In the mid-nineteenth century, as European navies learned to neutralize piracy, new patterns of circulation and settlement became possible in the western Mediterranean. The Deepest Border tells the story of how a borderland society formed around the Strait of Gibraltar, bringing historical perspective to one of the contemporary world's critical border zones. Drawing on primary and secondary research from Spain, France, Gibraltar, and Morocco—including military intelligence files, public health reports, consular correspondence, and travel diaries—Sasha D. Pack draws out parallels and connections often invisible to national and mono-imperial histories. In conceptualizing the Strait of Gibraltar region as a borderland, Pack reconsiders a number of the region's major tensions and conflicts, including the Rif Rebellion, the Spanish Civil War, the European phase of World War II, the colonization and decolonization of Morocco, and the ongoing controversies over the exclaves of Gibraltar, Ceuta, and Melilla. Integrating these threads into a long history of the region, The Deepest Border speaks to broad questions about how sovereignty operates on the "periphery," how borders are constructed and maintained, and the enduring legacies of imperialism and colonialism.

This book presents the theoretical-historical-comparative political framework needed to fully grasp the truly dynamic nature of 21st century global affairs. The author provides a realistic assessment of the shift from U.S predominance to a new mix of counterbalancing rival middle-tier and assertive regional powers, while highlighting those geopolitical zones of contention most critical for future international stability. The book will appeal to scholars and policy makers interested in understanding the contours of the emerging world order, and in identifying its principal shapers and leading political actors.

A writer in self-imposed exile in London receives a call from the Prime Minister of his former country, inviting him to return to write the Prime Minister's biography. As he embarks from his small flat in west London to the modern Caribbean island he once called home, he immediately finds himself thrust into a world of exceptional wealth, power, and corruption. In the midst of this turmoil the writer falls deeply in love. As the love affair advances, the writer's passion for the island resurfaces, until the loss of a close friend propels him to make one final, potentially cataclysmic decision that will change everything.

Women of the White House looks at the work, lives and times of the 47 women officially recognized as America's first lady. Through portraits, photographs, accounts and profiles, the book examines their contributions to the presidencies they supported and to the 230-year history of the role. The women who have held the position have evolved it from White House hostess to campaigner for social causes and a game-changing leadership position. A role model for the world, a powerful political player, a traditional yet modern woman – the position of first lady of the United States is many-faceted, complex and beyond high profile. Amy Russo explores how the social platforms these women established – from Mary Todd Lincoln's work for slaves and soldiers after the Civil War to Michelle Obama's fight for girls' education – have not only made the role iconic but also shaped America.

The move away from post-Cold War unipolarity and the rise of revisionist states like Russia and China pose a rapidly escalating and confounding threat for the liberal international order. In Iraq against the World, Samuel Helfont offers a new narrative of Iraqi foreign policy after the 1991 Gulf War to argue that Saddam Hussein executed a political warfare campaign that facilitated this disturbance to global norms. Following the Gulf War, the UN imposed sanctions and inspections on the Iraqi state—conditions that Saddam Hussein was in no position to challenge militarily or through traditional diplomacy. Hussein did, however, wage an influence campaign designed to break the unity of the UN Security Council. The Iraqis helped to impede emerging norms of international cooperation and prodded potentially revisionist states to act on latent inclinations to undermine a liberal post-Cold War order. Drawing on internal files from the ruling Ba'th Party, Helfont highlights previously unknown Iraqi foreign policy strategies, including the prominent use of influence operations and manipulative statesmanship. He traces Ba'thist operations around the globe—from the streets of New York and Stockholm, to the mosques of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, to the halls of power in Paris and Moscow. Iraqi Ba'thists carried out espionage, planted stories in the foreign press, established overt and covert relations with various political parties, and attempted to silence anyone who disrupted their preferred political narrative. They presented themselves simply as Iraqis concerned about the suffering of their friends and families in their home country, and, consequently, were able to assemble a loose political coalition that was unknowingly being employed to meet Iraq's strategic goals. This, in turn, divided Western states and weakened norms of cooperation and consensus toward rules-based solutions to international disputes, causing significant damage to liberal internationalism and the institutions that were supposed to underpin it. A powerful reconsideration of the history of Iraqi foreign policy in the 1990s and the early 2000s, Iraq against the World offers new insights into the evolution of the post-Cold War order.

