![]() |
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
||
|
Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > International relations > General
The first major comparative study of the causes and consequences of violent conflict that integrates and addresses the issue of self-determination. The authors show that with violent conflict in the developing world as the critical issue for the twenty-first century, and conflict prevention a central security problem for both the developed and developing world, self-determination movements can only be understood, and conflict prevented, in the context of global economic and cultural forces, and of local responses to them.
The book analyzes Brazil's Africa engagement as a rising power's strategy to gain global recognition, linking it to Brazil's broader foreign policy objectives and shedding light on the mechanisms of Brazilian status-seeking in Africa.
The post-cold war years have witnessed an unprecedented involvement
by the United Nations in the domestic affairs of states, to end
conflicts and rebuild political and administrative institutions.
International administrations established by the UN or Western
states have exercised extensive executive, legislative, and
judicial authority over post-conflict territories to facilitate
institution building and provide for interim governance.
This is the first volume to systematically look at how China uses international law to deal with its complex boundary questions--it borders on twelve countries. The book includes an examination of boundary claims, border policies, settlements, alignments, and armed conflicts. The author draws a clear picture of China's attitude toward the use of traditional law. He supports his study with treaties, historical background, maps, and legal arguments. The reader walks away with a fine understanding of China's behavior in negotiations and armed conflicts, the country's policy, and its philosophy on dispute settlement. China and International Law uses original sources to examine China's basic border policy. Chapters include: International Law; Border Policy; Boundary Disputes and Settlements; Unequal Boundary Treaties; Boundary Treaties; Determinants of Boundaries; and Methods for Settling Boundary Questions.
The editors and contributors to this study examine the future of domestic and foreign relations between Canada, Quebec, and their neighbors in the event of a yes vote on independence. They approach the possible emergence of an independent Quebec nation-state from the perspective of the study of world politics. As they suggest, this is particularly important because ethnic-based secessionist movements throughout the world now challenge our understanding of the supposed stability of the nation state within geographical regions and even the operation of states within global political and economic systems. They examine the implications of a sovereign Quebec with special reference to ethnic-based secession as a dimension of the emerging post cold war international system. In this context, the possible devolution of Canada is an event of enormous significance not only for North America, but also Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Given the evolving literature on minorities at risk, ethnicity, ethnonationalism, and ethnic conflict, the prospect of a sovereign Quebec and the devolution of Canada are possible events that may well define the study of world politics well into the 21st century. This book is an important addition for scholars, researchers, students, and concerned citizens interested in intranational relations and ethnicity and Canadian studies.
Global theory represents an influential and popular means of understanding contemporary social and political phenomena. Human identity and social responsibilities are considered in a global context and in the light of a global human condition. A global perspective is assumed to be new and to supersede preceding social theory. However, if contemporary global theory is influential, its identity, assumptions and novelty are controversial. Global Theory from Kant to Hardt and Negri scrutinises global theory by examining how contemporary global theorists simultaneously draw upon and critique preceding modern theories. It re-thinks contemporary global ideas by relating them to the social thought of Kant, Hegel and Marx, and in so doing highlights divergent ambiguous aspects of contemporary global theories, as well as the continuing impact of the ideas of Kant, Hegel and Marx.
Water is a key issue on the agenda of peace between Israel and its Arab neighbours. The circumstances in which Gaza gained its autonomy leaves it in a disadvantageous position with respect to water, and a deal on the hotly contested issue of the West Bank aquifers will be a protracted process. This book brings together the work of individuals involved directly in the negotiations and experts from various disciplines who have devoted their professional lives to the study of water and its management in the Jordan Basin. It looks at the issue from many different perspectives, offers new ideas and presents a realistic picture for the future.
An assessment of the role played by the Soviet and the Chinese Communists in the formation of the strategy of the Communist Party of India, and a case study in the postwar development of international Communist strategy in general are presented.
