The South China Sea is a major strategic waterway for trade and oil shipments to Japan, Korea as well as southern China. It has been the focus of a maritime dispute which has continued now for over six decades, with competing claims from China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia and Brunei. Recently China has become more assertive in pressing its claims - harassing Vietnamese fishing vessels and seizing reefs in the Philippine claim zone. China has insisted that it has "indisputable sovereignty" over the area and has threatened to enforce its claim. All of this is unsettling and draws in the United States which is concerned about freedom of navigation in the area. The US has been supporting the Philippines and has been developing security ties with Vietnam as a check upon China. This book examines the conflict potential of the current dispute, it discusses how the main claimants and the United States view the issue, and assesses the prospects for a resolution of the problem.

Using the examples of the Ottoman Empire, Spain, Austria, France and Germany, this book describes the principal geopolitical features of the expansionist state. It then presents a model of the operation of the expansionist process over space and time. It goes on to apply the geopolitical characteristics of the model to the period after 1945 in order to assess the extent to which the Soviet Union might be considered as being an expansionist state, either actually or potentially. This latter question is obviously once more extremely relevant with the current events in Ukraine.

Alcohol use is complex and multifaceted. Our understanding must be also. Alcohol use, both problematic and not, can be understood at many levels - from basic biological systems through to global public health interventions. To provide the multi-level perspective needed to address this complexity, the Handbook of Alcohol Use draws together an eclectic set of authors, including both researchers and practitioners, to examine the causes, processes and effects of alcohol consumption. Specifically, this book approaches the topic from biological, individual cognition, small group/systems, and domestic/global population perspectives. Each examines alcohol use differently and each offers its own ways to combat problematic behavior. While these alternative viewpoints are sometimes construed as incompatible or antagonistic, the current volume also explores how they can be complimentary. In summary, the Handbook of Alcohol Use brings together an international group of experts to explore how alcohol use can be understood from various perspectives and how these conceptualizations relate. In doing so, it allows us to understand alcohol consumption, and our responses to it, more from an account which spans 'from synapse to society'.

Global governance has come under increasing pressure since the end of the Cold War. In some issue areas, these pressures have led to significant changes in the architecture of governance institutions. In others, institutions have resisted pressures for change. This volume explores what accounts for this divergence in architecture by identifying three modes of governance: hierarchies, networks, and markets. The authors apply these ideal types to different issue areas in order to assess how global governance has changed and why. In most issue areas, hierarchical modes of governance, established after World War II, have given way to alternative forms of organization focused on market or network-based architectures. Each chapter explores whether these changes are likely to lead to more or less effective global governance across a wide range of issue areas. This provides a novel and coherent theoretical framework for analysing change in global governance. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Through a detailed account of the West German census controversies of the 1980s, this book offers a robust and geographical sense of what effective 'resistance' and 'empowerment' might mean in an age when the intensification of 'surveillance society' appears to render us ever more passive and incapable of controlling our own registration.

There are important changes in regional and global demographics ahead of us. A profound rise in the number of citizens in the Indian Ocean Region in the next fifty years will have significant impacts on the state, on the nature and operation of markets and the neo-liberal framework they operate in, and raise new challenges for regional security. This book considers the insufficient dialogue between ever increasing and closer connections between geo-economics and geo-securities in the Indian Ocean Region, and highlights some of the challenges. This book takes a broader understanding of security than what is usually meant in more traditional security frameworks in politics and international relations. Economic and politics are integrally, and obviously, related. This book considers regional themes such as discourses around strategic competition; models of regional cooperative security; Indian Ocean Region domestic economies/ contexts and the military industrial complex; and regional models of identity and cultural belonging. Regions and regionalisms are increasingly being used to challenge power, and the existence of any uniform model of macro-politics and macro-economics (whether it be neo-liberalism or otherwise). Most importantly, these discussions of region enable us to celebrate the similarities that we share as neighbours (in a real geographical sense) and to comprehend and respect these differences in these rich regional communities of markets, cultures, and securities. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of the Indian Ocean Region.

