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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > International relations > General
The project discusses Hezbollah's political ideology and how it evolves over time and the conditions that lead to the change of ideology. The author also examines Hezbollah's relationship with the patron states, Syria and Iran. In contrast with major arguments in the literature, the book argues that political ideologies are not fixed and they evolve depending on a number of factors such as the change in context, major events like a civil war in the patron state, and, most importantly, when the change of ideology becomes linked to survival of the insurgency. This monograph will appeal to a wide range of audiences such as researchers, scholars, and graduate students in the fields of Middle Eastern studies, political studies, Islamism, and nationalism.
A pioneering contribution to the study of negotiation theory, this volume takes as its central organizing principle the thesis that national leaders are generally the key actors in international politics and conflict management. Therefore, the editors argue, efforts to contain, manage, and reduce international conflicts through negotiation will be significantly enhanced through the availability of detailed information about the leading players. The papers collected here are deigned to evaluate this hypothesis through a detailed analysis of the major national leaders during the events of June-September 1982 in Lebanon, which began with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and culminated in the establishment of an international peace-keeping force in West Beirut.
The reintegration of ex-combatants after conflict is a crucial peacebuilding task, but several challenges stand in the way of efforts to successfully assist ex-combatants after war. Drawing on extensive field research including nearly 200 interviews with policy practitioners, government officials, and ex-combatants themselves, this book critically examines these challenges by analyzing reintegration policy and outcomes in Namibia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.McMullin presents a troubling contradiction in the conventional wisdom about peacebuilding as it relates to ex-combatants: limited economic opportunities and short term assistance programs mean that 'reintegration' tends to be back into the poverty and marginalization that contributed to war in the first place. Can reintegration back into poverty be called successful? This book will appeal to scholars of political violence, security studies, peacekeeping and peace building, transitional justice, social policy after war, and peace and conflict studies.
This book examines the academic discussion on climate engineering as an instance of politicization - as a subject of deliberation and decision-making. It traces legitimizing and delegitimizing frames applied to discuss both Carbon Dioxide Removal and Solar Radiation Management approaches in academic publications, and their implications for political decision-making. Moreover, it offers insights into how academic discourse on climate technology can influence political decision-making - especially at a technological stage where a socio-technical system with a high degree of inertia does not (yet) exist. The high degree of diversity of frames in the academic discussion is understood as an opportunity for deliberate decision-making concerning the future roles of these approaches in global climate policy. This book demonstrates how insights from science and technology studies can be operationalized in empirical political analysis. It appeals to scholars in both political science and environmental science who are interested in climate change policy-making and the science-policy nexus.
The disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s is often described as the starting-point of the EEC/EU involvement in Western Balkan politics, as if no political relations had developed between the EEC and Yugoslavia during the Cold War era. Instead, this book shows that the origin of EEC-Yugoslav relations must be placed in the crucial decade of the 1970s. Contrary to received opinion, this work demonstrates that relations between the EEC and Yugoslavia were grounded on a strong political rationale which was closely linked to the evolution of the Cold War in Europe and the Mediterranean. The main argument is that relations between the two parties were primarily influenced by the need to prevent the expansion of Soviet influence in the Balkans and to foster detente in Europe.
This book offers an original analysis and theorization of the biopolitics of development in the postcolonial present, and draws significantly from the later works of Michel Foucault on biopolitics. Foucault s works have had a massive influence on postcolonial literatures, particularly in political science and international relations, and several authors of this book have themselves made significant contributions to that influence. While Foucault s thought has been inspirational for understanding colonial biopolitics as well as governmental rationalities concerned with development, his works have too often failed to inspire studies of political subjectivity. Instead, they have been used to stoke the myth of the inevitability of the decline of collective political subjects, often describing an increasingly limited horizon of political possibilities, and provoking a disenchantment with the political itself in postcolonial works and studies. Working against the grain of current Foucauldian scholarship, this book underlines the importance of Foucault s work for the capacity to recognize how this degraded view of political subjectivity came about, particularly within the framework of the discourses and politics of development, and with particular attention to the predicaments of postcolonial peoples. It explores how we can use Foucault s ideas to recover the vital capacity to think and act politically at a time when fundamentally human capacities to think, know and to act purposively in the world are being pathologized as expressions of the hubris and underdevelopment of postcolonial peoples. Why and how it is that life in postcolonial settings has been depoliticized to such dramatic effect? The immediacy of these themes will be obvious to anyone living in the South of the world. But within the academy they remain heavily under-addressed. In thinking about what it means to read Michel Foucault today, this book tackles some significant questions and problems: Not simply that of how to explain the ways in which postcolonial regimes of governance have achieved the debasements of political subjectivity they have; nor that of how we might better equip them with the means to suborn the life of postcolonial peoples more fully; but that of how such peoples, in their subjection to governance, can and do resist, subvert, escape and defy the imposition of modes of governance which seek to remove their lives of those very capacities for resistance, subversion, flight, and defiance. "
Since its accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in December 2001, China has been committed to full compliance with the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement. This text considers the development of intellectual property in China, and offers an interdisciplinary analysis of China's compliance with the TRIPS Agreement using theories originating in international relations and law. It notes that despite significant efforts to amend China's substantive IP laws to prepare for WTO accession and sweeping changes to domestic legislation, a significant gap existed between the laws on paper and as enforced in practice, and that infringements to the agreement are still prevalent. The book examines how compliance with international rules can be promoted and encouraged in a specific jurisdiction. Making a case for a wider, more interdisciplinary and global outlook, it contends that compliance needs to align with the national interests of relevant countries and jurisdictions, as governments' economic interests support the greater enforcement of the IP laws.
