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"The article proposes an interdisciplinary introduction to the notion of the political world as farce. More exactly, it advances the argument that, despite experiencing the world as a joke of cosmic proportions, an individual can still create meaning even in the most meaningless conditions (concentration camps, totalitarian societies, etc.). The article traces the presence of the topic in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo and discusses the particular case of Milan Kundera, for whom the historical world appears as nothing but a cruel joke. The treatment of the topic is framed in relation to the theologia ludens tradition, the theatrical elements of Communism, as well as the process of meaning creation in conditions of meaninglessness."

Technology has always played an important role in global politics, economics, security, and culture. It has continuously shaped the structure of the global system, its actors, and the interactions between them and vice versa. However, theories of International Relations (IR), and in particular those of International Political Economy (IPE), have performed little to theoretically conceptualize technology as a powerful factor within explanations of change in global affairs. Although technology often is implicitly present in the theories of IR and IPE, it is often interpreted as an external, passive, apolitical, and residual factor. This essay argues that to develop a better understanding of transformation in global affairs, technology has to be integrated more systematically into the theoretical discussions of IR/IPE. Technology should be understood as a highly political and integral core component of the global system that shapes global affairs and itself is shaped by global economics, politics, and culture. This paper makes the case for an interdisciplinary approach, which systematically incorporates insights of Science and Technology Studies (S&TS) to provide a better understanding of how technology and the global system and politics interact with each other. In so doing, it opens the field to a richer understanding of how global systemic change is impacted by technology and how global politics, economics, and culture impact technological evolution.

This essay starts by exploring how history can contribute to the discipline of international relations (IR). It then moves beyond this question to explore a broader question, beyond IR and history, with which this symposium is concerned: how can we enhance interdisciplinary analysis in international studies? With regard to the first question, this essay advances several themes. First, while history can serve IR in several ways, it is especially salient to the study of change in IR. Second, the study of history can help us connect the dots across time in ways that can complement IR. Stringing detailed cases together or examining the broader sweep of a longer time period may help us discern causal connections that would have been buried in more streamlined and short-term analyses. Third, history can aid in theory-building, modeling, and testing in the study of IR. Quantitative approaches can also benefit from in-depth historical studies. In assessing the value of history to IR, however, it is critical to ask what type of historians and IR scholars we are considering and to be aware of the differences among them. Fourth, while it is useful to draw on history for IR, history also has its limits and may be misused. At the core, this essay examines how history can contribute to IR, but that analysis raises a broader question: how can we integrate notions and insights from various disciplines in international studies, including history and IR? This essay advances one schema for doing so, which it calls "integrated approaches." It demonstrates one type of integrated approach for the study of foreign policy behavior. The approach systematically draws on multiple disciplines to explain behaviors such as decisions to make treaties, go to war, or ally with other countries.

In recent years, there has been increasing popular and academic debate about how ethnic and racial diversity affects democratic politics and social cohesion in industrialized liberal democracies. In this introduction, different interdisciplinary theoretic

Using a critical review of selected works on Africa by prominent African intellectuals, this interdisciplinary study concludes that, contrary to Amartya Sen's theory about the "real freedoms" that people enjoy in democratic states, these freedoms cannot be realized in Africa, because the continent's mode of capitalism is dependent upon international finance. This system cannot function as an autonomous structure and has engendered major political contradictions in the continent's nation-states. The capitalist ruling elites have hindered the expansion of full democratic rights in Africa by encouraging and exploiting the politics of class division. The African experience with liberal democracy indicates that Sen's theory of development and "real freedoms" fails to take into account these contradictions as well as the religious and cultural idioms in Africa that run counter to liberal conceptions of emancipation. Achieving democracy and freedom in Africa is not merely a question of capacity building, it involves resolving difficult issues of power - particularly, in class and gender relations. The essay concludes by suggesting that there needs to be a shift away from conceptualizing development in terms of only economic factors to a new approach which combines more enlightened neoliberal capitalism with new indigenous strategies of development.

This article conceptualizes power in the context of long-term process of structural change. First, it discusses the field of transition studies, which deals with processes of structural change in societal systems on the basis of certain presumptions about

In this remarkably lucid and deceptively accessible little book, Tilly presents a unified theory of the processes that shape transitions to and from democracy. Although he draws upon his vast knowledge as historian and sociologist, the exposition develops