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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > International relations > General
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which
commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out
and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and
impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes
high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using
print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in
1984.
The United States Space Force, the sixth branch of the armed
forces, will soon play a leading role in American foreign policy
and will be necessary to protect its economic, political, and
social interests at home and abroad. This book argues that
America's newest branch of the armed forces, the United States
Space Force, will soon play a key strategic role in American
foreign policy, military and economic expansion, and technological
innovation. Written by a leading expert on and member of the Space
Force, the book offers an introduction to the Space Force, explains
the urgent need for it, and walks readers through what exactly the
Space Force is and is not. Drawing on dozens of interviews with
high-ranking members of the armed forces, the author claims that,
in the future, space will be the geopolitical center of world
politics, as such countries as the U.S., Russia, and China jockey
for control of it. America must therefore set aside partisan
politics to make space a top priority, as a failure to do so will
leave the U.S. and its citizens in a dangerous and vulnerable
position on the world stage. The first comprehensive book on the
United States Space Force and its role in national security The
first synthesis of space power, national security, and U.S. grand
strategy Includes interviews with senior people in the United
States Space Force and American national security Outlines a
comprehensive plan for ensuring American primacy in space
From a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian comes the first definitive history of the Western hemisphere, a sweeping five-century narrative of North and South America that redefines our understanding of both continents.
The story of the United States’ unique sense of itself was forged facing south – no less than Latin America’s was indelibly stamped by the looming colossus to the north. In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Professor Greg Grandin reveals how the Americas emerged from constant, turbulent engagement with each other, shedding new light on well-known historical figures like Bartolomé de las Casas, Simón Bolívar and Woodrow Wilson, as well as lesser-known actors such as the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda, who almost lost his head in the French Revolution and conspired with Alexander Hamilton to free America from Spain.
America, América traverses half a millennium, from the Spanish Conquest – the greatest mortality event in human history – through the eighteenth-century wars for independence and the Monroe Doctrine, to the coups and revolutions of the twentieth century. This monumental work of scholarship fundamentally changes our understanding of slavery and racism, the rise of universal humanism, and the role of social democracy in staving off extremism. At once comprehensive and accessible, America, América shows how the United States and Latin America together shaped the laws, institutions, and ideals that govern the modern world. Drawing on a vast array of sources, and told with authority and flair, this is a genuinely new history of the New World.
In analyzing the obstacles to democratization in post- independence
Africa, Mahmood Mamdani offers a bold, insightful account of
colonialism's legacy-a bifurcated power that mediated racial
domination through tribally organized local authorities,
reproducing racial identity in citizens and ethnic identity in
subjects. Many writers have understood colonial rule as either
"direct" (French) or "indirect" (British), with a third
variant-apartheid-as exceptional. This benign terminology, Mamdani
shows, masks the fact that these were actually variants of a
despotism. While direct rule denied rights to subjects on racial
grounds, indirect rule incorporated them into a "customary" mode of
rule, with state-appointed Native Authorities defining custom. By
tapping authoritarian possibilities in culture, and by giving
culture an authoritarian bent, indirect rule (decentralized
despotism) set the pace for Africa; the French followed suit by
changing from direct to indirect administration, while apartheid
emerged relatively later. Apartheid, Mamdani shows, was actually
the generic form of the colonial state in Africa. Through case
studies of rural (Uganda) and urban (South Africa) resistance
movements, we learn how these institutional features fragment
resistance and how states tend to play off reform in one sector
against repression in the other. Reforming a power that
institutionally enforces tension between town and country, and
between ethnicities, is the key challenge for anyone interested in
democratic reform in Africa.
