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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > International relations
This volume provides an up-to-the-minute review of the open economy approach to analysing environmental problems and policies, which has produced a wealth of research over the past decade. It contains non-technical, issue-oriented, and comprehensive surveys written by specialists in international and environmental economics. The volume will appeal to scholars and students of economics and political science.
The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements is an innovative volume that presents a comprehensive exploration of social movement studies, mapping the field and expanding it to examine the recent developments in cognate areas of studies, within and beyond sociology and political science. This volume brings together the most distinguished social and political scientists working in this field, each writing thought-provoking essays in their area of expertise, and facilitates conversations between classic social movement agenda and lines of research. The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements discusses core theoretical perspectives, recent contributions from the field, and how patterns of macro social change may affect social movements, as well as suggesting what contributions social movement studies can give to other research areas in various disciplines.
There have been remarkable developments in the field of human rights in the past few decades. Still, millions of asylum-seekers, refugees, and undocumented immigrants continue to find it challenging to access human rights. In this book, Ayten Gundogdu builds on Hannah Arendt's analysis of statelessness and argues that these challenges reveal the perplexities of human rights. Human rights promise equal personhood regardless of citizenship status, yet their existing formulations are tied to the principle of territorial sovereignty. This situation leaves various categories of migrants in a condition of "rightlessness," with a very precarious legal, political, and human standing. Gundogdu examines this problem in the context of immigration detention, deportation, and refugee camps. Critical of the existing system of human rights without seeing it as a dead end, she argues for the need to pay closer attention to the political practices of migrants who challenge their condition of rightlessness and propose new understandings of human rights. What arises from this critical reflection on human rights is also a novel reading of Arendt, one that offers refreshing insights into various dimensions of her political thought, including her account of the human condition, "the social question," and "the right to have rights." Rightlessness in an Age of Rights is a valuable addition to the literature on Hannah Arendt and a vital way of rethinking human rights as they relate to contemporary issues of immigration.
Is the process of state building a unilateral, national venture, or is it something more collaborative, taking place in the interstices between adjoining countries? To answer this question, Asymmetrical Neighbors takes a comparative look at the state building process along China, Myanmar, and Thailand's common borderland area. It shows that the variations in state building among these neighboring countries are the result of an interactive process that occurs across national boundaries. Departing from existing approaches that look at such processes from the angle of singular, bounded territorial states, the book argues that a more fruitful method is to examine how state and nation building in one country can influence, and be influenced by, the same processes across borders. It argues that the success or failure of one country's state building is a process that extends beyond domestic factors such as war preparation, political institutions, and geographic and demographic variables. Rather, it shows that we should conceptualize state building as an interactive process heavily influenced by a "neighborhood effect." Furthermore, the book moves beyond the academic boundaries that divide arbitrarily China studies and Southeast Asian studies by providing an analysis that ties the state and nation building processes in China with those of Southeast Asia.
