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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > International relations > Diplomacy
The New York Times said of Jozef Hieronim Retinger that he was on intimate terms with most leading statesmen of the Western World, including presidents of the United States. He has been repeatedly acknowledged as one of the principle architects of the movement for European unity after the World War II, and one of the outstanding creative political influences of the post war period. He has also been credited with being the dark master behind the so-called "Bilderberg Group," described variously as an organization of idealistic internationalists, and a malevolent global conspiracy. Before that, Retinger involved himself in intelligence activities during World War II and, given the covert and semi-covert nature of many of his activities, it is little wonder that no biography has appeared about him. This book draws on a broad range of international archives to rectify that.
Can John D. Negroponte be described as "The Last American Diplomat?" In a career spanning 50 years of unprecedented American global power, he was the last of a dying breed of patrician diplomats - devoted to public service, a self-effacing, and ultimate insider, whose prime duty was to advise, guide, and warn. Negroponte served as US ambassador to Honduras, Mexico, the Philippines and Iraq; he was US Permanent Representative to the UN, Director of National Intelligence and Deputy Secretary of State to George W. Bush. His was a high-flying and seemingly conventional career but one full of surprises. He opposed Kissinger in Vietnam, argued against direct military action against Marxists in Central America and warned that the Iraq War could be another "Vietnam." George W. Liebmann's incisive account of Negroponte's life and career is based on personal and shared experience, as well as thorough research and interviews with Negroponte and other leading actors. It will provide fascinating reading for students and researchers interested in the inside-story of American diplomacy, revealing personal and policy struggles, and the underlying fissures present even in the world's last remaining superpower.
Previous researches examine how transnational ethnic ties impact the relationship between host states and diaspora and why states and ethnic minorities in the diaspora may occasionally support violent rebel organizations in the homeland. However, these previous studies do not really consider the relationships among co-ethnic organizations without a homeland government. This book tackles the following important questions: How and when do co-ethnic Kurdish organizations provide open support for each other during conflict-peace cycle events? Moreover, do external threats impact the relationship among co-ethnic organizations? The aim of this research is to identify the causal factors that influence the transnational networks between Kurdish organizations. Research findings reveal that political rationality and external threats seem to be stronger predictors of political behavior than ethnic ties in the Kurdish case. This study helps scholars and policy makers to evaluate the impact of transnational networks between co-ethnic Kurdish organizations in cases of civil war, which may play a crucial role in the escalation and de-escalation of international conflicts. In addition, this research helps to understand the role of co-ethnic organizations in building sustainable peace in areas of conflict.
Recounting the actors and events of U.S. foreign policy, Zoellick identifies five traditions that have emerged from America's encounters with the world: the importance of North America; the special roles trading, transnational, and technological relations play in defining ties with others; changing attitudes toward alliances and ways of ordering connections among states; the need for public support, especially through Congress; and the belief that American policy should serve a larger purpose. These traditions frame a closing review of post-Cold War presidencies, which Zoellick foresees serving as guideposts for the future. Both a sweeping work of history and an insightful guide to U.S. diplomacy past and present, AMERICA IN THE WORLD serves as an informative companion and practical adviser to readers seeking to understand the strategic and immediate challenges of U.S. foreign policy during an era of transformation.
This cutting edge collection focuses on the nature of civil society and its role in facilitating governance in Central Asia, considering local implications related to the concept of social capital and civil society in the Uzbek context. It discusses the complexity of the notion of social capital in post-Soviet Uzbekistan, detailing the challenges and pressures facing the Uzbek people.Challenging prevailing views on post-Soviet political transitions, the book demonstrates that successful transition to democracy and rule of law cannot be accomplished unless the concerns, fears, frustrations and local understandings of the desired political system are heard, registered and carefully interpreted. Offering a comparative study of civil society and social capital in Asia, this collection is a key read not only for scholars and students in civil governance and post-soviet transitions, but also aid agencies, foreign governments, and international organisations working with civil society groups.
His Excellency Dr. Friedrich Rosen, the well known German Diplomatist and Orientalist, has written a fascinating account of his manifold experiences in the Near East, including Palestine, Syria, Persia and Mesopotamia, during a period of forty years. Many politically important or otherwise interesting mean and women, such as Ex-Emperor William II, Prince Bulow, Baron von Holstein, Sir Frank Lascelles, Sir Valentine Chirol, Lord Curzon and Miss Gertrude Bell, are spoken of in this volume.