In 1947 German Field Marshal Albert Kesselring was tried and convicted of war crimes committed during World War II. He was held responsible for his troops having executed nearly 9,000 Italian citizens--women, children, elderly men--in retaliation for partisan attacks. His conviction, however, created a real dilemma for the United States and western Europe. While some sought the harshest punishments available for anyone who had participated in the war crimes of the Nazi regime, others believed that the repatriation of alleged war criminals would help secure the allegiance of a rearmed West Germany in the dangerous new Cold War against the Soviet Union. Kerstin von Lingen's close analysis of the Kesselring case reveals for the first time how a network of veterans, lawyers, and German sympathizers in Britain and America achieved the commutation of Kesselring's death sentence and his eventual release--reinforcing German popular conceptions that he had been innocent all along and that the Wehrmacht had fought a "clean war" in Italy. Synthesizing the work of contemporary German and Italian historians with her own exhaustive archival research, she shows that Kesselring bore much greater guilt for civilian deaths than had been proven in court--and that the war on the southern front had been far from clean. Von Lingen weaves together strands of the story as diverse as Winston Churchill's ability to mobilize support among British elites, Basil Liddell Hart's need to be recognized as an important military thinker, and the Cold War fears of the "Senators' Circle" in the United States. Through this rich narrative, she shows how international politics shaped the trial's proceedings and outcome--as well as the memory and meaning of the war for German citizens--and sheds new light on the complex interplay between the combatants' efforts to "master the past" and the threatening state of international relations in the early Cold War. In analyzing the efforts to clear Kesselring's name, von Lingen
shows that the case was about much more than the fate of one
convicted individual; it also underscored the pressure to wrap up
the war crimes issue--and German guilt--in order to get on with the
business of bringing a rearmed Germany into the Western alliance.
Kesselring's Last Battle sheds new light on the "politics of
memory" by unraveling a twisted thread in postwar history as it
shows how historical truth is sometimes sacrificed on the altar of
expediency.
Russia has never been able to escape its relationship with Europe, or Europe with Russia. Geography and history have conspired to make them both neighbors and unavoidable factors in each other's daily lives. From the early 1700s until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Europe and Moscow both relied on material power to balance against any threats emerging from East and West. More recently, Europe and the EU have adopted a different strategy: make Russia non-threatening by making it European, like "us." Meanwhile, Russia's resistance to Europe's assimilationist mission is increasingly robust, fuelled by energy exports to Europe and the world. Contributors to this volume wrestle with the question of whether the European project is feasible, desirable, or even ethical.
Halim Rane's "Reconstructing Jihad "breaks new ground on some of the most crucial issues of the twenty-first century: the role of religion in international affairs, the use of armed force, and the achievability of a just peace. In the context of international norms and identity factors Rane presents a contemporary methodology for the reconstruction of jihad from a doctrine based on the use of armed force to one that gives 'Islamic' legitimacy to non-violent resistance. Using the Israel-Palestine conflict as a case study, this book explores the impact of competing international norms in the process of conflict resolution. Combining a constructivist perspective of international relations with contextualist and objective-oriented ("maqasid") approaches of Islamic Studies, the author examines the conditions under which a just resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict is possible. Based on extensive research and statistics, Rane demonstrates why Palestinian nonviolence would be more conducive to their liberation struggle than violent resistance and how this is a legitimate and authentic form of jihad consistent with the higher objectives of Islam - a necessary realization for Islamic militants if the conflict is to find a just resolution. With the continued failure of the conventional 'peace process' and the increasing intractability of the conflict, this book makes a timely contribution to resolving one of the world's most enduring dilemmas.
