Composed of original articles from academics and policy notes from practitioners, this book attempts to draw up the state of multilateralism through the UN model and identify potential ways to address its challenges and shortcomings. The contributors question the role of multilateralism, sometimes accused of being fragmented, inefficient and unrepresentative, and its impact on global governance, democracy, trade and investment, the environment, and human rights. Since most of the authors are not from the UN system, the content of the contributions provides an external and more neutral assessment of the UN's ability to continue to function today as a serious actor within a global movement in favor of a renewed form of multilateralism.

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.

This book uses the idea of internal cohesion through intra-BRICS cooperation to make the argument that the next phase in the evolution of BRICS is to strengthen cooperation among BRICS countries in the implementation of decisions taken. There is a risk that what the BRICS promises and what it represents both in the eyes of its friends and foes might not materialise in the absence of central institutions. So, the book calls for the deepening intra-BRICS cooperation across all policy areas where there are already undertakings could help mitigate this risk.

Investigates the production, trade and consumption of the bouquets sold in European supermarkets and the consequences of this for the globalised economy. From a macro-perspective, it appears that the cut flower industry has changed into a buyer-driven value chain with corporate retailers as the new lead firms. Yet, as this book shows, this is insufficient to explain how new trade relations come into being, and the consequences of this, not only for global economics, but for the producers, climate change and rural livelihoods. As the retailers and wholesalers of the flower industry in the West linked directly to producers in the Global South, trade relations changed fundamentally, and this critical new book explores the complexities of the power asymmetries and the way in which corporate retailers have shaped the market to promote their own interests, as well as the role non-economic actors played. This book examines in detail the situation at Lake Naivasha, Kenya, which has played a central part within this new market order. Since the 1970s, the area has developed into one of the most important production areas for the ready-made bouquets that sell so cheaply in European supermarkets. For the flower growers themselves, however, coping with the new conditions of supply and demand, the new market order has brought financial precariousness. Farms needed to be flexible in the production and marketing of their flowers. Yet while they were able to expand their production and achieve more stable employment conditions, this has not resulted in significantly higher remuneration. The rapidly changing economic situation has also had a profound impact, not only on local stakeholders, but on the environment, where there is intensified competition for resources and new production technologies. Published in association with the Collaborative Research Centre FUTURE RURAL AFRICA, funded by the German Research Council (DFG).

Qarakhanid Roads to China reconsiders the diplomacy, trade and geography of transcontinental networks between Central Asia and China from the 10th to the 12th centuries and challenges the concept of "the Silk Road crisis" in the period between the fall of the Tang Dynasty and the rise of the Mongols. Utilizing a broad range of Islamic and Chinese primary sources together with archaeological data, Dilnoza Duturaeva demonstrates the complexity of interaction along the Silk Roads and beyond that, revolutionizes our understanding of the Qarakhanid world and Song-era China's relations with neighboring regions.

The fourth edition of this dynamic and popular text provides a comprehensive introduction to contemporary politics in the Middle East. Fully revised and updated throughout, it features a new chapter on the Arab Spring and its aftermath, plus a wide range of vibrant case studies, data, questions for class discussion and suggestions for further reading. Purposefully employing a clear thematic structure, the book begins by introducing key concepts and contentious debates before outlining the impact of colonialism, and the rise and relevance of Arab nationalism in the region. Major political issues affecting the Middle East are then explored in full. These include political economy, conflict, political Islam, gender, the regional democracy deficit, and ethnicity and minorities. The book also examines the role of key foreign actors, such as the USA, Russia and the EU, and concludes with an in-depth analysis of the Arab uprisings and their impact in an era of uncertainty.

