The Waves of Time

Since the end of the Cold War, analysts of international politics have given much greater attention to issues of change. It has become increasingly clear to specialists from many fields that any understanding of large-scale political change must encompass far longer timescales than has been usual in the study of world politics, and must incorporate a multi-disciplinary perspective. This book offers an overview of the whole range of long-term analysis in international relations. It evaluates and draws on relevant theoretical approaches from other disciplines such as sociology economics, geography, history, anthropology and archaeology, as well as recent progress in evolutionary theory and the mathematical study of complexity. Using a new epistemological framework, Dark sets out a new theory of long-term world political change: the theory of 'Macrodynamics'. This is then applied to the latest available historical, anthropological and archaeological data to explain the changing forms of political organization, from the earliest human societies to the late twentieth century.
The resulting analysis is a reinterpretation of the processes of global and political change in the past and in the present. This, in turn, opens new areas of enquiry in the study of international relations and has profound implications of how we understand the changing world of today.