One China, Many Taiwans shows how tourism performs and transforms territory. In 2008, as the People's Republic of China pointed over a thousand missiles across the Taiwan Strait, it sent millions of tourists in the same direction with the encouragement of Taiwan's politicians and businesspeople. Contrary to the PRC's efforts to use tourism to incorporate Taiwan into an imaginary "One China," tourism aggravated tensions between the two polities, polarized Taiwanese society, and pushed Taiwanese popular sentiment farther toward support for national self-determination. Consequently, Taiwan was performed as a part of China for Chinese group tourists versus experienced as a place of everyday life. Taiwan's national identity grew increasingly plural, such that not just one or two, but many Taiwans coexisted, even as it faced an existential military threat. Ian Rowen's treatment of tourism as a political technology provides a new theoretical lens for social scientists to examine the impacts of tourism in the region and worldwide.

In this landmark work, four of the world's leading scholar-activists issue an urgent call for a truly intersectional, internationalist, abolitionist feminism. As a politics and as a practice, abolitionism has increasingly shaped our political moment, amplified through the worldwide protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a uniformed police officer. It is at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement, in its demands for police defunding and demilitarisation, and a halt to prison construction. As this book shows, abolitionism and feminism stand shoulder-to-shoulder in fighting a common cause: the end of the carceral state, with its key role in perpetuating violence, both public and private, in prisons, in police forces, and in people's homes. Abolitionist theories and practices are at their most compelling when they are feminist; and a feminism that is also abolitionist is the most inclusive and persuasive version of feminism for these times. ABOLITION. FEMINISM. NOW. 'This extraordinary book makes the most compelling case I've ever seen for the indivisibility of feminism and abolition' Robin D. G. Kelley 'This book is as capacious and demanding as the abolitionist feminism it calls for' Sara Ahmed

A definitive study on the decades-long run of high public confidence in the military and why it may rest on some shaky foundations. What explains the high levels of public confidence in the US military and does high confidence matter? In Thanks for Your Service, the eminent civil-military relations scholar Peter D. Feaver addresses this question and focuses on what it means for the military. Proprietary survey data show that confidence is partly based on public beliefs about the military's high competence, adherence to high professional ethics, and a determination to stand apart from the bitter divisions of partisan politics. However, as Feaver argues, confidence is also shaped by a partisan gap and by social desirability bias, the idea that some individuals express confidence in the military because they believe that is the socially approved attitude to hold. Not only does Feaver help us understand how and why the public has confidence in the military, but he also exposes problems that policymakers need to be aware of. Specifically, this book traces how confidence in the institution shapes public attitudes on the use of force and may not always reinforce best practices in democratic civil-military relations.

A Vanishing West in the Middle East covers the history of Western cooperation in the Middle East and North Africa since the end of the Cold War. Based on more than fifty interviews with diplomats and experts as well as consultations of the academic literature, it describes the operational and political frameworks through which the United States and European countries have intervened in the Arab world, and how their relations with the region have changed. Practitioner testimonies and detailed case studies illuminate U.S. successes and failures in enlisting allies for campaigns in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. This analysis goes to the heart of the American debate on “endless wars� but also questions the very concept of Western intervention in a region where the Arab Spring and subsequent uprisings have profoundly changed the geopolitical landscape. Today, whereas the United States wishes to pull back from the region, Europe understands it must become more involved. Whatever their particular motivations, both must adapt to an increasingly fragmented Middle East, influenced specifically by more assertive Chinese, Russian, Iranian, Emirati, and Turkish foreign policies.

This book presents an introduction to the subject of international sanctions. It provides summaries of fourteen major cases, including South Africa, Iraq and Serbia, and analysis of the complex political and economic problems which sanctions pose for governments of sender states as well as for targets. Goals, costs, vulnerability and humanitarian considerations are examined in the light of 20th-century experience and the enhanced role of the United Nations since the end of the Cold War receives detailed consideration.

A clear-headed vision for the United States' role in the Middle East that highlights the changing nature of U.S. national interests and the challenges of grand strategizing at a time of profound change in the international order. Following a long series of catastrophic misadventures in the Middle East over the last two decades, the American foreign policy community has tried to understand what went wrong. After weighing the evidence, they have mostly advised a retreat from the region. The basic view is that when the United States tries to advance change in the Middle East, it only makes matters worse. In The End of Ambition, Steven A. Cook argues that while these analysts are rightly concerned that engagement drains U.S. resources and distorts its domestic politics, the broader impulse to disengage tends to neglect important lessons from the past. Moreover, advocates of pulling back overlook the potential risks of withdrawal. Covering the relationship between the U.S. and the Middle East since the end of WWII, Cook makes the bold claim that despite setbacks and moral costs, the United States has been overwhelmingly successful in protecting its core national interests in the Middle East. Conversely, overly ambitious policies to remake the region and leverage U.S. power not only ended in failure, but rendered the region unstable in new and largely misunderstood ways. While making the case that retrenchment is not the answer to America's problems in the Middle East, The End of Ambition highlights how America's interests in the region have begun to change and critically examines alternative approaches to U.S.-Middle East policy. Cook highlights the challenges that policymakers and analysts confront developing a new strategy for the United States in the Middle East against the backdrop of both political uncertainty in the United States and a changing global order.

