VIRTUAL BOOK TALK | Philip Cunliffe - The New Twenty Years' Crisis: A Critique of International Relations, 1999-2019

Details and registration

Join Philip Cunliffe, author of The New Twenty Years’ Crisis: A Critique of International Relations, 1999-2019, in conversation with Lucian Ashworth (Memorial University of Newfoundland) and Maria Mälksoo (Brussels School of International Studies). Philip Cunliffe is senior lecturer in international conflict at the University of Kent.

Hosted by the University of Kent Brussels School of International Studies (BSIS), this free event is part of the BSIS Book Talks series and is open to the public.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The New Twenty Years' Crisis reveals that the liberal international order experienced a twenty-year cycle of decline from 1999 to 2019. In contrast to claims that the order has been undermined by authoritarian challengers, Cunliffe argues that the primary drivers of the crisis are internal. He shows that the heavily ideological international relations theory that has developed since the end of the Cold War is clouded by utopianism, replacing analysis with aspiration and expressing the interests of power rather than explaining its functioning. As a result, a growing tendency to discount political alternatives has made us less able to adapt to political change. In search of a solution, this book argues that breaking through the current impasse will require not only dissolving the new forms of utopianism, but also pushing past the fear that the twenty-first century will repeat the mistakes of the twentieth. Only then can we finally escape the twenty years' crisis.