International Politics on the World Stage

This concise text provides students and instructors with a comprehensive overview of world politics, inviting them in a straightforward and accessible way to explore international relations and its new challenges. A hallmark of the text is the authors' position that politics affect the lives of all of us, and that the individual can have an impact, whether small or large, by being politically aware and by taking action.

John T. Rourke, Ph.D., professor emeritus, is former head of the Department of Political Science at The University of Connecticut. He is author of International Politics on the World Stage, Eleventh Edition (McGraw-Hill, 2007); the author of Presidential Wars and American Democracy: Rally ‘Round the Chief (Paragon House, 1993); a coauthor of Direct Democracy and International Politics: Deciding International Issues through Referendums (Lynn Rienner, 1992); the editor of Taking Sides: Clashing Views in World Politics, Twelfth Edition, expanded (McGraw-Hill, 2007) and You Decide: Current Debates in American Politics (Longman, 2005); the author of Making Foreign Policy: United States, Soviet Union, China (Brooks Cole, 1990), Congress and the Presidency in U.S. Foreign Policymaking (Westview, 1985), and numerous articles and papers. He continues to teach and especially enjoys introductory classes. His regard for the students has molded his approach to writing—he conveys scholarship in a language and within a frame of reference that undergraduates can appreciate. Rourke believes, as the theme of this book reflects, that politics affect us all and we can affect politics. Rourke practices what he propounds; his career long involved the university’s internship program and advising one of its political clubs. Additionally, he has served as a staff member of Connecticut’s legislature, and has been involved in political campaigns on the local, state, and national levels.

Mark A. Boyer, Ph.D. is a professor of political science at The University of Connecticut. He received the 2004 UConn Alumni Association Award for Excellence in Teaching at the Graduate Level, the American Political Science Association’s 2000 Rowman & Littlefield Award for Innovation in the Teaching of Political Science, and the 2001 UConn Chancellor’s Information Technology Award. He is coauthor with Davis B. Bobrow of Defensive Internationalism (University of Michigan Press, 2005), coauthor with Brigid Starkey and Jonathan Wilkenfeld of Negotiating a Complex World (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), and author of International Cooperation and Public Goods (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). He has also published numerous articles in such journals as the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Simulation and Games, Journal of Peace Research, Review of International Political Economy, Diplomacy and Statecraft, Instructional Science, and others. Boyer is co-director of the GlobalEd Project (www.globaled.uconn.edu), which conducts computer-assisted international studies simulations for middle school and high school students throughout the United States. In 1992–93 he was a Pew Faculty Fellow in International Affairs, and from 1986 to 1988, an SSRC-MacArthur Fellow in International Peace and Security Studies. A strong proponent of active forms of learning, Boyer applies a wide mix of teaching approaches, ranging from case teaching to various types of simulations. His emphasis on active learning is reflected throughout this book and also in the Web site that accompanies the book.