Globalisation has created an interconnected world, but has not diminished violence, militarism and inequality. The Economics of Killing describes how the power of global elites, entrenched under globalisation, has created a deadly cycle of violence. In this groundbreaking work, Vijay Mehta shows how attempts at peaceful national development are routinely blocked by Western powers. He locates the 2008 financial crisis in US attempts to block China's model of development. He shows how Europe and the US conspire with regional dictators to prevent countries from developing advanced industries, and how this system has fed terrorism. Mehta argues that a different world is possible, based on policies of disarmament, demilitarisation and sustainable development. This original and thought-provoking book will be of great interest to anyone concerned about the consequences of endless war fuelled by the West.

This book is a very timely account of the legal, economic and political consequences for border states caught in the current tug-of-war between the West and Russia.The Ukraine crisis of 2014 focused policy-makers' attention on a geographical area full of dangers that had gone relatively unnoticed since the breakup of the Soviet Union, namely the security dynamics of the border states of Eastern Europe and the Black Sea. Twenty-five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a strong Russia returns alternatively threatening and cajoling, but at risk itself of suffering economic injury from western reprisals over its nostalgia for the map drawn at Yalta. That conflict, which hotted up over the Ukraine, was soon being played out over - and in the air space over - Syria and Turkey, while the border states themselves are likely to be drawn into the European refugee crisis and have the potential, after the 2015 Paris atrocities, to be breeding grounds for international terrorists. This groundbreaking book contains prescient warnings that must be heeded by leaders and diplomats on both sides of the East-West divide.

This seminal book explores the complex relationship between popular geopolitics and nation branding among the Newly Independent States of Eurasia, and their combined role in shaping contemporary national image and statecraft within and beyond the region. It provides critical perspectives on international relations, nationalism, and national identity through the use of innovative approaches focusing on popular culture, new media, public diplomacy, and alternative "narrators" of the nation. By positing popular geopolitics and nation branding as contentious forces and complementary flows, the study explores the tensions and elisions between national self-image and external perceptions of the nation, and how this complex interplay has become integral to contemporary global affairs.

*** Winner of the 2013 Julian Minghi Outstanding Research Award presented at the American Association of Geographers annual meeting *** Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, why are leading democracies like the United States, India, and Israel building massive walls and fences on their borders? Despite predictions of a borderless world through globalization, these three countries alone have built an astonishing total of 5,700 kilometers of security barriers. In this groundbreaking work, Reece Jones analyzes how these controversial border security projects were justified in their respective countries, what consequences these physical barriers have on the lives of those living in these newly securitized spaces, and what long-term effects the hardening of political borders will have in these societies and globally. Border Walls is a bold, important intervention that demonstrates that the exclusion and violence necessary to secure the borders of the modern state often undermine the very ideals of freedom and democracy the barriers are meant to protect.

The Indo-Pacific is fast becoming the world's dominant region. Now, as it grows in power and wealth, geopolitical competition has reemerged, threatening future stability not merely in Asia but around the globe. China is aggressive and uncooperative, and increasingly expects the world to bend to its wishes. The focus on Sino-US competition for global power has obscured 'Asia's other great game': the rivalry between Japan and China. A modernizing India risks missing out on the energies and talents of millions of its women, potentially hampering the broader role it can play in the world. And in North Korea, the most frightening question raised by Kim Jong-un's pursuit of the ultimate weapon is also the simplest: can he control his nukes? In Asia's New Geopolitics: Essays on Reshaping the Indo-Pacific, Michael R. Auslin examines these and other key issues transforming the Indo-Pacific and the broader world. He also explores the history of American strategy in Asia, from the 18th century through today. Taken together, Auslin's essays convey the richness and diversity of the region: with more than three billion people, the Indo-Pacific contains over half of the global population, including the world's two most populous nations, India and China. In a riveting final chapter, Auslin imagines a war between America and China in a bid for regional hegemony and what this conflict might look like.

