Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring The Arctic is demanding global attention. It is warming, melting, and thawing in a manner that threatens fundamental state-change. For communities that call the Arctic 'home' this is unwelcome. A warming Arctic brings with it the spectre of costly disruption and interference in indigenous lives and communal welfare. For others, the disappearance of sea ice makes the Arctic appear more accessible and less remote. This also brings with it dangers such as the prospect of a new era of great power rivalries involving China, Russia, and the United States. Submarine and long-range bomber patrolling are now commonplace. New terms such as 'global Arctic' are being used to capture the dynamic of change while others muse about the 'return of a Cold War'. The reality is inevitably more complex. The physical geography of the Arctic is highly varied and variable. Environmental change brings opportunities for indigenous and non-indigenous life-forms to survive and even thrive. The Arctic's four million people are not helpless pawns in a game of global geopolitics. The Arctic is not only a resource hotspot but also a place where sustainable energy systems are being introduced. A warming Arctic with less ice and permafrost is not unique in the longer history of the Earth either. The Arctic is a complex space. In this Very Short Introduction, Klaus Dodds and Jamie Woodward consider the major dimensions of the region and the linkages beyond - from the geopolitical to the environmental. They examine the causes, drivers, and effects of cultural, physical, political, and economic change, and ponder the future of the Arctic. As they show, it is a future which will affect us all. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Decolonisation and Regional Geopolitics argues that as much as the 'Congo crisis' (1960-1965) was a Cold War battleground, so too was it a battleground for Southern Africa's decolonisation. This book provides a transnational history of African decolonisation, apartheid diplomacy, and Southern African nationalist movements. It answers three central questions. First, what was the nature of South African involvement in the Congo crisis? Second, what was the rationale for this involvement? Third, how did South Africans perceive the crisis? Innovatively, the book shifts the focus on the Congo crisis away from Cold War intervention and centres it around African decolonisation and regional geopolitics.

The events of the Arab Uprisings posed an existential challenge to sovereign power across the Middle East. Whilst popular movements resulted in the toppling of authoritarian rule in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, other regimes were able to withstand these pressures. This book questions why some regimes fell whilst others were able to survive. Drawing on the work of political theorists such as Agamben and Arendt, Mabon explores the ways in which sovereign power is contested, resulting in the fragmentation of political projects across the region. Combining an innovative theoretical approach with interviews with people across the region and beyond, Mabon paints a picture of Middle Eastern politics dominated by elites seeking to maintain power and wealth, seemingly at whatever cost. This, for Mabon, is a consequence of the emergence and development of particular visions of political projects that harness or marginalise identities, communities, ideologies and faiths as mechanisms designed to ensure their survival. This book is essential reading for those interested in understanding why the uprisings took place, their geopolitical consequences, and why they are likely to happen again. -- .

What makes a state? This question has attracted more and more attention in recent years with Catalan's illegal vote for independence from Spain and Palestine's ongoing search for international recognition. And while Scotland chose to remain with the United Kingdom, discussions of independence have only continued as the ramifications of the later Brexit vote begin to set in. As James Ker-Lindsay and Mikulas Fabry show in this new addition to the What Everyone Needs to Know (R) series, the road to statehood does not run smooth. Declaring independence is only the first step; gaining both local and global acceptance is necessary before a state can become truly independent. The prospect of losing territory is usually not welcomed by the parent state, and any such threat to an existing culture and its economy is often met with resistance-armed or otherwise. Beyond this immediate conflict, the international community often refuses to accept new states without proof of defined territory, a settled population, and effective government, which frequently translates to a democratic one with demonstrated respect for human rights. Covering the legal, political, and practical issues of secession and state creation, Ker-Lindsay and Fabry provide an essential guide to this timely topic.

Barack Obama's foreign policy has failed but the American strategic mind has not yet closed. In After Obama, Robert Singh examines how and why US influence has weakened and contributed to the erosion of the world America made, endangering international order and liberal values. A well-intentioned but naive strategy of engagement has encouraged US adversaries such as Russia, China and Iran to assert themselves while allowing Western alliances to fray. But, challenging claims of an inevitable American decline, Singh argues that US leadership is a matter of will as much as wallet. Despite partisan polarization at home and the rise of the rest abroad, Washington can renew American leadership and, through a New American Internationalism, pave a path to the restoration of global order. Timely and provocative, the book offers a powerful critique of the Obama Doctrine and a call for strategic resolution in place of 'leading from behind'.