This revised and updated edition presents detailed analysis of the history and current state of the G20, and the challenges it faces. The emergence of the G20 was the result of calls for full inclusion of major developing and other systemically important countries and to reflect new global economic and political realities. The growth of Chinese power, growing significance of other major developing countries and new concerns concerning anti-globalization and rising protectionism in the West have all resulted in important changes to the dynamics of the institution. The suspension of Russia's membership in the G8 has also necessitated a change in G7/G20 dynamics and the G20's processes, agenda priorities and role in global governance. Providing a historical overview and analysis of the evolving agenda, methods of performance evaluation, relationship with structured international organizations and other external actors, Hajnal's text is an authoritative work of history, analysis and reference on the G20 and also G7/G8/G20 reform. This book is an essential source for researchers and students focusing on the G20, international organizations and global governance, and more generally for scholars in the fields of political science, economics, and finance.
Baron Rosen recounts his experiences as a diplomat.
Baron Rosen recounts his experiences as a diplomat.
Contemporary, thoughtful and extensively illustrated, Modern Diplomacy examines a broad range of current diplomatic practice. This leading and widely used book - now in its fifth edition - equips students with a detailed analysis of important international issues that reflect and impact upon diplomacy and its relations. The subject is brought to life through case studies and examples which highlight the working of contemporary diplomacy within the international political arena. Organised around five broad topic areas, including the nature of diplomacy, diplomatic methods, negotiation, the operation of diplomacy in specific areas and international conflict, the book covers all major topic areas of contemporary diplomacy. New features for this edition: Developments in diplomatic practice Strategies in diplomacy International trade, geopolitics and agreements Diplomacy of new regional organisations and groupings Developing country diplomacy Non-traditional diplomacy New concepts - parallel and counter diplomacy New case studies include: the Paris Climate Agreement, Brexit, international finance and trade agreements, and the UN security forces. Modern Diplomacy is essential reading for students and practitioners of international relations, foreign policy, international law, international political economy, international economics, the Foreign Services Institutes and the National Diplomatic Academies.
Despite the current rhetoric of Western leaders, democracies are
great and frequent war-makers and interventionists. This fact
stands in a strange contrast to the liberal self-image of
democracies being particularly peaceful. Addressing this contrast,
the book turns the 'democratic peace' theme on its head: rather
than investigating the reasons for the supposed pacifism of
democracies, it looks for the causes of their militancy. In order
to solve this puzzle, the authors transcend the disciplinary
boundaries of International Relations and draw on political theory,
political philosophy and sociology.
This anthology of articles, short studies, and interviews by Alexandros Petersen was written over the span of ten years, starting in 2004. Yet they are even more relevant today in their prescient analysis. Petersen insightfully addressed the implications of the West withdrawing its engagement from the Caucasus and Central Asia, the expansion of the Chinese influence, and Russia's strategic interests. The collection is organized along four main topics: (1) Eurasia and a changing transatlantic world: the world politics of shifting frontiers in the post-Soviet world; (2) Energy geopolitics in the Caspian and beyond, with its crucial implications for European energy security; (3) the Black Sea world, covering the dynamics of Russia, Turkey, and the South Caucasus, including the role of NATO and frozen conflicts in the region; (4) the new silk roads: China's inroads in Central Asia, which is often overlooked in the West but will be critical for the geopolitical balance of powers.
To find more information about Rowman and Littlefield titles, please visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.
This book by a leading scholar of international relations examines the origins of the new world disorder - the resurgence of Russia, the rise of populism in the West, deep tensions in the Atlantic alliance, and the new strategic partnership between China and Russia - and asks why so many assumptions about how the world might look after the Cold War - liberal, democratic and increasingly global - have proven to be so wrong. To explain this, Michael Cox goes back to the moment of disintegration and examines what the Cold War was about, why the Cold War ended, why the experts failed to predict it, and how different writers and policy-makers (and not just western ones) have viewed the tumultuous period between 1989 when the liberal order seemed on top of the world through to the current period when confidence in the western project seems to have disappeared almost completely.
Laying the foundations of a theory of 'international social closure' this book examines how actors compete for a seat at the table in the management of international society and how that competition stratifies the international domain. In a broad historical survey from the 'Family of Civilised Nations', through the Great Powers' club, to the G7 and G20 today, Naylor investigates the politics of membership in the exclusive clubs that manage international society and ensure its survival, providing us with a new way to think about how status competition has changed over time and what this means for international politics today. With its sociologically grounded theory, this book advances English School scholarship and transforms the study of contemporary summitry, providing a ground-breaking approach rooted in archival research, elite interviews, and ethnographic participant observation. This book is of interest to international relations scholars interested in the 'expansion' and globalisation of international society, the history of international summits, and transformations in international order, as well as to those examining concepts including stratification, hierarchy, and networked governance. With its emphasis on non-state actors in global governance, scholars and practitioners alike working on/for civil society will also find this research of great value.
