In the first edition (2010), Zhiqun Zhu examined the rationale and strategies of China's new multi-directional diplomacy since the early 1990s and assessed its impact on international political economy as well as responses from the international community. This fully revised second edition is still based on extensive research addressing these and other important policy issues whilst incorporating the latest major Chinese diplomatic activities since the last edition was published. This book continues to cover Chinese initiatives in the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and the South Pacific and studies China's current efforts to secure energy and other resources, to expand trade and investment, and to enhance 'soft power' around the world. The author further evaluates how China's activities affect these regions' political economy and how the international community, especially the United States, has reacted to China's new diplomacy. Whilst continuing to answer some lingering questions about Chinese foreign policy and its implications for both China and the international community as they become increasingly interdependent, this paperback edition is adapted for classroom use and provides questions for discussion to help readers review the key empirical and theoretical points of each chapter.

War, Identity and the Liberal State critically examines the significance of gender, race and sexuality to wars waged by liberal states and the soldiers who wage them. Drawing on original fieldwork research with British soldiers, it offers insights into how their lived experiences are shaped by, and shape, a politics of gender, race and sexuality that not only underpin power relations in the military, but a wider geopolitics of war. It explores how shared and collectively mediated knowledge on gender, race and sexuality facilitates certain claims about the nature of governing in liberal states and about why and how such states wage war against 'illiberal' ones in pursuit of global peace and security. In linking the politics of daily life to the international, this book insists that it is vital to explore how geopolitical events and practices are co-constituted, reinforced and contested in everyday experiences, practices and spaces. The book also urges scholars interested in the linguistic construction of geopolitics to consider the ways in which everyday objects, spaces and bodies also reinforce particular ideas about war, identity and statehood and some of their violent consequences. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international studies, security, gender and feminist studies and critical and social theory.

In this global era, Central Asia must be understood in both geo-economic and geopolitical terms. The region's natural resources compel the attention of rivalrous great powers and ambitious internal factions. The local regimes are caught between the need for international collaborations to valorize these riches and the need to maintain control over them in the interest of state sovereignty. Russia and China dominate the horizon, with other global players close behind; meanwhile, neighboring countries are fractious and unstable with real potential for contagion. This pathbreaking introduction to Central Asia in contemporary international economic and political context answers the needs of both academic and professional audiences and is suitable for course adoption.

Despite being one of the world's most vibrant democracies, police estimate between five and ten percent of the murders in South Africa result from vigilante violence. This is puzzling given the country's celebrated transition to democracy and massive reform of the state's legal institutions. Where most studies explain vigilantism as a response to state or civic failure, in Contradictions of Democracy, Nicholas Rush Smith illustrates that vigilantism is actually a response to the processes of democratic state formation. In the context of densely networked neighborhoods, vigilante citizens often interpret the technical success of legal institutions-for instance, the arrest and subsequent release of suspects on bail-as failure and work to correct such perceived failures on their own. Smith also shows that vigilantism provides a new lens through which to understand democratic state formation. Among young men of color in some parts of South Africa, fear of extra-judicial police violence is common. Amid such fear, instead of the state seeming protective, it can appear as something akin to a massive vigilante organization. An insightful look into the high rates of vigilantism in South Africa and the general challenges of democratic state building, Contradictions of Democracy explores fundamental questions about political order, the rule of law, and democratic citizenship.

The area between two countries, or at the edges of a civilization, has been called many things--frontier, backcountry, and most recently, the borderland. Even though borderlands are frequently located at the peripheries of empires and nations, they nevertheless shape how centers of national power-cities, national capitols, and so forth-have defined their relation to issues such as territorial expansion, sovereignty, immigration, labor, community formation, difference, and race and ethnicity. And in this global landscape, the borderlands area can teach a lot about how societies interact and how nations came to be as they are. North American Borderlands introduces students to exemplary recent scholarship on borderlands, focusing on borderland relationships--transnational or trans-cultural explorations of the many peoples and perspectives within borderlands regions.

