A critical look into how and why the U.S. military needs to become more adaptable. Every military must prepare for future wars despite not really knowing the shape such wars will ultimately take. As former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates once noted: "We have a perfect record in predicting the next war. We have never once gotten it right." In the face of such great uncertainty, militaries must be able to adapt rapidly in order to win. Adaptation under Fire identifies the characteristics that make militaries more adaptable, illustrated through historical examples and the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Authors David Barno and Nora Bensahel argue that militaries facing unknown future conflicts must nevertheless make choices about the type of doctrine that their units will use, the weapons and equipment they will purchase, and the kind of leaders they will select and develop to guide the force to victory. Yet after a war begins, many of these choices will prove flawed in the unpredictable crucible of the battlefield. For a U.S. military facing diverse global threats, its ability to adapt quickly and effectively to those unforeseen circumstances may spell the difference between victory and defeat. Barno and Bensahel start by providing a framework for understanding adaptation and include historical cases of success and failure. Next, they examine U.S. military adaptation during the nation's recent wars, and explain why certain forms of adaptation have proven problematic. In the final section, Barno and Bensahel conclude that the U.S. military must become much more adaptable in order to address the fast-changing security challenges of the future, and they offer recommendations on how to do so before it is too late.

Low-Carbon Energy Security from a European Perspective draws on the European Commission's funded project MILESECURE-2050. It considers low-carbon energy security and energy geopolitics in Europe, with a focus on four thematic clusters: challenging the energy security paradigm; climate change and energy security objectives (the components of a secure and low-carbon energy system); energy security in a geopolitical perspective, as it relates to economics, resource competition, and availability; and the influence of large scale renewable energy projects on energy security and shifting geopolitical alliances. An overarching narrative is that optimizing the energy system simultaneously across different objectives may be impossible, i.e., lowest cost, least environmental impact, minimal downtime, regional supply. This book explores these charged topics through insights from a series of novel, new energy project case studies, and demonstrates the need for difficult political conversations within Europe and beyond by posing fundamental yet new questions about the energy security paradigm.

Networked Selves is an original analysis of one of the most defining cultural features of our time: how people turn to the Web to construct a public self. It examines the trajectory of a practice that embodies this sociocultural shift in fundamental ways: blogging. The book traces the evolution of the Web as a means to publicly perform a self through an analysis of the emergence, development, and transformation of blogging from the mid-1990s to the early years of the 2010s. It discusses processes that have shaped practices of subjectivity on the Web over two decades in two countries: the United States and France. Through this comparative analysis, the book shows that the cultural identity of blogging as a practice of subjectivity in these countries is neither inevitable nor neutral. Instead, it demonstrates that the development of the Web required the forging of various articulations between specific conceptions of self, publicness, and technology. These articulations were responses to both transformations in the daily life of actors and larger economic, political, and cultural processes-notably neoliberalization. The book also explains how the cultural imaginary around blogs came into being in the United States and how it has also functioned as a model for actors in other countries, such as France. Networked Selves discusses how and why actors in the technology field in France have gradually abandoned traditional makers of exceptionalism that were key in the development of the country's national identity and favored notions that characterize the United States instead.

From the dawn of the atomic age to today, nuclear weapons have been central to the internal dynamics of US alliances in Europe and Asia. But nuclear weapons cooperation in US alliances has varied significantly between allies and over time. This book explores the history of America's nuclear posture worldwide, delving into alliance structures and interaction during and since the end of the Cold War to uncover the underlying dynamics of nuclear weapons cooperation between the US and its allies. Combining in-depth empirical analysis with an accessible theoretical lens, the book reveals that US allies have wielded significant influence in shaping nuclear weapons cooperation with the US in ways that reflect their own, often idiosyncratic, objectives. Alliances are ecosystems of exchange rather than mere tools of external balancing, the book argues, and institutional perspectives can offer an unprecedented insight into how structured cooperation can promote policy convergence. -- .

