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What is 'polarity of power' thesis ?

edited October 2013 in Political Science
Hi,

I was looking at a PSIR paper, and it asked to compare 'Polarity of power' and 'Balance of Power' concept and justify the relevance of it.

What is 'Polarity of Power' concept - all i can find is there can be multiple poles and the world can be unipolar, bipolar or multipolar but nothing as such as 'polarity of power' concept.

Is it proposed by any neo-realist? It would be great if someone can explain @stardust @ambitieux

Comments

  • Hi Thor,

    I was searching for Polarity of power and got your year old post :)

    From what i gathered, polarity of powers can be as explained below:


    • Polarity is basically concerned with the number of poles or great powers present in international politics at any given time.
    • Depending on the number, the world is unipolor, bipolar or multi polar.
    • It basically deals with the inequality of distribution of power.
    • It is considered as the ability of the state to conduct war on its own.
    • The thinkers essentially considers a sort of polarity, a ticket to stability in the world. For example Kenneth Waltz considered bipolarity as stable. Some thinkers considers multi-polarity as more stable.
    • A pole is decided by different sets of material indicator, like economic power, military power wetc.
    • Like other neo-realist it concentrated on other material conception as necessity for deciding pole.
    Criticism of polarity :
    • It lays emphasis on simply counting the number poles present, it ignores importance of many factors.
    • Like the polarity thesis defines bipolarity with presence of two poles; Soviet union and USA, it ignores the kind of roles other powers played. For example, China gave a equal fight to US in Korean war, but it is not considered in polarity of power thesis.

    And Neo-realist proposed polarity of power thesis.
    The PDF can be helpful
    http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/4099/1/Zala13PhD.pdf

    @Thor
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