It has been increasingly impossible to think about our changing world without coming across the term 'geopolitics'. In the wake of the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the United States, United Kingdom, and others, geopolitics has been offered as an explanation for the occupation's failure to reinvent the Iraqi state and as a blueprint for future action. But what is 'geopolitics'?

Drawing both on academic and political material, this book introduces readers to the concept of geopolitics, from the first usage of the term to its more recent reconceptualisations. The concept of geopolitics is introduced through four thematic sections - Imperial Geopolitics, Cold War Geopolitics, Geopolitics after the Cold War and Reconceptualising Geopolitics. Each section includes key writings from a range of diverse and leading authors such as Said, Agnew, Dalby, O Tuathail, Gregory, Barnett and Kaplan, and is accompanied by a critical introduction by the editors to guide the reader through the material. This Reader establishes the foundations of geopolitics while also introducing readers to the continuing significance of the concept in the 21st century.

This Reader provides an essential resource that exposes students to original writing. The Editors provide a pathway through the material with Section Introductions to assist the readers understanding of the context of the material and impacts of the writings. The readings included draw from a range of authors, writing from a range of locations. The Reader concludes with the latest changes in geopolitical thought, incorporating feminist and other perspectives.

Fear pervades dictatorial regimes. Citizens fear leaders, the regime's agents fear superiors, and leaders fear the masses. The ubiquity of fear in such regimes gives rise to the "dictator's dilemma," where autocrats do not know the level of opposition they face and cannot effectively neutralize domestic threats to their rule. The dilemma has led scholars to believe that autocracies are likely to be short-lived. Yet, some autocracies have found ways to mitigate the dictator's dilemma. As Martin K. Dimitrov shows in Dictatorship and Information, substantial variability exists in the survival of nondemocratic regimes, with single-party polities having the longest average duration. Offering a systematic theory of the institutional solutions to the dictator's dilemma, Dimitrov argues that single-party autocracies have fostered channels that allow for the confidential vertical transmission of information, while also solving the problems associated with distorted information. To explain how this all works, Dimitrov focuses on communist regimes, which have the longest average lifespan among single-party autocracies and have developed the most sophisticated information-gathering institutions. Communist regimes face a variety of threats, but the main one is the masses. Dimitrov therefore examines the origins, evolution, and internal logic of the information-collection ecosystem established by communist states to monitor popular dissent. Drawing from a rich base of evidence across multiple communist regimes and nearly 100 interviews, Dimitrov reshapes our understanding of how autocrats learn-or fail to learn-about the societies they rule, and how they maintain-or lose-power.

Nusantaria - often referred to as 'Maritime Southeast Asia' - is the world's largest archipelago and has, for centuries, been a vital cultural and trading hub. Nusantara, a Sanskrit, then Malay, word referring to an island realm, is here adapted to become Nusantaria - denoting a slightly wider world but one with a single linguistic, cultural and trading base. Nusantaria encompasses the lands and shores created by the melting of the ice following the last Ice Age. These have long been primarily the domain of the Austronesian-speaking peoples and their seafaring traditions. The surrounding waters have always been uniquely important as a corridor connecting East Asia to India, the Middle East, Europe and Africa. In this book, Philip Bowring provides a history of the world's largest and most important archipelago and its adjacent coasts. He tells the story of the peoples and lands located at this crucial maritime and cultural crossroads, from its birth following the last Ice Age to today.

Guaranteeing energy security is one of the most complex challenges of energy law and policy. Energy insecurity threatens economic development, social peace and stability. This book focuses on energy security in the strategically important region of Central Asia. The region holds huge energy reserves, but its energy systems are highly inefficient and unreliable, and thus require urgent reform. However, endemic corruption, discrimination and the strong centralization of power have so far blocked initiatives to reorganize energy supply. The case of Central Asia is uniquely relevant for understanding the informal constraints on energy law and policy. In addition, Central Asian energy insecurity illustrates the impact of geopolitics on the regulation of energy markets. The region is strategically located in Russia's sphere of influence and along China's New Silk Road. Its energy situation highlights the complex interactions amongst energy law, geopolitics and institutions.

This book is a collection of speeches presented at Singapore Perspectives 2019 by current players in international relations and leading academics and opinion shapers on how the post-Cold War world order, with emphasis on the relations between the United States and China, will affect small states like Singapore and countries in Southeast Asia - at local, national, and regional levels.It features speeches by prominent personalities, such as Singapore Minister for Foreign Affairs Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, former Singapore Foreign Minister Mr George Yeo, and former Indonesian Foreign Minister Dr Marty Natalegawa. Each speaker presents a fresh perspective on important developments in the world today.