This volume examines the history and current state of Canadian studies in a number of countries and regions across the world, including Canada's major trading partners. From the mid-1980s until 2012, Canadian studies was seen as an important tool of soft power, increasing awareness of Canadian culture, institutions and history. The abrupt termination in 2012 of the Canadian government's financial support for these activities triggered a debate that is still ongoing about the benefits that may have flowed from this support and whether the decision should be reversed. The contributors to this book focus on the process whereby Canadian studies became institutionalized in their respective countries and on the balance between what might be described as Canadian studies for its own sake versus Canadian studies as a deliberate instrument of cultural diplomacy.
Why is there so much conflict in the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa, and many other parts of the world? Is there something innate in human nature that makes it next to impossible to achieve peaceful coexistence? The answer, says career diplomat Carl Coon, must be sought in the distant prehistoric past when intergroup hostility became ingrained as a pattern of cultural evolution. For thousands of generations, our ancestors organised themselves in distinctive groups that competed with one another. Sometimes the competition was peaceful, but more often than not the struggle took violent forms.Today, we still witness the vestiges of these prehistoric roots when the intermingling of different ways of life results not in harmonious co-operation but in animosity, conflict, and violence. Coon suggests that we have recently embarked on a new phase of cultural evolution, one comparable in importance to the dawn of the Neolithic, when our forebears graduated from a hunter-gatherer way of life to agriculture and animal husbandry.At that time many diverse cultural groups were subsumed by larger, better organised groups whose talent for organisation was necessary to manage the complexities of a new agricultural and technologically more sophisticated society. Today, this process has reached its culmination with organisation established on a world-wide scale and societies becoming ever more multicultural. With the emergence of the global village the world is experiencing the natural atavistic impulse toward violence in certain parts of the globe just as the mechanisms and technology are being put in place to further intercultural co-operation.The challenge for enlightened men and women in contemporary society, says Coon, is to realise that cultural conflicts are an inevitable result of our evolutionary heritage; to use this insight to help manage the transition to a new, global society; and then to focus in a co-operative fashion on the new global priorities of environmental preservation and the promotion of an equitable, prosperous, and peaceful world community.
The collection brings together scholars from Public Policy and Foreign Policy to address the theme of policy fiascos. So far research on failure and fiascos in both Public Policy and Foreign Policy has existed independent of each other with very little communication between the two sub-disciplines. The contributions aim to bridge this divide and bring the two sides into a dialogue on some of the central issues in the study of fiascos including how to define, identify and measure policy failure (and success); the social and political contestation about what counts as policy fiascos; the causes of policy fiascos and their consequences; the attribution of blame; as well as processes of learning from fiascos. A common theme of the collection is to explore different epistemological and methodological approaches to studying policy fiascos. This book will appeal to scholars and practitioners interested in policy failures and fiascos both within and among states and other international actors. It was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.
In the summer of 2013 the Central Intelligence Agency and the Clinton Presidential Library made an unprecedented declassification of more than 300 documents showing the role of intelligence in supporting American decision-making on Bosnia in the 1990s, and in particular the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement, which brought an end to the fighting in Bosnia. The following spring, James Madison University hosted a conference in which scholars from all over the world assessed what the documents show about what is needed for the complex process of making peace. Aspects covered included military, political, diplomatic, and religious, among others. Timothy R. Walton's The Role of Intelligence in Ending the War in Bosnia in 1995 offers a collection of papers presented at the conference; several of the authors were participants in the events of the time.
The first-ever attempt to paint a full-scale portrait of the Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia during the Asia-Pacific War (1942-5). This book draws on the huge body of available narrative-military documents, bureaucratic records and personal accounts of combatants and civilians, including diaries, memoirs and collected correspondence-most of which have previously been either unknown or unavailable to non-Japanese readers. It examines how the Japanese imperial adventure in Southeast Asia sped up the collapse of the Japanese Empire as a whole, not only through its ultimate military defeat in the region, but also due to its failure as an occupier from the very beginning. Nakano explains the significance of the Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia as a learning experience for the occupiers, whether soldiers on the frontlines or civilians on the home front. He uses a synthesis, overlay and juxtaposition of a selection of these narratives, to reassemble the narrative as a whole. This brings into focus the outlook of those Japanese who set out for Southeast Asia with the purpose to urge the region's occupied people to collaborate with Japan to transform the region into an integral part of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Many would eventually discover that what required change was Japan and its whole approach to colonial rule, as was realized so quickly in the postwar era. The original Japanese version was published as Tonan Ajia senryo to Nihonjin: Teikoku Nihon no kaitai [The occupation of Southeast Asia and the Japanese: The dismantling of the Japanese Empire]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2012. ISBN: 430922542X.
