This latest book in Yale Ferguson and Richard Mansbach's decades-long research collaboration is exceptionally ambitious. Starting from the controversial claim that current globalizing processes are decreasing states' capacity, legitimacy, and authority while increasing those of many of the other collectivities that populate global politics (p. 312), the authors argue that it is time to redraw “our mental maps of global politics” (p. xi). They set out to do so, proposing to “explain the forces shaping change” along the way (p. xi). Of course to either remap global politics or explain the forces that shape change is a formidable task. It is thus impressive that they have managed to argue their case as successfully as they have, especially in such a lively and often delightfully irreverent way.

The authors, following James Rosenau (Distant Proximities, 2003), begin by sketching what they see as the “postinternational” organization of the contemporary world. As they argue, the current world is not a tidy state-centric international system but a “messy” (p. 36) “crazy-quilt” (p. 78) of various political spaces. In contrast to the international system, political spaces in the contemporary world are not necessarily territorially based nor are their authorities necessarily sovereign. In fact, most are far from autonomous and independent; they are nested within one another, overlapping in a complex web of identity and authority. Insofar as global politics are postinternational—and the authors make a compelling case, especially in Chapters 6 and 7—it becomes impossible to disagree that a remapping of global politics is necessary. Indeed, as Ferguson and Mansbach argue beautifully in Chapter 2, the conventional maps of international relations are too limited by extremist theories to capture the logic of postinternationalism. They are variously imprisoned by the uncompromising constructs of scientism, state-centrism, and relativism.

Yet precisely because of the discipline's ossified assumptions, especially about state-centrism, Ferguson and Mansbach cannot simply proceed to their remapping project. As they implicitly recognize, any postinternational remapping project is unlikely to be accepted by the discipline unless the authors can first offer some compelling account of how world politics moved from an international to postinternational world in the first place. Thus, in Chapters 3 through 5, the authors sketch a loose model of the processes that drive global change, illustrating their arguments with plenty of anecdotal evidence. They draw on their previous collaborative research to shift the focus of global political analysis from states to polities, understood as institutionalized but not necessarily territorialized or sovereign structures of identity and authority that exist at all levels of political life. They then argue that because IR has mistakenly conflated polities with territory, it has gotten stuck in an international model of politics that misses the ongoing processes of “fission and fusion” that “alter and constitute” the identities, loyalties, and authorities that configure polities (pp. 21–22). In the context of globalization, these processes are augmented in a way that has “tipped” international over into postinternational.

With this account of change in mind, Ferguson and Mansbach turn finally in Chapters 6 through 9 to mapping postinternational global politics. They approach the task by issue area: that is, by developing “case studies” of the postinternational global economy, war, and technology, in which they narrate the complexity of economics, violence, and knowledge flows in the postinternational world. They conclude by considering the practical and normative implications of living in such a complex and uncertain world.

This is an important book, particularly when it comes to the authors' account of the forces shaping global change. For one, it is conceptually innovative in ways that enable it to accommodate both change and continuity. For instance, the notion of polities is so flexible that it can account for history and the future, no matter what they entail. And yet this does not doom the concept to becoming a vacuous category. One can easily imagine a variety of ways to construe the idea of “polities” in a sufficiently rigorous manner for facilitating directed research. Unfortunately, Ferguson and Mansbach themselves do not do the best job of this. They repeat many of the oversights of their earlier work on polities, such as some slippage between their definitions and their illustrative examples (e.g., if identity is the core of polities, can one really unproblematically refer to transnational corporations as polities? [p. 102]), and some notions, like culture, loyalty, and moral communities, whose relationships to polities are undertheorized (pp. 152, 155, 159). But the promise of a fruitful research trajectory on polity formation, persistence, alteration, and decline is undeniable.

The focus on fission and fusion is also promising. Because these forces emerge from dynamics among polities within the larger context of global politics, there is, as the book's subtitle suggests, a connection in the present between the past and the future. Questions that are left unanswered—for instance about the particular microlevel processes that set fission and fusion in motion—provide fertile ground for further inquiry. Finally, the authors' model allows for (in fact, expects) “more than one story to be true” (p. 338). One benefit of such a model, as they note, is that it demands systematic engagement with the kind of normative questions that IR has otherwise so systematically ignored. Another benefit is that it offers IR a way out of its current obsession with “elegance, parsimony … and games for the gamers” (p. 38). It offers a model of the world that actually looks like the world in which we live. For all of these reasons, this book should be read and taken into account by anyone interested in change in the world order.

However, when it comes to the primary goal of the book, Remapping Global Politics is, unfortunately, less evocative. That is, Ferguson and Mansbach explicitly promise to redraw the map of global politics but they never do (p. xi). Given all of the diversity, depth, complexity, and tendency toward change in the postinternational world, mapping it would seem to entail a detailed representation of the spatial arrangement or distribution of polities, with special attention to their nesting arrangements. Moreover, since the idea is to remap global politics, one should do this globally. But this is not what the authors do, not even within the specific issue areas of economics, war, and technology that they examine. Instead, they offer the reader thick and very interesting but limited and unsystematic stories about the various developments in those issue areas, with only general reference to how identity and authority are being shaped by them. In this sense, Ferguson and Mansbach abandon their effort to map postinternationalism in favor of a discussion of its dynamics. The result is a book that does less to actually remap global politics than it does to persuade readers that it needs to be remapped.