Focusing on critical approaches to security, this new textbook offers readers both an overview of the key theoretical perspectives and a variety of methodological techniques.

With a careful explication of core concepts in each chapter and an introduction that traces the development of critical approaches to security, this textbook will encourage all those who engage with it to develop a curiosity about the study and practices of security politics. Challenging the assumptions of conventional theories and approaches, unsettling that which was previously taken for granted these are among the ways in which such a curiosity works. Through its attention to the fact that, and the ways in which, security matters in global politics, this work will both pioneer new ways of studying security and acknowledge the noteworthy scholarship without which it could not have been thought.

This textbook will be essential reading to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of critical security studies, and highly recommended to students of traditional security studies, International Relations and Politics.

The role and powers of nation states are a topic of increasing debate. The transfer of competencies upwards to supra-national organizations, sideways to quasi-autonomous actors, and downwards to sub-national authorities has rguably transformed both the structure and capacity of national governments. It is within this context that the concept of multi-level governance has emerged as an approach to understanding the dynamic inter-relationship within and between different levels of governance and government. Moreover, multi-level governance is frequently interpreted as a novel analytical framework with the capacity to challenge and refine traditionally dominant approaches. Multi-Level Governance analyses the ways in which the concept has been applied across different academic and policy territories. The future of nation states vis-a-vis sub-national and supra-national organizations and the increasing fluidity of political power is clearly a fundamental issue for scholars of politics and government. New analytical frameworks that eschew traditional disciplinary boundaries and epistemological positions are needed to comprehend the changing nature of governance. In this context, the volume undertakes a critical assessment of both the potentialities and the limitations of multi-level governance.

Palestine: A Socialist Introduction systematically tackles a number of important aspects of the Palestinian struggle for liberation, contextualizing it in an increasingly polarized world and offering a socialist perspective on how full liberation can be won.

Through an internationalist, anti-imperialist lens, this book explores the links between the struggle for freedom in the United States and that in Palestine, and beyond. It examines both the historical and contemporary trajectory of the Palestine solidarity movement in order to glean lessons for today’s organizers, and compellingly lays out the argument that, in order to achieve justice in Palestine, the movement has to take up the question of socialism regionally and internationally.

Contributors include: Jehad Abusalim, Shireen Akram-Boshar, Omar Barghouti, Nada Elia, Toufic Haddad, Remi Kanazi, Annie Levin, Mostafa Omar, Khury Petersen-Smith, and Daphna Thier.

Written by 55 of the richest white men, and signed by only 39 of them, the US constitution is the sacred text of American nationalism. Popular perceptions of it are mired in idolatry, myth and misinformation - many Americans have opinions on the constitution but have little idea what it says. This book examines the constitution for what it is - a rulebook for elites to protect capitalism from democracy. Social movements have misplaced faith in the constitution as a tool for achieving justice when it actually impedes social change through the many roadblocks and obstructions we call 'checks and balances'. This stymies urgent progress on issues like labour rights, poverty, public health and climate change, propelling the American people and rest of the world towards destruction. Robert Ovetz's reading of the constitution shows that the system isn't broken. Far from it. It works as it was designed to.

A compelling account of the threat immigration control poses to the citizens of free societies Immigration is often seen as a danger to western liberal democracies because it threatens to undermine their fundamental values, most notably freedom and national self-determination. In this book, however, Chandran Kukathas argues that the greater threat comes not from immigration but from immigration control. Kukathas shows that immigration control is not merely about preventing outsiders from moving across borders. It is about controlling what outsiders do once in a society: whether they work, reside, study, set up businesses, or share their lives with others. But controlling outsiders-immigrants or would-be immigrants-requires regulating, monitoring, and sanctioning insiders, those citizens and residents who might otherwise hire, trade with, house, teach, or generally associate with outsiders. The more vigorously immigration control is pursued, the more seriously freedom is diminished. The search for control threatens freedom directly and weakens the values upon which it relies, notably equality and the rule of law. Kukathas demonstrates that the imagined gains from efforts to control immigration are illusory, for they do not promote economic prosperity or social solidarity. Nor does immigration control bring self-determination, since the apparatus of control is an international institutional regime that increases the power of states and their agencies at the expense of citizens. That power includes the authority to determine who is and is not an insider: to define identity itself. Looking at past and current practices across the world, Immigration and Freedom presents a critique of immigration control as an institutional reality, as well as an account of what freedom means-and why it matters.

