Superpower describes a sovereign state or supranational union that holds a dominant position characterized by the ability to exert influence and project power on a global scale. This is done through the combined means of economic, military, technological, political, and cultural strength as well as diplomatic and soft power influence. Traditionally, superpowers are preeminent among the great powers. While a great power state is capable of exerting its influence globally, superpowers are states so influential that no significant action can be taken by the global community without first considering the positions of the superpowers on the issue.
International relations (IR), are the interactions among sovereign states. The scientific study of those interactions is also referred to as international studies, international politics, or international affairs. In a broader sense, the study of IR, in addition to multilateral relations, concerns all activities among states—such as war, diplomacy, trade, and foreign policy—as well as relations with and among other international actors, such as intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), international legal bodies, and multinational corporations (MNCs).
Neo-Gramscianism is a critical theory approach to the study of international relations (IR) and the global political economy (GPE) that explores the interface of ideas, institutions and material capabilities as they shape the specific contours of the state formation. The theory is heavily influenced by the writings of Antonio Gramsci. Neo-Gramscianism analyzes how the particular constellation of social forces, the state and the dominant ideational configuration define and sustain world orders. In this sense, the neo-Gramscian approach breaks the decades-old stalemate between the realist schools of thought and the liberal theories by historicizing the very theoretical foundations of the two streams as part of a particular world order and finding the interlocking relationship between agency and structure. Karl Polanyi, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault are cited as major sources within the critical theory of IR.
John Joseph Mearsheimer is an American political scientist and international relations scholar. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.
Michael W. Doyle is an American international relations scholar who is a theorist of the liberal "democratic peace" and author of Liberalism and World Politics. He has also written on the comparative history of empires and the evaluation of UN peace-keeping. He is a University professor of International Affairs, Law and Political Science at Columbia University - School of International and Public Affairs. He is the former director of Columbia Global Policy Initiative. He co-directs the Center on Global Governance at Columbia Law School.
The School of International Service (SIS) is American University's school of advanced international study, covering areas such as international politics, international communication, international development, international economics, peace and conflict resolution, international law and human rights, global environmental politics, and U.S. foreign policy.
Giles Scott-Smith is a Dutch-British academic. He is a professor of transnational relations and new diplomatic history at Leiden University and serves as the dean of Leiden University College The Hague.
Odd Arne Westad FBA is a Norwegian historian specializing in the Cold War and contemporary East Asian history. He is the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University, where he teaches in the Yale History Department and in the Jackson School of Global Affairs. Previously, Westad held the S.T. Lee Chair of US-Asia Relations at Harvard University, teaching in the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He has also taught at the London School of Economics, where he served as director of LSE IDEAS. In the spring semester 2019 Westad was Boeing Company Chair in International Relations at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University.
Michael E. Cox is a British academic and international relations scholar. He is currently Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics (LSE) and Director of LSE IDEAS. He also teaches for the TRIUM Global Executive MBA Program, an alliance of NYU Stern and the London School of Economics and HEC School of Management.
Franciscus Cornelis Gerardus Maria "Frans" Timmermans is a Dutch politician who served as Executive Vice President of the European Commission for the European Green Deal and European Commissioner for Climate Action in the von der Leyen Commission from 2019 until his resignation in 2023. He is a member of the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA).
Doug Stokes is a British academic who is Professor in International Security and Strategy in the Department of Politics at the University of Exeter. He was born in 1972 in Hackney, East London. His father was a gardener and sign writer and his mother was a cleaner and secretary. He was educated in London inner city state schools and left home at 17, and Hackney when 25.
Netherlands–Russia relations is the relationships between the two countries, the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Russian Federation. Russia has an embassy in The Hague, and the Netherlands has an embassy in Moscow, a consulate in Saint Petersburg, and an honorary consulate in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.
Ronen Palan is an Israeli-born economist and Professor of International Political Economy in the Department of International Politics at the City University London. He has many books and articles on the political economy of the state, globalisation and state strategies, and evolutionary approaches to the study of international relations. Ronen Palan was of the founding editors of the Review of International Political Economy. Palan's major empirical work is the area of offshore financial centres and tax havens. Palan has argued that offshore finance "is certainly not the sole cause for the decline of the nation-state, but it must be seen as an important contributing factor to the decline".
The transnational capitalist class (TCC), also known as the transnational capitalist network (TCN), in neo-Gramscian and Marxian-influenced analyses of international political economy and globalization, is the global social stratum that controls supranational instruments of the global economy such as transnational corporations and heavily influences political organs such as the World Trade Organization.
William I. Robinson is an American professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work focuses on political economy, globalization, Latin America and historical materialism. He is a member of the International Parliamentary and Civil Society Mission to Investigate the Political Transition in Iraq.
Stephen Gill, FRSC is Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He is known for his work in International Relations and Global Political Economy and has published, among others, Power and Resistance in the New World Order, Power, Production and Social Reproduction, Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations (1993), American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (1990) and The Global Political Economy: Perspectives, Problems and Policies.
A Second Cold War, Cold War II, or the New Cold War has been used to describe heightened geopolitical tensions in the 21st century between usually, on one side, the United States and, on the other, either China or Russia—the successor state of the Soviet Union, which led the Eastern Bloc during the original Cold War.
Gordon M. Hahn is a researcher specializing in Islam and politics in Russia and Eurasia, international relations in Eurasia and terrorism in Eurasia. He is the author of several books and a number of research articles on Russia and the Caucasus Emirate. Hahn gives media interviews on the global Jihadist movement.
Jeffrey Harrod is a writer and essayist on politics and international political economy and known for his work on the power of corporations and the position of labour in international economic relations. He has been critical of global approaches which reduce the importance of nation-states. Working with Robert W. Cox a power dynamics approach to the political economy of work was developed. Harrod's application of this approach to those in low-waged or precarious employment is currently used by researchers in those fields. Since 2012 he has maintained a blog and in 2016 published his first novel, After Man.
Geopolitical economy is a contemporary Marxist approach to understanding the capitalist world historically. It was proposed by Radhika Desai in her Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire as a critique of contemporary mainstream theories of International political economy (IPE) and International relations (IR). Geopolitical economy's critique rests on a rejection of orthodox views of the world economy as a seamless whole, united either by markets or by a single leading state, as in free market, free trade "globalization" and "hegemony" theories respectively. Instead, geopolitical economy emphasizes the interplay of political entities, namely, states, in the development of capitalism by going back to classical political economy and to the Marxist theories of imperialism, which geopolitical economy argues should be considered the first theories of international relations.
