"No theory of politics or reading of history anticipated the end of the Cold War. This has made it a particularly lively subject of academic debate in the three decades since its demise, as scholars have argued over why and how the Cold War ended, and what those explanations suggest about our theoretical understandings of international politics. Broadly speaking, the participants in these debates can be divided into two camps, materialists and ideationalists. The materialists, led by William Wohlforth and his co-authors, ...
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"No theory of politics or reading of history anticipated the end of the Cold War. This has made it a particularly lively subject of academic debate in the three decades since its demise, as scholars have argued over why and how the Cold War ended, and what those explanations suggest about our theoretical understandings of international politics. Broadly speaking, the participants in these debates can be divided into two camps, materialists and ideationalists. The materialists, led by William Wohlforth and his co-authors, maintained that the Soviet Union's peaceful international retrenchment in the late 1980s accorded with its relative decline in the international balance of power, and that any ideational innovation that enabled this retreat was endogenous to changes in material power"--
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