A comparative exploration of Western and Chinese understandings of justice and their possible use to reframe Sino-American relations and international governance. The concept of justice is central to politics: it justifies the ordering of society and the distribution of rewards. In Justice and International Order, Richard Ned Lebow and Feng Zhang compare and contrast Western and Chinese conceptions of justice. They argue that justice can almost invariably be reduced to the principles of fairness and equality, although they are developed and expressed differently in the two cultures. Lebow and Zhang show that there has been a noticeable shift in both in favoring equality over fairness in the modern era. They analyze the growing conflict between China and the West in the light of these conceptions of justice and show how they might be deployed to ameliorate it. The authors also offer a critique of what passes for global order and explore ways in which fairness and equality, and trade-offs between them, offer pathways to better and more peaceful worlds.

A collection of essays that situates and furthers contemporary debates around the prospects of democracy in diverse societies within and beyond the West. Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism examines the relationship between the functioning of democracy and the prior existence of religious plurality in three societies outside the West: India, Pakistan, and Turkey. All three societies had on one hand deep religious diversity and on the other long histories as imperial states that responded to religious diversity through their specific pre-modern imperial institutions. Each country has followed a unique historical trajectory with regard to crafting democratic institutions to deal with such extreme diversity. The volume focuses on three core themes: historical trends before the modern state's emergence that had lasting effects; the genealogies of both the state and religion in politics and law; and the problem of violence toward and domination over religious out-groups. Volume editors Karen Barkey, Sudipta Kaviarj, and Vatsal Naresh have gathered a group of leading scholars across political science, sociology, history, and law to examine this multifaceted topic. Together, they illuminate various trajectories of political thought, state policy, and the exercise of social power during and following a transition to democracy. Just as importantly, they ask us to reflexively examine the political categories and models that shape our understanding of what has unfolded in South Asia and Turkey.

Interest in democratic socialism is on the rise, but this wide-ranging comparison of two systems shows that the Nordic model of capitalism achieves virtually everything that contemporary democratic socialists say we should want. Socialism is back in the conversation, and recent polls suggest the share of young Americans who have a favorable impression of socialism is about the same as the share that have a favorable view of capitalism. The case for a modern democratic socialism is that capitalism is bad, or at least not very good, and that socialism would be an improvement. To fully and fairly assess democratic socialism's desirability, Lane Kenworthy argues in Would Democratic Socialism Be Better?, we need to compare it to the best version of capitalism that humans have devised: social democratic capitalism. Kenworthy offers a close look at the evidence about how capitalist economies have performed on an array of outcomes. He finds that social democratic capitalism achieves virtually everything that contemporary democratic socialists say we should want.

Across the developing world, governments still lack the fiscal capacity to fund critical public goods, alleviate poverty, and invest in economic development. Yet, we know little about how to effectively build strong states in these settings. This book develops and tests a new theory to explain why fiscal capacity in African states is low. Drawing on work in psychology and behavioral economics, this book argues that taxation leads citizens to demand more from leaders as they seek to recover lost income from taxation. It then argues that governments' willingness to tax will depend on the extent to which they can satisfy citizens' demands while maintaining rent extraction. Rent-seeking leaders of low-capacity states will strategically underinvest in fiscal capacity in order to avoid the higher demands they face under taxation. Contrary to many existing theories, Martin shows that this can actually lead to lower taxation in democracies compared to autocracies, as citizen accountability demands pose a bigger threat to rulers. The book uses multiple empirical approaches to test the theory. Laboratory experiments in Uganda and Ghana, combined with Afrobarometer data, demonstrate that taxation increases citizens' demands on leaders. Global cross-national panel data show that democracy can actually lead to lower taxation in low-capacity states. When taxation is sustainable, however, it is associated with better governance. Case studies in Uganda, based on the author's own fieldwork and original survey data, provide additional support for the theory. These findings provide new framework for understanding the challenges to building state capacity, especially fiscal capacity, in modern developing countries.