Terrorism and its manifestations continue to evolve, becoming deadlier and more menacing. This study considers the evolution of terrorism since 1968 and how airlines and governments have attempted to deal with this form of violence through a series of nonforce strategies. Using historical examples, we see how governments, particularly the United States, attempted to counter politically motivated aerial hijacking with metal detectors, legal means, and, finally, in frustration, counterviolence operations to subdue terrorists. As nations witnessed aerial hijacking and sieges, the requirement for paramilitary and military counterterrorist forces became a necessity. Through use of examples from Israel (Entebbe 1976), West Germany (Mogadishu 1977), and Egypt (Malta 1985), Taillon concludes that cooperation--ranging from shared intelligence to forward base access and observers--can provide significant advantages in dealing with low-intensity operations. He hopes to highlight those key aspects of cooperation at an international level which have, at least in part, been vital to successful counterterrorist operations in the past and, as we witnessed again in the campaign in Afghanistan, are destined to remain so in the future.
This book focuses on ethnic nationalism and its universality as a phenomenon in world politics. By employing case studies, the essays demonstrate the past, current, and future persistence of this fragmenting tendency and its implications for various regional and world-wide political dynamics. By its very comprehensiveness and geographic case diversity, the study provides evidence that there are two simultaneous (and sometimes contradictory) dynamics taking place in the international political arena--integration and fragmentation. This collection of essays analyzes fragmentation. There are significant implications for description, analysis, evaluation, and prescriptive policy in international relations. This book challenges the bias in post-war America (and the West overall) that the preeminent, if not exclusive, political behavior tendency in regional and world politics is integration of actors and their behavior. While not seeking to refute or deny integration, it suggests balancing the analysis of international politics by upgrading the fragmentation tendencies based upon a very basic phenomenon--ethnic nationalism.
Trade liberalization policies have changed the assumptions of economic theory because they have changed the core definition of its concepts-imports and exports. When most trade is done in components rather than finished goods, how do we assign nationaility to value added during the production process? Anguelov analyzes foreign direct investment (FDI) as the core tool behind the internationalization of the production function. He tracks the changing nature of incentives in location and diversification of multinational corporations (MNCs), as well as the role governements have in the creation and implementation of trade policies that impact MNC investments.
The South Asian diaspora is a diverse group who settled in different parts of the world, often concentrated in developed countries. There is an emerging trend of re-engagement of the diaspora in the South Asian region. Entrepreneurs in Japan and Singapore as well as the Malaysian Indian diaspora are involved in South India making the region a lucrative space for capital, talent and ideas. This volume expands into diasporic communities such as the Nepali community in Singapore and their contribution to their home economy through remittances. Beyond economics, the contributors explore how transnational politics overlap with religious ideologies amongst Pakistanis in United Kingdom and the Sathya Sai Baba movement which contributes to diasporic identity building in host countries. They also explore media and culture: in the last decade Bollywood films have portrayed life in the diaspora, and have featured the diaspora and Non Resident Indians (NRI) as fully formed stock characters and protagonists. The process of diaspora re-engagement has tremendous development implications for South Asian countries, both individually and for their regional integration.