Barack Obama's foreign policy has failed but the American strategic mind has not yet closed. In After Obama, Robert Singh examines how and why US influence has weakened and contributed to the erosion of the world America made, endangering international order and liberal values. A well-intentioned but naive strategy of engagement has encouraged US adversaries such as Russia, China and Iran to assert themselves while allowing Western alliances to fray. But, challenging claims of an inevitable American decline, Singh argues that US leadership is a matter of will as much as wallet. Despite partisan polarization at home and the rise of the rest abroad, Washington can renew American leadership and, through a New American Internationalism, pave a path to the restoration of global order. Timely and provocative, the book offers a powerful critique of the Obama Doctrine and a call for strategic resolution in place of 'leading from behind'.

The NATO occupation of Afghanistan is over, and a balance-sheet can be drawn. These essays on war and peace in the region reveal Tariq Ali at his sharpest and most prescient. Rarely has there been such an enthusiastic display of international unity as that which greeted the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Compared to Iraq, Afghanistan became the 'good war.' But a stalemate ensued, and the Taliban waited out the NATO contingents. Today, with the collapse of the puppet regime in Kabul, what does the future hold for a traumatised Afghan people? Will China become the dominant influence in the country? Tariq Ali has been following the wars on Afghanistan for forty years. He opposed Soviet military intervention in 1979, predicting disaster. He was also a fierce critic of its NATO sequel, 'Operation Enduring Freedom'. In a series of trenchant commentaries, he described the tragedies inflicted on Afghanistan, as well as the semi-Talibanisation and militarisation of neighbouring Pakistan. Most of his predictions proved accurate. The Forty Year War in Afghanistan brings together the best of his writings and includes a new introduction.

Rather than a natural frontier between natural enemies, this book approaches the English Channel as a shared space, which mediated the multiple relations between France and England in the long eighteenth century, in both a metaphorical and a material sense. Instead of arguing that Britain's insularity kept it spatially and intellectually segregated from the Continent, Renaud Morieux focuses on the Channel as a zone of contact. The 'narrow sea' was a shifting frontier between states and a space of exchange between populations. This richly textured history shows how the maritime border was imagined by cartographers and legal theorists, delimited by state administrators and transgressed by migrants. It approaches French and English fishermen, smugglers and merchants as transnational actors, whose everyday practices were entangled. The variation of scales of analysis enriches theoretical and empirical understandings of Anglo-French relations, and reassesses the question of Britain's deep historical connections with Europe.

The NEBI Yearbook 2000 aims to provide a balanced picture of both the integrationist opportunities and disintegrationist pressures in the North European and Baltic Sea area - a region with over 50 million inhabitants and great economic and trading potentials. It brings together a wide range of scientific methods and perspectives in addition to a comprehensive statistical section with information found nowhere else. The result is a unique source of up-to-date knowledge of this increasingly important European region.

A story about family, politics and journeying through a fractured country in a delicate time, The Havoc of Choice explores the long reaching effects of colonisation and corruption within the context of a singular household and the disparate experiences of class and clan they encapsulate. 2007, Kenya. Long held captive by her father's shadow of corruption, Kavata has spent her life suffocated by political machinations. When her husband decides to run in the next election, these shadows threaten to consume her home. Unable to bear this darkness, Kavata plots to escape. As her family falls apart, so too does her country. In the wake of Kenya's post-election turmoil, Kavata and her family must find their way back to each other across a landscape of wide-spread confusion, desperation, and heartrending loss. One of the first pieces of long fiction from Kenya to explore its 2007 post-election violence (PEV) in such detail, The Havoc of Choice is a delicate and deeply personal attempt to understand the root of this spontaneous yet organised conflict and to figure out what healing looks like for the people of Kenya.

The Mexico-Guatemala border has emerged as a geopolitical hotspot of illicit flows of both goods and people. Contraband Corridor seeks to understand the border from the perspective of its long-term inhabitants, including petty smugglers of corn, clothing, and coffee. Challenging assumptions regarding security, trade, and illegality, Rebecca Berke Galemba details how these residents engage in and justify extralegal practices in the context of heightened border security, restricted economic opportunities, and exclusionary trade policies. Rather than assuming that extralegal activities necessarily threaten the state and formal economy, Galemba's ethnography illustrates the complex ways that the formal, informal, legal, and illegal economies intertwine. Smuggling basic commodities across the border provides a means for borderland peasants to make a living while neoliberal economic policies decimate agricultural livelihoods. Yet smuggling also exacerbates prevailing inequalities, obstructs the possibility of more substantive political and economic change, and provides low-risk economic benefits to businesses, state agents, and other illicit actors, often at the expense of border residents. Galemba argues that securitized neoliberalism values certain economic activities and actors while excluding and criminalizing others, even when the informal and illicit economy is increasingly one of the poor's only remaining options. Contraband Corridor contends that security, neoliberalism, and illegality are interdependent in complex ways, yet how they unfold depends on negotiations between diverse border actors.

Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, today's world leaders are abandoning disarmament treaties, building up their nuclear arsenals, and exchanging threats of nuclear strikes. To survive this new atomic age, we must relearn the lessons of the most dangerous moment of the Cold War: the Cuban missile crisis. Serhii Plokhy's Nuclear Folly offers an international perspective on the crisis, tracing the tortuous decision-making that produced and then resolved it, which involved John Kennedy and his advisers, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, and their commanders on the ground. In breathtaking detail, Plokhy vividly recounts the young JFK being played by the canny Khrushchev; the hotheaded Castro willing to defy the USSR and threatening to align himself with China; the Soviet troops on the ground clearing jungle foliage in the tropical heat, and desperately trying to conceal nuclear installations on Cuba, which were nonetheless easily spotted by U-2 spy planes; and the hair-raising near misses at sea that nearly caused a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine to fire its weapons. More often than not, the Americans and Soviets misread each other, operated under false information, and came perilously close to nuclear catastrophe. Despite these errors, nuclear war was ultimately avoided for one central reason: fear, and the realization that any escalation on either the Soviets' or the Americans' part would lead to mutual destruction. Drawing on a range of Soviet archival sources, including previously classified KGB documents, as well as White House tapes, Plokhy masterfully illustrates the drama and anxiety of those tense days, and provides a way for us to grapple with the problems posed in our present day.

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE STANFORD DOLMAN TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR** Alev Scott's odyssey began when she looked beyond Turkey's borders for contemporary traces of the Ottoman Empire. Their 800-year rule ended a century ago - and yet, travelling through twelve countries from Kosovo to Greece to Palestine, she uncovers a legacy that's vital and relevant; where medieval ethnic diversity meets 21st century nationalism, and displaced people seek new identities. It's a story of surprises. An acolyte of Erdogan in Christian-majority Serbia confirms the wide-reaching appeal of his authoritarian leadership. A Druze warlord explains the secretive religious faction in the heart of the Middle East. The palimpsest-like streets of Jerusalem's Old Town hint at the Ottoman co-existence of Muslims and Jews. And in Turkish Cyprus Alev Scott rediscovers a childhood home. In every community, history is present as a dynamic force. Faced by questions of exile, diaspora and collective memory, Alev Scott searches for answers from the cafes of Beirut to the refugee camps of Lesbos. She uncovers in Erdogan's nouveau-Ottoman Turkey a version of the nostalgic utopias sold to disillusioned voters in Europe and the U.S. And yet - as she relates with compassion, insight and humour - diversity is the enduring, endangered heart of this fascinating region.

War does not stop when the armed conflict ends. This compelling eyewitness account of a key political crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2007 demonstrates how interventions from foreign powers to end armed conflict can create new forms of conflict that are not only as determined and resilient, but can lead groups to challenge the power of fragile states through political and legal means. Countering such challenges is an integral but often ignored part of peace processes. How do these nonviolent wars evolve? How can the power of fragile states be challenged through nonviolent means in the aftermath of armed conflict? And what is the role of diplomacy in countering such challenges? This book offers key insights for policy makers dealing with fragile states who seek answers to such questions.

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.

An assessment of Russia that suggests that we should look beyond traditional means of power to understand its strength and capacity to disrupt international politics. Too often, we are told that Russia plays a weak hand well. But, perhaps the nations cards are better than we know. Russia ranks significantly behind the US and China by traditional measures of power: GDP, population size and health, and military might. Yet 25 years removed from its mid-1990s nadir following the collapse of the USSR, Russia has become a supremely disruptive force in world politics. Kathryn E. Stoner assesses the resurrection of Russia and argues that we should look beyond traditional means of power to assess its strength in global affairs. Taking into account how Russian domestic politics under Vladimir Putin influence its foreign policy, Stoner explains how Russia has battled its way back to international prominence. From Russias seizure of the Crimea from Ukraine to its military support for the Assad regime in Syria, the country has reasserted itself as a major global power. Stoner examines these developments and more in tackling the big questions about Russias turnaround and global future. Stoner marshals data on Russias political, economic, and social development and uncovers key insights from its domestic politics. Russian people are wealthier than the Chinese, debt is low, and fiscal policy is good despite sanctions and the volatile global economy. Vladimir Putins autocratic regime faces virtually no organized domestic opposition. Yet, mindful of maintaining control at home, Russia under Putin also uses its varied power capacities to extend its influence abroad. While we often underestimate Russias global influence, the consequences are evident in the disruption of politics in the US, Syria, and Venezuela, to name a few. Russia Resurrected is an eye-opening reassessment of the country, identifying the actual sources of its power in international politics and why it has been able to redefine the post-Cold War global order.