The Russians are invading. But the locals have a plan. It's March 2022 and Russian tanks are roaring across the vast, snow-dusted fields of Ukraine. Their destination: Voznesensk, a town with a small bridge that could change the course of the war. The heavily-armed Russians are expecting an easy fight - or no fight at all. After all, Voznesensk is a quiet farming town, full of pensioners. But the locals appear to have other ideas. Svetlana, a grandmother with arthritis, reacts in fury when Russian troops turn her cottage into their blood-soaked headquarters. Valentin, a quick-talking lawyer, joins the town's 'Dads Army' defenders, crouching in a trench with an AK47. Meanwhile, 21-year-old Sergei grabs a Molotov cocktail and lies in wait for Russian tanks as they push towards Dead Water Bridge. The odds are terrible. But a plan is emerging, and there's a chance it could save not just Voznesensk, but the rest of southern Ukraine. Meanwhile, inside the tanks, an inner battle rages. As Russian officer Igor Rudenko prepares to invade, he has a secret. He is Ukrainian himself. A gripping work of reportage that tells the story of a pivotal moment in Ukraine's war, this is a real-life thriller about ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances with resilience, humour and ingenuity
What is Vladimir Putin up to? This book shows how the mentality of Putin and his team - the code of Putinism - has shaped Russian politics over the past two decades. It explains not only the thoughts and ideas that motivate Putin's decisions, but also the set of emotions and habits that influence how Putin and his close allies view the world. The code of Putinism has powerfully shaped the nature of Russia's political system, its economy, and its foreign policy. Taylor draws on a large number of interviews, the speeches of Putin and other top officials, and the Russian media to analyze the mentality of Team Putin. Key features of Russian politics today - such as authoritarianism, Putin's reliance on a small group of loyal friends and associates, state domination of the economy, and an assertive foreign policy - are traced to the code of Putinism. Key ideas of the code include conservatism, anti-Americanism, and the importance of a state that is powerful both at home and abroad. Dominant habits of Putin and his associates include control, order, and loyalty. Important feelings driving Russia's rulers include the need for respect, resentment about lost status and mistreatment by the West, and vulnerability. While some observers portray Putin as either a cold-blooded pragmatist or a strident Russian nationalist, Taylor provides a more nuanced and compelling interpretation of Putin's motives and actions. The Code of Putinism also shows how Putin's choices, guided by this mentality, have led to a Russia that is misruled at home and punching above its weight abroad.
How do ideologies shape international relations in general and Middle Eastern countries' relations with the United States in particular? The Clash of Ideologies by Mark L. Haas explores this critical question. Haas argues that leaders' ideological beliefs are likely to have profound effects on these individuals' perceptions of international threats. These threat perceptions, in turn, shape leaders' core security policies, including choices of allies and enemies and efforts to spread their ideological principles abroad as a key means of advancing their interests. Two variables are particularly important in this process: the degree of ideological differences dividing different groups of decision makers ( "ideological distance "), and the number of prominent ideologies that are present in a particular system ( "ideological polarity "). The argument is tested in four case studies of states' foreign policies, primarily since the end of the Cold War: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey. As the argument predicts, ideological differences in these cases were a key cause of international conflict and ideological similarities a source of cooperation. Moreover, different ideological groups in the same country at the same time often possessed very different understandings of their threat environments, and thus very different foreign policy preferences. These are findings that other prominent international relations theories, particularly realism, cannot explain. Clash of Ideologies goes beyond advancing theoretical debates in the international relations literature. It also aims to provide policy guidance on key international security issues. These prescriptions are designed to advance America's interests in the Middle East in particular, namely how U.S. leaders should best respond to the ideological dynamics that exist in the region.
For two hundred years the provision of military security has been a central and defining function of the modern nation-state. The increasing reliance on private military and security companies in contemporary conflict marks a fundamental transformation in the organization of military violence, and it raises issues of accountability and ethics that are of particular concern to feminists. This privatization of force not only enables states to circumvent citizens' democratic control over questions of war and peace, but also undermines women's and minority groups' claims for greater inclusion in the military sphere. Gender and Private Security in Global Politics brings together key scholars from the fields of international relations, security studies, and gender studies to argue that privatization of military security is a deeply gendered process. The chapters employ a variety of feminist perspectives, including critical, postcolonial, poststructuralist, and queer feminist perspectives, as well as a wide range of methodological approaches including ethnography, participant-observation, genealogy, and discourse analysis. This is the first book to develop an extended feminist analysis of private militaries and to draw on feminist concerns regarding power, justice and equality to consider how to reform and regulate private forces.