Nobody meant for this to happen.

Facebook didn’t mean to facilitate a genocide.

Twitter didn’t want to be used to harass women.

YouTube never planned to radicalise young men.

But with billions of users, these platforms need only tweak their algorithms to generate more ‘engagement’. In so doing, they bring unrest to previously settled communities and erode our relationships.

Social warming has happened gradually – as a by-product of our preposterously convenient digital existence. But the gradual deterioration of our attitudes and behaviour on- and offline – this vicious cycle of anger and outrage – is real. And it can be corrected. Here’s how.

This book offers an assessment of the naval policies of emerging naval powers, and the implications for maritime security relations and the global maritime order. Since the end of the Cold War, China, Japan, India and Russia have begun to challenge the status quo with the acquisition of advanced naval capabilities. The emergence of rising naval powers is a cause for concern, as the potential for great power instability is exacerbated by the multiple maritime territorial disputes among new and established naval powers. This work explores the underlying sources of maritime ambition through an analysis of various historical cases of naval expansionism. It analyses both the sources and dynamics of international naval competition, and looks at the ways in which maritime stability and the widespread benefits of international commerce and maritime resource extraction can be sustained through the twenty-first century. This book will be of much interest to students of naval power, Asian security and politics, strategic studies, security studies and IR in general.

'Defying the Dragon' tells a remarkable story of audacity: of how the people of Hong Kong challenged the PRC's authority, just as its president reached the height of his powers. Is Xi's China as unshakeable as it seems? What are its real interests in Hong Kong? Why are Beijing's time-honoured means of control no longer working there? And where does this leave Hongkongers themselves? Stephen Vines has lived in Hong Kong for over three decades. His book shrewdly unpacks the Hong Kong-China relationship and its wider significance-right up to the astonishing convergence of political turmoil and international crisis with Covid-19 and the 2020 crackdown. Vividly describing the uprising from street level, Vines explains how and why it unfolded, and its global repercussions. Now, the international community is reassessing relations with Beijing, just as Hong Kong's rebellion and China's handling of the pandemic have exposed the regime's weakness. In a crisis that has become existential all round, what lies ahead for Hong Kong, China and the world?

"War and Drugs" explores the relationship between military incursions and substance use and abuse throughout history. For centuries, drugs have been used to weaken enemies, stimulate troops to fight, and quell post-war trauma. They have also served as a source of funding for clandestine military and paramilitary activity. From the Opium Wars through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, themes of colonialism, capitalism, and anticommunism have constructed the foundation for the current crisis of international drug trafficking and addiction. In addition to offering detailed geopolitical perspectives, this book explores the intergenerational trauma that follows military conflict and the rising tide of substance abuse among veterans, especially from the Vietnam and Iraq-Afghan eras. Addiction specialist Bergen-Cico raises important questions about the past and challenges us to consider new approaches in the future especially to that longest of U.S. wars: the erstwhile War on Drugs.

Immigrants and minorities in Europe and America have responded in diverse ways to security legislation introduced since 9/11 that targets them, labeling them as threats. This book identifies how different groups have responded and explains why, synthesizing findings in the fields of securitization, migrant integration, and migrant mobilization.

The Dutch Reformed Church, it was said in apartheid South Africa, was the National Party at prayer, and indeed, given that the Bible was so fundamental to much of the legislation that governed the apartheid state, that apparently satirical description had the ring of truth. 'Religion in South Africa's past', writes Dhammamegha Annie Leatt has been 'saturated by politics' and politics 'saturated by religion'. So how, she asks, was it possible for a new state to found itself without religious authority? Why did the churches give up so much of their political role in the transition? How can we think about tradition and the customary in relation to secularism? How can we not? In The State of Secularism Leatt guides the reader from a history of global political secularism through an exploration of the roles played by religion and traditional authority in apartheid South Africa to the position of religion in the post-apartheid state. She analyses the negotiations relating to religion in the constitution-making process, arguing, that South Africa is both secular in its Constitution and judicial foundations and increasingly non-secular in its embrace of traditional authorities and customary law. In the final chapter Leatt turns her attention to post-apartheid South Africa, examining changing relationships between churches and the ruling African National Congress and the increasing influence of traditional leaders and evangelical Christians in an anti-liberal alliance. This book makes a tremendous contribution to the literature on postcolonial politics on the African continent. It has wonderful insights into the founding of a constitutional democracy in South African and will appeal to students in history, politics, sociology and anthropology and constitutional law.

