This contributed volume offers a state-of-the-art, holistic overview of the employment of a Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus approach to implement the seventeen United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with a geographical focus on applications in different African regions. The book is divided into three sections, each composed of several chapters contributed by experts in their respective fields. Section I introduces the WEF Nexus and its role in the achievement of the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs. It highlights the attempt to connect different spheres of sustainability thanks to the Nexus, taking advantage of the existing interlinkages and interconnections among the Goals. Section II proposes a multi-scale and multi-stakeholder approach to various aspects of the Nexus and reviews existing quantitative tools. This section focuses on the issue of resource control and development aims and spotlights how Nexus dynamics influence the achievement of the SDGs as a whole. Section III applies the WEF Nexus to different African regions, which are balancing a rising population and an economic boom with severe vulnerability in the face of climate change.

This book focuses on current key issues of international security from an actor-centered approach. The volume is divided into 3 sections: the first part analyses an array of security issues in Europe, the second one explores how those security issues play out in the Americas, and the third focuses on Africa. Each of the chapter authors outlines the relevant ideas, interests and institutions. The volume provides an overview of how global, regional, and national actors, differ in their management approaches, capacity levels, and how these differences translate into cross-regional cooperation on security issues.

Two of the world's leading political scientists present the best of their research, focusing on how to build and test a social science of law and courts. Written for a broad, scholarly audience, the book is also recommended for use in graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in law and the social sciences.

This study analyses the reasons for and the broad implications of the post-cold war reforms of arms and dual-use export controls within the European Union. It conceptualizes the arms export policy process as a policy system, involving the interaction of three basic elements-the policy environment, policy stakeholders and public policies. Three national case studies (the UK, Germany and Sweden) explore the major problems and paradoxes of practical regulatory activity.

This book explores the emerging EU-China relationship with a focus on the impact of the Belt and Road Initiative. It takes a narrative approach to understanding the EU-China relationship as a means to highlight how scholars in the EU and China interpret the narrativization of EU-China bilateral relations and to how this bilateral relationship is refracted through relations with third parties. The volume brings together scholars from China and Europe in the fields of Chinese foreign policy, EU studies, and strategic communication. The empirical focus cuts across policy, publics and media, and across history, political economy and diplomacy. The Belt and Road Initiative, alongside the other policy areas addressed in the chapters, offers ways for people in Europe and China to get to know one another in new ways, and for the EU and its member states and the Chinese state to forge new partnerships.

This book challenges the common perception that global politics is making progress on indigenous issues and argues that the current global care for indigeneity is, in effect, violent in nature. Examining the inclusion of indigenous peoples in the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and the Arctic Council, the authors demonstrate how seemingly benevolent practices of international political and legal recognition are tantamount to colonialism, the historical wrong they purport to redress. By unveiling the ways in which contemporary neoliberal politics commissions a certain type of indigenous subject-one distinguished by resilience in particular-the book offers a pioneering account of how international politics has tightened its grip on indigeneity.

This book questions whether the institutions and practices of the emerging EU diplomatic system conform to established standards of the state-centric diplomatic order; or whether practice is paving the way for innovative, even revolutionary, forms of diplomatic organisation.

This book examines the role of the EU in ensuring privacy and data protection on the internet. It describes and demonstrates the importance of privacy and data protection for our democracies and how the enjoyment of these rights is challenged by, particularly, big data and mass surveillance. The book takes the perspective of the EU mandate under Article 16 TFEU. It analyses the contributions of the specific actors and roles within the EU framework: the judiciary, the EU legislator, the independent supervisory authorities, the cooperation mechanisms of these authorities, as well as the EU as actor in the external domain. Article 16 TFEU enables the Court of the Justice of the EU to play its role as constitutional court and to set high standards for fundamental rights protection. It obliges the European Parliament and the Council to lay down legislation that encompasses all processing of personal data. It confirms control by independent supervisory authorities as an essential element of data protection and it gives the EU a strong mandate to act in the global arena. The analysis shows that EU powers can be successfully used in a legitimate and effective manner and that this subject could be a success story for the EU, in times of widespread euroskepsis. It demonstrates that the Member States remain important players in ensuring privacy and data protection. In order to be a success story, the key stakeholders should be prepared to go the extra mile, so it is argued in the book. The book is based on academic research for which the author received a double doctorate at the University of Amsterdam and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels. It builds on a long inside experience within the European institutions, as well as within the community of data protection and data protection authorities. It is a must read in a time where the setting of EU privacy and data protection is changing dramatically, not only as a result of the rapidly evolving information society, but also because of important legal developments such as the entry into force of the General Data Protection Regulation. This book will appeal to all those who are in some way involved in making this regulation work. It will also appeal to people interested in the institutional framework of the European Union and in the role of the Union of promoting fundamental rights, also in the wider world.

