| Summary/Abstract |
Post–World War II thinking about security, prosperity, and development emphasized macro-level explanations, applied across widely varied temporal and spatial scales. Western scholars of International Relations (IR) were preoccupied with questions of strategic balance and world order, typically focusing on possibilities for war and peace through one of two lenses, Realist or Idealist. Similarly, challenges of prosperity and development were understood in competing “modernization” or “dependency” terms, where “underdevelopment” was seen as the product of either “backward” states or an exploitative world system. In almost every case, the unit of analysis was the sovereign state operating in an anarchical inter-state (or international) system. Over time, many came to perceive these dominant explanations of (dis)order not only as deficient analytically but harmful in practice. Put differently, the actual course of world events rarely, if ever, matched the outcomes expected by the theorists.
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