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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > International relations
In May 1945, as World War II drew to a close in Europe, some 30,000 Russian Cossacks surrendered to British forces in Austria, believing they would be spared repatriation to the Soviet Union. The fate of those among them who were Soviet citizens had been sealed by the Yalta Agreement, signed by the Allied leaders a few months earlier. Ever since, mystery has surrounded Britain's decision to include among those returned to Stalin a substantial number of White Russians, who had fled their country after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and found refuge in various European countries. They had never been Soviet citizens, and should not have been handed over. Some were prominent tsarist generals, on whose handover the Soviets were particularly insistent. General Charles Keightley, the responsible British officer, concealed the presence of White Russians from his superiors, who had issued repeated orders stipulating that only Soviet nationals should be handed over, and even then only if they did not resist. Through a succession underhanded moves, Keightley secretly delivered up the leading Cossack commanders to the Soviets, while force of unparalleled brutality was employed to hand over thousands of Cossack men, women, and children to a ghastly fate. Particularly sinister was the role of the future British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, whose own machinations are scrutinized here. Following the publication of Count Nikolai Tolstoy's last book on the subject in 1986, the British government closed ranks, and three years later an English court issued a GBP1,500,000 judgment against him for allegedly libeling the British chief of staff who issued the fatal orders. Since then, however, Count Tolstoy has gradually acquired a devastating body of heretofore unrevealed evidence filling the remaining gaps in this tragic history. Much of this material derives from long-sealed Soviet archives, to which Tolstoy received access by a special decree from the late Russian President Boris Yeltsin. What really happened during these murky events is now revealed for the first time.
Cruelty has long been a feature of states' domestic and foreign policies but is seldom acknowledged. Governments mouth respect for human rights yet promote discrimination, violence and suppression of critics. Documenting case studies from around the world, distinguished academic and human rights activist Stuart Rees exposes politicians' cruel motives and the resulting outcomes. Using his first-hand observations and insights from international poets, he argues for courageous action to support non-violence in every aspect of public and private life for the survival of people, animals and the planet.
The world today is overwhelmed by wars between nations and within nations, wars that have dominated American politics for quite some time. Point of Attack calls for a new understanding of the grounds for war. In this book John Yoo argues that the new threats to international security come not from war between the great powers, but from the internal collapse of states, terrorist groups, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and destabilizing regional powers. In Point of Attack he rejects the widely-accepted framework built on the U.N. Charter and replaces it with a new system consisting of defensive, pre-emptive, or preventive measures to encourage wars that advance global welfare. Yoo concludes with an analysis of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, failed states, and the current challenges posed by Libya, Syria, North Korea, and Iran.
We know Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as two of today's most high-profile African American political figures, but who paved the way for these notable diplomats? More than one hundred and thirty years ago, Ebenezer D. Bassett served as the first black United States ambassador. In the midst of the aftermath of the Civil War, the U.S. government broke the color barrier by naming this leading educator, abolitionist, and activist to the controversial post of ambassador to the hemisphere's Black Republic - Haiti. For the first time, a nation founded on the principle that all men are created equal would have as its representative abroad someone previously less than equal under the law. This movement toward equality proved to be a force impossible to turn back, leading to a wider acceptance of blacks in U.S. foreign policy. This book lays bare the struggles Bassett faced as a pioneer of racial integration, helping to secure Bassett's legacy as the first African American political figure, a man who not only altered the American political structure, but led the way for all future civil rights advocates. This book highlights Bassett's achievements, which directly contributed to the racial revolution in the U.S. These include being appointed the first African American diplomat and chief of a U.S. diplomatic mission, leading the integration of public schools, and fighting for equal rights alongside revolutionaries such as Frederick Douglass. Bassett played a critical role in foreign affairs during the late 19th century, the formative years of American expansionism in Latin America and the Caribbean. 2008 marks the 100th anniversary of Bassett's death. Though he is long forgotten by history, his legacy as an innovator, activist, and diplomat lives on, and his life story--a tale of intelligence, integrity, and bravery--serves as an inspiration to patriotic Americans of all races and backgrounds. "Hero of Hispaniola" secures Bassett's legacy as the first African American political figure, a man who not only altered the American political structure, but led the way for all future civil rights advocates to follow.