Given the consolidated position of English as the international language for communication in business and management, as well as in institutional contexts, this book depicts a wide panorama of encounters where identity, image and reputation are a key focus in creating effective interactions. The main theme of the work is how temporal and spatial meaning representations in language reflect and, in turn, construct these personal, professional and corporate identities. From each chapter different sociolinguistic realities emerge which affect English, as it is used by both native and non-native speakers, especially in the relationship between local or national cultures and the global professional discourse community. In this context not only have domain-specific language features been analysed, but also the communication strategies and interactive patterns at work in how different geo-political cultures construe, manifest and adjust their identities over the course of time and in varying physical, virtual, and cognitive spaces.

Following the financial crisis and subsequent impacts of economic slowdown and austerity, the emergence of new local governance models and innovation is a very timely issue. The same goes for identifying new types of funding schemes and fiscal models prompted by austerity with the reduction in financial resources for local governments. This book offers a broad perspective on some of the organizational and financial problems faced by cities and local governments across Europe and analyses the reactions and reforms implemented to address current economic and public finance conditions. The geographical coverage of the case studies, multidisciplinary background of the contributing authors and focus on a multiplicity of issues and challenges that confront local governments, not just financial issues as is often the case, means this book is relevant to a wide readership. The book is written for post-graduate students, advanced undergraduates, and researchers in the multidisciplinary field of local government studies (Public Administration, Geography, Political Science, Law, Economy and Sociology), as well as practitioners working in local government institutions.

This book provides a new point of departure for thinking critically and creatively about international borders and the perceived need to defend them, adopting an innovative 'preferred future' methodology. The authors critically examine a range of 'border domains' including law, citizenship, governance, morality, security, economy, culture and civil society, which provide the means and justification for contemporary border controls, and identify early signs that the dynamics of sovereignty and borders are being fundamentally transformed under conditions of neoliberal globalization. The goal is to locate potential pathways towards the preferred future of relaxed borders, and provide a foundation for a progressive politics dedicated to moving beyond mere critique of the harm and inequity of border controls and capable of envisaging a differently bordered world. This book will be of considerable interest to students of border studies, migration, criminology, peacemaking, critical security studies and IR in general.

At the turn of the millennium the state of Europe is fluid and contested, yet how this affects the everyday lives of European peoples and the ways they experience the social world they live in remains largely unexplored. Drawing upon ethnographic information from diverse European settings, this volume points to the contradictions that the project of a "Europe without boundaries" involves. In illustrating how the removal of political boundaries can create other boundaries, the articles in this volume provide alternatives to recent theorising on complexity, which takes little account of human agency.

The 'Western' green movement has grown rapidly in the last three decades: green ministers are in government in several European countries, Greenpeace has millions of paying supporters, and green direct action against roads, GM crops, the WTO and neo-liberalism, have become ubiquitous. The author argues that 'greens' share a common ideological framework but are divided over strategy. Using social movement theory and drawing on research from many countries, he shows how the green movement became more differentiated over time, as groups had to face the task of deciding what kind of action was appropriate. In the breadth of its coverage and its novel focus on the relationship between green ideas and action, this book makes an important contribution to the understanding of green politics.

Written by one of the world's leading political geographers, this fully revised and updated textbook examines the dramatic changes wrought by ideological, economic, socio-cultural and demographic changes unleashed since the end of the Cold War. Saul Cohen considers these forces in the context of their human and physical settings, and explores their geographical influence on foreign policy and international relations.