In this provocative book, renowned public intellectual Ivan Krastev reflects on the future of the European Union-and its potential lack of a future. With far-right nationalist parties on the rise across the continent and the United Kingdom planning for Brexit, the European Union is in disarray and plagued by doubts as never before. Krastev includes chapters devoted to Europe's major problems (especially the political destabilization sparked by the more than 1.3 million migrants from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia), the spread of right-wing populism (taking into account the election of Donald Trump in the United States), and the thorny issues facing member states on the eastern flank of the EU (including the threat posed by Vladimir Putin's Russia). He concludes by reflecting on the ominous political, economic, and geopolitical future that would await the continent if the Union itself begins to disintegrate.

On 19 August 2014, a member of the jihadist rebel group known as ISIS uploaded a video to YouTube. Entitled 'Message to America', the clip depicted the final moments of the life of kidnapped American journalist James Foley - and the gruesome aftermath of his beheading at the hands of a masked executioner. Foley's murder - and the other choreographed killings that would follow - captured the world's attention, and Islamic State's campaign of kidnapping exploded into regional war. Based on three years of on-the-ground reporting from every side of the Syrian conflict, Hunting Season is James Harkin's quest to uncover the truth about how and why Islamic State came to target Western hostages, who was behind it and why almost no one outside a small group of people knew anything about it until it was too late. He reveals how the campaign of kidnapping and the development of Islamic State were joined at the hip from the beginning. The book is an utterly absorbing account of the world's newest and most powerful terror franchise and what it means for modern war.

This book furthers academic scholarship in cutting-edge areas of geographical and geopolitical writing by drawing on a series of little-studied undersea living projects conducted by the US Navy during the Cold War (Project Genesis, Sealab I, II and III). Supported by an engaging and novel empirical setting, the central themes of the book revolve around the practice and construct of 'territory', 'terrain', the 'elemental' and the interrelationships between these material phenomenon and both human and non-human bodies. Furthermore, the book will point to future research trajectories in the form of 'extreme geographies' to better understand living practices in a world that is increasingly submerged and extreme.

From the Palestinian struggle against Israeli Apartheid, to First Nations' mass campaigns against pipeline construction in North America, Indigenous peoples are at the forefront of some of the crucial struggles of our age. Rich with their distinct histories and cultures, they are connected by the shared enemy they face: settler colonialism. In this introduction to the subject, Sai Englert highlights the ways in which settler colonialism has and continues to shape our global economic and political order. From the rapacious accumulation of resources, land, and labour, through Indigenous dispossession and genocide, to the development of racism as a form of social control, settler colonialism is deeply connected to many of today's social ills. To understand settler colonialism as an ongoing process, is therefore also to start engaging with contemporary social movements and solidarity campaigns differently. It is to start seeing how distinct struggles for justice and liberation are intertwined.

Building Transnational Networks tells the story of how a broad group of civil society organizations came together to contest free trade negotiations in the Americas. Based on research in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, the United States, and Canada, it offers a full hemispheric analysis of the creation of civil society networks as they engaged in the politics of trade. The author demonstrates that most effective transnational actors are the ones with strong domestic roots and that 'southern' organizations occupy key nodes in trade networks. The fragility of activist networks stems from changes in the domestic political context as well as from characteristics of the organizations, the networks, or the actions they undertake. These findings advance and suggest new understandings of transnational collective action.

After the shock of the conflict against the Indian Army in Sikkim in 1967 and the loss of almost 400 soldiers, the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) pressed for resolving all territorial disputes by discussion only, without using force or firearms against one another. This book analyses the process of bulletless border management by the Indian Army against the PLA, presenting the history of this process over the course of half a century.

Climate Terror engages with a highly differentiated geographical politics of global warming. It explores how fear-inducing climate change discourses could result in new forms of dependencies, domination and militarised 'climate security'.

The definitive guide to the world's most contested region. The Indo-Pacific is both a place and an idea. It is the region central to global prosperity and security. It is also a metaphor for collective action. If diplomacy fails, it will be the theatre of the first general war since 1945. But if its future can be secured, the Indo-Pacific will flourish as a shared space, the centre of gravity in a connected world. What we call different parts of the world - Asia, Europe, the Middle East - seems innocuous. But the name of a region is totemic, guiding the decisions of leaders and the story of international order, war and peace. In recent years, the label 'Indo-Pacific' has suddenly gained wide use. But what does it really mean? Written by a globally-renowned expert, Indo-Pacific Empire is the definitive guide to tensions in the region. It deftly weaves together history, geopolitics, cartography, military strategy, economics, games and propaganda to address a vital question: how can China's dominance be prevented without war? -- .