Rekindling the Strong State in Russia and China offers a thorough analysis of the profound regeneration of the State and its intense interaction with the external projections of Russia and China. In the international political scene, leaderships are under constant negotiation. Financial crisis, social and cultural transformations, values setting and migration flows have a deep impact on global powers, leading to the appearance of new actors. At present, the assumed rise of a new axis between two emerging powers, such as Russia and China, effaces their different backgrounds, leading to misinterpretations of their positioning in the geopolitical arena. This book is an essential and multifaceted guide aimed at understanding the deep changes that affect these two countries and their global aspirations. Contributors are: Marco Puleri; Andrea Passeri; Marco Balboni; Carmelo Danisi; Mingjiang Li; Mahalakshmi Ganapathy; Rosa Mule; Olga Dubrovina; Evgeny Mironov; Yongshun Cai; Vasil Sakaev; Eugenia Baroncelli; Sonia Lucarelli; Nicolo Fasola; Stefano Bianchini; Stanislav Tkachenko; Vitaly Kozyrev; Marco Borraccetti; Francesco Privitera; Antonio Fiori, Massimiliano Trentin; Arrigo Pallotti; Giuliana Laschi; Michael Leigh.

This book examines diplomatic role of Okoi Arikpo during Biafran War in Nigeria. It examines his diplomatic engagements and how they shaped the international politics of the fighting. Okoi Arikpo was Nigeria's longest serving Minister of Foreign Affairs, saddled with the country's chief diplomatic responsibilities from 1967 and 1975. Okoi Arikpo played the role of Federal emissary on foreign relations in the Biafran Crisis as well. The Foreign Ministry's role in the foreign policy decision-making system was also due to the sort of leadership that Arikpo was able to provide.

The text aims to uncover the roots of the United States' near perpetual involvement in war since the beginning of WWI in 1914. Using alliance politics as the main framework of analysis, it offers a new interpretation that contrasts with the traditional views that war is an interruption of the American foreign policy emphasis on diplomacy. Instead, it posits that war has been the norm during the past century while peaceful interludes were but a time of respite and preparation for the next conflict. After a thorough discussion of the concepts of alliance building and the containment doctrine, the work then addresses such themes as the alliance networks used to confront German and Japanese powers during the early 20th century wars, the role of alliances in containing the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the creation of alliances to restrict and defeat rogue state powers, and whether they were useful when dealing with the challenges posed by terrorism in the post-9/11 world. Each chapter features case studies, a summary, references, and web links. In addition, the book utilizes primary sources, such as U.S. Department of Defense and State documents and presidential statements. An exhaustive study of containment and alliance, this text will be an essential resource for anyone studying U.S. foreign policy, international relations, and national security.

Is the EU a success or a failure? Should It Stay or Should It Go? Britain and the EU The Big Waste or Essential to Feed Europe? The Common Agricultural Policy Observers of the European Union could be forgiven in thinking that since its inception the EU project has been under threat from near constant crises. In recent years, controversial issues such as EU enlargement, the fallout from the Eurozone crisis, migration policies, Brexit and the Corona pandemic have tested the EU to its limits and divided public opinion in the process. The major third edition of this comprehensive textbook on the EU seeks to introduce the integration project by looking at the thorny debates politicians, European citizens and the media contend with on a daily basis. Well known for its unique and pedagogically-innovative key debates format, the editors have invited top names in the field to contribute a stirring contribution either 'for' or 'against' each of the toughest political questions the EU faces. In doing so, not only does it offer a broad introduction to all the key concerns of the Union, but it does so in a way that is contemporary, engaging and designed to spark controversy. New to this Edition: - All chapters fully revised and updatedNew chapter on the transatlantic partnership - All chapters now with key takeaway points - Across all controversies, more inclusion of mainstream gender and feminist approaches

The onset of the 2004 EU enlargement witnessed a number of predictions being made about the approaches, capacity and ability of Central European judges who were soon to join the Union. Optimistic voices, foreshadowing the deep transformative power that Europe was bound to exercise with respect to the judicial mentality and practice in the new Member States, were intertwined with gloomy pictures of post-Communist limited formalism and mechanical jurisprudence that could not be reformed, which were likely to undermine the very foundations of mutual trust and recognition the judicial system of the Union is built upon. Ten years later, this volume revisits these predictions and critically assesses the evolution of Central European judicial mentality, institutions and constitutionality under the influence of the EU membership. Comparatively evaluating the situation in a number of Central European Member States in their socio-legal contexts, notably Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania, the volume offers unique insights into the process of (non) Europeanisation of national legal systems and cultures.

