The study of international relations and world affairs which focuses primarily on the questions of how to reduce significantly the likelihood of international violence and to create tolerable conditions of worldwide economic welfare, social justice and ecological stability.
The substantive matters comprehended by world order are a range of actors (world institutions, international organizations, regional arrangements, transnational actors, the nation-state, infra-national groups, and the individual) as they relate to the following dimensions of world political and community processes: peace-keeping, third party resolution of disputes and other modes of pacific settlement, disarmament and arms control, economic development and welfare, the technological and scientific revolutions, ecological stability, and human and social rights.
Political-social-legal forms, organizations and institutions are envisaged which are relevant to the solution of world problems. Relevant utopia models are developed which consist of projections of reasonably concrete behavioural models or images of a system of world political and social processes capable of preventing organized international violence and providing adequate worldwide economic welfare, social justice and ecological stability, as well as concrete behavioural statements of transition from the present system to that of the model.
The world system or global system is the totality of interacting social, technological, information, cultural and other systems, whether at the community, national or international level. Natural environmental systems may also be included.
Meta-theoretical research at the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations focuses on comparative analysis of two antinomous conceptions of systemic structure ("order") and two competing ideas of historical development ("progress"). On this basis, the aim is to introduce, conceptually formulate and philosophically analyse two systems-of-thought that are seen as representing the fundamental dichotomy in the study of global orders and universal futures: (realist) Globalism and (idealist) Universalism.
Dialectical materialism is the dynamic applied by the Marxist and Hegelian analysis of historical processes in which each historical situation is said to contain tensions, conflicts and contradictory elements which are the driving force of change. History dialectically progresses from one condition to its opposite and then to a synthesis at a higher level. Thus it is suggested that the contradictions of the world system (such as are inherent in class struggle) will lead to a crisis and eventually to the emergence of a new order as a higher form of synthesis.