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States was growing by fits and starts into its new role as a global power. Unlike European empires, it sought to distinguish itself as a new kind of power. Corporations and media outlets were spreading American brands, ideas, and commodities worldwide, increasing we would today call soft power. Meanwhile, American citizens and government officials grappled with their nation's rising prominence and debated how best to engage with the wider world. One of those ways was to use foreign aid to define the nation's new role and responsibilities with regards to the international community. This first book narrates the early history of American foreign relief and assistance as a way of guiding the international community in peaceful cooperation and modernization towards greater stability and democracy. It tells the story of how the United States government came to realize the value of overseas aid as a tool of statecraft. A prime case in point is the American Red Cross, a quasi-private, quasi-state organization. Established in 1882, the ARC was a privately funded and staffed organization, primarily dependent on volunteer labor. However, it shared a special relationship with the U.S. government, formalized by Congressional charters, which made it the "official voluntary" aid association of the United States in times of war and natural disaster. Together, international-minded American progressives-a generation of American health professionals, social scientists, and public intellectuals-made the ARC into a vehicle for the global dissemination of their ideas about health, social welfare, and education. They urged their fellow citizens to reject their traditional attachments to isolationism and non-entanglement and to commit to "humanitarian internationalism." Their international activities included feeding, housing, and anti-epidemic projects in wartime France, Italy, Russia, and Serbia; the development of playgrounds, education initiatives, and child health clinics in postwar Poland and Czechoslovakia; correspondence programs to unite American children and their international peers; and the extension of all of these efforts to U.S. territories, sites where the conceptual lines between foreign and domestic blurred in the U.S. imagination. This history calls attention to the ways that private organizations have served the diplomatic needs of the U.S. state, as well as been an institutional space for Americans who wanted to participate in international affairs in ways that deviated from official state agendas. By the mid-1920s, voluntary humanitarian interventionism had become the basis for a new set of American civic and political obligations to the world community.
This 24th volume of Annotated Leading Cases of International Criminal Tribunals contains decisions taken by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 2005-2006. It includes the full text of the most important decisions, identical to the original version, and includes concurring, separate, and dissenting opinions. In the book, distinguished experts in the field of international criminal law have commented on the decisions. (Series: Annotated Leading Cases of International Criminal Tribunals - Vol. 24)
In its first seven years, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) tripled trade and quintupled foreign investment among the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, increasing its share of the world economy. In 2001, however, North America peaked. Trade slowed among the three, manufacturing jobs shrunk, and illegal migration and drug-related violence soared. Europe caught up, and China leaped ahead. In The North American Idea , eminent scholar and policy-maker Robert A. Pastor explains that NAFTA's mandate was too limited to address the new North American agenda. Instead of offering bold initiatives like a customs union to expand trade, the three leaders thought small. Interest groups stalemated the small ideas as they inhibited the bolder proposals, and the governments accomplished almost nothing. To overcome this resistance and re-invigorate the continent, the leaders need to start with an idea based on a principle of interdependence. If one country fails, all three are harmed, and if one grows, they all benefit. Drawing on first-hand experience as a policy-maker and analyst, Pastor shows how this idea-once woven into the national consciousness of the three countries-could mobilize public support for continental solutions to problems that have confounded each nation working on its own. To stimulate trade and reduce illegal migration, for example, the three countries could set up a fund to invest in the continent's infrastructure. Such a fund would be impossible without leadership and an idea of the continent's current importance and its future promise. Providing essential historical context and challenging readers to view the continent in a new way, Robert Pastor offers an expansive vision and a detailed blueprint for a more integrated, dynamic, and equitable North America.
The two years since publication of the first edition of The Law of EU External Relations: Cases, Materials, and Commentary on the EU as an International Actor have been characterized by the large amount of case law on the new provisions on external relations, which have found their way into the Lisbon Treaty. Moreover, there have been important changes in EU secondary law on external relations as a consequence of these changes to the Lisbon Treaty. In this second edition, new case law and legislative developments are critically discussed and analysed in this comprehensive collection of EU Treaty law. Combining chapters on the general basis of the Union's external action and its relation to international law, with chapters which further explore the law and practice of the EU in the specialized fields of external action, this book presents the law of EU external relations in a concise and accessible manner for students, practitioners, and academics in the field. Topics include the common commercial policy, development cooperation, cooperation with third countries, humanitarian aid, the enlargement and neighbourhood policies, the external environmental policy, and the common foreign and security policy. Carefully selected primary documents are accompanied with analytic commentary on the issues they raise and their significance for the overall structure of EU external relations law. The primary materials selected include many important legal documents that are hard to find elsewhere but give a vital insight into the operation of EU external relations law in practice.