With one quarter of proven oil reserves and the largest oil production in the world, Saudi Arabia has been at the center of world politics. Its vast oil resources have been utilized in various ways to maximize internal and external security. While oil revenue allowed the Saudi state to buy off legitimacy at home and abroad, the Saudi state exploited oil supply to either forge alliances with or pressure consuming and producing countries. By providing an insightful account of how oil resources shaped Saudi security policies since the mid-twentieth century, Islam Y. Qasem offers a timely contribution to the study of oil politics and the interrelationship between economic interdependence and security.

There hardly seems to be a global issue in the world today in which the United Nations (UN) is not expected to play a key role. And indeed, despite a persistent gulf between high expectations and the UN's capacities, the organization continues to be a unique and indispensable actor in areas such as peace maintenance, human rights protection, and development. Thoroughly revised and updated, the second edition of this highly acclaimed text provides a concise analysis of the UN, its structure and work, achievements and shortcomings, and its likely role and prospects in the twenty-first century. The new edition covers the latest institutional and structural developments - including the creation of the Peacebuilding Commission and the establishment of a permanent Human Rights Council - and reflects recent debates on UN reform.

Switzerland suffered four major terrorist attacks in 1969 and 1970, which forced the Swiss government to address the issue of international terrorism for the first time. Subsequently, "neutral" Switzerland worked closely with Western Cold War powers to develop international counterterrorism measures and forged a European-Israeli counterterrorist alignment to counter Palestinian terrorism in Europe. Using recently declassified archival records, this book is the first study to examine how the Swiss government positioned the country within the international struggle against terrorism. The book brings to light the creation of the Club de Berne, a secret European network of intelligence agencies connected to Israel and the United States. It offers new insights about the history of Swiss, Western European, and Israeli security cooperation.

Airpower for Strategic Effect is intended to contribute to the understanding of airpower-what it is, what it does, why it does it, and what the consequences are. This is the plot: airpower generates strategic effect. Airpower's product is strategic effect on the course of strategic history. Everything about military airpower is instrumental to the purpose of securing strategic effect.

The general perception of the garment and textile industry in the global South is fueled only by images of dismal labor conditions and unsuitable factories, descriptions of labor clashes with police, and analyses of low wages and exploitative multinational corporations. This book presents an insightful perspective on the garment and textiles industries in Asia by highlighting that an industry fraught with competing concerns can, in fact, collaborate and work together when it is in the interest of both the state and interest groups to do so. This comparative study recognizes the role of both the state and interest groups in the policy making process and argues that they are interlinked and require one another for sustainable reforms. Employing original, in-depth research in three different countries, the study skillfully delves down deep beyond the macro statistics and commonly held images to cast light on some of the significant policy and attitudinal shifts that have occurred in this industry. It demonstrates that even though the struggle continues, it is important to recognize the improvements thus far and to work towards positive change. This book also takes a much larger historical view of the sector, arguing that manipulation of the trading regime has created and continues to create both incentives and disincentives for the various stakeholders involved in this industry. This book is is essential for students and researchers in policy studies, labor studies, South and Southeast Asian studies, international trade, and political science, as well as those engaged in program design and evaluation of projects focused on labor rights. This study is also critical for non-governmental organizations with a thematic focus on the garments and textiles industry, labor rights, human rights, and international trade policy, as well as for private sector organizations focused on improving labor conditions around the world. More information at http: //www.cambriapress.com/books/9781604978780.cf