This book argues that terrorism in the modern world has occurred in four "waves" of forty years each. It offers evidence-based explanations of terrorism, national identity, and political legitimacy by leading scholars from various disciplineswith contrasting perspectives on political violence. Whether violence is local or global, it tends to be both patterned and innovative. It elicits chaos, but can be understood by the application of new models or theories, depending upon the methods and data experts employ. The contributors in this volume apply their experiences and studies of terrorists, mob violence, fashions in international and political violence, religion's role in terrorism and violence, the relationship between technology and terror, a recurring paradigm of terrorist waves, nation-states struggling to establish democratic/elective governments, and factions competing for control within states - in order to make sense of both national and international acts of political violence and to ask and answer some of the most disturbing questions these phenomena present. This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism, religion and violence, nationalism, sociology, war and conflict studies and IR in general.

Elections always have consequences, but the 2017 Bundestag election in Germany proved particularly consequential. With political upheaval across the globe-notably in Britain and the USA-it was vital to European and global order that Germany remain stable. And it did through the re-election of Angela Merkel as chancellor, now in her fourth term. Just under the surface, however, instability is mounting-exemplified by the entry of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) as the largest opposition party, the decline of the Social Democrats, the ever-restive Bavarians, and the growing factionalism within the Christian Democratic Union as the Merkel era comes to an end. Paying special attention to the rise of the AfD, this volume delves into the campaign, leading political figures, the structure of the electorate, the state of the parties, the media environment, coalition negotiations, and policy impacts.

* Mexico was named an Outstanding Academic Title of 2010 by Choice Magazine.

Bloodshed connected with Mexican drug cartels, how they emerged, and their impact on the United States is the subject of this frightening book. Savage narcotics-related decapitations, castrations, and other murders have destroyed tourism in many Mexican communities and such savagery is now cascading across the border into the United States. Grayson explores how this spiral of violence emerged in Mexico, its impact on the country and its northern neighbor, and the prospects for managing it.

Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ruled in Tammany Hall fashion for seventy-nine years before losing the presidency in 2000 to the center-right National Action Party (PAN). Grayson focuses on drug wars, prohibition, corruption, and other antecedents that occurred during the PRI's hegemony. He illuminates the diaspora of drug cartels and their fragmentation, analyzes the emergence of new gangs, sets forth President Felipe Calderi1/2n's strategy against vicious criminal organizations, and assesses its relative success. Grayson reviews the effect of narcotics-focused issues in U.S.-Mexican relations. He considers the possibility that Mexico may become a failed state, as feared by opinion-leaders, even as it pursues an aggressive but thus far unsuccessful crusade against the importation, processing, and sale of illegal substances.

Becoming a "failed state" involves two dimensions of state power: its scope, or the different functions and goals taken on by governments, and its strength, or the government's ability to plan and execute policies. The Mexican state boasts an extensive scope evidenced by its monopoly over the petroleum industry, its role as the major supplier of electricity, its financing of public education, its numerous retirement and health-care programs, its control of public universities, and its dominance over the armed forces. The state has not yet taken control of drug trafficking, and its strength is steadily diminishing. This explosive book is thus a study of drug cartels, but also state disintegration.