The Global Financial Crisis has re-ordered how the EU intervenes in the EU financial market, both with respect to regulation and with respect to supervision. After 5 years of a behemoth reform agenda, the new landscape is now clear. Rule-making power has decisively moved to the EU and radical reforms have been made to the organization of supervision. EU Securities and Financial Markets Regulation provides the first comprehensive, critical, and contextual account of the vast new rule-book which now applies to the EU financial market in the aftermath of the seismic reforms which have followed the financial crisis. Topics covered in-depth include the AIFMD, EMIR, the Short Selling Regulation, the new market abuse and transparency regimes, the rating agency regime, the UCITS IV-VI reforms, and MiFID II/MiFIR; the analysis is wide-reaching, extending to secondary legislation and relevant soft law. The book also examines the far-reaching institutional changes which have followed and considers in detail the role and impact of the European Securities and Markets Authority and the potential impact of the Single Supervisory Mechanism for euro area banks on the supervision of the EU financial market. EU Securities and Financial Markets Regulation is the third edition of the highly successful and authoritative monograph first published as EC Securities Regulation. Almost entirely recast and re-written from the 2008 second edition to reflect the changes wrought by the Global Financial Crisis, it adopts the in-depth contextual and analytical approach of earlier editions and so considers the market, political, international, institutional, and constitutional context of the new regulatory and supervisory regime, and the underlying forces which have (and will continue to) shape it.
Throughout the entire Cold War era, Vietnam served as a grim symbol
of the ideological polarity that permeated international politics.
But when the Cold War ended in 1989, Vietnam faced the difficult
task of adjusting to a new world without the benefactors it had
come to rely on. In Changing Worlds, David W. P. Elliott, who has
spent the past half century studying modern Vietnam, chronicles the
evolution of the Vietnamese state from the end of the Cold War to
the present. When the communist regimes of Eastern Europe
collapsed, so did Vietnam's model for analyzing and engaging with
the outside world. Fearing that committing fully to globalization
would lead to the collapse of its own system, the Vietnamese
political elite at first resisted extensive engagement with the
larger international community. Over the next decade, though,
China's rapid economic growth and the success of the Asian "tiger
economies," along with a complex realignment of regional and global
international relations reshaped Vietnamese leaders' views. In 1995
Vietnam joined the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN),
its former adversary, and completed the normalization of relations
with the United States. By 2000, Vietnam had "taken the plunge" and
opted for greater participation in the global economic system.
Vietnam finally joined the World Trade Organization in 2006.
This book investigates the role of bourgeoisie society and the political developments of the nineteenth century in the peculiarities of German history. Most historians attribute German exceptionalism to the failure or absence of bourgeois revolution in German history and the failure of the bourgeoisie to conquer the pre-industrial traditions of authoritarianism. However, this study finds that there was a bourgeois revolution in Germany, though not the traditional type. This so-called silent bourgeois revolution brought about the emergence and consolidation of the capitalist system based on the sanctity and disposability of private property and on production to meet individual needs through a system of exchange dominated by the market. In this connection, this book proposes a redefinition of the concept of bourgeois revolution to denote a broader pattern of material, institutional, legal, and intellectual changes whose cumulative effect was all the more powerful for coming to be seen as natural.