An analysis and critical commentary on the general approach of American foreign policy toward Soviet Russia during the formative years of the Cold War. Whitcomb contends that the United States must bear a major share of the responsibility for the endless litany of conflicts, crises, and military confrontations that came to mark our foreign relations after 1945. Whitcomb shows that the American foreign affairs tradition led the country to entertain persistent misperceptions of the realities of the international arena in which it had to function. At the same time, Whitcomb points to the incompatability between many of the nation's most cherished values and the habits of action that Americans exhibited in their relationships with other states. An important post-revisionist view, this book will be of interest to American foreign policy for scholars and students alike.
This book presents a new way of looking at and analyzing policies, programs and/or plans in which research scientists have used their knowledge to develop mechanisms such as South Africa's National Water Resource Strategy, Second Edition; Australian and South African climate change adaptation strategies for government entities and the UNDP's Water and Ocean Governance focus area. It critically assesses how science can be used in the service of society and how researchers and practitioners can bridge the gaps that arise as a result of incomplete thinking. Presenting a bird's-eye view of how thinking and understanding operate in the policy context, it offers a valuable contribution to fields of inquiry such as research methods, comparative analyses, political science, international relations and the natural and social sciences in general. This book fills a market gap, providing real-world solutions to the practical application of science, paradigms and theories.
This study begins with a set of strategic assumptions--most notably that the risks of U.S.-Russian war are and will remain extremely low and that the U.S. military remains a stabilizing influence in many geographic theaters. O'Hanlon then shows that the United States' interests in the Third World, while nowhere truly vital, are sufficiently important to justify a measured degree of global military presence and engagement. Historical, political, and military analysis suggests that these interests can be protected efficiently and effectively with a U.S. military reduced in size by roughly 40 to 50 percent in most types of major combat forces, and by 95 percent in nuclear forces. In the realm of conventional forces, these cuts would be about twice as deep as those planned by Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney; in the nuclear realm they would be much deeper than those approved by the Bush administration. By contrast, analysis suggests that U.S. capabilities should be largely held constant--or in some cases even expanded--in logistics, intelligence and communications, R&D, and special forces. The resulting force posture would cost about $200 billion in 1991 dollars through the early years of the next century, and perhaps $230 billion annually thereafter. O'Hanlon's is one of the first in-depth studies of how the U.S. military might be reconfigured for the post-Cold War world. This study will prove useful for defense policy makers at the specialized levels and for students of the guns vs. butter policy issues and debates.
At the start of the twentieth century, British intelligence agents began to venture in increasing numbers to the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire, drawn by the twin objectives of securing the route to India and finding adventure and spiritualism in an antique land. But these competing objectives created a dilemma: how were they to discreetly and patriotically gather facts in a region they were drawn to for its legendary inscrutability and promise of fame and escape from Britain? Spies in Arabia tracks the intelligence community's tactical grappling with this dilemma and its myriad cultural, institutional, and political consequences during and after the Great War. Arguing that violence and culture were more closely allied in imperial rule than has been recognized, it tells the story of an imperial state dependent on equivocal agents groping through a fog of cultural notions and an interfering mass democracy towards a new style of "covert empire" centered on a brutal aerial surveillance regime in Iraq. Drawing on a wealth of archival sources - from the fictional to the recently declassified - it explains how Britons reconciled genuine ethical scruples with the actual violence of their Middle Eastern empire - how imperialism was made fit for an increasingly democratic and anti-imperial world. In doing so, it offers the first cultural history of Britain's Middle Eastern empire, anchored in a radically new interpretation of the institutions and practices of intelligence-gathering and the state. The result is a new understanding of the military, cultural, and political legacies of the Great War and of the British empire in the twentieth century. Unpacking the romantic fascination with "Arabia" as the land of espionage, Spies in Arabia presents a start tale of poetic ambition, war, terror, and failed redemption - and the prehistory of our present discontents.
