Interpreter training in conflict and post-conflict scenarios

Abstract

the professional interests of a neoliberal academy, and under the dead-handed control that institutional gatekeepers have over the scope of increasingly moribund debates. Thus, it might be germane to conclude that the reshaping of post-Cold war international order has been as fraught as the previous century’s restructuring, but the modern version somehow lacks the substantial and engaged ideas that might improve international order for the future as well as be able to produce books like this one. There are clearly institutional, political and economic reasons for the current, enormous deficit today which resonate across International Relations Then and Now. This book remains impressive and a very useful introduction to IR, and I found that it generated a similar enthusiasm on a second reading, thirty years later. The updates are subtle and it has not dated, including more on the critical and post-colonial contributions in particular as well as an acknowledge that IR’s journey has been far from linear and unproblematic. Underlying this gem of a book is an important insight for IR scholarship: ‘then’ cannot be the same as ‘now’, given the massive advances of critical scholarship on IR. The challenge is currently similar in scale to the era when Groom and his colleagues first wrote this book (which I presume was the late 1980s): change in international order is unpredictable, often unexpected, and may provoke war, while peace requires historical and theoretical preparation, and understanding, if it is to overcome the dogged opposition of evolving systems of power and interest.