The two seminal events of relatively recent times that have significantly influenced contemporary international relations are: one, the breakdown of the bipolar global system along with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991; and, the other, the simultaneous terrorist strikes on the World Trade Centre in New York, and the Pentagon in 2001. They need some discussions in our present analysis, because, though separated by a decade, they indicate a comparable pattern suggesting some causal links with our central concern around realism and its hegemony in international relations. For example, the first event of 1991 eliminated the most serious challenge to the capitalist world market which, since then, has been more intensively globalised under a single hegemonic power. The second event of 2001 destroyed one of the main operational hub of the global market, and damaged its hegemonic power's military headquarters, in the process, denting the myth of invulnerability of the global system's only military super power.

A global system with a uniquely globalised market, influencing factors of production, consumption, communication, and life-style across the territorial boundaries of the sovereign states, but without a global sovereign, and a militarily vulnerable hegemonic power, is a new experience for the arguably fledgling global civil society; and full of imponderables for order and stability of the global system, as events across the world since 9/11 indicate. Consequently, the interface of international realism as the hegemonic ideology, and the new phase of globalisation ushered by it, needs to be explored for any projections of the future trends, and desirable policy interventions.