No Accident, Comrade argues that chance became a complex yet conflicted cultural signifier during the Cold War, when a range of thinkers--politicians, novelists, historians, biologists, sociologists, and others--contended that totalitarianism denied the very existence and operation of chance in the world. They claimed that the USSR perpetrated a vast fiction on its population, a fiction amplified by the Soviet view that there is no such thing as chance or accident, only manifestations of historical law (hence the popular American refrain used to refer to Marxism: "It was no accident, Comrade").
By reading an expansive range of American novels published between 1947-2005, alongside nonfiction texts by the likes of Jerzy Kosinski, Daniel Bell, Ian Hacking, and mid-century game theorists, No Accident, Comrade explains how associations of chance with democratic freedom and the denial of chance with totalitarianism circulated in Cold War America. Chance became tied to the liberties of U.S. democracy, whereas its eradication or denial became symptomatic of Soviet tyranny. With works by Nabokov, Ellison, Pynchon, Didion, DeLillo, Colson Whitehead, and many others, Steven Belletto shows how writers developed innovative strategies for dealing with and incorporating these ever-present beliefs about chance and its role in their culture. These newly developed narrative techniques allowed them to theorize, satirize, and make sense of the constantly changing relationship between the individual and the state during a largely rhetorical conflict.

The integration of the Eurasian Economic Union has been under constant development as officials try to successfully implement new economic policies within its various regions. Introducing a new policy such as this creates the formation of new markets, the improvement of cooperation initiatives, as well as a new legislative base and supplementations. These continual alterations require updated analysis and research for political leaders to follow regarding provincial incorporation methods. Regional Integration and Future Cooperation Initiatives in the Eurasian Economic Union is an essential reference source that discusses the conceptual and empirical frameworks of the current phase of Eurasian integration as well as its economic impact. Featuring research on topics such as multilateral cooperation, free trade, and international views, this book is ideally designed for politicians, economists, strategists, public relations specialists, research scholars, policymakers, students, and academicians seeking coverage on regional integration issues in modern Eurasia.

This study examines how China has developed a diplomatic mechanism to expand its international influence through the establishment of strategic partnerships. These strategic partnerships have sparked a debate among analysts. On the one hand, some optimistic studies applaud the win-win objective of China's foreign policy and portray China as a successful model for developing countries. On the other hand, more skeptical studies depict China as a rising imperial power that represents a competitive threat to Latin America. This book focuses on China's strategic partnerships with Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela within the oil sector. It stresses how Chinese strategic partnerships with each of these four countries have diverged across cases over time (1991-2015). The study finds that the strategic partnerships are asymmetrical in which China benefits more than four Latin American countries in a variety of aspects. I suggest Latin American countries to push for greater diversification of export agenda toward China, to develop new productive partnerships beyond traditional sectors and to increase the competitiveness of firms. Meanwhile, China's diplomatic actions toward Latin America are more than likely to result in forms of change, particularly across my four country cases, and where strategic partnerships are concerned.

This book contradicts the dominant myth that incompetent, corrupt, and uncompromising Palestinian decision-makers are responsible for the lasting stalemate in the Middle-East Peace Process. It highlights recent political developments in Palestine that fundamentally redefine important parameters of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Contrary to public perception, new political trends in the Palestinian Territories bolster prospects for the realization of Palestinian national aspirations. Michael Broning identifies key indicators which fundamentally question dominant Israeli narratives and pose an unprecedented strategic challenge to the Israeli leadership. These include the re-invention of Hamas, the reform of the Fatah movement, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's state-building efforts and the surge of non-violent resistance against Israel. This persuasive book forces us to reconsider the perceived wisdom that the Palestinians are powerless to influence events as they struggle for peace.