A sharp vision of our changing world order as Covid and climate breakdown usher in a new 'survival of the fittest'. How well have different cultures and societies responded, and could this become a turning point in the flow of history? Before Covid, a new competition was already arising between alternative geopolitical models-but the context of this clash wasn't yet clear. What if it takes place on neutral ground? In a state of nature, with few or no political rules, amid quickly evolving chaos? When the greatest threat to national security is no longer other states, but the environment itself, which countries might rise to the top? This book explores how Covid-19 has already transformed the global system, and how it serves as a prelude to a planet afflicted by climate change. Bruno Macaes is one of the first to see the pandemic as the dawn of a new strategic era, heralding a profoundly changed world-political landscape. Cover image: Ludwig Meidner, 'Apocalyptic City', 1913. (c) Ludwig Meidner-Archiv, Judisches Museum der Stadt Frankfurt am Main

This books surveys the evolution of the international order in the quarter century since the end of the Cold War through the prism of developments in key regional and functional parts of the 'liberal international order 2.0' (LIO 2.0) and the roles played by two key ordering powers, the United States and the People's Republic of China. Among the partial orders analysed in the individual chapters are the regions of Europe, the Middle East and East Asia and the international regimes dealing with international trade, climate change, nuclear weapons, cyber space, and international public health emergencies, such as SARS and ZIKA. To assess developments in these various segments of the LIO 2.0, and to relate them to developments in the two other crucial levels of political order, order within nation-states, and at the global level, the volume develops a comprehensive, integrated framework of analysis that allows systematic comparison of developments across boundaries between segments and different levels of the international order. Using this framework, the book presents a holistic assessment of the trajectory of the international order over the last decades, the rise, decline, and demise of the LIO 2.0, and causes of the dangerous erosion of international order over the last decade.

Facing threats ranging from Islamist insurgencies to the Ebola pandemic, African regional actors are playing an increasingly vital role in safeguarding peace and stability across the continent. But while the African Union has demonstrated its ability to deploy forces on short notice and in difficult circumstances, the challenges posed by increasingly complex conflict zones have revealed a widening divide between the theory and practice of peacekeeping. With the AU's African Standby Force becoming fully operational in 2016, this timely and much-needed work argues that responding to these challenges will require a new and distinctively African model of peacekeeping, as well as a radical revision of the current African security framework. The first book to provide a comprehensive overview and analysis of African peace operations, The Future of African Peace Operations gives a long overdue assessment of the ways in which peacekeeping on the continent has evolved over the past decade. It will be a vital resource for policy makers, researchers and all those seeking solutions and insights into the immense security challenges which Africa is facing today.

'Vanessa Nakate continues to teach a most critical lesson. She reminds us that while we may all be in the same storm, we are not all in the same boat.' Greta Thunberg 'An indispensable voice for our future.' Malala Yousafzai 'A powerful global voice.' Angelina Jolie No matter your age, location or skin colour, you can be an effective activist. Devastating flooding, deforestation, extinction and starvation. These are the issues that not only threaten in the future, they are a reality. After witnessing some of these issues first-hand, Vanessa Nakate saw how the world's biggest polluters are asleep at the wheel, ignoring the Global South where the effects of climate injustice are most fiercely felt. Inspired by a shared vision of hope, Vanessa's commanding political voice demands attention for the biggest issue of our time and, in this rousing manifesto for change, shows how you can join her to protect our planet now and for the future. Vanessa realised the importance of her place in the climate movement after she, the only Black activist in an image with four white Europeans, was cropped out of a press photograph at Davos in 2020. This example illustrates how those who will see the biggest impacts of the climate crisis are repeatedly omitted from the conversation. As she explains, 'We are on the front line, but we are not on the front page.' Without A Bigger Picture, you're missing the full story on climate change.

This book aims to enrich the thinking and discussion in relation to the importance that citizenship, immigration, rights and private laws play in the modern world. This is in a time when social cohesion and national identity is being challenged. It will explore the impact these laws have had on Australia, European Union (EU) and Slovenia. Identity and social cohesion are contested concepts and can invoke different responses. The challenges states and the EU are likely to face in retaining and even strengthening their respective identities and social cohesion from continued geopolitical shocks, security, economic volatility and environmental degradation is likely to be formidable. These alone pose some of the most complex political and policy issues facing the world. The EU can be held up as a polity that, has developed an identity and level of cohesion, while allowing member states to retain their national identities. It has, to date, also been successful in managing the rise of nationalism. However, that has come under threat in recent times. Thus, the very foundations of liberal democracy could be diluted from the impact of these challenges. Moreover, the basic foundations of rights have, in part, already been diluted from the rise of terrorism (which is acceptable), however, the geopolitical differences pose a significant challenge, in, and of themselves.

