Reddit reviews Theories of International Politics and Zombies

This field can be very overwhelming and requires digesting a lot of information, so don't feel bad if you have a hard time understanding everything at first. Start by reading up and learning about the foundations of international relations (IR), which will later help you understand geopolitics. Despite the fact that this subreddit is named r/geopolitics, it not focus solely on geopolitical issues and instead looks at international relations as a whole.

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Begin by reading Jack Snyder's article "One World, Rival Theories". It is a little dated, but it provides a sound overview of the field of international relations, the three primary paradigms of IR, and some examples of practitioners of those paradigms. Alternatively, if you wish to spend a little money, read Dan Drezner's Theories of International Politics and Zombies. It's a more relaxed and humorous introduction into IR through the lens of a global zombie threat.

You can also watch the London School of Economics and Political Science's video International Relations: An Introduction. It's about 10 minutes long and partially an advertisement for the university, but it provides a very simple overview of IR. If you wish to watch something longer and more in-depth, William Spaniel created a International Relations 101 playlist with videos that deal with individual aspects of IR. If you decide to watch it, do it in order so that you do not get overwhelmed by the more interesting-sounding (but much more complex) videos.

Once you feel you have a basic understanding of international relations and its theories, it's time to move to geopolitics. For this, I recommend watching Ronald J. Granieri's lecture entitled "What is Geopolitics and Why Does It Matter?" It's a little long, but it is one of the best explanations of geopolitics. Another video to watch is Robert Kaplan's (the patron saint of geopolitics) lecture entitled "The Geopolitics of the World", which is a little less introductory but provides a decent overview of geopolitics.

After all this, you should have a solid-enough grasp of the field to begin branching off and reading about more specific materials.

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I am currently working on an introduction to geopolitics and international relations for r/geopolitics as a way to introduce neophytes to the theories and ideas that are the foundation of the field. Unfortunately, it is one of several projects I am working at this moment. Combined with the time commitments to my actual career and crazy personal life (yes, us mods have lives outside of Reddit), it probably won't be completed anytime soon.

Pair it with Drezners book on Zombies and International Relations and you got some educational beach reading!

Daniel Drezner's Theories of International Politics and Zombies is probably the best introduction to the subject I've read. It takes a fun case study and uses it to introduce all the different schools of thought and theories in the field in a way that's both detailed and easy for laymen to pick up on.

Cynthia Weber's International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction is a good call. It covers the major theories from a more relatable view

Link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/International-Relations-Theory-Critical-Introduction/dp/0415778425

My choice would be Daniel Drezner's Theories of International Politics and Zombies. It covers a lot of theories in what I found to be a really approachable and understable way.

Link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Theories-International-Politics-Zombies-Drezner/dp/0691147833/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1411909029&sr=1-1&keywords=international+relations+and+zombies

Source: Currently studying MA International Relations

I haven't read it but I've heard good things about Drezer's IR/Zombies book.

There are also a number of summaries of it online.

Drezner's Theories of International Politics and Zombies can be an enjoyable introduction to International relations. If you're interested in something more academic you can start by reading Morganthau's Politics Among Nations. And there's always the wikipedia route.

In terms of a fun way to navigate the theoretical underpinnings of IR I would thoroughly recommend Drenzer's Theories of International Politics and Zombies.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Theories-International-Politics-Zombies-Daniel-W-Drezner/0691147833

In your OP you mentioned links to human nature, this is an area where multiple theories collide. It's a question consistently pondered by the academic community but it is addressed (or dismissed) by most contemporary theories of IR. You shouldn't have to go far into the literature to discover this.

>Yes.
>And this is how people with a bit of insight see people pushing for harmful nonsense like national borders even thought the world would be much better off without them.

The phenomenon I refer to, dubbed the minority rule by Taleb, is an empirical observation of how society works as a system. It is not a value judgment, the 3% domination is not 'bad', it's only a description of how changes in human thought/preferences/values happen. Other examples of the minority rule include the rise of Christianity and prohibition, both of which at the time were supported by a very small, but insistent minority with a majority which was ambivalent towards it.