This edited collection is a timely and in-depth perception analysis of Euro-Mediterranean relations and the EU policy actions towards the Mediterranean region. The book takes as its departure point the recent geopolitical developments in the Middle East and North Africa, urging the renewal of a Euro-Mediterranean partnership while challenging the 'Eurocentric orientation of EU policies' - a critical factor which explains why the EU has been unable to adjust its policies to the region's fast-changing complexities. The volume subsequently introduces the findings of an elite survey conducted between 2017-2018 with local stakeholders in 9 countries in the Mediterranean. The findings and policy recommendations presented in the book aim to contribute to making EU policies more responsive to major challenges in the region, more flexible on the multilateral and the bilateral level and more inclusive of key stakeholders. This book will interest EU policy-makers, civil society, academics and researchers on EU policy, as well as IR experts in general.

*Winner of the 2020 Lionel Gelber Prize* FINANCIAL TIMES, ECONOMIST, PROSPECT and EVENING STANDARD BOOK OF THE YEAR PICK A landmark book that completely transforms our understanding of the crisis of liberalism, from two pre-eminent intellectuals Why did the West, after winning the Cold War, lose its political balance? In the early 1990s, hopes for the eastward spread of liberal democracy were high. And yet the transformation of Eastern European countries gave rise to a bitter repudiation of liberalism itself, not only in the East but also back in the heartland of the West. In this brilliant work of political psychology, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that the supposed end of history turned out to be only the beginning of an Age of Imitation. Reckoning with the history of the last thirty years, they show that the most powerful force behind the wave of populist xenophobia that began in Eastern Europe stems from resentment at the post-1989 imperative to become Westernized. Through this prism, the Trump revolution represents an ironic fulfillment of the promise that the nations exiting from communist rule would come to resemble the United States. In a strange twist, Trump has elevated Putin's Russia and Orban's Hungary into models for the United States. Written by two pre-eminent intellectuals bridging the East/West divide, The Light that Failed is a landmark book that sheds light on the extraordinary history of our Age of Imitation.

Winner of the International Studies Association's Harold and Margaret Sprout Award 2008 for the best book on international environmental problems. This pioneering study examines the impacts of neoliberal global governance on forests and provides an exhaustive overview of international forest politics: Intergovernmental Panel on Forests World Commission on Forests and Sustainable Development Intergovernmental Forum on Forests United Nations Forum on Forests Forest Certification New policies to address illegal logging World Bank's forests strategy Convention on Biological Diversity - and other international forest-related processes The book is an essential reference for students of global environmental politics and required reading for forest policy makers. It concludes by arguing for a democratization of global governance and a fundamental restructuring of the regulatory environment so that final decision making authority is restored to the local level. Driven by concern at what forest loss means for communities and future generations, this is a book that stands to make a difference.

To understand the current difficulties and future prospects of European integration, multiple perspectives are required. The essays in this collection explore historical and geopolitical aspects of European integration and their relevance to interpretations of the current climate. They also examine the different regional dynamics of integration and the attitudes that result from those experiences, including those in European peripheries which are so often overshadowed by the dominant centres. In drawing all of these perspectives together, the collection allows the reader to assess the EU's current crisis in context.

Cet ouvrage decrit la politique africaine du Maroc sous le regne de Mohammed VI, et demontre comment la construction d'une identite de role autour de la notion de "juste milieu" affecte les representations du Royaume de son environnement international. This book describes Morocco's African policy under the reign of Mohammed VI, and demonstrates how the construction of a role identity around the notion of "golden mean" affects the Kingdom's representations of its international environment.

First published in 1985, this book is about an important episode, and two of its sequels, in Beijing's long struggle to achieve two goals, by force if necessary. First, to prevent the US from detaching Taiwan from China and establishing Taiwan as a universally recognized separate and independent country, as Russia and the Soviet Union were able to detach and establish Outer Mongolia; and second, to end the Chinese Civil War by bringing Taiwan under the rule of Beijing and the Chinese Communist Party.