From 1896 to 1924, motivated by fears of an irresistible wave of Asianmigration and the possibility that whites might be ousted from their positionof global domination, British colonists and white Americans instituted stringentlegislative controls on Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian immigration.Historians of these efforts typically stress similarity and collaborationbetween these movements, but in this compelling study, David C. Atkinsonhighlights the differences in these campaigns and argues that the main factorunifying these otherwise distinctive drives was the constant tensions theycaused. Drawing on documentary evidence from the United States, GreatBritain, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand, Atkinson traceshow these exclusionary regimes drew inspiration from similar racial, economic,and strategic anxieties, but nevertheless developed idiosyncraticallyin the first decades of the twentieth century. Arguing that the so-called white man's burden was often white supremacyitself, Atkinson demonstrates how the tenets of absolute exclusion-meant to foster white racial, political, and economic supremacy-onlyinflamed dangerous tensions that threatened to undermine the BritishEmpire, American foreign relations, and the new framework of internationalcooperation that followed the First World War.
This is the annual volume in a continuing UNESCO series that addresses a range of issues in the field of peace and conflict resolution. It provides an up-to-date overview of research on disarmament within the social sciences as well as background information to the new thinking about global security that emerged in 1988 and which has spurred the relaxing of international tensions. The volume also presents an invaluable comparison of viewpoints on the post-Cold War future and on the linking of disarmament to development issues. Changes in enemy perception, the problems of conversion (both economic and psychological) from military to peaceful production, and the growing danger of non-military threats to peace are among the phenomena analyzed here by a group of the world's leading scholars of peace and conflict studies. Information and insights into current conditions and a survey of the potential problems that could negatively affect the evolution of the new thinking and common security ideologies are offered by each author in chapters that represent important contributions to the discourse and discussion on peace and conflict. Following an introductory chapter that places the individual articles of the Yearbook in the context of the new thinking, Anatoli Leonidovich Adamichin demonstrates how the new thinking of Soviet policy makers is already reversing dangerous elements of the Cold War--a fact underlined by recent events in Eastern Bloc countries. The concepts of creative space and creative internationalism are investigated by Robert C. Johansen in his article on U.S.-Soviet security. K. Subrahmanyam considers disarmament and development, focusing on the imperatives of the interdependence of issues and peoples, and Hans Gunter Brauch surveys recent and on-going international research on disarmament in the social and human sciences. Chapters on regional developments and on the Unesco peace and disarmament programs complete the volume. For researchers, teachers, and students of peace and conflict resolution, this review of basic concepts, issues, and literature is an essential tool. Activists, concerned general readers, government and political leaders, and members of the diplomatic corps will find it not only factual but a source of inspiration and an incentive to practical action in the promotion of peace and security.
Can states be ruled in the same way as individuals? Has
globalization made the analogy between men and states redundant?
This book tackles such questions by analyzing the presuppositions
of the domestic analogy and providing the tools to assess its
validity using a variety of contexts and theories. What renders
such a reasoning problematic is not that it relies on a mere
analogy, but the fact that it surreptitiously transforms a
historically situated model, that of the western sovereign state,
into a universal paradigm.
This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the role of the EU in international security through five detailed case studies and in doing so fills a distinct gap in the scholarship on European security and policy-making. Significantly, it offers a broadened conceptualization of the EU as an international security actor, including JHA policy. Furthermore, case studies which explore, amongst other things, EU responses to piracy off the coast of Somalia, climate change and terrorism offers a fresh insight into EU policy on contemporary security challenges. As such, this book constitutes an important and original input in the debate on European security after the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty and is a must-read for students and scholars of EU Politics, Security Studies and International Relations.