While moving across borders has been made easier for some in Russia in recent years, for others, physical as well as socio-cultural borders are proving to be more and more difficult to cross. Tackling the differences between the ways in which official discourses construct borders and the ways people who live there experience them in their everyday lives, this book uses innovative theoretical approaches and empirical work with young North Caucasian migrants to explore issues of identity, citizenship, exclusion and belonging. The Chechen war, terrorist attacks and confrontations between Caucasian migrants and local residents have served as touchstones for intense public debates about who belongs in Russian society and who does not. Young people of North Caucasian origin are experiencing the effects of such debates as they learn to negotiate and maintain their identities in an environment in which they are defined as a threat to national security whilst simultaneously being pressured to align with core civic values of the state. This book reflects on the notion that the cultural borders, which define civic liberties and people's right to belong, are increasingly being defined within society, and not by the external borders of states.

A superb combination of focused case studies and high level conceptual thinking, this volume is an important monument in the ongoing development of Inter-American studies The articles gathered here closely examine a wide variety of cultural phenomena implicated in the 'entanglements' which have defined the history of the Americas. From religious networks to music and dance, and across a range of literary and artistic works, the mobility of people, objects, and ideas in the Americas is expertly mapped. At the same time, the book represents a serious enterprise of theory-building. Drawing on the histories of postcolonial thought, mobility studies, and work on human migration, Mobile and Entangled America(s) clearly establishes a new interdisciplinary field attentive both to the complexities of cultural form and the pervasiveness of power relations. Each article stands as a significant piece of scholarship on its own, but all are in dialogue with each other. The result is a richly satisfying and important volume of cultural scholarship.

The foreign policies of Turkey and Iran seem increasingly to dictate the course of events in the Middle East. More recently, and especially following the Syrian crisis, the spotlight has turned to these states' dynamic re-entry onto the political stage, revealing them as key players with an international role in efforts towards the balance of power across the region. This book traces the major determinants of Turkish and Iranian foreign policies and their influence on events in the Middle East. Based on an examination of these states' politics and policies since 1979, and using material gathered from interviews with leading political figures from Turkey, Iran and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Marianna Charountaki offers fresh insights into how we understand the contemporary global order. Of particular importance, this book shows, is the effect of both external and internal factors on foreign policy and how the interaction between state and non-state actors informs political decisions. In placing these issues in a theoretical framework, Marianna Charountaki pioneers a new conceptual map within International Relations. An interdisciplinary study that provides a fresh new perspective, this book will be of particular interest to scholars of International Relations, Politics, Foreign Policy, Kurdish and Middle East Studies.

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.

Kristen Ghodsee and Mitchell A. Orenstein blend empirical data with lived experiences to produce a robust picture of who won and who lost in post-communist transition, contextualizing the rise of populism in Eastern Europe. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, more than 400 million people suddenly found themselves in a new reality, a dramatic transition from state socialist and centrally planned workers' states to liberal democracy (in most cases) and free markets. Thirty years later, postsocialist citizens remain sharply divided on the legacies of transition. Was it a success that produced great progress after a short recession, or a socio-economic catastrophe foisted on the East by Western capitalists? Taking Stock of Shock aims to uncover the truth using a unique, interdisciplinary investigation into the social consequences of transition-including the rise of authoritarian populism and xenophobia. Showing that economic, demographic, sociological, political scientific, and ethnographic research produce contradictory results based on different disciplinary methods and data, Kristen Ghodsee and Mitchell Orenstein triangulate the results. They find that both the J-curve model, which anticipates sustained growth after a sharp downturn, and the "disaster capitalism" perspective, which posits that neoliberalism led to devastating outcomes, have significant basis in fact. While substantial percentages of the populations across a variety of postsocialist countries enjoyed remarkable success, prosperity, and progress, many others suffered an unprecedented socio-economic catastrophe. Ghodsee and Orenstein conclude that the promise of transition still remains elusive for many and offer policy ideas for overcoming negative social and political consequences.

Tourism has become increasingly shaped by neoliberal policies, yet the consequences of this neoliberalisation are relatively under-explored. This book provides a wide-ranging inquiry into the particular manifestations of different variants of neoliberalism, highlighting its uneven geographical development and the changing dynamics of neoliberal policies in order to explain and evaluate the effects of neoliberal processes on tourism. Covering a variety of different aspects of neoliberalism and tourism, the chapters investigate how different types of tourism are used as part of more general neoliberalisation agendas, how neoliberalism differs according to the geographic context, the importance of discourse in shaping neoliberal practices and the different approaches of putting the neoliberal ideology into practice. Aiming to initiate debates about the connections between neoliberalism and tourism and advance further research avenues, this book makes a timely contribution which discusses the relationships between markets, nation-states and societies from a social science perspective. Neoliberalism is considered as a political-economic ideology, as variants of the global neoliberal project, as discourse and practices through which neoliberalism is enacted.