Shaper Nations provides illuminating perspectives on the national strategies of eight emerging and established countries that are shaping global politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The volume's authors offer a unique viewpoint: they live and work primarily in the country about which they write, bringing an insider's feel for national debates and politics. The conventional wisdom on national strategy suggests that these states have clear central authority, coherently connect means to ends, and focus on their geopolitical environment. These essays suggest a different conclusion. In seven key countries-Brazil, China, Germany, India, Israel, Russia, and Turkey-strategy is dominated by nonstate threats, domestic politics, the distorting effect of history and national identity, economic development concerns, and the sheer difficulty, in the face of many powerful internal and external constraints, of pursuing an effective national strategy. The shapers represent a new trend in the international arena with important consequences. Among them is a more uncertain world in which countries concentrate on their own development rather than on shared problems that might divert precious resources, and attend more to regional than to global order. In responding to these shaper states, the United States must understand the sources of their national strategies in determining its own role on the global stage.

Designed to complement the main themes of any introductory course, Snow's bestselling text presents original case studies that survey the state of the international system and look in-depth at issues of current interest. The cases are extremely timely, geopolitically diverse, accessibly written, and of high interest and salience amidst today's headlines. New examples include the pandemic, racial inequality, foreign interference in elections, cyberwar, and global warming.

In Mexico City, as in many other large cities worldwide, contemporary modes of urban governance have overwhelmingly benefited affluent populations and widened social inequalities. Disinvestment from social housing and rent-seeking developments by real estate companies and land speculators have resulted in the displacement of low-income populations to the urban periphery. Public social spaces have been eliminated to make way for luxury apartments and business interests. Low-income neighbourhoods are often stigmatized by dominant social forces to justify their demolition. The urban poor have however negotiated and resisted these developments in a range of ways. This text explores these urban dynamics in Mexico City and beyond, looking at the material and symbolic mechanisms through which urban marginality is produced and contested. It seeks to understand how things might be otherwise, how the city might be geared towards more inclusive forms of belonging and citizenship.

War and the City examines the geopolitical significance of the Lebanese Civil War through a micro-level exploration of how the urban landscape of Beirut was transformed by the conflict. Focusing on the initial phase of the war in 1975 and 1976, the volume also draws significant parallels with more recent occurrences of internecine conflict and with the historical legacies of Lebanon's colonial past. While most scholarship has thus far focused on post-war reconstruction of the city, the initial process of destruction has been neglected. This volume thus moves away from formal macro-level geopolitical analysis, to propose instead an exploration of the urban nature of conflict through its spaces, infrastructures, bodies and materialities. The book utilizes urban viewpoints in order to highlight the nature of sovereignty in Lebanon and how it is inscribed on the urban landscape. War and the City presents a view of geopolitics as not only shaping narratives of international relations, but as crucially reshaping the space of cities.

A large and widening gap has opened between Western democracies' international ambitions and their domestic political capacity to support them. On issues ranging from immigration and international trade to national security, new political parties on the left and the right are rejecting the core foreign policy principles that Western governments have championed for over half a century. Much of the debate over the weakening of the Western liberal order has focused on recent changes: Donald Trump's presidency, Britain's vote to leave the European Union, and the surge of nationalist sentiment in France, Germany, and other Western democracies. In Geopolitics and Democracy, Peter Trubowitz and Brian Burgoon provide a powerful new explanation for the rise of anti-globalism in the West. Combining a novel theoretical framework and empirical strategy, Trubowitz and Burgoon show that support for globalism has been receding for 30 years in Western parties and legislatures. They trace the anti-globalist backlash to foreign policy decisions that mainstream parties and party elites made after the end of the Cold War. These decisions sought to globalize markets and pool sovereignty at the supranational level while applying neoliberal reforms to social protections and guarantees at home-a combination of policies that succeeded in expanding the Western liberal order, but at the cost of mounting public discontent and political fragmentation. At a time when problems of great power rivalry, spheres of influence, and reactionary nationalism have returned, Geopolitics and Democracy reveals how domestic support for international engagement during the long East-West geopolitical contest was contingent upon social protections within Western democracies. In the absence of a renewed commitment to those social purposes, Western democracies will struggle to find a collective grand strategy that their domestic publics will support.

"Damned if you do; damned if you don't" voices the strategic impasse the USA finds itself in today. Liberal interventionism and globalization-the two pillars of the international system-seem not to work. Explaining the inability of Western powers to enact wise initiatives, Corradi explores the de-coupling of political systems: we are connected with each other but disconnected from policy makers. The paradox of increased connectivity and collective disengagement sets a perverse dynamic between publics and elites, with a serious impact on world affairs. Corradi analyzes the social bases of present dilemmas and how incipient decline can be managed, and paralysis overcome.

