International Security at Twenty-five: From One World to Another

Abstract

As the first American academic journal to focus on security issues, IS has provided a forum for policymakers and scholars to debate the major security problems of the day. In its early years, the journal, reflecting the field, was substantially preoccupied with urgent Cold War issues. The Soviet-American nuclear rivalry was an abiding concern. The overall military balance between East and West was an important source of contention. Regional competition between Moscow and Washington in the developing world attracted wide attention. Alongside the policy-oriented agenda, there arose over the years a growing representation of more theoretical work, gradually producing the mix of theory and policy that has come to characterize the journal. Though the end of the Cold War raised questions in some minds about the status of the field and the survival of IS, the journal has flourished over the last decade. A substantially new agenda has emerged, one that raises fundamental questions about America’s role in the world, the character of great power relations, and the feasibility and desirability of various possible post–Cold War international orders. Violence and disorder in the post–Cold War world have pressed new issues onto the agenda, particularly in connection with ethnic, civil, and regional conflict. And the academic side of the field of international security has pursued a series of stimulating debates about the democratic peace theory, relative gains, the virtues and limitations of realism, institutionalism, rational choice, and so on that have enlivened the field and the pages of IS. Despite hopes and expectations to the contrary, problems of international security have remained prominent in the post–Cold War era. IS looks forward to another twenty-five years of contributing to serious debate on these consequential issues.