Book Talk with Øystein Tunsjø

Come to learn and discuss a new book release!

The Return of Bipolarity in
World Politics

Tuesday, October 2, 2018 at 12:00pm
Pardee School of Global Studies, 121 Bay State Rd.

ØYSTEIN TUNSJØ is professor at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies at the Norwegian Defence University College. He is the author of U.S. Taiwan Policy: Constructing the Triangle (2008) and Security and Profit in China’s Energy Policy: Hedging Against Risk (Columbia, 2013). Tunsjø is coeditor of several books, including Strategic Adjustment and the Rise of China: Power and Politics in East Asia (2017, with Robert S. Ross).

The Return of Bipolarity in World Politics surveys the new era of super-powers to argue that the combined effects of the narrowing power gap between China and the United States and the widening power gap between China and any third-ranking power portend a new bipolar system that will differ in crucial ways from that of the last century. Tunsjø expands Kenneth N. Waltz’s structural-realist theory to examine the new bipolarity within the context of geopolitics, which he calls “geostructural realism.” He considers how a new bipolar system will affect balancing and stability in U.S.-China relations, predicting that the new bipolarity will not be as prone to arms races as the previous era’s; that the risk of limited war between the two superpowers is likely to be higher in the coming bipolarity, especially since the two powers are primarily rivals at sea rather than on land; and that the superpowers are likely to be preoccupied with rivalry and conflict in East Asia instead of globally. Tunsjø presents a major challenge to how international relations understands superpowers in the twenty-first century.