REVIEW ARTICLE/RAJEN HARSHE*
Third World Underdevelopment And International Relations
Robert H. Jackson: Quasi-States; Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 240, £ 12.95 paperback edition.
International Relations Studies (LR.S.) have widened and deepened the scope of their inquiry as a consequence of the rapid growth in the number of sovereign units after the Second World War. Most of the newly bom states of Afro-Asia which have become active participants in the international system have had twofold impact on the I.R.S. First, as sovereign states they are not merely members of several international organisations, agencies and forums but they have also been entertaining various kinds of ties such as military, economic, political, cultural and technological with other states. This has immensely magnified the vastness as also the complexities of I.R.S. Second, and as a corollary, in the midst of perennially growing complexities of the field it is becoming increasingly difficult to grasp the nature of I.R.S. More often, tools, categories of analysis, concepts and theories of any important explanatory exercise are either getting blunted or falling into disrepute due to their very obsolete basis.
Obviously, the twofold impact of the participation of newly born states in the intemationahsystem is increasingly making the problem of cognition of I.R.S. more ancTmore acute. The resolution of this problem is feasible if old concepts and theories are refashioned or new concepts and theories are innovated to bind the vastness and the complexities of the field in the pursuit of making it more comprehensible. Robert Jackson's present study can be treated as aresponse to this challenge1 Owing to its incontestable significance to the field of I.R.S., this review article proposes to place Jackson's work in a perspective. Such an exercise will have three important components. First, it will situate this book amid the existing body of
^Department of Political Science, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad
Social Scientist, Vol. 23 Nos. 7-9, July-September 1995