Video surveillance, public records, fingerprints, hidden microphones, RFID chips: in contemporary societies the intrusive techniques of surveillance used in daily life have increased dramatically. The "war against terror" has only exacerbated this trend, creating a world that is closer than one might have imagined to that envisaged by George Orwell in 1984.How have we reached this situation? Why have democratic societies accepted that their rights and freedoms should be taken away, a little at a time, by increasingly sophisticated mechanisms of surveillance?From the anthropometry of the 19th Century to the Patriot Act, through an analysis of military theory and the Echelon Project, Armand Mattelart constructs a genealogy of this new power of control and examines its globalising dynamic. This book provides an essential wake-up call at a time when democratic societies are becoming less and less vigilant against the dangers of proliferating systems of surveillance.

According to many experts, China is already the largest economy on the planet - yet its relations with the rest of the world have deteriorated in recent years, and are now at an all-time low. Is this a passing phase caused by the shockwaves of the Covid pandemic and the personalities of leaders in China and in the USA, or are the current divergencies going to become wider and more entrenched, as China grows economically and develops technological leadership? Can the West learn from its past mistakes and engage successfully with China on many common interests, or are we on the verge of a new Cold War? In The Chinese Conundrum, Vince Cable - author of the Sunday Times number-one bestseller The Storm: The World Economic Crisis and What it Means - provides an answer to these and many other topical questions of global politics and economy, examining the long history of relationships between China and the West, as well as the change in attitudes on both sides of the divide, with a particular focus on the possible repercussions of the recent election of Joe Biden as president of the United States. The result is a gripping, insightful and accessible investigation into the intricacies of today's economic and geopolitical situation.

How do societies identify and promote merit? Enabling all people to fulfill their potential, and ensuring the selection of competent and capable leaders are central challenges for any society. These are not new concerns. Scholars, educators, and political and economic elites in China and India have been pondering them for centuries and continue to do so today, with enormously high stakes. In Making Meritocracy, Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi have gathered over a dozen experts from a range of intellectual perspectives-political science, history, philosophy, anthropology, economics, and applied mathematics-to discuss how the two most populous societies in the world have addressed the issue of building meritocracy historically, philosophically, and in practice. They focus on how contemporary policy makers, educators, and private-sector practitioners seek to promote it today. Importantly, they also discuss Singapore, which is home to large Chinese and Indian populations and the most successful meritocracy in recent times. Both China and India look to it for lessons. Though the past, present, and future of meritocracy building in China and India have distinctive local inflections, their attempts to enhance their power, influence, and social well-being by prioritizing merit-based advancement offers rich lessons both for one another and for the rest of the world-including rich countries like the United States, which are currently witnessing broad-based attacks on the very idea of meritocracy.

Young people, and in particular children, have typically been marginalised in geopolitical research, positioned as too young to understand or relate to the adult-dominated world of international relations. Integrating current debates in critical geopolitics and political geography with research in children's geographies, childhood studies and youth research, this book sets out an agenda for the field of children's and young people's critical geopolitics. It considers diverse practices such as play, activism, media consumption and diplomacy to show how children's and young people's lives relate to wider regional and global geopolitical processes. Engaging with contemporary concepts in human geography including ludic geopolitics, affect, emotional geographies, intergenerationality, creative diplomacy, popular geopolitics and citizenship, the authors draw on geopolitical research with children and young people from Europe, Asia, Australasia, Africa and the Americas. The chapters highlight the ways in which young people can be enrolled, ignored, dismissed, empowered and represented by the state for geopolitical ends. Notwithstanding this state power, the research presented also shows how young people have agency and make decisions about their lives which are influenced by wider geopolitical processes. The focus on the lives of children and young people problematises and extends what it is we think of when considering 'the geopolitical' which enriches as well as advances critical geopolitical enquiry and deserves to be taken seriously by political geographies more broadly.