By day, Julia Ebner works at a counter-extremism think tank, monitoring radical groups from the outside. But two years ago, she began to feel she was only seeing half the picture; she needed to get inside the groups to truly understand them. She decided to go undercover in her spare hours - late nights, holidays, weekends - adopting five different identities, and joining a dozen extremist groups from across the ideological spectrum.

Her journey would take her from a Generation Identity global strategy meeting in a pub in Mayfair, to a Neo-Nazi Music Festival on the border of Germany and Poland. She would get relationship advice from 'Trad Wives' and Jihadi Brides and hacking lessons from ISIS. She was in the channels when the alt-right began planning the lethal Charlottesville rally, and spent time in the networks that would radicalise the Christchurch terrorist.

In Going Dark, Ebner takes the reader on a deeply compulsive journey into the darkest recesses of extremist thinking, exposing how closely we are surrounded by their fanatical ideology every day, the changing nature and practice of these groups, and what is being done to counter them.

A robust yet accessible history of US involvement in the world's most dangerous waterway, and a guide for what to do about it. Lamentations that the United States is "losing" the South China Sea to China are now common. China has rapidly militarized islands and reefs, projects power across the disputed waterway, and freely harasses US allies and partners. The US has been unable to halt these processes or convince Beijing to respect the rights of smaller neighbors. But what exactly would "losing" mean? In On Dangerous Ground, Gregory B. Poling evaluates US interests in the world's most complex and dangerous maritime disputes by examining more than a century of American involvement in the South China Sea. He focuses on how the disputes there intersected and eventually intertwined with the longstanding US commitment to freedom of the seas and its evolving alliance network in Asia. He shows that these abiding national interests-defense of maritime rights and commitment to allies, particularly the Philippines-have repeatedly pulled US attention to the South China Sea. Understanding how and why is critical if the US and its allies hope to chart a course through the increasingly fraught disputes, while facing a more assertive, more capable, and far less compromising China. With an emphasis on decisions made not just in Washington and Beijing, but also in Manila and other Southeast Asian capitals, On Dangerous Ground seeks to correct the record and balance the China-centric narrative that has come to dominate the issue. It not only provides the most comprehensive account yet of America's history in the South China Sea, but it also demonstrates how that history should inform US national security policy in one of the most important waterways in the world.

This book examines the problems of boundary demarcation and its impact on territorial disputes, and offers techniques to manage and resolve the resulting conflicts.

Historically, most civil conflicts and internal wars have been directly related to boundary or territorial disputes. Cross-border discord directly affects the sustenance and welfare of local populations, often resulting in disease, impoverishment, and environmental damage as well as creating refugees. Although the impact of territorial disputes is great, they can often be settled through bilateral, and sometimes multilateral, agreements or international arbitration.

This book sets out to probe into the problems of existing techniques on boundary demarcation and to test their possible impacts on boundary and territorial disputes. Various factors and their influences on cross-border tensions are tested, either qualitatively or quantitatively. After close examination of dozens of the most significant cases, the book presents various alternative solutions to the achievement of cross-border cooperation in disputed territories. An art of avoiding war is included within the book, comprising six key schemes and five negotiating techniques. The comparative advantages, costs and benefits of each of these is analyzed and evaluated.

This book will help guide practitioners in territorial disputes and will be of interest to students of conflict management, international security, peace and conflict studies, political violence and IR in general."

By delving into the history of geopolitics and bringing us up to date with cutting-edge case studies looking at infrastructure, terrain, and maps, this book will dispel simplistic and misleading notions about the nature of how humans interact with the environment. Stops on the way will include critical geopolitics, religious geopolitics, popular geopolitics, feminist geopolitics, and, newest of all, critical quantitative geopolitics. More importantly, it uncovers new areas of research for the next generation of researchers, showing how critical and quantitative methods can be applied to look at how geography and war relate to diverse areas such as disease, sport, dispossession, and immigration.