In the past few decades, an apparent international consensus has developed regarding a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. However, in spite of this consensus and the fact that peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians have been ongoing in one way or another for over 17 years, peace has been elusive at best. The frustration and the suffering of the people on both sides of the conflict have led many to believe that the two-state-solution consensus is, in fact, unattainable, and this has fueled the emergence of alternative solutions. On one end of the spectrum, there are those on the Israeli side that advocate the idea of conflict management, instead of conflict resolution. At the other end of the spectrum are those (mostly on the pro-Palestinian side) who champion the proposal of a single, bi-national state. It was in this context that a group of academics from the U.S., Israel, and Palestine, gathered at a conference aptly titled "Pathways to Peace" in March 2008 to explore, discuss, and generate fresh, new ideas to bring forth an academic perspective of peace along with the aim of attaining justice and security for both the peoples of Palestine and Israel. Essays arising from this meeting were written to note down these ideas from some of the most important researchers in this area, such as Professor Herbert Kelman from Harvard University, Professor Naomi Chazan from Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Dr. Sami Adwan from Bethlehem University, as well as other renowned academics from a diverse variety of scholarly backgrounds. This multidisciplinary perspective presents an academic and holistic method of examining and seeking out the elusive resolution to what is one of the longest conflict of the modern era. This edited volume is a collection of essays based on the papers and keynote presentations that were delivered at this conference in a number of different academic disciplines, including political sciences, economics, psychology, philosophy, and literature. It is unique not only in its inclusion of authors from all sides and different political views but also in how it incorporates the various disciplines and theoretical perspectives in proposing and advocating varied solutions to the conflict. This volume makes a substantial contribution to scholarship on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by its application of academic thinking to the solution for one of the most serious conflicts of our time.
This book answers two related questions concerning civil war peace agreements. First, it explains why some peace agreements get signed while others do not get signed, and second, why do some of those agreements that get signed not hold to ultimately bring an end to protracted civil wars. In spite of the fact that most mediated settlements of civil wars are not durable, it is still important that we understand why some civil war agreements reach initial steps towards settlement, without which full and durable end of conflict is not possible. To improve our understanding of the process through which civil war agreements are concluded and why some settlements hold while others do not, this study looks at empirical evidence from three mediated sets of peace agreements. The focus is first a series of fourteen agreements that finally ended the first civil war in Liberia in 1997; second, the 1993 Arusha peace accord that failed to prevent the escalation of conflict into genocide in Rwanda; and third, a series of three agreements that were signed but did not initially hold to end the conflict in Sierra Leone. An excellent and thorough study, this book will be a welcome reference for collections in African studies, international peace studies, and political science.
This work is a critical examination of the dangers which confront the United States in the current era of global instability with historical examples of past crises and prescriptive suggestions for the future. America enters the post-Cold War world as a superpower, but one whose future security, and perhaps even survival, cannot be taken for granted. Only three times in modern history has the world seen such potential instability; in two of those instances, the result was total war. In the coming millennium, major crises and wars are inevitable. Whether or not the United States successfully negotiates such conflicts will depend upon decisions made today. Only careful analysis and planning can help to assure that the United States will preserve its independence and prosperity. This study includes historical examples which illustrate why the current global situation is exceptionally dangerous and how America should prepare to avoid and survive crises, maintain freedom of action, and improve strategic decision-making. The author reviews the most dangerous strategic shortcomings and makes twenty-six recommendations for the future on such topics as military force structure, foreign policy goals, and domestic policy.
... aims to be something more than a biographical dictionary of missionaries, academics, artists, leaders, diplomats, educators, soldiers, engineers, etc. (dead and alive), who established relationships between the US and Africa. The entries include information on institutions, organizations, business firms, even ships that were involved in these contacts. . . . recommended for most libraries. "Choice" Contacts between the United States and Africa began in the seventeenth century when American slavers arrived on the West African Coast. They were quickly followed by a multitude of colonists, traders, missionaries, soldiers, diplomats, engineers, scientists, authors, artists, explorers, and hunters, among others, as well as a range of American institutions, societies, and businesses. This unique reference work provides in one alphabetical format a resource on more than 700 people, organizations, and events that have affected the relations between the United States and Africa from the 1600s to the present. The focus is primarily on those individuals and organizations that were actually in Africa and that have left written or visual records of their stay. Each entry is followed by a short bibliography of major sources, including information on existing manuscript material; a useful index completes the text. Of special interest to scholars of African studies, world history, American foreign policy, and colonialism, this comprehensive reference tool will be a valuable aid in understanding American involvement in Africa.