It has been the home to priests and prostitutes, poets and spies. It has been the stage for an improbable flirtation between an Israeli girl and a Palestinian boy living on opposite sides of the barbed wire that separated enemy nations. It has even been the scene of an unsolved international murder. This one-time shepherd's path between Jerusalem and Bethlehem has been a dividing line for decades. Arab families called it "al Mantiqa Haram." Jewish residents knew it as "shetach hefker." In both languages it meant the same thing: "the Forbidden Area." Peacekeepers that monitored the steep fault line dubbed it "Barbed Wire Alley." To folks on either side of the border, it was the same thing: A dangerous no-man's land separating warring nations and feuding cultures. The barbed wire came down in 1967. But it was soon supplanted by evermore formidable cultural, emotional and political barriers separating Arab and Jew. For nearly two decades, coils of barbed wire ran right down the middle of what became Assael Street, marking the fissure between Israeli-controlled West Jerusalem and Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem. In a beautiful narrative, A Street Divided offers a more intimate look at one road at the heart of the conflict, where inches really do matter.

Refugees, Migration, and Conflicts in South Asia: Rethinking Lives, Politics, and Policy is designed to make an interdisciplinary in-depth study of refugees, migration, conflicts, and development in the South Asian context. The region of South Asia is the most populous in the world, with preexisting problems of refugees, migration, conflicts, and violence. Since their formation, most of the South Asian states have been experiencing these problems. This book attempts to critically delineate the inflow and outflow of refugees and migrants. This book also critically addresses civil wars, ethnoreligious conflicts, and political violence in the South Asian region. By depicting the socioeconomic and security aspects of migration along with human security, this book has projected the vulnerability of this region.

This Palgrave Pivot argues that if we are to understand civil conflict we need to grasp how everyday life is shaped by local conflict imaginaries. In order to examine this claim the book sets out to explore the contours of conflict imaginaries from two very different sites of conflict. Both Colombia and Indonesia have suffered from the collective trauma of political violence but in very different social, cultural and political contexts. Sketching out what they mean by a conflict imaginary, and explaining the relationship of this key concept to social imaginaries more broadly, the authors provide a historical overview of how political violence has been represented in both countries. They go on to outline the original qualitative research methods used to provide empirical evidence for the importance of conflict imaginaries, methods which allow them to explore the images and metaphors that underpin the spatial, chronological and emotional cartographies through which people make sense of political violence. With an emphasis on the construction of place-based knowledge, they consider the role of the local, the national and the global in the imagining of civil conflict, and show how film can be used to explore the imaginative worlds of social actors living alongside violence, revealing in the process the need to take seriously their hopes, fears, dreams and fantasies.

This volume presents the outcomes of qualitative research on the meaning of religion in selected CEE regions. In several case studies, we reveal some features of social perception of religion present in verbalized and institutionalized social experiences and practices. We argue these societies develop their own social model of religion, which seems to be largely based on cultural, religious, and historical schemes dating back to the Habsburg Monarchy. They locate religious identity on a continuum with civic identity. Historical diversity may be endorsed as "traditional pluralism" while equality and tolerance is considered unnecessary. Capturing contradicting images of historical and contemporary pluralism may offer new insight into the puzzle of religion and politics in the CEE region.

The book is a study on planetary realism in a critical analysis of Australia in the age of the Anthropocene. It contextualises Australia in the degradation of the biosphere deeply harmful to humanity's wellbeing, accelerating the threat of nuclear war and the tensions of a declining democracy. The Anthropocene is a critical period, threatening the viability of the Australian nation-state. It involves the decarbonisation of the economy driven by domestic and foreign corporate power, and the geopolitics of world domination as a close ally of the US. Australia's militarisation for war against China must be contested in the pursuit for a green and just new deal framed in the foreign policy of reconciliation with Asia, including a fully cooperative entente with China

By comparing the great-powers' foreign policy, this book investigates the global competition and revisionist attempts to dismantle the Western liberal order. Since February 2022, the international system has been challenged by the Russian invasion in Ukraine and its profound, multiple consequences.Putin's War has reinvented the West. But still, this is not "the end of history". To illustrate that tensions between democratic and autocratic great powers are nowadays at their peak since the end of the Cold War, one should consider President Biden's words in Warsaw, referring to President Putin: "For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power!"