Why do decision-makers in similar liberal democracies interpret the
same legal definition in very different ways? International law
provides states with a common definition of a 'refugee' as well as
guidelines outlining how asylum claims should be decided. Yet, the
processes by which countries determine who should be granted
refugee status look strikingly different, even across nations with
many political, cultural, geographical, and institutional
commonalities. This book compares the refugee status determination
(RSD) regimes of three popular asylum seeker destinations - the
United States, Canada, and Australia. Despite similarly high levels
of political resistance to accepting asylum seekers across these
three states, once asylum seekers cross their borders, they access
three very different systems. These differences are significant
both in terms of asylum seekers' experience of the process and in
terms of their likelihood of being found to be a refugee.
In Legislating International Organization, Kathryn Lavelle argues against the commonly-held idea that key international organizations are entities unto themselves, immune from the influence and pressures of individual states' domestic policies. Covering the history of the IMF and World Bank from their origins, she shows that domestic political constituencies in advanced industrial states have always been important drivers of international financial institution policy. Lavelle focuses in particular on the U.S. Congress, tracing its long history of involvement with these institutions and showing how it wields significant influence. Drawing from archival research and interviews with members and staff, Lavelle shows that Congress is not particularly hostile to the multilateralism inherent in the IMF and World Bank, and has championed them at several key historical junctures. Congress is not uniformly supportive of these institutions, however. As Lavelle illustrates, it is more defensive of its constitutionally designated powers and more open to competing interest group concerns than legislatures in other advanced industrial states. Legislating International Organization will reshape how we think about how the U.S. Congress interacts with international institutions and more broadly about the relationship of domestic politics to global governance throughout the world. This is especially relevant given the impact of 2008 financial crisis, which has made the issue of multilateralism in American politics more important than ever.
This work provides an up-to-date and comprehensive directory and guide to over 1700 international and regional organizations around the world.
When are borders justified? Who has a right to control them? Where should they be drawn? Today people think of borders as an island's shores. Just as beaches delimit a castaway's realm, so borders define the edges of a territory, occupied by a unified people, to whom the land legitimately belongs. Hence a territory is legitimate only if it belongs to a people unified by a civic identity. Sadly, this Desert Island Model of territorial politics forces us to choose. If we want territories, then we can either have democratic legitimacy, or inclusion of different civic identities-but not both. The resulting politics creates mass xenophobia, migrant-bashing, hoarding of natural resources, and border walls. To escape all this, On Borders presents an alternative model. Drawing on an intellectual tradition concerned with how land and climate shape institutions, it argues that we should not see territories as pieces of property owned by identity groups. Instead, we should see them as watersheds: as interconnected systems where institutions, people, the biota, and the land together create overlapping civic duties and relations, what the book calls place-specific duties. This Watershed Model argues that borders are justified when they allow us to fulfill those duties; that border-control rights spring from internationally-agreed conventions-not from internal legitimacy; that borders should be governed cooperatively by the neighboring states and the states system; and that border redrawing should be done with environmental conservation in mind. The book explores how this model undoes the exclusionary politics of desert islands.
This volume covers the Middle East from Algeria to Yemen, presenting and interpreting events from the preceding year. The book provides information on the United Nations and all major organizations in the region and can be used as a reference resource by those studying the business of this area.
Provides a comprehensive directory and guide to over 1700 international and regional organizations around the world. Extensively researched, it covers a wide spectrum of organizations from the UN and NATO to the League of Arab States. Contents include: an introductory essay on the developing role of international organizations and the international community in the 21st century; texts of significant international documents; a chronology charting the historical development of international organizations; and a who's who of the leading officials of international organizations together with addresses and contact details.
This reference provides detailed facts and figures on the bodies that encourage international peace and security, and greater cooperation in economic, social, cultural, and humanitarian areas. Details are provided on the history and legislative framework of international organizations, helping to provide the necessary background information to aid your understanding of international cooperation. The Europa Directory International Organizations contains a thorough and informative introductory essay on the developing role of international organizations and the challenges facing the international community in the 21 century. This source also contains texts of significant international charters, treaties, and documents; biographical information on the leading officials of international organizations; an extensive list of UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions; a Calendar of Observances; and a comprehensive index. |
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