Why do conflict-generated diasporas mobilize in contentious and
non-contentious ways or use mixed strategies? This book develops a
theory of socio-spatial positionality and its implications for the
individual agency of diaspora entrepreneurs. A novel typology
features four types of diaspora entrepreneurs-Broker, Local,
Distant, and Reserved-depending on the relative strength of their
socio-spatial linkages to host-land, original homeland, and other
global locations. A two-level typological theory captures nine
causal pathways unravelling how diaspora entrepreneurs operate in
transnational social fields and interact with host-land foreign
policies, homeland governments, parties, non-state actors, critical
events, and limited global influences. Non-contention often occurs
when diaspora entrepreneurs act autonomously and when host-state
foreign policies converge with their goals. Dual-pronged contention
is common under the influence of homeland governments, non-state
actors, and political parties. The most contention occurs in
response to violent events in the original homeland or adjacent to
it fragile states. The book is informed by 300 interviews among the
Albanian, Armenian, and Palestinian diasporas connected to de facto
states, Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Palestine respectively.
Interviews were conducted in the UK, Germany, France, Netherlands,
Sweden, Switzerland, Brussels in Belgium, as well as Kosovo and
Armenia in the European neighbourhood.
Mass media sources everyday spread the information about events in
the different regions of the world. And, most probably, there is no
person, who by different level of interest, does not observe the
news. On the information line, there are presented the meetings and
negotiations, terrorist acts, conflicts and cooperation, wars, big
financial and trade deals. How to understand and analyze all those
factors? Which regularities act at the world political arena? In
the modern world, internal and external events are interconnected
with each other by close ties, which finds how the broadcasts are
presented. All this, having been taken together, has the direct
attitude to the World Politics. World politics is a new scientific
discipline, which has been established only at the second half of
the twentieth century, but which gained the rapid distribution in
many countries. In the focus of its attention - political
processes, which are going on in the modern world, but with the
perspectives of their further development. In this regard, the
world politics (in comparison for example from history) is oriented
on the present and future periods and by this means has the closest
ties with the political practice. One more significance of the
world politics relates to the fact, that it cannot be understood
without the knowledge of the relative fields - history, economics,
law, social sciences, and psychology. Considering the
above-mentioned realities, this book plays a very important role
for the increasing public awareness on different processes within
the world politics, which concerns the interests of each citizen of
our planet. The target audience and potential users of this book
will be representatives of the different target groups -
Politicians, Diplomats, Scientists, University Professors,
Journalists, NGO activists, employees of the various International
Governmental and Intergovernmental Organizations, and Students
interested in World Politics, Globalization, Democracy and Human
Rights, Economics, Defense and Security, Conflict Resolution,
Environment, Migration, and Cybersecurity issues.
This book addresses the possibilities of analyzing the modern
international through the thought of Michel Foucault. The broad
range of authors brought together in this volume question four of
the most self-evident characteristics of our contemporary
world-'international', 'neoliberal', 'biopolitical' and 'global'-
and thus fill significant gaps in both international and Foucault
studies. The chapters discuss what a Foucauldian perspective does
or does not offer for understanding international phenomena while
also questioning many appropriations of Foucault's work. This
transdisciplinary volume will serve as a reference for both
scholars and students of international relations, international
political sociology, international political economy, political
theory/philosophy and critical theory more generally.
In Power and Regionalism in Latin America: The Politics of
MERCOSUR, Laura Gomez-Mera examines the erratic patterns of
regional economic cooperation in the Southern Common Market
(MERCOSUR), a political-economic agreement among Argentina, Brazil,
Paraguay, Uruguay, and, recently, Venezuela that comprises the
world's fourth-largest regional trade bloc. Despite a promising
start in the early 1990s, MERCOSUR has had a tumultuous and
conflict-ridden history. Yet it has survived, expanding in
membership and institutional scope. What explains its survival,
given a seemingly contradictory mix of conflict and cooperation?
Through detailed empirical analyses of several key trade disputes
between the bloc's two main partners, Argentina and Brazil,
Gomez-Mera proposes an explanation that emphasizes the tension
between and interplay of two sets of factors: power asymmetries
within and beyond the region, and domestic-level politics. Member
states share a common interest in preserving MERCOSUR as a vehicle
for increasing the region's leverage in external negotiations.