The increasing emergence, re-emergence, and spread of deadly infectious diseases which pose health, economic, security and ethical challenges for states and people around the world, has given rise to an important global debate. The actual or potential burden of infectious diseases is sometimes so great that governments treat them as threats to national security. However, such treatment potentially increases the risk that emergency disease-control measures will be ineffective, counterproductive and/or unjust. Research on ethical issues associated with infectious disease is a relatively new and rapidly growing area of academic inquiry, as is research on infectious diseases within the field of security studies. This volume incorporates ethical and security perspectives, thus furthering research in both fields. Its unique focus on the intersection of ethical and security dimensions will, furthermore, generate fresh insights on how governments should respond to infectious disease challenges. Readers should include professionals and scholars working in infectious disease, epidemiology, public health, health law, health economics, public policy, bioethics, medical humanities, health and human rights, social/political philosophy, security studies, and international politics.

In this global era, Central Asia must be understood in both geo-economic and geopolitical terms. The region's natural resources compel the attention of rivalrous great powers and ambitious internal factions. The local regimes are caught between the need for international collaborations to valorize these riches and the need to maintain control over them in the interest of state sovereignty. Russia and China dominate the horizon, with other global players close behind; meanwhile, neighboring countries are fractious and unstable with real potential for contagion. This pathbreaking introduction to Central Asia in contemporary international economic and political context answers the needs of both academic and professional audiences and is suitable for course adoption.

Over the past decade, democratization and civil society promotion became key variables in preserving global security and the liberal economic market. This book examines the prevalence of democratization policies as a hegemonic geopolitical tool; these policies represent a concerted political effort in which civil society organizations are manipulated through funding strategies. Denise Horn offers a fresh, innovative feminist-constructivist perspective by arguing that Western gender norms-i.e. those norms that determine degrees of participation within civil society-inform the policies of hegemonic powers and transform the foundations of civil society in transitional states. This powerful volume will be of interest to students and scholars in Gender and Women's Studies, Political Science, and International Relations.

Over the 19th and 20th centuries, the political map of Europe changed considerably. At the end of this period, there were remarkably contrasting tendencies concerning the functions and densities of borders. The borders inside the European Union lost their importance, whereas Central and Eastern Europe saw the birth of a multitude of new state borders. The long-term study of border regions, therefore, is a relevant subject for geographers, historians, social scientists, and political scientists. The main thesis of this text is that the rise of the modern nation-state reinforced the separating function of state borders by nationalizing the people on both sides of them. This process gained strength in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and was challenged in the post-war era by processes of supra-national integration, globalization and the revolution in communication and transport, as the case studies from different parts of Europe in this book show.

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.

As the North Pole is transformed from a sea-ice cap to an ice-free sea, the Arctic Ocean is becoming an environmentally insecure area. This volume proposes environmental security as providing a holistic framework to assess security risks and then identify the appropriate adaptation and mitigation responses.

Geopolitics is a crucial element in understanding international relations in East Asia, with major and medium powers competing for influence. This book examines geopolitics in East Asia, focusing in particular on its major, contentious maritime territorial disputes. It looks in particular detail at the overlapping claims between Japan, China and Taiwan over the Senkaku/Diao yu Islands in the East China Sea as well as the Paracel Islands claimed by China, Taiwan, and Vietnam and the Spratly Islands involving Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam in the South China Sea. The book offers a comparative study of the East and South China Seas by arguing that their respective circumstances are influenced by similar geopolitical considerations; factors such as territory, natural resources and power competition all impact on disputes and broader regional relations. It is precisely the interplay of these geopolitical forces that can lead to the rapid escalation of a maritime territorial dispute or reversely to a diffusion of tensions. The book considers how such disputes might be managed and resolved peacefully, despite the geopolitical conditions that can make co-operation on these issues difficult to achieve. Ralf Emmers examines the prospect for conflict management and resolution by identifying catalysts which may contribute to improving the climate of relations.

'Borders' have attracted considerable attention in public and academic debates in light of the impact of globalisation and, in Europe, the end of the divisions of the Cold War era. Instead, being inside or outside of the EU has become a major paradigmatic divide between claimed 'spheres of influence' by 'Brussels' and 'Moscow' respectively. In the aftermath of the end of communism, established certainties no longer seemed to apply. And this included many of the borders within the former eastern Bloc, with some losing their relevance, while others re-assert themselves. As its particular contribution, this book adopts a symbiotic approach to the analysis of borders, drawing on a political-economy perspective, while also recognising the importance of the socio-cultural dimension as found in 'border studies'. This seeks to do greater justice to the complex, composite nature of borders as geo-political, state-legal and cultural-historic constructs in both theory and practice. In addition, the book's approach stretches across spatial scales to capture the multi-level nature of borders. The first part of the book presents the conceptual framework as it sets out to embrace this multi-faceted, multi-layered nature of borders. In the second part, case studies from north-central Europe, including the Baltic Sea Region, exemplify the complexity of borders in the context of post-socialist transformation and continuing EU-isation.