Alla Osipenko is the gripping story of one of history's greatest ballerinas, a courageous rebel who paid the price for speaking truth to the Soviet state. The daughter of a distinguished Russian aristocratic and artistic family, Osipenko was born in 1932, but raised almost in a cocoon of pre-Revolutionary decorum and protocol. In Leningrad she studied directly under Agrippina Vaganova, the most revered and influential of all Russian ballet instructors. In 1950, she joined the Mariinsky (then-Kirov) Ballet, where her lines, shapes, movement both exemplified the venerable traditions of Russian ballet and projected those traditions into uncharted and experimental realms. She was the first of her generation of Kirov stars to enchant the West when she danced in Paris in 1956. Five years later, she was a key figure in the sensational success of the Kirov in its European debut. But Osipenko's sharp tongue and candid independence, as well as her almost-reckless flouting of Soviet rules for personal and political conduct, soon found her all but quarantined in Russia. An internationally acclaimed ballerina at the height of her career, she found that she would now have to prevail in the face of every attempt by the Soviet state and the Kirov administration to humble her. Throughout the book, Osipenko talks frankly and freely in a way that few Russians of her generation have allowed themselves to. She discusses her traumatic relationship to the Soviet state, her close but often-fraught relationship with her family, her four husbands, her lovers, her colleagues, her son's arrest for selling dollars in Leningrad and subsequent death. This biography features a cast of characters drawn from all sectors of Soviet and post-Perestroika society.

Local Peacebuilding and National Peace is a collection of essays that examines the effects of local peacebuilding efforts on national peace initiatives. The book looks at violent and protracted struggles in which local people have sought to make their own peace with local combatants in a variety of ways, and how such initiatives have affected and have been affected by national level strategies. Chapters on theories of local and national peacemaking are combined with chapters on recent efforts to carry out such processes in warn torn societies such as Africa, Asia, and South America, with essays contributed by experts who were actually actively involved in the peacemaking process. With its unique focus on the interaction of peacemaking at local and national levels, the book will fill a gap in the literature. It will be of interest to students and researchers in such fields as peace studies, conflict resolution, international relations, postwar recovery and development.

European integration is under pressure. At the same time, the notion of a European administrative space is being explicitly voiced. But does a shared idea of the public servant exist in Europe? This volume shows how the public servant has been conceived throughout history, and asks whether such conceptions are converging towards a common European administrative identity. It combines conceptual and institutional history with political thought and empirical political science. Sager & Overeem's timely analysis constitutes an original effort to integrate history of ideas and cutting-edge survey research. It presents the subject's ideational foundations as well as its modern manifestation in European administrative space.

Many reformers argue that the future of democracies depends on the quality of their political institutions. If so, it may be worthwhile examining the democratic-instrumental vision of citizens and their representatives--which assumes that they can and should decide how they might be organized and governed--and thereby develop a better theoretical understanding of the nature, architecture, dynamics of change, performance, and effects of institutions.
It may be useful to study the possibilities and limitations of governing through deliberately changing institutional arrangements and thereby achieving intended, anticipated and desired effects--including how institutions contribute to organized rule, orderly change, civilized co-existence, unity in diversity and the ability to accommodate and continuously balance rather than eliminate what John Stuart Mill called "standing antagonisms."
Governing through Institution Building offers an organization-theory-based institutional approach and it assumes that a fruitful route to improved understanding of political organization and government is to observe large-scale institutional reforms. The primary source of insight is the grand experiment in political integration through institution building and polity formation in Europe--the European Union. Yet, the book relates to century-long controversies concerning what is good government and how best to organize common affairs. The main challenge is to examine the claim that theoretical ideas and concepts developed in the context of the sovereign state are outdated in the context of the emerging European polity and a globalized world and to analyze what students of political institutions, as well as citizens, can learn from recent European experiments in democratic organization and government.

The 12th volume of International Development Policy explores the relationship between international drug policy and development goals, both current and within a historical perspective. Contributions address the drugs and development nexus from a range of critical viewpoints, highlighting gaps and contradictions, as well as exploring strategies and opportunities for enhanced linkages between drug control and development programming. Criminalisation and coercive law enforcement-based responses in international and national level drug control are shown to undermine peace, security and development objectives. Contributors include: Kenza Afsahi, Damon Barrett, David Bewley-Taylor, Daniel Brombacher, Julia Buxton, Mary Chinery-Hesse, John Collins, Joanne Csete, Sarah David, Ann Fordham, Corina Giacomello, Martin Jelsma, Sylvia Kay, Diederik Lohman, David Mansfield, Jose Ramos-Horta, Tuesday Reitano, Andrew Scheibe, Shaun Shelly, Khalid Tinasti, and Anna Versfeld.