Bringing together interconnected discussions to make explicit the complexity of the Arctic region, this book offers a legal discussion of the ongoing territorial disputes and challenges in order to frame their impact into the viability of different governance strategies that are available at the national, regional and international level. One of the intrinsic features of the region is the difficulty in the determination of boundaries, responsibilities and interests. Against this background, sovereignty issues are intertwined with environmental and geopolitical issues that ultimately affect global strategic balances and international trade and, at the same time, influence national approaches to basic rights and organizational schemes regarding the protection of indigenous peoples and inhabitants of the region. This perspective lays the ground for further discussion, revolving around the main clusters of governance (focusing on the Arctic Council and the European Union, with the particular roles and interest of Arctic and non-Arctic states, and the impact on indigenous populations), environment (including the relevance of national regulatory schemes, and the intertwinement with concerns related to energy, or migration), strategy (concentrating in geopolitical realities and challenges analysed from different perspectives and focusing on different actors, and covering security and climate change related challenges). This collection provides an avenue for parallel and converging research of complex realities from different disciplines, through the expertise of scholars from different latitudes.

During the last twenty years, burgeoning transnational trade, investment and production linkages have emerged in the area between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The appearance of this area of interdependence and interaction and its potential impact on global order has captured the attention of political leaders, and the concept of the Indo-Pacific region is increasingly appearing in international political discourse. This book explores the emergence of the Indo-Pacific concept in different national settings. Chapters engage with critical theories of international relations, regionalism, geopolitics and geoeconomics in reflecting on the domestic and international drivers and foreign policy debates around the Indo-Pacific concept in Australia, India, the United States, Indonesia and Japan. They evaluate the reasons why the concept of the Indo-Pacific has captured the imaginations of policy makers and policy analysts in these countries and assess the implications of competing interpretations of the Indo-Pacific for conflict and cooperation in the region. A significant contribution to the analysis of the emerging geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific, this book will be of interest to researchers in the field of Asian Studies, International Relations, Regionalism, Foreign Policy Analysis and Geopolitics.

In recent decades, women living in border cities have taken on new roles and have become one of the most vulnerable population groups; experiencing the effects of the economic crisis of the early 21st century and the consequent increase in social inequality and violence. This situation is particularly evident for the northern borderlands of Mexico and Morocco. The geopolitical position of these regions is defined by their strong existing asymmetry with their neighbouring countries: the United States, in the case of Mexico, and the Mediterranean European countries, in the case of Morocco. This book contributes to the understanding of current changes in the workplace, in family, in sexuality and sexual violence within the setting of the borderlands, through various studies addressing the manner in which these transformations are interpreted and experienced by women in everyday life and in their individual and collective agency.

The odyssey of 600,000 imperial Japanese soldiers incarcerated in Soviet labor camps after World War II and their fraught repatriation to postwar Japan. In August 1945 the Soviet Union seized the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and the colony of Southern Sakhalin, capturing more than 600,000 Japanese soldiers, who were transported to labor camps across the Soviet Union but primarily concentrated in Siberia and the Far East. Imprisonment came as a surprise to the soldiers, who thought they were being shipped home. The Japanese prisoners became a workforce for the rebuilding Soviets, as well as pawns in the Cold War. Alongside other Axis POWs, they did backbreaking jobs, from mining and logging to agriculture and construction. They were routinely subjected to "reeducation" glorifying the Soviet system and urging them to support the newly legalized Japanese Communist Party and to resist American influence in Japan upon repatriation. About 60,000 Japanese didn't survive Siberia. The rest were sent home in waves, the last lingering in the camps until 1956. Already laid low by war and years of hard labor, returnees faced the final shock and alienation of an unrecognizable homeland, transformed after the demise of the imperial state. Sherzod Muminov draws on extensive Japanese, Russian, and English archives-including memoirs and survivor interviews-to piece together a portrait of life in Siberia and in Japan afterward. Eleven Winters of Discontent reveals the real people underneath facile tropes of the prisoner of war and expands our understanding of the Cold War front. Superpower confrontation played out in the Siberian camps as surely as it did in Berlin or the Bay of Pigs.