The study of foreign policy is usually concerned with the interaction of states, and thus with governance structures which emerged either with the so-called 'Westphalian system' or in the course of the 18th century: diplomacy and international law. As a result, examining foreign policy in earlier periods involves conceptual and terminological difficulties, which echo current debates on 'post-national' foreign policy actors like the European Union or global cities. This volume argues that a novel understanding of what constitutes foreign policy may offer a way out of this problem. It considers foreign policy as the outcome of processes that make some boundaries different from others, and set those that separate communities in an internal space apart from those that mark foreignness. The creation of such boundaries, which can be observed at all times, designates specific actors - which can be, but do not have to be, 'states' - as capable of engaging in foreign policy. As such boundaries are likely to be contested, they are unlikely to provide either a single or a simple distinction between 'insides' and 'outsides'. In this view, multiple layers of foreign-policy actors with different characteristics appear less as a modern development and more as a perennial aspect of foreign policy. In a broad perspective stretching from early Greek polities to present-day global cities, the volume offers a theoretical and empirical presentation of this concept by political scientists, jurists, and historians.

Examines the causes and consequences of Saudi Arabia's current security policy and the domestic, regional, and international challenges the country's defense program presents to the general welfare of the Middle East. As possessor of a quarter of the world's oil reserves and host to two of the holiest cities in Islam, Saudi Arabia is an integral part of the cultural, economic, and political well-being of the Middle East. From Persian Gulf security, to Middle Eastern politics, to the international energy industry, events in this desert kingdom strongly impact the stability of the region. This comprehensive resource analyzes contemporary Saudi Arabia-its modern history, the role of Islam, and the nature of Saudi foreign relations-and reveals how these and other factors dictate and shape the country's current security policies and priorities. Middle East expert and author Mathew Gray has organized the work into six sections: the first provides an historical overview of the region from the mid-1700s to the 1980s; the second explores the Saudi political and security system; the third discusses Saudi-U.S. relations; the fourth looks at Saudi relations with the Gulf region and the wider Middle East; and the fifth considers Saudi Arabia's role in Sunni extremism and terrorism. The final chapter looks at emerging security threats for Saudi Arabia. The book includes an overview of future challenges and risks including climate change, water shortages, and problems of Saudi identity and social dispersion. Explains the role of oil in sustaining the state-society political bargain, and the impact of population on its effectiveness Links Islam and Islamic extremism to a range of influencing factors, including political pressure, demographic changes, and the role of globalization in fostering more extreme views Weaves together an analysis of politics, economics, foreign relations, and social change, showing how these all relate to and impact each other and, above all, shape Saudi Arabia's and the Middle East's security environment

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the French government cultivated images of sensual and sophisticated white French women in an attempt to reestablish its global image as a great nation. French publicists, journalists, and government officials working in the tourism industry began a concerted effort to improve France's international image and win valuable tourist money by promoting the beauty, sexual appeal, and general allure of French women, all while shrinking the boundaries of what was considered beautiful. Charm Offensive explores how this elevation of French femininity created problems on both sides of the equation: the pressure on French women to conform to an exacting physical standard was immense, while the inability of anyone else to access that standard, coupled with the constant prods to try, resulted in a sense of failure. Drawing on cultural figures like Air France air hostesses, tourism workers, and celebrities such as Brigitte Bardot, the book demonstrates how women were mobilized as ambassadors of French superiority. Analysing cultural and political sources simultaneously, Charm Offensive offers an innovative understanding of a tumultuous time of decolonization.