Between January and September 2019, the government of Kazakhstan carried out five humanitarian missions to repatriate more than 600 of its citizens from Syria. Thirty-three were adult males; the rest were women and children. The women had left Kazakhstan to become part of Islamic State - either out of personal conviction, or at the request of their jihadi husbands. Some of the children had gone with them. Others had been born amidst the horror of the war in Syria and Iraq, and the consequences of violent ideology; they knew nothing else of life. Collectively, these missions were known as Operation: Jusan (the jusan shrub, or wormwood, is symbolic for Kazkahs of home on the steppe). Erlan Karin's involvement took him from the planning stages to the extensive de-radicalisation and rehabilitation programmes that followed the airlifts. Here he reveals the full story of a high-stakes mission that required sensitive diplomacy, meticulous timing and great courage. Drawing on extensive first-hand accounts from the returnees, Karin also examines their motives in joining the would-be Caliphate, and the role of women and children within it, finally weighing up the risks of returning trained terrorists to their mother country.

A major analysis of how China is attempting to become a media and information superpower around the world, seeking to shape the politics, local media, and information environments of both East Asia and the World. Since China's ascendancy toward major-power status began in the 1990s, many observers have focused on its economic growth and expanding military. China's ability was limited in projecting power over information and media and the infrastructure through which information flows. That has begun to change. Beijing's state-backed media, which once seemed incapable having a significant effect globally, has been overhauled and expanded. At a time when many democracies' media outlets are consolidating due to financial pressures, China's biggest state media outlets, like the newswire Xinhua, are modernizing, professionalizing, and expanding in attempt to reach an international audience. Overseas, Beijing also attempts to impact local media, civil society, and politics by having Chinese firms or individuals with close links buy up local media outlets, by signing content-sharing deals with local media, by expanding China's social media giants, and by controlling the wireless and wired technology through which information now flows, among other efforts. In Beijing's Global Media Offensive - a major analysis of how China is attempting to build a media and information superpower around the world, and how this media power integrates with other forms of Chinese influence - Joshua Kurlantzick focuses on how all of this is playing out in both China's immediate neighborhood - Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand - and also in the United States and many other parts of the world. He traces the ways in which China is trying to build an information and influence superpower, but also critically examines the new conventional wisdom that Beijing has enjoyed great success with these efforts. While China has worked hard to build a global media and information superpower, it often has failed to reap gains from its efforts, and has undermined itself with overly assertive, alienating diplomacy. Still, Kurlantzick contends, China's media, information and political influence campaigns will continue to expand and adapt, helping Beijing exports its political model and protect the ruling Party, and potentially damaging press freedoms, human rights, and democracy abroad. An authoritative account of how this sophisticated and multi-pronged campaign is unfolding, Beijing's Global Media Offensive provides a new window into China's attempts to make itself an information superpower.

Collaborative Advantage offers a bold new take on the drivers and consequences of globalization, both for innovation in renewable energy industries and domestic politics. In an era of rapid international economic integration, how do countries interact, innovate, and compete in industries, like energy, that are fundamental to national interests? In Collaborative Advantage, Jonas Nahm examines the development of the wind and solar industries, two historically important sectors that have long been the target of ambitious public policy. As wind and solar grew from cottage industries into lucrative global sectors of geopolitical importance, China, Germany, and the United States each developed distinct constellations of firms with starkly different technical capabilities. The book shows that globalization itself has reinforced such distinct national patterns of industrial specialization. Economically, globalization has allowed domestic firms to specialize in specific activities because of new opportunities to collaborate with firms from abroad. Politically, new possibilities for specialization have allowed firms to repurpose existing domestic institutions for application in new industries. Against the backdrop of policy efforts that have generally failed to grasp the cross-national nature of innovation, the book offers a novel explanation for both the causes of changes in the global organization of innovation and their impact on domestic politics. As interdependence in global supply chains has again come under fire in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, Collaborative Advantage challenges the notion that globalization is primarily about competition between nations, highlighting instead the central role of international collaboration in the global economy, particularly in clean energy industries critical to solving the climate crisis.

Against the backdrop of climate change and tectonic political shifts in world politics, this handbook provides an overview of the most crucial geopolitical and security related issues in the Arctic. It discusses established shareholder's policies in the Arctic - those of Russia, Canada, the USA, Denmark, and Norway - as well as the politics and interests of other significant or future stakeholders, including China and India. Furthermore, it explains the economic situation and the legal framework that governs the Arctic, and the claims that Arctic states have made in order to expand their territories and exclusive economic zones. While illustrating the collaborative approach, represented by institutions such as the Arctic council, which has often been described as an exceptional institution in this region, the contributing authors examine potential resource and power conflicts between Arctic nations, due to competing interests. The authors also address topics such as changing alliances between Arctic nations, new sea lines of communication, technological shifts, and eventually the return to power politics in the area. Written by experts on international security studies and the Arctic, as well as practitioners from government institutions and international organizations, the book provides an invaluable source of information for anyone interested in geopolitical shifts and security issues in the High North.

