In a complex world there is often a tendency to try to make politics as simple as possible. This tendency is evident, for example, in the cases of journalists seeking to explain events and situations to uninitiated recipients, intellectuals in the social sciences trying to identify grand theories that can make sense of a multiplicity of diverse phenomena, and politicians wanting to identify solutions to problems and events so that they will harness electoral support. In all these instances it is possible to identify efforts to explain issues by reducing them to a simplified calculus which then enables the process of making decisions to take place in a supposedly more straightforward fashion. Similarly, in the area of ethical debates about the rectitude of war, for example, complicated political events that emanate from a wide range of historical, social and cultural factors may be reduced to their most banal in order to engender decisions based on judgements about good and evil. Actors on the stage of global politics are sometimes guilty of establishing simple dualisms that create binary divisions between societies which are democracies and those which are not in order to make the world a simpler place to understand. This approach to political issues signifies the preference for ‘simplicity, for things to be definite and manageable, for wishing that the connections we establish between a simple cause and an effect are necessary and sufficient for establishing a scientific law, and that we have found the answer to our problems’ (Smith 1998: 321).