>I won't even get into the conversation about the other views you expressed. They are quite disturbing and really demonstrate how one can't reason with right wingers.

I am glad you addressed my arguments in good faith, especially the previous part where you gave me a trick question as to whether I stopped beating my wife, eh, hated brown babies considered myself 'better' than the less well-off majority of the world. A usual appeal to emotion as is typical to 'left-wingers' right?

Here are some academic references if you are looking for pompous posturing:
Hofstede's cultural framework i.e. academics do in fact code cultures into different categories

High-trust societies, crime and corruption

When I say an apple is a fruit, I take it for granted you don't need a reference. If you are disputing what I wrote, namely that high-trust societies are more successful and that minority rule is a mechanism through which trust can erode, go ahead and persuade me or give me references showing the contrary.

>Honestly... did you study economics at all?

Yes, both micro; and macro, Keynesian and monetarist and a few other flavors.

>Do you understand how societies develop?

I know this is a rhetorical question, but in keeping up with good faith I'll try to answer. Societies develop organically largely based on the natural and man-made environments that shape the people. We got agriculture because of a weird trick where someone found a really easy way of getting food. We got priests and kings because said agriculture gave us net-producers (farmers) whose surplus created a class of net consumers, or in economic terms, the opportunity cost of obtaining food went down -> a managerial class was born for co-ordinating land use and maintaining sufficient grain stores -> this requires mathematics (new invention!) -> and writing (new invention!). Then history goes on to progress through various innovations as the net consumer class invents more things, increasing the size of net consumers, thereby creating more innovations in a cyclical fashion.. ships, gunpowder, compass, printing press, oil, electricity, steam-driven carriage, mechanical computers, and so on.

>Did you study politics in anyway?

Yes, I've read Theories of International Politics and Zombies, a primer on the major modern theoretical frameworks of politics (liberalism, Realpolitik and neoconservatism) by some guy from Stanford. And yes, my answer was partially tongue-in-cheek, if you're about to say I 'don't know about politics' because I happened to do a finance degree instead of politics (I only had a choice of one). Feel free to present your rebuttal, I haven't seen it yet.

>Did you ever actually think about what would happen in a world without borders?

A very important question: a world without borders and transfer payments (i.e. social security), or one without borders and something closer to a laissez-faire system? With the first one, I think we will naturally see massive rent-seeking as I already said, which is perfectly natural human behavior that all of us do, in short we'll go bankrupt. With the latter one, I think we'll see a very painful process where: a) poor developing countries lose the bulk of their capital and skilled labor, causing unprecedented recession and impoverishment, as the skilled middle-classes of Kenya, China, Nigeria, Peru, Ukraine, Yemen, Bhutan and of many many other countries move to the wealthier countries with their know-how and money, providing a boon for the wealthier countries; b) inequality increases worldwide due to that and c) the wealthier classes segregate themselves from others like in Brazil.

>I mean, it's like you got your opinions from the mouth of right wing politicians paired with the racist drivel of certain media rather than critical thought about the world and proper education.

I don't care for politicians nor most media. I hope my academic pomp and peacocking reassured you of some level of education (tongue-in-cheek again).

>How do you intend to back up your opposition to fostering global equality between humans?

Straw-man alarm. Read my previous post again:

>The way forward is to help inferior cultures develop into high-trust cultures organically and from within: aid, education, development programs, the end of ridiculous import tariffs. In other words, none of this harmful brain-drain by taking away all of Africa's and India's top engineers and intelligentsia into developed countries, leaving the worse-off countries even worse off with very few competent people to run things.

To paraphrase: let us help the developing countries help themselves, like we did with Korea, Vietnam, China, Japan, Malaysia, etc.

>What do you believe culture is?