With Economic and Monetary Union, the European Union has embarked on one of the biggest projects in its history. Previous literature has focused on how EMU came into being and on the policy issues that it raises. This text seeks to move the discussion forwards by offering a systematic evaluation of how it is affecting EU states, both members and non-members of the Euro-Zone. It explicitly situates EMU in the growing literature on Europeanization. It examines the effects on public policies, political structures, discourses, and identities. The book seeks to identify the scope of EMU's effects, the direction that it imparts to political and policy changes, the mechanisms by which it produces its effects, and the role of domestic institutions, political leadership and specific forms of discourse in shaping responses. In addition, the book assesses how, and with what effects, EMU is affecting key policy sectorslabour markets and wages, welfare states, and financial market governance.

This book states that burden-sharing is one of the most persisting sources for tension and disagreement within NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation). It also belongs to one of the most studied issues within NATO with distinguishable traditions and schools of thought. However, this pertinent question has been rarely discussed extensively by academics. The key idea of the book is to make burden-sharing more understandable as a historical, contemporary and future phenomenon. The authors take a comprehensive look at what is actually meant with burden-sharing and how it has evolved as a concept and a real-life phenomenon through the 70 years of NATO's existence.

This book narrates the integration of consumer culture into transnational human rights advocacy and explores its political impact. By examining tactics that include benefit concerts, graphic imagery of suffering, and branded outreach campaigns, the book details the evolution of human rights into a mainstream moral cause. Drawing inspiration from the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, the author argues that these strategies are effective in attracting masses of supporters but weaken the viability of human rights by commodifying its practices. Consumer capitalism co-opts the public's moral awakening and transforms its desire for global engagement into components of a lifestyle expressed through market transactions and commercial relationships, rather than political commitments. Reclaiming human rights as a subversive idea can reconnect the practice of human rights with its principles and generate a movement bound to the radical spirit of human rights.

NATO has been a successful forum for managing European security policy. Yet European governments have repeatedly tried to build a new security institution in NATO's shadow. In this innovative book, Stephanie C. Hofmann asks why governments attempted to create an additional institution despite no obvious functional necessity and why some attempts failed while others succeeded. European Security in NATO's Shadow considers security cooperation through the lens of party ideologies to shed new light on these questions. She observes that political parties are motivated to propose new institutions by their multidimensional ideologies. Moreover, the success of efforts to create such institutions depends on the degree of ideological congruence among parties in power. In particular, the relationship between the values of multilateralism, sovereignty and Europe informed the impetus and success rate of the attempts made during negotiations for the Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice treaties to create a European security institution.

This collection of essays aims to look afresh at an institution which continues to be of central importance to all who are interested in the development of European Union law and policy. The essays seek to develop particular avenues of analysis and perspectives - including a philosophical, a sociological and a gender-based analysis - which, despite the significant increase in the range and volume of literature on the Court of Justice, have not yet been fully explored.

This book provides a multilayered analysis of food import dependency and its impact on food security in the Caribbean region. The study analyses the main impact of trade liberalization in the Caribbean within the WTO framework and main policy mechanisms to support domestic food production in order to reduce food import dependency. Moreover, the author evaluates economic and social benefits of food self-sufficiency as a strategy aimed to improve domestic food production by increased availability of locally produced food products.

This book of essays,the product of a conference held at the University of Birmingham in the spring of 1998, contains contributions from a group of extremely distinguished scholars in the fields of both public and private law. The meaning of proportionality is examined in a number of different contexts, including those of EC law, the domestic law of the Member States of the EU and the law of the European Convention on Human Rights. Its substantive content and procedural implications are analysed and contrasted, in particular, with the concept of Wednesbury unreasonableness. Its use in criminal and anti-discrimination law is also examined, as is its future likely impact in the UK after incorporation of the European Convention. Contributors: Paul Craig, Evelyn Ellis, David Feldman, Nicholas Green QC, Lord Hoffmann, Francis G. Jacobs, Jeremy McBride, Takis Tridimas, Walter van Gerven.

This book investigates the politics of transatlantic trade, specifically the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations. Using a novel approach, the authors analyze the rhetorical choices made by opponents and supporters of an agreement, and the logical behind their arguments. Opponents used emotive frames and strategically chosen issues to increase public opposition to the negotiations; supporters countered, but also accommodated, parts of opponents' rhetoric in hopes of quelling discontent. The study also highlights the resulting changes to EU trade policy, thus contributing to the literatures on trade policy, politicization, and rhetorical analysis.

This book examines the effectiveness and consistency of EU democracy promotion in its Eastern neighbourhood between 1991 and 2014. It concludes that the EU's democratization role in this region was, not surprisingly, weak within this time period. However, this weak role only took shape under four domestic and transnational conditions: (a) a higher cost-benefit balance of rule transfer, (b) a lower structural difficulty a given country would need to overcome on its way towards a democratic regime, (c) increased levels of authority distribution across branches of power, and (d) a higher extent of democratic diffusion resulting from regional interactions. In those countries where these domestic and transnational conditions were present, as in Moldova, Ukraine, and Georgia, the EU's democratizing influence was in causal terms only the tip of the iceberg. Most variation in regime dynamics remains to be explained by domestic and transnational contexts.