This political analysis exposes the fanciful logic that the United States can use nuclear weapons to vanquish nuclear adversaries or influence them when employing various coercive tactics. During the Cold War, American policymakers sought nuclear advantages to offset an alleged Soviet edge. Policymakers hoped that US nuclear capabilities would safeguard deterrence, when backed perhaps by a set of coercive tactics. But policymakers also hedged their bets with plans to fight a nuclear war to their advantage should deterrence fail. In The False Promise of Superiority, James H. Lebovic argues that the US approach was fraught with peril and remains so today. He contends that the United States can neither simply impose its will on nuclear adversaries nor safeguard deterrence using these same coercive tactics without risking severe, counterproductive effects. As Lebovic shows, the current faith in US nuclear superiority could produce the disastrous consequences that US weapons and tactics are meant to avoid. This book concludes that US interests are best served when policymakers resist the temptation to use, or prepare to use, nuclear weapons first or to brandish nuclear weapons for coercive effect.

A unique analysis of the numbers that came to define Chinese politics and how this quantification evolved over time. For decades, a few numbers came to define Chinese politics-until those numbers did not count what mattered and what they counted did not measure up. Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts argues that the Chinese government adopted a system of limited, quantified vision in order to survive the disasters unleashed by Mao Zedong's ideological leadership. Jeremy Wallace explains how that system worked and analyzes how the problems that accumulated in its blind spots led Xi Jinping to take drastic action. Xi's neopolitical turn-aggressive anti-corruption campaigns, reassertion of party authority, and personalization of power-is an attempt fix the problems of the prior system, as well as a hedge against an inability to do so. The book argues that while of course dictators stay in power through coercion and cooptation, they also do so by convincing their populations and themselves of their right to rule. Quantification is one tool in this persuasive arsenal, but it comes with its own perils.

The book deals with historical, social, economic, political, and international causes, contexts, and consequences of inequalities and conflicts in Africa. In particular, the book is to puts conflicts and turbulences in Ethiopia in a broader, African comparative perspective. It also identifies and analyzes multiple causes of conflicts which cannot be studied only as a result of one variable. Inequalities and conflicts have a whole set of causes stemming from historically inherited, as well as global, international, socio-economic, political and other contexts which cannot be analyzed separately. This book is vital for anyone who is interested in the study of African history, comparative politics, and conflict in Africa.

The 21st century has been characterized by great turbulence, climate change, a global pandemic, and democratic decay. Drawing on post-structural political theory, this book explores two dominant concepts used to make sense of our disturbed reality: the state and the network. The book explains how they are inextricably interwoven, while showing why they complicate the way we interpret our present. In seeking a better understanding of today's world, this book argues that we need to pull apart the familiar lines of our maps. By looking beneath and across these lines, an 'unmapping' presents new insights and opportunities for a better future.

An in-depth account of why countries' treacherous foreign policies often have harmless origins, how this predicament shapes international politics, and what to do about it. The increasing unpredictability of state behavior in recent world politics is a surprising development. The uncertainty that results intensifies conflict and stymies trust. In Volatile States in International Politics, Eleonora Mattiacci offers the first account of this issue that investigates which states have been volatile and why. Leveraging statistical techniques and archival data in a probing analysis of rivals and allies since the end of World War II, she rejects attempts at dismissing volatility as reflecting mercurial leaders or intractable issues. Instead, Mattiacci explains that a state acts in a volatile manner when its clashing domestic interests leverage power to achieve their goals on the international arena. In demonstrating states' potential for volatile behaviors, she asks us to reconsider how much we really know about change and instability in international politics. When properly understood, she shows, volatile behavior can become less confusing for observers and potentially less dangerous. This book offers novel, evidence-based tools to cope with volatility in the global arena.

This volume seeks to uncover and discuss the links between genocide, geopolitics and transnational networks. By studying the destruction of the Union Patrotica (UP) in Colombia - a process usually regarded as one of the extreme by-products of the Colombian armed conflict- through the lens of genocide studies, Gomez-Suarez challenges mainstream international relations, genocide and Colombian armed conflict studies. Moving beyond the analysis of the Colombian case, the book offers a broader interdisciplinary theoretical framework that also attends to transnational relations of perpetrators and resisters and the political economy of affective-dispositions for mapping genocidal conjuncture. Methodologically, the text aims to present a re-interpretation of what constitutes genocide beyond its legal definition and turn towards its political and ethical dimensions to create a conceptual framework in which genocide appears to turn ever more into a decentralized network of various actors that contributed to a genocidal mentality, which, ultimately, enable the destruction of the civil society networks. This work will be an important contribution to both the debates on genocide and international relations and the study of global connectivities.