Drawing on never before used archival materials, Replacing the Dead exposes the history of Soviet and Russian abortion policy. It is not unusual for nations recovering from wars to incentivize their populations to raise their birthrates. The post-World War II Soviet pronatalism campaign attempted this on an unprecedented scale, aiming to replace a lost population of 27 million. Why, then, did the USSR re-legalize abortion in 1955? Mie Nakachi uses previously hidden archival data to reveal that decisions made by Stalin and Khruschev under the rubric of 'family law' created a society of broken marriages, "fatherless" children, and abortions, each totaling in the tens of millions. The government reversed laws regarding paternal responsibility, thereby encouraging men to impregnate unmarried women and widows, and blocked available contraception, overriding the advice of the medical establishment. Some 8.7 million out-of-wedlock children were born between 1945 and 1955 alone. In the absence of serious commitment to supporting Soviet women who worked full-time, the policy did extensive damage to gender relations and the welfare of women and children. Women, famous cultural figures, and Soviet professionals initiated a movement to improve women's reproductive health and make all children equal. Because Soviet leaders did not allow any major reform, an abortion culture grew among Soviet women and spread throughout the Soviet sphere, including Eastern Europe and China. Based on groundbreaking research, Replacing the Dead traces how the idea of women's right to an abortion emerged from an authoritarian society decades before it did in the West and why it remains the dominant method of birth control in present-day Russia.

In the decades since the end of the Second World War, it has been widely assumed that the western model of liberal democracy and free trade is the way the world should be governed. However, events in the early years of the twenty-first century – first, the 2003 war with Iraq and its chaotic aftermath and, second, the financial crash of 2008 – have threatened the general acceptance that continued progress under the benign (or sometimes not so benign) gaze of the western powers is the only way forwards. And as America turns inwards and Europe is beset by austerity politics and populist nationalism, the post-war consensus looks less and less secure. But is this really the worst of times?

In a forensic examination of the world we now live in, acclaimed historian Michael Burleigh sets out to answer that question. Who could have imagined that China would champion globalization and lead the battle on climate change? Or that post-Soviet Russia might present a greater threat to the world’s stability than ISIS? And while we may be on the cusp of still more dramatic change, perhaps the risks will – in time – bring not only change but a wholly positive transformation.

Incisive, robust and always insightful, The Best of Times, The Worst of Times is both a dazzling tour d’horizon of the world as it is today and a surprisingly optimistic vision of the world as it might become.

***Winner of the L.H.M. Ling Outstanding First Book Prize 2020*** ***Shortlisted for the Bread and Roses Award 2020*** Since the first atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima, the history of nuclear warfare has been tangled with the spaces and places of scientific research and weapons testing, armament and disarmament, pacifism and proliferation. Nuclear geography gives us the tools to understand these events, and the extraordinary human cost of nuclear weapons. Disarming Doomsday explores the secret history of nuclear weapons by studying the places they build and tear apart, from Los Alamos to Hiroshima. It looks at the legacy of nuclear imperialism from weapons testing on Christmas Island and across the South Pacific, as well as the lasting harm this has caused to indigenous communities and the soldiers that conducted the tests. For the first time, these complex geographies are tied together. Disarming Doomsday takes us forward, describing how geographers and geotechnology continue to shape nuclear war, and, perhaps, help to prevent it.

This book presents a challenge to the discipline of international relations (IR) to rethink itself, in the light of both its own modern origins, and the two centuries of world history that have shaped it. By tracking the development of thinking about IR, and the practice of world politics, this book shows how they relate to each other across five time periods from nineteenth-century colonialism, through two world wars, the Cold War and decolonization, to twenty-first-century globalization. It gives equal weight to both the neglected voices and histories of the Global South, and the traditionally dominant perspectives of the West, showing how they have moved from nearly complete separation to the beginnings of significant integration. The authors argue that IR needs to continue this globalizing movement if it is to cope with the rapidly emerging post-Western world order, with its more diffuse distribution of wealth, power and cultural authority.