Within the span of a generation, Nazi Germany's former capital, Berlin, found a new role as a symbol of freedom and resilient democracy in the Cold War. This book unearths how this remarkable transformation resulted from a network of liberal American occupation officials, and returned emigres, or remigres, of the Marxist Social Democratic Party (SPD). This network derived from lengthy physical and political journeys. After fleeing Hitler, German-speaking self-professed "revolutionary socialists" emphasized "anti-totalitarianism" in New Deal America and contributed to its intelligence apparatus. These experiences made these remigres especially adept at cultural translation in postwar Berlin against Stalinism. This book provides a new explanation for the alignment of Germany's principal left-wing party with the Western camp. While the Cold War has traditionally been analyzed from the perspective of decision makers in Moscow or Washington, this study demonstrates the agency of hitherto marginalized on the conflict's first battlefield. Examining local political culture and social networks underscores how both Berliners and emigres understood the East-West competition over the rubble that the Nazis left behind as a chance to reinvent themselves as democrats and cultural mediators, respectively. As this network popularized an anti-Communist, pro-Western Left, this book identifies how often ostracized emigres made a crucial contribution to the Federal Republic of Germany's democratization.
Perspectives in Waging Conflicts Constructively offers diverse perspectives on how large-scale conflicts can be conducted with more positive benefits, minimizing their destructiveness. Distinguished analysts and practitioners review the core ideas of the innovative "constructive conflict approach" and examine cases where conflicts have been waged with fewer destructive consequences. An introduction presents key concepts in constructive conflict resolution, and chapters offer cases of these theories in action. Cases feature both global and regional examples ranging from Israel to North Korea. The book also contains recommendations for policy makers, non-governmental organizations, and citizens about how stakeholders at all levels might help avoid destructive patterns that are common in large-scale conflict while working for positive change. Contributors include Patrick G. Coy, Esra Cuhadar, Bruce W. Dayton, Martina Fischer, Galia Golan, Louis Kriesberg, Christopher Mitchell, Robert Murrett, Thania Paffenholz, Lee Smithey, and Steven Zunes.
This book tells the dramatic story of the recruitment and training of a group of German communist exiles by the London office of the Office of Strategic Services for key spy missions into Nazi Germany during the final months of World War II. The book chronicles their stand against the rise of Hitler in 1930s that caused them to flee Germany for Czechoslovakia and then England where they resettled and awaited an opportunity to get back into the war against the Nazis. That chance would arrive in late 1944 when the OSS recruited them for these important missions which became part of the historic German Penetration Campaign. Some of the German exiles carried out successful missions that provided key military intelligence to the Allied armies advancing into Germany while others suffered untimely deaths immediately upon the dispatch of their missions that still raise troubling issues. And based on declassified East German government files, this book also reveals that notwithstanding the US military alliance with the Soviet Union, a few of the German communist exiles betrayed the trust that the OSS had placed in them by working with a secret spy network in England that enabled its agents to receive top secret mission related information and OSS sources and methods. That spy network was run by the GRU, the Red Army military intelligence service. This is the same intelligence service that has just been cited by US law enforcement officers as having hacked into computers run by the Democratic National Committee and launched a social media campaign in order to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. While the dual loyalties of the German exiles later became known to the United States military, such knowledge did not prevent it from posthumously awarding military decorations to the men who led these missions. Until that day, no German national had ever been presented with such medals for their service to the Allied armies in World War II.
The Wars of the French Revolution, 1792-1801 offers a comprehensive and jargon-free coverage of this turbulent period and unites political, social, military and international history in one volume. Carefully designed for undergraduate students, through twelve chapters this book offers an introduction to the origins and international context of the French Revolution as well as an in-depth examination of the reasons why war began. Aspects unpicked within the book include how France acquired a de facto empire stretching from Holland to Naples; the impact of French conquest on the areas concerned; the spread of French ideas beyond the frontiers of the French imperium; the response of the powers of Europe to the sudden expansion in French military power; the experience of the conflicts unleashed by the French Revolution in such areas as the West Indies, Egypt and India; and the impact of war on the Revolution itself. Offering extensive geographical coverage and challenging many preconceived ideas, The Wars of the French Revolution, 1792-1801 is the perfect resource for students of the French Revolution and international military history more broadly.
This book charts ideas European intellectuals (mostly from Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy) put forward to solve the problem of war during the first half of the twentieth century: a period that began with the Anglo-Boer war and that ended with the explosion of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such ideas do not belong to a homogeneous tradition of thought, but can be understood as a unique discourse that takes different characteristics according to the point of view of each author and of the specific historical situation. |
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