Essential Readings in World Politics

This book is better than your average world politics reader in the scope of material it covers. Each chapter is preceded by some comments from Mingst and Snyder which makes the text easier to follow for those learning about IR for the first time. Additionally, they cover a broad range of perspectives including those of a classical realist, neo-realist, liberalist, dependency theorist, feminist, Marxist, and more. I was especially impressed by the thoughtful inclusion of feminist articles in key chapters, and the unconventionality of including articles from Foreign Policy and The Economist. Some of the excerpts seem arbitrarily shortened or cut off (probably due to space constraints) and therefore I feel some crucial information was addressed too briefly (and in a couple cases not at all). However, this is a good introductory reader if one is interested in International Relations, World Politics, and the International Political Economy.