There has been little examination of the China policy of the Theodore Roosevelt administration. Works dealing with the topic fall either into brief discussions in biographies of Roosevelt, general surveys of Sino-American relations, or studies of special topics, such as the Chinese exclusion issue, which encompass a portion of the Roosevelt years. Moreover, the subject has been overshadowed somewhat by studies of problems between Japan and the United States in this era. The goal of this study is to offer a more complete examination of the American relationship with China during Roosevelt's presidency. The focus will be on the discussion of major issues and concerns in the relationship of the two nations from the time Roosevelt took office until he left, something that this book does for the first time. Greater emphasis needs to be placed on creating a more complete picture of Teddy Roosevelt and China relations, especially in regard to his and his advisers' perceptual framework of that region and its impact upon the making of China policy. The goal of this study is to begin that process. Special attention is paid to the question of how Roosevelt and the members of his administration viewed China, as it is believed that their viewpoints, which were prejudicial, were very instrumental in how they chose to deal with China and the question of the Open Door. The emphasis on the role of stereotyping gives the book a particularly unique point of view. Readers will be made aware of the difficulties of making foreign policy under challenging conditions, but also of how the attitudes and perceptions of policymakers can shape the direction that those policies can take. A critical argument of the book is that a stereotyped perception of China and its people inhibited American policy responses toward the Chinese state in Roosevelt's Administration. While Roosevelt's attitudes regarding white supremacy have been discussed elsewhere, a fuller consideration of how his views affected the making of foreign policy, particularly China policy, is needed, especially now that Sino-American relations today are of great concern.

This book provides an in-depth look into key political dynamics that obtain in a democracy without parties, offering a window into political undercurrents increasingly in evidence throughout the Latin American region, where political parties are withering. For the past three decades, Peru has showcased a political universe populated by amateur politicians and the dominance of personalism as the main party-voter linkage form. The study peruses the post-2000 evolution of some of the key Peruvian electoral vehicles and classifies the partisan universe as a party non-system. There are several elements endogenous to personalist electoral vehicles that perpetuate partylessness, contributing to the absence of party building. The book also examines electoral dynamics in partyless settings, centrally shaped by effective electoral supply, personal brands, contingency, and iterated rounds of strategic voting calculi. Given the scarcity of information electoral vehicles provide, as well as the enormously complex political environment Peruvian citizens inhabit, personal brands provide readymade informational shortcuts that simplify the political world. The concept of "negative legitimacy environments" is furnished to capture political settings comprised of supermajorities of floating voters, pervasive negative political identities, and a generic citizen preference for newcomers and political outsiders. Such environments, increasingly present throughout Latin America, produce several deleterious effects, including high political uncertainty, incumbency disadvantage, and political time compression. Peru's "democracy without parties" fails to deliver essential democratic functions including governability, responsiveness, horizontal and vertical accountability, or democratic representation, among others.

This book explains changes to Iranian grand strategy over the past four decades, and it does so by advancing a multicausal model that unifies the three main paradigms of International Relations (IR) theory. Hence, ideas (constructivism) mediate between the structure of material capabilities (realism) and agents (liberalism) and interact with each to produce, respectively, threat perception and political preferences. Using these two explanatory factors, the author demonstrates how the Islamic Republic's grand strategy has systematically varied over time to produce a mix of outcomes that includes balancing, expansionism, bandwagoning, appeasement, engagement and retrenchment. Beyond its theoretical contribution, this book is policy-relevant in that it explains - and predicts - the external conduct of what is arguably the Middle East's most consequential actor, with implications reverberating far beyond the region. Academic in conception and rigor, the book is intended not only for specialists and practitioners but appeals to the lay reader interested in the broader Middle East/West Asia, the region's relationship with major powers, and regional conflict dynamics.

Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan offers a fresh perspective on gender politics by focusing on the Japanese housewife of the 1950s as a controversial representation of democracy, leisure, and domesticity. Examining the shifting personae of the housewife, especially in the appealing texts of women's magazines, reveals the diverse possibilities of postwar democracy as they were embedded in media directed toward Japanese women. Each chapter explores the contours of a single controversy, including debate over the royal wedding in 1959, the victory of Japan's first Miss Universe, and the unruly desires of postwar women. Jan Bardsley also takes a comparative look at the ways in which the Japanese housewife is measured against equally stereotyped notions of the modern housewife in the United States, asking how both function as narratives of Japan-U.S. relations and gender/class containment during the early Cold War.