Book Review: Force and Statecraft: Diplomatic Challenges of our Time (4th Edition)

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Book Review: Force and Statecraft: Diplomatic Challenges of our Time (4th Edition)

Journal Title: International Journal of Interdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Studies (IJIMS) - Year 2018, Vol 5, Issue 1

Abstract

“Force and Statecraft: Diplomatic Challenges of our Time” (4th Edition) was published in 2007 by the Oxford University Press, Inc, New York. Its original text was first published by the same publishing house in 1983. The authors – Paul Gordon Lauren, Gordon A. Craig and Alexander L. George – distinguished professor emeritus of History, distinguished diplomatic historians and eminent strategic studies specialist/political scientist respectively, combined their long years of experience and expertise to produce this fascinating ‘bible’ for all historians and scholars of International Relations. The book is divided into three parts of varying lengths and themes, albeit the general subject matter –force, statecraft and diplomacy – is explicitly kept with a total of twelve chapters. The authors’ central argument is that an international community or system based on consensual, shared and accepted rules and laws, norms and customs is the best approach to prevent violence, conflict and wars and the best way to ensure the endurance of peace in our modern period.1 Varying sets of assumptions underlie their ideas and thus became the framework on which the book was built. It was first asserted in the first place that conflicts and disagreements and violence were inevitable as organized groups of people came into contact with others whom they rarely shared any common traits and characteristics and thus a possible conflict of interest. There was the need therefore to develop appropriate mechanisms to facilitate interaction without the recourse to violence and war. Moreover, they conceived of an explicit and a shared international community with a consensual body of rules, laws, norms and customs that could minimize the occurrence of violence during this interaction between or among unknown actors. In addition, this “viable international system” must have the following requirements such as a consensual values and norms, shared goal and objectives among the principal parties; a structure indicating the scope and appropriate number of interacting states, with the distribution of capabilities; procedures for achieving their objectives including adaptation to new development and changes. The above initial experiment collapsed in the twentieth century due to its inability to adapt to the “diplomatic revolution” – new rapid developments and changes – that was associated with the modern period. They finally assumed that modern diplomatic techniques such as negotiation, deterrence, coercive diplomacy and crisis management cannot be underestimated in a modern system of force, statecraft and diplomacy. In a more general term, the first part transport readers and students through history of the international system: from the implicitly unorganized state system such as the period before Hobbes Leviathan2 through to the mid-seventeenth century, to the moments of a somehow eighteenth century comity, through to the classical periods of balance of power consensus3 and its later organization of concerts of Europe4 or powers and swiftly through the much talked about collective security5 of which we currently somehow upholds to our current trends of security challenges – terrorism6. In effect, it charts the developments of force, statecraft and diplomacy from the early periods, for example, the day of Thucydides and his Greek conundrum7 to the present day international relations and diplomacy shaped by the end of the Second World War and the Cold War and include a more important recent event – 9/11 (the havoc Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida forces rained on New York City, Washington, DC.

Authors and Affiliations

Thomas Ameyaw-Brobbey

Keywords

EP ID EP31195
DOI -
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