What can unfold from an engagement of feminist issues, concerns and practices with the geopolitical? How does feminism allow for a reconfiguration of how these two elements, the geo- and the -political, are understood and related? What kinds of objects can be located and put into motion? What kinds of relations can be drawn between these? What kinds of practice become valued? And, what is glossed or rendered absent in the process? In this thought-provoking and original contribution, Deborah P. Dixon cautions against the exhaustion of feminist geopolitics as a critique of both a classical and a critical geopolitics, and points instead to how feminist imaginaries of Self, Other and Earth allow for all manner of work to be undertaken. Importantly, one of the things they provide for is a reservoir of concerns, thoughts and practices that can be reappropriated to flesh out what a feminist geopolitics can be. While providing a much-needed, sustained interjection that draws out achievements to date, the book thus gestures forward to productive lines of inquiry and method. Grounded via a series of globally diverse case studies that traverse time as well as space, Feminist Geopolitics feels for the borders of geopolitical thought and practice by navigating four complex and corporeally-aware objects of analysis, namely flesh, bone, touch and abhorrence.

First published in 1982. Wide-ranging and fully documented, this book is the first detailed study of the origins, contexts and consequences of the long-standing dispute between China, Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines over the Paracel and Spratly Archipelagos in the South China Sea - one of the world's most strategically important inter-ocean basins and China's southern maritime frontier. Samuels' analysis: * Highlights the impact of the shifting balance of power in Asia and the growing competition for oceanic resources * Examines the implications of the dispute in terms of the historical and modern role of china as a maritime power in Asia.

Reflecting the revival of interest in a social theory that takes place and space seriously, this book focuses on geographical place in the practice of social science and history. There is significant interest among scholars from a range of disciplines in bringing together the geographical and sociological 'imaginations'. The geographical imagination is a concrete and descriptive one, concerned with determining the nature of places, and classifying them and the links between them. The sociological imagination aspires to explanation of human activities in terms of abstract social processes. The chapters in this book focus on both the intellectual histories of the concept of place and on its empirical uses. They show that place is as important for understanding contemporary America as it is for 18th-century Sri Lanka. They also show how the concept can provide insight into 'old' problems such as the nature of social life in Renaissance Florence and Venice. The editors are leading exponents of the view of place as a concept that can 'mediate' the geographical and sociological imaginations.

Numerous scholars have noticed that certain political institutions, including federalism, majoritarian electoral systems, and presidentialism, are linked to lower levels of income redistribution. This book offers a political geography explanation for those observed patterns. Each of these institutions is strongly shaped by geography and provides incentives for politicians to target their appeals and government resources to localities. Territorialized institutions also shape citizens' preferences in ways that can undermine the national coalition in favor of redistribution. Moreover, territorial institutions increase the number of veto points in which anti-redistributive actors can constrain reform efforts. These theoretical connections between the politics of place and redistributive outcomes are explored in theory, empirical analysis, and case studies of the USA, Germany, and Argentina.

Leading academics from around the world, who specialize in analysing maritime strategic issues, deliberate the impact of the American 'pivot' or 're-balance' strategy, and the 'Air-Sea Battle' operational concept, on the maritime power and posture of a number of selected states. Intending to strengthen US economic, diplomatic, and security engagement throughout the Asia-Pacific, both bilaterally and multilaterally, the re-balance stands out as one of the Obama administration's most far-sighted and ambitious foreign policy initiatives.

European External Action provides a critical assessment of the practice of EU diplomacy in a key site of Africa-European relations and the global development industry - the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. It analyses how the EU positions itself through its newly established diplomatic corps, the European External Action Service (EEAS), and how it is perceived as a collective geopolitical actor by its external cooperation partners. Going beyond existing studies on EU policy making in Brussels and African-European relations more generally, this book explores in a novel way the conduct of external relations and perceptions of the EU - abroad. Based on institutional ethnography within the EU Delegation in Nairobi and research affiliation with the University of Nairobi, as well as interviews with leading individuals of Kenyan-European interaction, it analyses the practices, processes and perceptions through which EU diplomacy is enacted and realised in a strategic node of global North-South relations. In light of the EU's claim as a key partner for developing countries and its ambition to be a major player in global politics, European External Action thereby speaks not only to wider debates on the EU's role as a global and development actor, but also provides new insights in the internal dynamics and the making of external agency in and through EU diplomacy.

