Paul Hirst's new book, War and Power in the Twenty First Century, will be published by Polity, late 2001.

Future developments in war, armed conflict and international relations are central to our collective fate in this century. This book looks forward by considering the forces that will drive changes in military organisations, sources of conflict, the power of states and the nature of the international system.

New military technologies will alter how wars are fought and will influence the balance of power. Changes in the global environment will provide new causes of conflict and will change economic priorities. As a result, the state will survive as the key social institution and populations will look to it to acquire and to distribute scarce resources. Many of the changes that seem transformatory today, like globalization, the Internet and mass consumerism, will be shown to be less significant than we believe them to be.

Hirst puts such changes into perspective by comparing them to the revolutionary changes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe: the firepower revolution, the rise of the sovereign territorial state and the parallel development of the international system, and the creation of world trade. These basic structures of the modern world are still with us and will remain despite major changes in twenty first century society.

• Shows that fashionable ideas that the nation state will be displaced by other, trans-national, forms of organisation are wrong. States will remain the dominant political actors within and across borders in the twenty first century.
• Climate change will lead to major displacements of populations and to scarcity of basic resources like energy, water and farmland. This will lead to new conflicts. It will also lead to states seeking to acquire these resources and to rationing them.
• By mid century there will be revolutionary changes in military technology. New weapons will not make war less bloody, but they may swing warfare back in favour of the defensive. They may also make high-tech weapons accessible to a wider range of states and thus reduce the current military dominance of the USA.
• The international system will remain unequal and conflictual, but to mid century at least the great powers of the G7 will remain dominant.
• The neo-liberal belief that world inequality will be eliminated by greater trade openness and economic de-regulation is false. Equally, the fashionable beliefs of the anti-globalziation protesters provide no credible alternatives. The world will remain unfair and unstable, but without the political forces or the economic ideas capable of shaping a better international order.
• The analysis is set in an historical context and compares current changes with those that established the basic features of the modern state and international system.