Race to the Moon is a suspenseful thriller about the 30-year clash between the United States and the Soviet Union to be the first to put a man on the moon. This true account is heavy with intrigue, espionage, and controversy. Beginning with a 1961 pledge by President John F. Kennedy to plant the Stars and Stripes on the lunar surface by the end of the decade, the story flashes back to the first days of World War II. At that time, England was tipped off by a high Nazi official that the Third Reich was developing revolutionary long-range rockets. This same source clandestinely provided documents that shocked British scientists: The Germans were 25 years ahead of England and the United States in rocket development! And then, in September 1944, 60-foot-long V-2 rockets, for which there was no defense, began raining down on London, causing enormous destruction and loss of life. Even while the fighting was still raging in Germany in the spring of 1945, a handful of young U.S. Army officers scored a colossal coup: They connived to steal 100 of the huge V-2s that had been found in an underground factory. They were dismantled and slipped by train out of Germany, destination White Sands, New Mexico. Then began a no-holds-barred search for German rocket scientists in the chaos of a defeated Third Reich, with the Americans and British on one side and the Russians on the other. Within weeks of the close of the war, Wernher von Braun and 126 of his rocket team members were corraled, shipped to the United States, and began working secretly on missile development. At the same time, the Soviets literally kidnapped other German rocket scientists and sent them to Russia to continue their space work. In the years ahead, Wernher von Braun and his German rocket team, nearly all of whom became naturalized citizens of the United States, collaborated with American scientists to overcome enormous space achievements by the Soviets--and bungling by Washington politicians--to send Neil Armstrong scampering about on the moon in 1969.
Bidisha Biswas explores the question of how a democratic state chooses between policies of coercion and accommodation when dealing with political violence by addressing an important, yet under examined, topic-India' approach to internal conflicts. In Managing Conflicts in India, Biswas selects three cases of conflict: the separatist campaign in Punjab during the 1980s; the protracted insurgency in Kashmir; and attacks on the Indian state by left-wing extremists, also known as Maoists and Naxalites, a campaign that has existed in different forms since the 1960s. Using archival research and fieldwork, Biswas shows that the Indian state has chosen a mix of tactics in dealing with these insurgencies. She argues that the government's responses have often been dictated by immediate political concerns, rather than a strategic vision. While the integrity of the Indian state remains intact, its democratic quality and credibility have been seriously compromised. By focusing on the choices-and missteps-that the Indian government has made, Biswas sheds light not only on the insurgencies themselves, but also on the overall processes that impact effective conflict management. For recent author events, follow these links: http://carnegieendowment.org/2014/06/16/managing-conflicts-in-india-policies-of-coercion-and-accommodation/hcui http://www.start.umd.edu/events/book-talk-managing-conflicts-india-policies-coercion-and-accommodation
To understand the challenges of political leadership and how top executives succeed in accomplishing an Administration s objectives, business-in-government experts Paul R. Lawrence and Mark A. Abramson present the findings of a four-year study of top political appointees in the Obama Administration. The 42 participants Deputy Secretaries and agency heads provide case studies of how each approaches the management challenges and achieves the mission of their organization. Full of behind-the-scenes insights and practical advice from government political executives on how they face management challenges in real time, What Government Does: How Political Executives Manage offers indispensable insights to current and prospective political appointees and everyone interested in understanding how leaders make government agencies more effective. The new book, a follow-up to their previous book, Paths to Making a Difference: Leading in Government, presents an insightful framework of what government does. Instead of thinking about government by policy area, the authors present an alternative approach in which government executives are categorized by the type of agency they are managing. The book includes chapters on Deputy Secretaries, producers, regulators, infrastructors, scientists, and collaborators."
This book provides a comprehensive study of asymmetric territorial conflict combining game theory, statistical empirical analysis and historiographic analysis. It proposes a model to explain the dynamics of territorial conflict between rivals with a wide disparity in capabilities between them. Using the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a case study and testing the model on a database of almost four hundred territorial conflicts, Resnick argues that changes in 'patience' - explained by parallel evolutionary processes occurring in the respectively strong and weak societies - underlie the changing behaviour witnessed in such rivalries. Located within the general context of the interplay between material constraints and ideas, the theoretical significance of this model goes beyond the context of territorial conflict and can be seen to provide an explanation for the ideational aspects of power transitions and change in world politics.This book constitutes a significant advance in the literature on territorial conflict, which has increasingly come to be recognized as a key field of enquiry in the discipline of conflict studies and international relations scholarship in general.
What can 'assemblage thinking' contribute to international theory? Assemblages have been invoked in several disciplines to make sense of the heterogeneity of the elements of society and the ways in which these are politically intertwined. Can parallel developments be prompted in IR?Reassembling International Theory investigates how the contemporary debates on assemblages in social theory can contribute to generating critical considerations on the connections and dissociation of political agency, physical world and international dynamics. It draws on a variety of international relations experiences and on conversations with key 'assemblage' theorists to tease out the theoretical and methodological implications, ontological and material dynamics, as well as the politics of assemblage thinking.Including contributions from Rita Abrahamsen, Roland Bleiker, Antoine Bousquet, Christian Bueger, David Chandler, Stephen Collier, Olaf Corry, Xavier Guillaume, Graham Harman, Debbie Lisle, Maximilian Mayer, Aihwa Ong, Mark Salter, Saskia Sassen, Peer Schouten, Nick Srnicek and Michael Williams, this text will appeal to scholars in International Relations, Political Sociology and Human Geography.