Global Geopolitical Power and African Political and Economic Institutions: When Elephants Fight describes the emergence and nature of the prevailing African political and economic institutions in two periods. In the first, most countries adopted political and economic institutions that funneled significant levels of political and economic power to the political elites, usually through one- or no-party (military) political systems, inward-oriented development policies, and/ or state-led-and often state-owned-industrialization. In the second period, most countries adopted institutions that diluted the overarching political and economic power of ruling elites through the adoption of de jure multiparty electoral systems, more outward-oriented trade policies, and the privatization of many state owned or controlled sectors, though significant political and economic power remains in their hands. The choices made in each period were consistent with prevailing ideas on governance and development, the self-interests of political elites, and the perceived availability of support or autonomy vis-a-vis domestic, regional, and international sources of power at the time. This book illustrates how these two region-wide shifts in prevailing political and economic institutions and practices of Africa can be linked to two prior global geopolitical realignments: the end of WWII with the ensuing American and Soviet led bipolar system, and the end of the Cold War with American primacy. Each period featured changed or newly empowered international and regional leaders with competing national priorities within new intellectual and geopolitical climates, altering the opportunities and constraints for African leaders in instituting or maintaining particular political and economic institutions or practices. The economic and political institutions of Africa that emerged did so as a result of a complex mix of contending domestic, regional, and international forces (material and intellectual)-all which were themselves greatly transformed in the wake of these two global geopolitical realignments.

This book explores and maps the relationship between borders, security and global governance. Theoretically, the book seeks to establish to what degree, and in what ways, traditional notions of borders, security and (global) governance are being eroded, undermined and contested in the context of a globalising world. Borders are increasingly being re-conceptualised to account for connectivity as well as divisions at the same time as focus is shifting from permanence to permeability. The ambivalence ascribed to bordering processes is at heart a security concern; borders are not only entwined with state formation but are also attempts at governing securities, identities and histories. Proceeding from a critical rendering of statist conceptualisations of borders, security and governance, the book not only emphasises the politics of borders, mobility and re-locations, but also provides a shared groundwork for interrogating the spatial conditions for bordering and border work as manifestations of a continuously deferred becoming rather than being. A principal contribution of the volume is its scrutiny of how borders are enacted and perceived in and through the everyday, and of how such production and construal can make sense as acts of resistance to various forms of governing. Such a focus reveals the necessity of investigating how governing from afar affects the possibilities and tendencies to securitise as well as desecuritise, within as well as beyond elite settings. This book will be of much interest to students of border studies, human geography, governmentality, global governance and IR/critical security studies.

This volume provides a unique look at the changes in the way Chinese foreign and security policy is made during the reform era, and the implications of those changes for China's future behavior on the international stage. Bringing together the contributions of more than a dozen scholars who undertook extensive field research in the People's Republic of China, South Korea, and Taiwan, the book is the most comprehensive, in-depth, and rigorous account of how Chinese foreign and security policy is formulated and implemented.
Since the reform era began in the late 1970s, a new and ever-changing mix of forces has been reshaping Chinese foreign and national security policy-making institutions and processes. This volume examines those forces: bureaucratic politics and evolving organizations, changing elite views and skills, an altered domestic agenda, increasingly diverse social forces and public opinion, and the growing complexity of the international system itself, including globalization and multilateral regimes. The analysis goes one step further to look at specific foreign and security policy issues and relationships, including case studies dealing with Korea, Taiwan, the World Trade Organization, and arms control.
The volume addresses itself to policy-makers in both the public and private sectors, as well as scholars of China and international relations. It concludes that China's foreign and national security policy making, as well as its behavior abroad, is largely shaped by the forces of globalization, decentralization, pluralization, and professionalization. But the book also shows how the enduring power of Chinese decision makers and their national interest focus also mould China's behavior, notably in crises and in major strategic decisions. Looking to the future, the book suggests that the forces of change in the Chinese system offer the possibility, though not the certainty, that China may increasingly fit more comfortably into the international system in the years ahead, though not without frictions and mishaps.