social institution and populations will look to it to acquire and
to distribute scarce resources like water, energy and land. Many of
the changes that seem transformatory today, like globalization, the
internet and mass consumerism, will be shown to be less significant
than we believe them to be.

Hirst puts such changes into perspective by comparing them with
the revolutionary changes in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries in Europe: the firepower revolution, the rise of the
sovereign territorial state and the parallel development of the
international system, and the creation of world trade. These basic
structures of the modern world are still with us and will remain,
despite major changes in twenty-first-century society.

This book will appeal to students of politics, political
sociology & international relations as well as the interested
general reader.

Table des matières

Acknowledgements vi

Introduction 1

1 Military Revolutions 7

2 The International System in the Westphalian Era 44

3 The Future of War 79

4 The Future of the International System 110

Conclusion 145

Notes 149

Further Reading 159

Index 165

A propos de l’auteur

Paul Hirst is Professor of Social Theory, Birkbeck College, University of London