Gomez-Mera argues that while external vulnerability and overlapping
power asymmetries have provided strong and consistent incentives
for regional cooperation in the Southern Cone, the impact of these
systemic forces on regional outcomes also has been crucially
mediated by domestic political dynamics in the bloc's two main
partners, Argentina and Brazil. Contrary to conventional wisdom,
however, the unequal distribution of power within the bloc has had
a positive effect on the sustainability of cooperation. Despite
Brazil's reluctance to adopt a more active leadership role in the
process of integration, its offensive strategic interests in the
region have contributed to the durability of institutionalized
collaboration. However, as Gomez-Mera demonstrates, the tension
between Brazil's global and regional power aspirations has also
added significantly to the bloc's ineffectiveness.
This book examines the coexistence of crony capitalism and
traditionally democratic institutions such as political competition
and elections in Russia after the collapse of communism. The
combination, Gulnaz Sharafutdinova argues, has produced a distinct
pattern of political evolution in contemporary Russia. Elections
are meant to ensure government accountability and allow voters to
elect a government responsive to their needs, but in postcommunist
Russia the institutional forms of democracy did not result in the
expected outcomes. Instead, democratic institutions in the context
of crony capitalism-in which informal elite groups dominate policy
making, and preferential treatment from the state, not market
forces, is crucial to amassing and holding wealth-were widely
devalued and discredited. As Sharafutdinova demonstrates,
especially through her close scrutiny of elections in two regions
of Russia, Nizhnii Novgorod and the Republic of Tatarstan, crony
capitalism made elections especially intense struggles among the
elites. Massive amounts of money flowed into campaigns to promote
candidates by discrediting their rivals, money purchased candidates
and power, and elites thereby solidified their control. As a
result, the majority of citizens perceived elections as the means
for the elite to access power and wealth rather than as expressions
of public will. Through her detailed case studies and her analyses
of contemporary Russia in general, Sharafutdinova argues
persuasively that the turn toward authoritarianism associated with
Vladimir Putin and supported by a majority of Russian citizens was
a negative political response to the interaction of electoral
processes and crony capitalism.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which
commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out
and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and
impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes
high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using
print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in
1990.
As the EU's relations with Russia remain at an all-time low and
continue to be in a state of paralysis, marked by
de-institutionalisation, inertia and estrangement, the EU's policy
towards Russia seems up for review. By taking stock of the
implementation of the EU's Global Strategy and the five principles
that are guiding EU-Russia relations, this volume provides a
forward-looking angle and contributes to a better understanding of
the current EU-Russia relationship and the prospects for overcoming
the existing deadlock. By bringing together European and Russian
scholars and adopting an interdisciplinary perspective that
combines insights from EU studies, international relations, and
European and international law, the book provides a comprehensive
and holistic view on the state of affairs in EU-Russia relations.
Founded in 1929, the Jewish Agency played a central role in the
founding of the State of Israel. Throughout the 1920s, 30s and 40s,
many secret meetings took place between the JA and Arab leaders and
elites. The dominant narrative claims that Syrian leaders and
elites were not involved in any such meetings. However, this book
reveals for the first time that a multitude of secret meetings and
negotiations took place including with the Syrian National Block -
the official Syrian leadership at the time - and the Shahbandari
opposition and leaders of Jabal al-Druze. Based mainly on primary
sources from Israeli archives, including documentation of
discussions, reports and decisions taken by the JA leadership, the
book tells a new story of a critical period of history, the Arab
Revolt of 1936-1939 in Palestine. Mahmoud Muhareb argues that the
main historic objective of the JA was to reach agreements with Arab
leaders and Arab states, behind the back of the Palestinians and at
their expense, and to normalize its relations with the Arab states
while it continued to deny the national rights of the Palestinians.
The book challenges Israeli and Syrian official narratives and
substantiates the Palestinian narrative, as well as some Israeli
new historians who asserted Israel refusal to recognize the
national rights of the Palestinians and affirmed its attempts to
reach a comprehensive settlement with the Arab states at the
expense of the Palestinians. The book includes Arabic and Hebrew
sources translated into English for readers.