A #1 national bestseller in hardcover. The Daily Wire and Verdict conservative podcast titan takes the good fight to the evil and grammatically challenged woke intelligensia who engage in political blackballing, censorship, and the twisting of words to mean their exact opposite. A call to arms for sanity and liberty from decades of leftist brainwashing. “Every single American needs to read Michael Knowles’s Speechless. I don’t mean ‘read it eventually.’ I mean: stop what you’re doing and pick up this book.” —CANDACE OWENS "The most important book on free speech in decades—read it!” —SENATOR TED CRUZ A New Strategy: We Win, They Lose The Culture War is over, and the culture lost. The Left’s assault on liberty, virtue, decency, the Republic of the Founders, and Western civilization has succeeded. You can no longer keep your social media account—or your job—and acknowledge truths such as: Washington, Jefferson, and Columbus were great men. Schools and libraries should not coach children in sexual deviance. Men don’t have uteruses. How did we get to this point? Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire exposes and diagnosis the losing strategy we have fallen for and shows how we can change course—and start winning. In the groundbreaking Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds Knowles reveals: How the “free speech absolutists” gave away the store The First Amendment does not require a value-neutral public square How the Communists figured out that their revolution could never succeed as long as the common man was attached to his own culture Where political correctness came from How, comply or resist, political correctness is a win-win game for the bad guys Why taking our stand on “freedom of speech” helps put atheism, decadence, and nonsense on the same plane with faith, virtue, and reality The real question: Will we shut down drag queen story hour, or cancel Abraham Lincoln? For 170 years the First Amendment was compatible with prayer in public school How the atheists got the Warren Court to rule their way To this day, there’s a First Amendment exception for obscenity. What exactly is the argument that perverts’ teaching toddlers to twerk is not obscene? Read Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds if you want to learn how to take the fight to the enemy.

Josiah Sutton was convicted of rape. He was five inches shorter and 65 pounds lighter than the suspect described by the victim, but at trial a lab analyst testified that his DNA was found at the crime scene. His case looked like many others,arrest, swab, match, conviction. But there was just one problem,Sutton was innocent.We think of DNA forensics as an infallible science that catches the bad guys and exonerates the innocent. But when the science goes rogue, it can lead to a gross miscarriage of justice. Erin Murphy exposes the dark side of forensic DNA testing: crime labs that receive little oversight and produce inconsistent results prosecutors who push to test smaller and poorer-quality samples, inviting error and bias law-enforcement officers who compile massive, unregulated, and racially skewed DNA databases and industry lobbyists who push policies of stop and spit."DNA testing is rightly seen as a transformative technological breakthrough, but we should be wary of placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of the same broken criminal justice system that has produced mass incarceration, privileged government interests over personal privacy, and all too often enforced the law in a biased or unjust manner. Inside the Cell exposes the truth about forensic DNA, and shows us what it will take to harness the power of genetic identification in service of accuracy and fairness.

Lesbian and gay citizens today enjoy a much broader array of rights and obligations and a greater ability to live their lives openly in both the U.S. and Canada. However, while human rights protections have been exponentially expanded in Canada over the last twenty years, even basic protections in areas such as employment discrimination are still unavailable to many in the United States. This book examines why these similar societies have produced such divergent policy outcomes, focusing on how differences between the political institutions of the U.S. and Canada have shaped the terrain of social movement and counter-movement mobilization. It analyzes cross-national variance in public policies toward lesbians and gay men, especially in the areas of the decriminalization of sodomy, the passage of anti-discrimination laws, and the enactment of measures to recognize same-sex relationships.

American Girls and Global Responsibility brings together insights from Cold War culture studies, girls' studies, and the history of gender and militarization to shed new light on how age and gender work together to form categories of citizenship. Jennifer Helgren argues that a new internationalist girl citizenship took root in the country in the years following World War II in youth organizations such as Camp Fire Girls, Girl Scouts, YWCA Y-Teens, schools, and even magazines like Seventeen. She shows the particular ways that girls' identities and roles were configured, and reveals the links between internationalist youth culture, mainstream U.S. educational goals, and the U.S. government in creating and marketing that internationalist girl, thus shaping the girls' sense of responsibilities as citizens.

In Identifying a Free Society Milan Zafirovski offers a holistic sociological approach to modern free society as a total social system. The book examines the main conditions and indicators of modern free society such as democracy, a free economy, a free culture, and a free civil society, hence political, economic, cultural, and individual liberty entwined with equality and justice. It provides specific and aggregate free-society estimates for Western and related societies based on a variety of objective rankings, data, and reports.