As Cold War battle lines are seemingly re-drawn, Russia's various 'frozen' war zones (ongoing separatist conflicts) are often cited as particularly volatile and assumed by some Western commentators and policymakers to be 'next' on Putin's 'wish list'. But, as Helena Rytoevuori-Apunen demonstrates here, this is a gross (and dangerous) oversimplification that will only serve to fuel the vicious circle of reciprocal military escalation. Drawing on a range of empirical research and across separatist conflicts in Georgia (South Ossetia and Abkhazia), Moldova (Transnistria and Gagauzia) and Azerbaijan (Nagorno-Karabakh) and the 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, her timely book provides a balanced assessment and critique of the assumptions and misunderstandings that inform mainstream discussions, as well as placing the conflicts in their proper and complex historical contexts. At a time when there is an increasing tendency to view Russia as the source of all instability in Eastern Europe, Power and Conflict in Russia's Borderlands is essential reading for anyone interested in the geopolitics of post-Soviet Russia, as well as policymakers and practitioners of peace/conflict resolution studies.

This book examines the forces and processes which have led to relative political stability or unleashed trends in that direction in some countries of South Asia. It also delves into the factors that have stimulated economic growth in some countries, and impeded economic growth in others. Eminent authors from the region examine how far the positive political and economic trends in the region are irreversible or lend themselves to internal convulsions or external influences. There is also a focus on how far inter-state relations within the region have led to stronger intra-regional co-operation, particularly in the economic field. The potential of SAARC as a regional organisation in promoting intra-regional integration, as an instrument of political and economic growth, has been authoritatively examined. The book brings together the thoughts, experiences and insights of South Asias leading academicians, policy makers and media persons on this highly important subject of South Asian stability and growth with respect to the recent past and the foreseeable future.

Unique in bringing together contributions from academics and practitioners on the theme of strategic, intelligent modern lobbying this book provides a thorough and accessible discussion on key ideas pertinent to the pursuance of public affairs in the European Union. Combining innovative academic research with first-hand professional experience it offers the reader a combination of practical recommendations, case studies and academic theory to add new insights to interest group research and lobbying strategies. While focusing on the European Union the contributors acknowledge the multi-level dimension of EU decision-making and incorporate research on multi-level governance as well as lobbying by sub-national authorities. Through this they present a fuller picture of a subject that should appeal to students, academics and practitioners alike.

Research on The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) is a valuable addition to understanding the political situation in the potentially volatile South China Sea region. This book covers topics such as baselines, historic title and rights, due regard and abuse of rights, peaceful use of the ocean, navigation regimes, marine scientific research, intelligence gathering, the UNCLOS dispute settlement system and regional common heritage. In search of varying viewpoints, the authors in this book come from multiple countries, including the Philippines, Australia, Ireland, Mainland China and Taiwan, the United States, and Indonesia, Singapore, UK and Germany. Ongoing events, such as the recent waves made by China in the East China Sea and increasing tensions between the South East Asian countries over the use of South China Sea, make this book especially pertinent.

A Companion to Political Geography presents students and researchers with a substantial survey of this active and vibrant field. The volume contains specially written essays by prominent scholars from around the world and covers a wide variety of crucial themes in contemporary critical political geography.Each contributor not only charts the important work that has been done in the past, but also helps to define directions for future research. The material is organized thematically, but within this structure key debates and controversies are addressed from a range of theoretical viewpoints, including the most cutting edge. In this way, the Companion not only introduces the best thinking on political-geographic issues, but also supplies readers with a sense of the relevance and possibilities of the subject.

Since the late 1980s, ecological thought and the European eco-movement have gone through a phase of fundamental transformation which has been widely acknowledged but not yet theorised in any satisfactory way. This important text questions why radical ecological criticism has had so little impact on contemporary society, despite the urgency of the issues it highlights. The book offers a challenging theoretical critique of ecological thought itself.

