4 - Turbulence

Summary

[World leaders today] are playing on a chessboard where international and domestic transactions form a seamless web, where the number of public and private players are barely countable let alone controllable, where the rules are yet to be defined, where the true nature of threats remains shrouded by their very multiplicity and complexity and where it is hard to judge what constitutes winning and losing.

Leslie H. Gelb

Notwithstanding differences among observers over how fundamental and pervasive the transformations at work in the world may be, few are prepared to argue against the description of the world summarized in this epigraph. Even those who view history as incessantly repeating itself acknowledge that some dimensions of the current scene are unfamiliar and not easily accommodated by comparisons with the past. As already noted, however, while some analysts judge the transformations to be important but not so crucial as to undermine or alter the underlying structures of the interstate system, others view the changes as giving rise to a new worldview and transforming long-standing parameters into dynamic variables. Since the latter perspective is the focus of this book, the objective of this chapter is to integrate these transformed variables into a theory - the turbulence model - that can facilitate analysis of governance along the Frontier. This goal may seem to spring from a profound oxymoron.