For more than a century, no US adversary or coalition of adversaries - not Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the Soviet Union - has ever reached sixty percent of US GDP. China is the sole exception, and it is fast emerging into a global superpower that could rival, if not eclipse, the United States. What does China want, does it have a grand strategy to achieve it, and what should the United States do about it? In The Long Game, Rush Doshi draws from a rich base of Chinese primary sources, including decades worth of party documents, leaked materials, memoirs by party leaders, and a careful analysis of China's conduct to provide a history of China's grand strategy since the end of the Cold War. Taking readers behind the Party's closed doors, he uncovers Beijing's long, methodical game to displace America from its hegemonic position in both the East Asia regional and global orders through three sequential "strategies of displacement." Beginning in the 1980s, China focused for two decades on "hiding capabilities and biding time." After the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, it became more assertive regionally, following a policy of "actively accomplishing something." Finally, in the aftermath populist elections of 2016, China shifted to an even more aggressive strategy for undermining US hegemony, adopting the phrase "great changes unseen in century." After charting how China's long game has evolved, Doshi offers a comprehensive yet asymmetric plan for an effective US response. Ironically, his proposed approach takes a page from Beijing's own strategic playbook to undermine China's ambitions and strengthen American order without competing dollar-for-dollar, ship-for-ship, or loan-for-loan.

The Third UN is the ecology of supportive non-state actors-intellectuals, scholars, consultants, think tanks, NGOs, the for-profit private sector, and the media-that interacts with the intergovernmental machinery of the First UN (member states) and the Second UN (staff members of international secretariats) to formulate and refine ideas and decision-making at key junctures in policy processes. Some advocate for particular ideas, others help analyze or operationalize their testing and implementation; many thus help the UN 'think'. While think tanks, knowledge brokers, and epistemic communities are phenomena that have entered both the academic and policy lexicons, their intellectual role remains marginal to analyses of such intergovernmental organizations as the United Nations.

If race is increasingly understood to be socially constructed, why does it continue to seem like a physiological reality? The trickery of race, Sita Balani argues, comes down to how it is embedded in everyday life through the domain we take to be most intimate and essential: sexuality. Modernity inaugurates a new political subject made legible as an individual through the nuclear family, sexual adventure and the pursuit of romantic love. By examining the regulation of sexual life at Britain's borders, in colonial India, and through the functioning of the welfare state, marriage laws, education, and counterterrorism, Balani reveals that sexuality has become fatally intertwined with the making of race.

‘Heavily sourced, crisply written and deeply alarming.’ The Times  ‘This is a remarkable book with a chilling message.’ Guardian The Chinese Communist Party is determined to reshape the world in its image. Its decades-long infiltration of the West threatens democracy, human rights, privacy, security and free speech. Throughout North America and Europe, political and business elites, Wall Street, Hollywood, think tanks, universities and the Chinese diaspora are being manipulated with money, pressure and privilege. Hidden Hand reveals the myriad ways the CCP is fulfilling its dream of undermining liberal values and controlling the world.

The Mexico–Guatemala border has emerged as a geopolitical hotspot of illicit flows of both goods and people. Contraband Corridor seeks to understand the border from the perspective of its long-term inhabitants, including petty smugglers of corn, clothing, and coffee. Challenging assumptions regarding security, trade, and illegality, Rebecca Berke Galemba details how these residents engage in and justify extralegal practices in the context of heightened border security, restricted economic opportunities, and exclusionary trade policies. Rather than assuming that extralegal activities necessarily threaten the state and formal economy, Galemba's ethnography illustrates the complex ways that the formal, informal, legal, and illegal economies intertwine. Smuggling basic commodities across the border provides a means for borderland peasants to make a living while neoliberal economic policies decimate agricultural livelihoods. Yet smuggling also exacerbates prevailing inequalities, obstructs the possibility of more substantive political and economic change, and provides low-risk economic benefits to businesses, state agents, and other illicit actors, often at the expense of border residents. Galemba argues that securitized neoliberalism values certain economic activities and actors while excluding and criminalizing others, even when the informal and illicit economy is increasingly one of the poor's only remaining options. Contraband Corridor contends that security, neoliberalism, and illegality are interdependent in complex ways, yet how they unfold depends on negotiations between diverse border actors.

While the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance are usually associated with Italy's historical seats of power, some of the era's most characteristic works are to be found in places other than Florence, Rome, and Venice. They are the product of the diversity of regions and cultures that makes up the country. In Endless Periphery, Stephen J. Campbell examines a range of iconic works in order to unlock a rich series of local references in Renaissance art that include regional rulers, patron saints, and miracles, demonstrating, for example, that the works of Titian spoke to beholders differently in Naples, Brescia, or Milan than in his native Venice. More than a series of regional microhistories, Endless Periphery tracks the geographic mobility of Italian Renaissance art and artists, revealing a series of exchanges between artists and their patrons, as well as the power dynamics that fueled these exchanges. A counter history of one of the greatest epochs of art production, this richly illustrated book will bring new insight to our understanding of classic works of Italian art.