The importance of the Himalayan state of Nepal has been obscured by the international campaign to free Tibet and the vicissitudes of the Sino-Indian rivalry. This book presents the history of Nepal's domestic politics and foreign relations from ancient to modern times. Analysing newly declassified reports from the United States and Britain, published memoirs, oral recollections and interviews, the book presents the historical interactions between Nepal, China, Tibet and India. It discusses how the ageing and inevitable death of the 14th Dalai Lama, the radicalization of Tibetan diaspora and the ascendancy of the international campaign to free Tibet are of increasing importance to Nepal. With its position between China and India, the book notes how the focus could shift to Nepal, with it being home to some 20,000 Tibetan refugees and its chronic political turmoil, deepened by the Asian giants' rivalry. Using a chronological approach, the past and present of the rivalry between China and India are studied, and attempts to chart the future are made. The book contributes to a new understanding of the intricate relationship of Nepal with these neighbouring countries, and is of interest to students and scholars of South Asian studies, politics and international relations.

Over the past two decades or so, medieval geopolitics have come to occupy an increasingly prominent place in the collective imagination and writings of International Relations scholars. Although these accounts differ significantly in terms of their respective analytical assumptions, theoretical concerns and scholarly contributions, they share at least one common arguably, defining element: a belief that a careful study of medieval geopolitics can help resolve a number of important debates surrounding the nature and dynamics of "international" relations. There are however three generic weaknesses characterizing the extant literature: a general failure to examine the existing historiography of medieval geopolitics, an inadequate account of the material and ideational forces that create patterns of violent conflict in medieval Latin Christendom, and a failure to take seriously the role of "religion" in the geopolitical relations of medieval Latin Christendom.

This book seeks to address these shortcomings by providing a theoretically guided and historically sensitive account of the geopolitical relations of medieval Latin Christendom. It does this by developing a theoretically informed picture of medieval geopolitics, theorizing the medieval-to-modern transition in a new and fruitful way, and suggesting ways in which a systematic analysis of medieval geopolitical relations can actually help to illuminate a range of contemporary geopolitical phenomena. Finally, it develops an historically sensitive conceptual framework for understanding geopolitical conflict and war more generally.

The writings of Carl Schmitt are now indissociable from both an historical period and a contemporary moment. He will forever be remembered for his association with the National Socialists of 1930s Germany, and as the figure whose writings on sovereignty, politics, and the law provided justification for authoritarian, decisional states. Yet at the same time, the post-September 11th 2001 world is one in which a wide range of scholars have increasingly turned to Schmitt to understand a world of "with us or against us" Manichaeism, spaces of exception which seem to be placed outside the law by legal mechanisms themselves, and the contestation of a uni-polar, post-1989 world. This attention marks out Schmitt as one of the foremost emerging theorists in critical theory and assures his work a large and growing audience. This work brings together geographers, and Schmitt experts who are attuned to the spatial dimensions of his work, to discuss his 1950 work The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. Explaining the growing audience for Schmitt's work, a broad range of contributors also examine the Nomos in relation to broader debates about enmity and war, the production of space, the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, and the recuperability of such an intellect tainted by its anti-Semitism and links to the Nazi party. This work will be of great interest to researchers in political theory, socio-legal studies, geopolitics and critical IR theory

Multilateral UN summits from Stockholm to Copenhagen have set the pace and direction for the global governance of sustainable development. The 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) was a key moment in the evolution of sustainable development as a discourse and summitry as a technology of government. It firmly established multi-stakeholder partnerships, carbon-trading and communication strategies as primary techniques for dealing with environmental crises. It was also a significant event in terms of South African domestic politics, witnessing some of the largest protests since the end of Apartheid. Carl Death draws on Foucauldian governmentality literature to argue that the Johannesburg Summit was a key site for the refashioning of sustainable development as advanced liberal government; for the emergence of an exemplary logic of rule; and for the mutually interdependent relationship between 'mega-events' (summits, world cups, Olympic games) and 'mega-protests' understood as Foucauldian counter-conducts. Analysing detailed and original research on the WSSD, Death argues that summits work to make politically sustainable a global order which is manifestly unsustainable. Paradoxically however, they also provide opportunities for the status quo to be protested and resisted. This work will be of great interest to scholars of development studies, global governance and environmental politics.