The Cold War began almost immediately after the end of World War II
and the defeat of the Nazis in Europe. As images of the Nazis'
atrocities became part of American culture's common store, the evil
of their old enemy, beyond the Nazis as a wartime opponent, became
increasingly important. As America tried to describe the danger
represented by the spread of Communism, it fell back on
descriptions of Nazism to make the threat plain through comparison.
At the heart of the tensions of that era lay the inconsistency of
using one kind of evil to describe another. The book addresses this
tension in regards to McCarthyism, campaigns to educate the public
about Communism, attempts to raise support for wars in Asia, and
the rhetoric of civil rights. Each of these political arenas is
examined through their use of Nazi analogies in popular, political,
and literary culture. The Nazi Card is an invaluable look at the
way comparisons to Nazis are used in American culture, the history
of those comparisons, and the repercussions of establishing a
political definition of evil.
European Perceptions of China and Perspectives on the Belt and Road
Initiative is a collection of fourteen essays on the way China is
perceived in Europe today. These perceptions - and they are
multiple - are particularly important to the People's Republic of
China as the country grapples with its increasingly prominent role
on the international stage, and equally important to Europe as it
attempts to come to terms with the technological, social and
economic advances of the Belt and Road Initiative. The authors are,
on the whole, senior academics specializing in such topics as
International Relations and Security, Public Diplomacy, Media and
Cultural Studies, and Philosophy and Religion from more than a
dozen different European countries and are involved in various
international projects focussed on Europe-China relations.
Cell phone apps share location information; software companies
store user data in the cloud; biometric scanners read fingerprints;
employees of some businesses have microchips implanted in their
hands. In each of these instances we trade a share of privacy or an
aspect of identity for greater convenience or improved security.
What Robert M. Pallitto asks in Bargaining with the Machine is
whether we are truly making such bargains freely - whether, in
fact, such a transaction can be conducted freely or advisedly in
our ever more technologically sophisticated world. Pallitto uses
the social theory of bargaining to look at the daily compromises we
make with technology. Specifically, he explores whether resisting
these 'bargains' is still possible when the technologies in
question are backed by persuasive, even coercive, corporate and
state power. Who, he asks, is proposing the bargain? What is the
balance of bargaining power? What is surrendered and what is
gained? And are the perceived and the actual gains and losses the
same - that is, what is hidden? At the center of Pallitto's work is
the paradox of bargaining in a world of limited agency. Assurances
that we are in control are abundant whether we are consumers,
voters, or party to the social contract. But when purchasing goods
from a technological behemoth like Amazon, or when choosing a
candidate whose image is crafted and shaped by campaign strategists
and media outlets, how truly free, let alone informed, are our
choices? The tension between claims of agency and awareness of its
limits is the site where we experience our social lives - and
nowhere is this tension more pronounced than in the surveillance
society. This book offers a cogent analysis of how that complex,
contested, and even paradoxical experience arises as well as an
unusually clear and troubling view of the consequential compromises
we may be making.
In Offering Hospitality: Questioning Christian Approaches to War,
Caron E. Gentry reflects on the predominant strands of American
political theology-Christian realism, pacifism, and the just war
tradition-and argues that Christian political theologies on war
remain, for the most part, inward-looking and resistant to
criticism from opposing viewpoints. In light of the new problems
that require choices about the use of force-genocide, terrorism,
and failed states, to name just a few-a rethinking of the
conventional arguments about just war and pacifism is timely and
important. Gentry's insightful perspective marries contemporary
feminist and critical thought to prevailing theories, such as
Christian realism represented in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr and
the pacifist tradition of Stanley Hauerwas. She draws out the
connection between hospitality in postmodern literature and
hospitality as derived from the Christian conception of agape, and
relates the literature on hospitality to the Christian ethics of
war. She contends that the practice of hospitality, incorporated
into the jus ad bellum criterion of last resort, would lead to a
"better peace." Gentry's critique of Christian realism, pacifism,
and the just war tradition through an engagement with feminism is
unique, and her treatment of failed states as a concrete security
issue is practical. By asking multiple audiences-theologians,
feminists, postmodern scholars, and International Relations
experts-to grant legitimacy and credibility to each other's
perspectives, she contributes to a reinvigorated dialogue.
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