This important reference tool surveys the multifaceted field of peace activism from 1800 to 1980. The dictionary defines the parameters of peace advocacy, surveys the different approaches taken in antiwar efforts, and provides information on many individuals who have either contributed to organized peace efforts or who have questioned war and organized violence. More than 250 authors from 15 nations have written 750 biographical entries about public advocates of peace; antiwar activists; leaders in organizations devoted to world peace; those who have worked to prevent armed conflicts; and writers, artists, and many others who have played major roles in the cause of peace. Although many of the subjects come from the United States and Europe, important subjects from Canada, Latin America, Africa, East Asia, and South Asia are also represented. Besides providing basic biographical information, each entry concentrates on the subject's work, ideas, and activity as a peace leader and also contains a short bibliography of works about the subject, works by the subject, and manuscript materials if available. Carefully indexed and cross-referenced, the volume contains an introductory overview of nineteenth- and twentieth-century peace efforts, gives a selective chronology of peace movements, and provides an appendix listing the peace leaders by country. No other volume provides such a comprehensive survey of peace leaders throughout the world as this one. The Biographical Dictionary of Modern Peace Leaders will undoubtedly prove to be an invaluable research and reference tool for scholars and students of international relations, international law, and political philosophy.
This collection examines various aspects of the efforts made to limit warfare through arms limitation and disarmament agreements in the period from the first Hague conference to the outbreak of World War II in Europe. The issue for each contributor is not necessarily to show whether individual endeavors, separate conferences, and the rest were successful or unsuccessful--though this is an important consideration. Rather, each chapter tends to offer differing points of view on accomplishments and failures because, as is so often the experience in historical study, the record is mixed; and this situation is certainly no less characteristic of arms limitation and disarmament between 1899 and 1939. Written by experts on disarmament issues, these chapters put into historical perspective how and why the effort, to restrain war were undertaken at the Hague conferences, the Washington conference, and among antiwar groups. Each contributor approaches this task using the method he or she deems most appropriate. Some employ an historiographical approach; others undertake to produce analyses based heavily on archival holdings in order to offer new interpretations of the past or revise existing ones. This book will be of interest to students and teachers alike of modern history and political science.
This edited volume illuminates the role of women in violence to demonstrate that gender is a key component of discourse on conflict and peace. Through an examination of theory and practice of women's participation in violent conflicts, the book makes the argument that both conflict and post-conflict situations are gender insensitive.
Focused on the role of Central Europe in international politics at the turn of the 20th century, the authors take stock of the knowledge about the discipline of IR, enhance the visibility of scholars from Central Europe, and fill the void which has emerged after several researches on Central Europe were completed in the 1990s.
What limits, if any, should be placed on a government's efforts to spy on its citizens in the name of national security? Spying on foreigners has long been regarded as an unseemly but necessary enterprise. Spying on one's own citizens in a democracy, by contrast, has historically been subject to various forms of legal and political restraint. For most of the twentieth century these regimes were kept distinct. That position is no longer tenable. Modern threats do not respect national borders. Changes in technology make it impractical to distinguish between 'foreign' and 'local' communications. And our culture is progressively reducing the sphere of activity that citizens can reasonably expect to be kept from government eyes. The main casualty of this transformed environment will be privacy. Recent battles over privacy have been dominated by fights over warrantless electronic surveillance and CCTV; the coming years will see debates over DNA databases, data mining, and biometric identification. There will be protests and lawsuits, editorials and elections resisting these attacks on privacy. Those battles are worthy. But the war will be lost. Modern threats increasingly require that governments collect such information, governments are increasingly able to collect it, and citizens increasingly accept that they will collect it. This book proposes a move away from questions of whether governments should collect information and onto more problematic and relevant questions concerning its use. By reframing the relationship between privacy and security in the language of a social contract, mediated by a citizenry who are active participants rather than passive targets, the book offers a framework to defend freedom without sacrificing liberty. |
You may like...
Assessing Transformation Products of…
Joerg E. Drewes, Thomas Letzel
Hardcover
R4,835
Discovery Miles 48 350
The Handbook of Metabolic Phenotyping
John C. Lindon, Jeremy K. Nicholson, …
Paperback
R4,944
Discovery Miles 49 440
Microbial Diversity in Time and Space
R.R. Colwell, K Ohwada, …
Hardcover
R4,161
Discovery Miles 41 610
|