I'm currently half-way through Jonathan Haidt's the Righteous Mind, which can be summarised as follows: us western folks are really the odd ones out, culturally and morally speaking, compared to the rest of the world. While our morality largely rests on two axes, harm/care and fairness/cheating (i.e. a thing is right or wrong depending on the physical/emotion harm and its fairness), the morality of most humans worldwide (as well as conservative westerns) has five axes: harm/care, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation. So a liberal says: what's the big deal with gay marriage, what do you care what someone you don't even know does, no one is hurt (harm/care), plus gay couples should have equal rights (fairness/cheating)! The majority of the world, where gay marriage is unheard of, plus western conservatives, disagree with gay marriage because while it is not harmful and it does make LGBTs more equal, it is opposed because marriage is held as a sacred union between two opposite sexes (sanctity/degradation) and therefore does not meet their moral standards. By the way, Jonathan Haidt is a liberal Jew married to an Asian woman, so I think his liberal credentials are pretty high, in case you suspected him of being a white nationalist (tongue-in-cheek).

So what does this all mean on a global scale? Simply that most of the world finds liberal western values unpalatable. Gay marriage, women's equality, multiculturalism are all things dear to you which will simply become extinct if a large enough minority rule with a five-axis morality comes along. This has already happened in countries like: Afghanistan (before and after the zealous Taliban minority rule), Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Pakistan (I could write a whole article on Pakistan, it's quite interesting - there's a huge secular community who have become more persecuted over the years by overzealous fundamentalists and various laws on fasting, apostasy, etc.), Iran (also a country with a very interesting dynamic).

Simply put: most of the world dislikes your western values more than you like them, which is why you come with a losing hand if you wish to carelessly transfer large populations from non-western countries to your community. You think I am 'right-wing'? You should see what a centrist or 'liberal' Gambian, Chinese or Russian thinks about free speech, gay rights, transgender rights and other values you (and I) hold dear. If you think you can magically convert millions of folks who don't think like you into supporting gay rights, free speech and all that by transplanting them on your soil, then you're in for a surprise. My solution is to help them develop economically in their own nations organically, first and foremost, and liberalism will then follow - only after that can they join the common border of the "Global North" (which funnily enough includes Australia and New Zealand), because they will be on par economically and therefore not engage in harmful rent-seeking, and second of all their cultural morality will be more compatible with ours, creating amicable encounters instead of cultural clashes.

This one is super easy to understand, albeit more so based on international politics.

https://www.amazon.ca/Theories-International-Politics-Zombies-Drezner/dp/0691147833

Are there zombies?

just gonna leave this here. Explains everything you need to know about our world's preparedness for the zombie apocolypse

http://www.amazon.com/Theories-International-Politics-Zombies-Drezner/dp/0691147833/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1347241934&sr=8-1&keywords=international+relations+and+zombies

No, this is from a hilarious IR intro book that explains each school of IR with examples from Zombie movies.

https://www.amazon.com/Theories-International-Politics-Zombies-Drezner/dp/0691147833

Watching and reading the news, real news, not Fox news, will be the best things you can do for exposure to politics. (al-Jazeera and BBC are my favorites, Last Week Tonight has some good in depth pieces)

Additionally, you are most interested in the current election, try finding a voter's guide for your county. Most counties (that I'm aware of) produce a partisan guide where each candidate gets to write about themselves.

Assuming that you mean US politics:

Here is a basic civics lesson, click on the different parts of the flow chart to read about the different parts of government.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/americas/04/us_election/govt_system/html/introduction.stm

here is two full online free courses you can take on US politics: http://www.saylor.org/courses/polsc231/
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/political-science/17-20-introduction-to-american-politics-spring-2013/

Here is a fact checking website that explains different claims made by various people/groups:
http://www.politifact.com/

If you want to know about political science, I would suggest Theories of International Relations and Zombies for a good intro to IR theory and Principles of Comparative Politics.

http://www.amazon.com/Theories-International-Politics-Zombies-Drezner/dp/0691147833
http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Comparative-Politics-William-Roberts/dp/1608716791/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414722373&sr=1-1&keywords=principles+of+comparative+politics

While I'm linking to things,
Here is the US Constitution http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html
The declaration of independence http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html
The UN universal declaration of human rights http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/

You should read this. Read it for a class I took earlier this summer called "Science Fiction, Zombies, and International Relations" that was quite good.