'In explaining the rise to power of Kim Yo Jong, Lee displays his deep knowledge and understanding of North Korea's extreme, ruthless and self-obsessed dynastic autocracy, the creators and rulers of a de-facto nuclear weapon state. Not a reassuring story'- Sir John Scarlett, former Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) The Sister is a fascinating, authoritative account of the spectacular rise of Kim Yo Jong, de-facto deputy to her brother, Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, and the most powerful woman in North Korea. In 2022, in a particularly fiery speech, Kim Yo Jong threatened to nuke South Korea, reminding the world of the dangers posed by her state. But how did the youngest daughter of Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, his ‘sweet princess’, become the ruthless chief propagandist, internal administrator and foreign policymaker for her brother’s totalitarian regime? The Sister, written by Sung-Yoon Lee, a scholar and specialist on North Korea, uncovers the truth about Kim Yo Jong, her close bond with Kim Jong Un and the lessons in manipulation they learned from their father. He also examines the iron grip the Kim dynasty has on their country, the grotesque deaths of family members deemed disloyal, and the signs that Kim Yo Jong has been positioned as her brother’s successor should he die while his own children are young. Readable and insightful, this book is an invaluable portrait of a woman who might yet hold the survival of her despotic dynasty in her hands. 'An incisive portrayal of North Korea's "princess", Kim Yo Jong, but also a chilling portrait of a family dynasty that has oppressed and exploited North Korea for generation after generation' - Max Boot, Washington Post columnist, author and senior fellow, Council on Foreign Relations

Women filing gender-based asylum claims long faced skepticism and outright rejection within the United States immigration system. Despite erratic progress, the United States still fails to recognize gender as an established category for experiencing persecution. Gender exists in a sort of limbo segregated from other aspects of identity and experience. Sara L. McKinnon exposes racialized rhetorics of violence in politics and charts the development of gender as a category in American asylum law. Starting with the late 1980s, when gender-based requests first emerged in case law, McKinnon analyzes gender- and sexuality-related cases against the backdrop of national and transnational politics. Her focus falls on cases as diverse as Guatemalan and Salvadoran women sexually abused during the Dirty Wars and transgender asylum seekers from around the world fleeing brutally violent situations. She reviews the claims, evidence, testimony, and message strategies that unfolded in these legal arguments and decisions, and illuminates how legal decisions turned gender into a political construct vulnerable to American national and global interests. She also explores myriad related aspects of the process, including how subjects are racialized and the effects of that racialization, and the consequences of policies that position gender as a signifier for women via normative assumptions about sex and heterosexuality. Wide-ranging and rich with human detail, Gendered Asylum uses feminist, immigration, and legal studies to engage one of the hotly debated issues of our time.

Arguing that we only have democracy when systems of power are held to account, Kaufman examines the real work being done to challenge the operations of power that underlie four unruly social problems: climate change, sweatshop labour, police abuse, and economic deprivation. In Challenging Power, Kaufman pairs each of these issues with an operation of power -- the large scale influence of multinational corporations; the power of governments; the authority of financial markets; and the control inherent in systems of meaning -- and using case studies like the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh and the killing of Eric Garner, forcefully demonstrates what is involved in challenging these operations of power. Advancing a positive message, Kaufman maintains that these networks are not omnipotent and can be challenged if we develop 'mechanisms of accountability' which allow us to conceptualise the nature of these problems and the actions required to resist them. Kaufman provides then, a model for ethical action that allows us to investigate and appreciate our own connections to the powerful forces that control our world.

This book is directed at researchers and policymakers at all levels and is intended to stimulate fresh thinking for the development of unconventional and innovative ideas for migration policymaking. The papers in this edited volume are the results of a joint ICMPD/IMISCOE workshop on "Innovative Concepts for Alternative Migration Policies", held at the International Centre for Migration Policy Development in Vienna in 2006, with the participation of migration researchers, policymakers and representatives of international organisations. Based on the strengths of the combined ideas presented by the authors of these ten short papers, eight basic principles for the design of innovative migration policy approaches are presented and developed.

At the opening of South Africa's first democratic parliament in 1994, newly elected president Nelson Mandela issued a clarion call to an unlikely group: white Afrikaans women, who during apartheid occupied the ambivalent position of being both oppressor and oppressed. He conjured the memory of poet Ingrid Jonker as `both an Afrikaner and an African' who `instructs that our endeavours must be about the liberation of the woman, the emancipation of the man and the liberty of the child'. More than two decades later, the question is: how have white Afrikaans-speaking women responded to the liberating possibilities of constitutional democracy?

With Afrikaner nationalism in disrepair, and official apartheid in demise, have they re-imagined themselves in opposition to colonial ideas of race, gender, sexuality and class?

Sitting Pretty explores this postapartheid identity through the concepts of ordentlikheid, as an ethnic form of respectability, and the volksmoeder, or mother of the nation, as enduring icon. Issues of intersectionality, space, emotion and masculinity are also investigated.