A Visual Debate on the Age of Nonpolarity

On The World of Politics Review, Judah Grunstein, (2008) speaks about nonpolarity from a global perspective and he suggests that a nonpolar world not only involves more actors but also lacks the more predictable fixed structures and relationships that tend to define worlds of unipolarity, bipolarity, or multipolarity. Alliances, in particular, will lose much of their importance, if only because alliances require predictable threats, outlooks, and obligations, all of which are likely to be in short supply in a nonpolar world. Relationships will instead become more selective and situational. It will become harder to classify other countries as either allies or adversaries; they will cooperate on some issues and resist on others. While for Mouffe in 2005, unipolarity hasn’t ended yet and multipolarity remains an emerging future prospect. On the other hand Richard Haass recognizes the rise of regional sovereign power hubs across the continents as an important part of his nonpolar model, but still places more emphasis on the many kinds of elusive networked agents as well as the withering away of traditional structures of diplomacy, accountability, and coalition.

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