Partition—the physical division of territory along ethno-religious lines into separate nation-states—is often presented as a successful political "solution" to ethnic conflict. In the twentieth century, at least three new political entities—the Irish Free State, the Dominions (later Republics) of India and Pakistan, and the State of Israel—emerged as results of partition. This volume offers the first collective history of the concept of partition, tracing its emergence in the aftermath of the First World War and locating its genealogy in the politics of twentieth-century empire and decolonization. Making use of the transnational framework of the British Empire, which presided over the three major partitions of the twentieth century, contributors draw out concrete connections among the cases of Ireland, Pakistan, and Israel—the mutual influences, shared personnel, economic justifications, and material interests that propelled the idea of partition forward and resulted in the violent creation of new post-colonial political spaces. In so doing, the volume seeks to move beyond the nationalist frameworks that served in the first instance to promote partition as a natural phenomenon.

The global security situation is challenging and constantly changing. Responding to threats requires the effective coordination of the various levers of national power. These must now go beyond the traditional diplomatic, information, military and economic levers, to involve other, non-security agencies, including those responsible for the environment, health, education and industry. Through a uniquely extensive study of countries from across the world, this book considers how nations have developed bespoke coordination mechanisms to the unique threats they face, and how these mechanisms have had to evolve as the threats change. It covers nations for whom the system is well established (e.g. the US in 1947) and other countries whose arrangements are more recent, such as the UK (2010). Where the National Security Councils have existed for longest, the case studies highlight how they have transformed as the national understanding of security has changed, typically to reflect a broadening. Consequently, while there are no universal solutions, the comparative approach taken in this book identifies enduring principles for shaping the creation or reform of national security coordination fit for the challenges of the twenty-first century.

'I'm a fairly calm fellow; I don't usually get het up about things. But I was, let's say, concerned when I tuned into the Moscow Echo radio station and heard that the Kremlin had put a price on my head. The announcement didn't quite say 'dead or alive'. But it came close...' Mikhail Khodorkovsky, March 2021 Mikhail Khodorkovsky has seen behind the mask of Vladimir Putin. Once an oil tycoon and the richest man in Russia, Khodorkovsky spoke out against the corruption of Putin's regime - and was punished by the Kremlin, stripped of his entire wealth and jailed for over ten years. Now freed, working as a pro-democracy campaigner in enforced exile, Khodorkovsky brings us the insider's battle to save his country's soul. Offering an urgent analysis of what has gone wrong with Putin, The Russia Conundrum maps the country's rise and fall against Khodorkovsky's own journey, from Soviet youth to international oil executive, powerful insider to political dissident, and now a high-profile voice seeking to reconcile East and West. With unparalleled insight, written with Sunday Times bestselling author Martin Sixsmith, The Russia Conundrum exposes the desires and damning truths of Putin's Russia, and provides an answer to the West on how it must challenge the Kremlin - in order to pave the way for a better future.

The incredible story of a breathtaking rescue in the frenzied final hours of the US evacuation of Afghanistan — and how a brave Afghan mother and a compassionate American officer engineered a daring escape. When the US began its withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the Afghan army instantly collapsed, Homeira Qaderi was marked for death at the hands of the Taliban. A celebrated author, academic, and champion for women’s liberation, Homeira had achieved celebrity in her home country by winning custody of her son in a contentious divorce, a rarity in Afghanistan’s patriarchal society. Despite her fierce determination to stay in her homeland, it finally became clear to Homeira that escaping was the only way she and her family would survive. However, like so many, she was mired in the chaos that ensued at Kabul Airport, struggling to get on a plane with her eight-year-old son, Siawash, along with her parents and the rest of their family.  Meanwhile, a young US foreign service officer, Sam Aronson, who had volunteered to help rescue the more than 100,000 Americans and their Afghan helpers stranded in Kabul, learned that the CIA had established a secret entrance into Kabul Airport two miles away from the desperate crowds crushing toward the gates. He started bringing families directly through, and on the very last day of the evacuation, Sam was contacted by Homeira’s literary agent, who persuaded him to help Homeira get out.  The story that follows is unbelievable but true. Zuckoff’s firsthand accounts come exclusively and directly from Homeira, Aronson, and Homeira’s literary agent. The Secret Gate is beyond riveting, and will keep readers on the edge of their seats.