Prefazione all'edizione italiana

What the reader is about to leaf through is one of the most important and widespread international relations manuals in the United States, the birthplace of the discipline as it has developed since the Second World War. In this manual we can well assert that today we find the new mainstream of the discipline, enriched by the results of a debate that has lost much of the fury that had characterized it in the final decades of the last century and which has progressively opened up to the stimuli provided by the more recent and, in some respects, even revolutionary. Precisely the richness of the comparison, on the one hand, and the ability to orient it constructively, on the other, have made it possible to reach a result in which it is possible to draw a balance that is as shared as possible of the object, methodology and research programs of international relations. For the student, as well as for the neophyte of the discipline or for those who are simply intrigued by the political study of international reality, this manual offers a certainly peculiar approach. What presents itself to our eyes is a book conceived in every way to answer questions about international politics. It is an easy-to-access volume which, rather than proposing a systematic organization of disciplinaryly consolidated knowledge right from the start, opts for a spiral mechanism, a real "endless screw" that leads the reader towards increasingly in-depth knowledge of the dynamics of international politics, the regularities that govern them and the ways to frame, interpret and explain them.