This work analyzes the activities and influence of professional economists in international agencies exploring: what positions economists occupy, including the role they play in policy decisions; how economists are recruited and trained; and how cultural and ideological backgrounds influence their assimilation into the agency. Focusing on the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, GATT, and COED, Economists in International Agencies is the first work to isolate and define the role of economists in international agencies.

This book traces the trajectory and different meanings of the concept of peacebuilding in the United Nations since the early 1990s. It analyses how that concept gained life in a particular context and the implications of this process for the Organisation's support to societies affected by armed conflict in general and for peace operations in particular. Departing from tenets about the influence of ideas in world politics and engaging with the critique of the liberal peace scholarship, the book provides a theoretically informed narrative of how peacebuilding acquired different meanings while remaining largely motivated, justified, legitimated and informed by a proactive and top-down agenda of promoting liberal democratic institutions, norms and values as a remedy to the challenges faced by societies affected by armed conflict. The book will appeal to scholars, policymakers and practitioners in peacebuilding and post-conflict development.

This book explores the relations between the EU and the BRICS in the areas of politics, economic development, trade and security. The contributions cover topics such as the position of the EU and BRICS in the global order and the EU as a "normative power," as well as the evolution, characteristics and institutionalization of BRICS and the roles of its member countries Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. The book will appeal to researchers and scholars interested in the rise of BRICS and the resulting challenges and opportunities for the European Union and Global Governance.

This book constitutes an up-to-date methodology reference work for International Relations (IR) scholars and students. The study of IR calls for the use of multiple and various tools to try and describe international phenomena, analyze and understand them, compare them, interpret them, and try to offer theoretical approaches. In a nutshell, doing research in IR requires both tools and methods-from the use of archives to the translation of results through mapping, from conducting interviews to analyzing quantitative data, from constituting a corpus to the always touchy interpretation of images and discourses. This volume assembles twenty young researchers and professors in the field of IR and political science to discuss numerous rich and thoroughly explained case studies. Merging traditional political science approaches with methods borrowed from sociology and history, it offers a clear and instructive synthesis of the main resources and applied methods to study International Relations.

This book argues that early European Commission officials envisaged an integrated civil Europe from the outset. Largely overlooked is the fact that between 1951 and 1972 there was a group of European Commission (and before that the High Authority) officials who wished to build a Civil Europe to sit alongside an economic and political Europe. This Civil Europe was, it was hoped, to become home to a European citizenry equipped with a European civil consciousness that complemented their national and local loyalties. To this end these officials pioneered a series of civil initiatives designed to begin the process of building Civil Europe. This book analyses three such civil initiatives: the building of the first European School, the European Community's participation in Expo 58 and the production of the European Community's own documentaries. From the start Europe was designed and conceived of in terms of a European general civil public and not solely in terms dictated by economic and political interests.

This book examines selected actions and investments of the European Central Bank (ECB) from a climate and sustainability standpoint. Shedding new light on the topic from various angles - ethical, philosophical, political, economical and legal - it situates sustainability mainstreaming in the finance and investment field at all levels. The former ECB President Mario Draghi once said that he considered sustainable development and an intact environment to be human rights, and therefore enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. The acting ECB President Christine Lagarde added that the future path for the climate is uncertain, but it would remain within our power to influence it. However, with all that in mind the ECB's policy of buying assets as securities is often questionable. This volume analyzes these actions in connection with sustainability, and puts forward practical recommendations for improving the ECB's investment strategy on its way creating a sustainable financial market.

Since emerging in 2006 from a ten-year Maoist insurgency, the 'People's War', Nepal has struggled with the difficult transition from war to peace, from autocracy to democracy, and from an exclusionary and centralized state to a more inclusive and federal one. The present volume, drawing on both international and Nepali scholars and leading practitioners, analyzes the context, dynamics and key players shaping Nepal's ongoing peace process. While the peace process is largely domestically driven, it has been accompanied by wide-ranging international involvement, including initiatives in peacemaking by NGOs, the United Nations and India, which, throughout the process, wielded considerable political influence; significant investments by international donors; and the deployment of a Security Council-mandated UN field mission. This book shines a light on the limits, opportunities and challenges of international efforts to assist Nepal in its quest for peace and stability and offers valuable lessons for similar endeavors elsewhere.

Examining how the Association of Southeast Asian Nations' (ASEAN) has responded to external threats since 1975 and drawing on rarely analysed material including declassified government documents and WikiLeaks cables, this book develops the `vanguard state theory' to explain why regional states act as they do in the face of potential sovereignty violation.