Corn Crusade: Khrushchev's Farming Revolution in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union is the first history of Nikita Khrushchev's venture to cover the Soviet Union in corn, a crop common globally but hitherto rare in his country. Lasting from 1953 until 1964, this crusade was an emblematic component of his efforts to resolve agrarian crises inherited from Joseph Stalin. Using policies and propaganda to pressure farms to expand corn plantings tenfold, Khrushchev expected the resulting bounty to feed not people, but the livestock necessary to produce the meat and dairy products required to make good on his frequent pledges that the Soviet Union was soon to "catch up to and surpass America." This promised to enrich citizens' hitherto monotonous diets and score a victory in the Cold War, which was partly recast as a "peaceful competition" between communism and capitalism. Khrushchev's former comrades derided corn as one of his "harebrained schemes" when ousting him in October 1964. Echoing them, scholars have ridiculed it as an "irrational obsession," blaming the failure on climatic conditions. Corn Crusade brings a more complex and revealing history to light. Borrowing technologies from the United States, Khrushchev expected farms in the Soviet Union to increase productivity because he believed that innovations developed under capitalism promised greater returns under socialism. These technologies generated results in many economic, social, and climatic contexts after World War II but fell short in the Soviet Union. Attempting to make agriculture more productive and ameliorate exploitative labor practices established in the 1930s, Khrushchev achieved only partial reform of rural economic life. Enjoying authority over formal policy, Khrushchev stood atop an undisciplined hierarchy of bureaucracies, local authorities, and farmworkers. Weighing competing incentives, they flouted his authority by doing enough to avoid penalties, but too little to produce even modest harvests of corn, let alone the bumper crops the leader envisioned.
The Latin American narcotics trade is an important national security issue for the United States because it is destabilizing important Latin American allies and creating serious social problems within the United States. Frustration with the inability to block the flow of cocaine, marijuana, and heroin from Latin America prompted passage of major national anti-drug laws in 1986 and 1988. Throughout the decade, United States narcotics policy has created serious friction between the United States and Latin America yet, according to Mabry, it essentially has failed in its goals. Nine experts on this subject deal with the major issues of United States narcotics policy and offer recommendations for future action. The history of the United States narcotics policy, the nature of the trade, the debate over the use of the United States military in interdiction efforts, the role of Congress in making policy, and the origin and implementation of narcotics policy, be it directed against a specific nation or against the entire region, are presented. In addition, the book also contains a List of Tables covering: Consumption of Drugs, and Columbian Trafficker's Investment Preferences. An extensive bibliography is included designed to give other scholars and those interested in this issue an excellent start for further research.
Since the 1990s, the field of transitional justice has exploded with international support for the establishment of trials, truth commissions, and other measures aimed at helping societies address massive human rights violations. The United States' role has been particularly significant, providing extensive funding, political support, and technical assistance to such measures. Surprisingly, however, scant attention has been paid to analyzing the country's approach to transitional justice. In this book, Bird offers the first systematic and cross-cutting account of US foreign policy on transitional justice. She examines the development of US foreign policy on the field from World War I to the present, with an in-depth examination of US involvement in measures in Cambodia, Liberia, and Colombia. She supports her findings with nearly 200 interviews with key US and foreign government officials, staff of transitional justice measures, and country experts. By "opening the black box" of US foreign policy, Bird shows how diverse interests and the constantly evolving priorities of presidential administrations, Congress, the State Department, and other agencies shape US involvement in transitional justice. Despite bureaucratic battles, Bird argues that US foreign policy on transitional justice is surprisingly consistent and characterized by an approach that is value-driven, strategic, and retributive. She demonstrates how this approach has influenced the field as a whole, including the type of transitional justice measures selected, their design, and how they are implemented.
Since the 1970s, global capitalism has been marked by evermore intense cycles of boom and crisis. Today, Spain is at the epicentre of a crisis that threatens the future of the eurozone. Drawing upon Marxian value theory, Charnock, Purcell, and Ribera-Fumaz explain the deep historical and structural roots of the crisis in Spain, contextualised within global political and economic transformations in recent decades. They analyse the most recent cycle of boom and crisis in Spain, the nexus among European circuits of financial capital, urbanisation, and the emergent dynamics of state austerity and popular revolt - from the indignados movement to demands for an independent Catalonia. |
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