Lebanon is an exceptionally misunderstood country; its religious politics are typically misrepresented and denigrated in Western political commentary. Politics and War in Lebanon offers a lucid examination of Lebanese society and politics. Mordechai Nisan examines Lebanon in its own termson its own cultural turf. He then points to the causes of political disintegration in 1975 and explores the capacity of Lebanon to recover and retain its unique national poise. Avoiding disorienting Western stereotypes, Nisan presents Lebanon in its own native frame of reference, as a multi-ethnic country that operates according to its immutable and enigmatic political forms. Lebanon is different from other Arab countries, as demonstrated through its very complex electoral system, its tradition of cross-elite cooperation, and its special sense of Lebanese national identity that differentiates it from its overbearing Syrian neighbor. Nisan explores intra-Maronite Christian feuds, identifies Syria's occupation strategy, analyzes the violence of the Palestinians, and studies Israel's failed policy strategy and the role of Hezbollah in the Lebanese power equation. Lebanon is caught between its special historical identity as a country ofpoise, creativity, and liberty and the interminable warfare in the streets and villages of the country. Although its future appears dim, its resilience enabled it to prevail in the past, and may yet continue to do so.

'Sectarianism' is one of the most over-discussed yet under-analysed concepts in debates about the Middle East. Despite the deluge of commentary, there is no agreement on what 'sectarianism' is. Is it a social issue, one of dogmatic incompatibility, a historic one or one purely related to modern power politics? Is it something innately felt or politically imposed? Is it a product of modernity or its antithesis? Is it a function of the nation-state or its negation? This book seeks to move the study of modern sectarian dynamics beyond these analytically paralysing dichotomies by shifting the focus away from the meaningless '-ism' towards the root: sectarian identity. How are Sunni and Shi'a identities imagined, experienced and negotiated and how do they relate to and interact with other identities? Looking at the modern history of the Arab world, Haddad seeks to understand sectarian identity not as a monochrome frame of identification but as a multi-layered concept that operates on several dimensions: religious, subnational, national and transnational. Far from a uniquely Middle Eastern, Arab, or Islamic phenomenon, a better understanding of sectarian identity reveals that the many facets of sectarian relations that are misleadingly labelled 'sectarianism' are echoed in inter- group relations worldwide.

Globalization and Capitalist Geopolitics is concerned with the nature of corporate power against the backdrop of the decline of the West and the struggle by non-western states to challenge and overcome domination of the rest of the world by the West. This book argues that although the US continues to preside over a quasi-imperial system of power based on global military preponderance and financial statecraft, and remains reluctant to recognize the realities global economic convergence, the age of imperial state hegemony is giving way to a new international order characterized by capitalist sovereignty and competition between regional and transnational concentrations of economic power. This title seeks to interrogate the structure of world order by examining leading approaches to globalization and political economy in international relations and international political economy. Breaking with the classical school, Woodley argues that geopolitics should be understood as a transnational strategic practice employed by powerful state actors, which mirrors predatory corporate rivalry for control over global resources and markets, reproducing the structural conditions for corporate power through the transnational state form of capital. In a period of increasing geopolitical insecurity and economic instability this title provides an authoritative yet accessible commentary on debates on capitalism and globalization in the wake of the financial crisis. It is valuable resource for students and scholars seeking to develop a deeper understanding of the historical determinants of the changing dynamics of neoliberal capitalism and their implications for world order.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Hybrid Warfare refers to a military strategy that blends conventional warfare, so-called 'irregular warfare' and cyber-attacks with other influencing methods, such as fake news, diplomacy and foreign political intervention. As Hybrid Warfare becomes increasingly commonplace, there is an imminent need for research bringing attention to how these challenges can be addressed in order to develop a comprehensive approach towards Hybrid Threats and Hybrid Warfare. This volume supports the development of such an approach by bringing together practitioners and scholarly perspectives on the topic and by covering the threats themselves, as well as the tools and means to counter them, together with a number of real-world case studies. The book covers numerous aspects of current Hybrid Warfare discourses including a discussion of the perspectives of key western actors such as NATO, the US and the EU; an analysis of Russia and China's Hybrid Warfare capabilities; and the growing threat of cyberwarfare. A range of global case studies - featuring specific examples from the Baltics, Taiwan, Ukraine, Iran and Catalonia - are drawn upon to demonstrate the employment of Hybrid Warfare tactics and how they have been countered in practice. Finally, the editors propose a new method through which to understand the dynamics of Hybrid Threats, Warfare and their countermeasures, termed the 'Hybridity Blizzard Model'. With a focus on practitioner insight and practicable International Relations theory, this volume is an essential guide to identifying, analysing and countering Hybrid Threats and Warfare.