The globalizing world is increasingly confronting a new category of security issues related to resource availability. The resource environment contains both traditional categories, such as energy, foodstuffs, and water, as well as new technologically related resources, such as rare earth minerals. The essays in this volume emphasize both the uniqueness and the magnitude of these new challenges, while simultaneously acknowledging that cooperation and competition in response to these security concerns occur within the context of both the historical and contemporary international power configurations. Moreover, these challenges are of a global nature and will require global perspectives, global thinking, and innovative global solutions. Krishna-Hensel brings together a wide range of topics focusing on critical resource availability impacting upon global security and the geopolitical ramifications of resource competition. The volume addresses the development of strategic thinking on these issues and underscores the increasing awareness that this is a critical area of concern in the twenty-first century global landscape.

This edited volume provides an innovative contribution to the debate on contemporary European geopolitics by tracing some of the new political geographies and geographical imaginations emergent within - and made possible by - the EU's actions in the international arena. Drawing on case studies that range from the Arctic to East Africa, the nine empirical chapters provide a critical geopolitical reading of the ways in which particular places, countries, and regions are brought into the EU's orbit and the ways in which they are made to work for 'EU'rope. The analyses look at how the spaces of 'EU'ropean power and actorness are narrated and created, but also at how 'EU'rope's discursive (and material) strategies of incorporation are differently appropriated by local and regional elites, from the southern shores of the Mediterranean to Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The question of EU border management is a particularly important concern of several contributions, highlighting some of the ways in which the Union's border-work is actively (re)making the European space.

Green activism played a critical role in the downfall of Soviet-style communism in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s. After the revolutions, environmentalists were expected to exert influence within the new democracies and to form the bedrock of the new civil societies that were predicted to flourish across the region; the prospect of EU membership provided activist networks with even greater optimism about their political opportunities. Two decades later what has been the impact of political and economic liberalisation on environmental campaigners and policy advocates? Has access to elites increased with democratisation and Europeanization? To what extent does the realm of environmental politics, within individual states and across the region, continue to represent an optic on change and continuity? Through country case-studies and comparative analysis of national movements, this edited volume addresses each of these questions and provides a different perspective of green politics in the region. This book was previously published as a special issue of Environmental Politics.

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.

This book argues that current economist theories do not take into account the socially constructed nature of the debate surrounding the environment and environmental policy. It examines whether proposed economic solutions to environmental policy are, in fact, viable in practice. The book demonstrates that social conflicts cause policy compromises, which shape the economic system of a post-industrial ecological society. The author offers an innovative socio-economic theory of environmental politics, which illuminates the transformation dynamics brought about by the ecological crisis. Regulation Theory and Sustainable Development will be of interest to students and scholars of environmental politics, policy and governance.

Reconstruction - the rebuilding of state, economy, culture and society in the wake of war - is a powerful idea, and a profoundly transformative one. From the refashioning of new landscapes in bombed-out cities and towns to the reframing of national identities to accommodate changed historical narratives, the term has become synonymous with notions of "post-conflict" society; it draws much of its rhetorical power from the neat demarcation, both spatially and temporally, between war and peace. The reality is far more complex. In this volume, reconstruction is identified as a process of conflict and of militarized power, not something that clearly demarcates a post-war period of peace. Kirsch and Flint bring together an internationally diverse range of studies by leading scholars to examine how periods of war and other forms of political violence have been justified as processes of necessary and valid reconstruction as well as the role of war in catalyzing the construction of new political institutions and destroying old regimes. Challenging the false dichotomy between war and peace, this book explores instead the ways that war and peace are mutually constituted in the creation of historically specific geographies and geographical knowledges.