Petr Drulák Book order

Recent rise of the non-Western parts of the world makes the need for a genuine global dialogue more urgent than ever before. To take an effective part in it, the West needs to face a conceptual challenge. The Western understanding of the political world is based on such deeply ingrained concepts as power, politics, statecraft, cooperation, multilateralism, dependence, identity or human rights. The Westerners tend to wrongly assume that everyone else is bound to share these concepts. This book shows that the reality is different. Investigating African, Asian, Islamic and Latin American political thinking, the book introduces non-Western concepts of politics as well as non-Western readings of seemingly familiar Western concepts. By doing this, it points to the obstacles to the global dialogue as well as to opportunities which may be exploited.

The concept of national interest belongs among the most widely used and abused concepts in the foreign policy debate. This volume illustrates how the term can be used as a meaningful analytical tool. It introduces three criteria (relevance, domestic consensus, and external acceptance) which serve to identify national interest. The authors apply these criteria to Czech foreign policy making and provide some interesting findings concerning a country’s possibilities to define and pursue its national interest. Since the authors use four different methodologies (case studies, discourse analysis, grounded theory, and ethnography), the volume also shows the variety of possible ways to analyse national interests.

Fourteen essays by eastern European academics and published in Prague.