As David Vine demonstrates, the overseas bases raise geopolitical tensions and provoke widespread antipathy towards the United States. They also undermine American democratic ideals, pushing the U.S. into partnerships with dictators and perpetuating a system of second-class citizenship in territories like Guam. They breed sexual violence, destroy the environment, and damage local economies. And their financial cost is staggering: though the Pentagon underplays the numbers, Vine's accounting proves that the bill approaches $100 billion per year. For many decades, the need for overseas bases has been a quasi-religious dictum of U.S. foreign policy. But in recent years, a bipartisan coalition has finally started to question this conventional wisdom. With the U.S. withdrawing from Afghanistan and ending thirteen years of war, there is no better time to re-examine the tenets of our military strategy. Base Nation is an essential contribution to that debate.
In the wake of 9/11, the United States government rediscovered the value of culture in international relations, sending cultural ambassadors around the world to promote the American way of life. This is the most recent effort to use American culture as a means to convince others that the United States is a land of freedom, equality, opportunity, and scientific and cultural achievements to match its material wealth and military prowess. In The History of United States Cultural Diplomacy Michael Krenn charts the history of the cultural diplomacy efforts from Benjamin Franklin's service as commissioner to France in the 1770s through to the present day. He explores how these efforts were sometimes inspiring, often disastrous, and nearly always controversial attempts to tell the 'truth' about America. This is the first comprehensive study of America's efforts in the field of cultural diplomacy. It reveals a dynamic conflict between those who view U.S. culture as a means to establish meaningful dialogues with the rest of the world and those who consider American art, music, theater as additional propaganda weapons.
Sorge's activities between 1930 and 1942 have tended to be lauded as those of a superlative human intelligence operator and the Soviet Union's GRU (Soviet military intelligence unit) as the optimum of spy-masters. Although it was unusual for a great deal of inside knowledge to be obtained from the Japanese side, most attention has always been paid on the German side to the roles played by representatives of the German Army in Japan. This book, supported by extensive notes and a bibliography, by contrast, highlights the friendly relations between Sorge and Paul Wenneker, German naval attache in Japan from 1932 to 1937 and 1940-45. Wenneker, from extensive and expanding contacts inside the Japanese Navy (and also concealed contacts with the Japanese Army) supplied Sorge with key information on the depth of rivalry between the Japanese armed services.
Contested Waters provides an in-depth analysis of trans-boundary water conflict involving the Indus Basin in Pakistan. The book focuses on both national scale and local scale case studies to illustrate how these water conflicts are both discursively and materially driven by human institutions and politics. Through case studies of controversy over large dams, local flooding and irrigation methods, Daanish Mustafa highlights the various deeply political and institutional factors driving water conflict - specifically the disparity between national scale strategies of water politics and local scale water politics - and calls for engagement with water conflict in political terms.
Since the 1960s, many influential Latin Americans, such as the leaders of student movements and unions, and political authorities, participated in exchange programs with the United States to learn about the American way of life. In Brazil, during the international context of the Cold War, when Brazil was governed by a military dictatorship ruled by generals who alternated in power, hundreds of union members were sent to the United States to take union education courses. Did they come back "Americanized" and able to introduce American trade unionism in Brazil? That is the question this book seeks to answer. It is a subject that is as yet little explored in the history of Latin American labor and international relations: the influence of foreign union organizations on national union politics and movements. Despite the US's investment in advertising, courses, films and trips offered to Brazilian union members, most of them were not convinced by the American ideas on how to organize an "authentic" union movement - or, at least, not committed to applying what they learned in the States.
That Indonesia's ongoing occupation of West Papua continues to be largely ignored by world governments is one of the great moral and political failures of our time. West Papuans have struggled for more than fifty years to find a way through the long night of Indonesian colonization. However, united in their pursuit of merdeka (freedom) in its many forms, what holds West Papuans together is greater than what divides them. Today, the Morning Star glimmers on the horizon, the supreme symbol of merdeka and a cherished sign of hope for the imminent arrival of peace and justice to West Papua. Morning Star Rising: The Politics of Decolonization in West Papua is an ethnographically framed account of the long, bitter fight for freedom that challenges the dominant international narrative that West Papuans' quest for political independence is fractured and futile. Camellia Webb-Gannon's extensive interviews with the decolonization movements' original architects and its more recent champions shed light on complex diasporic and inter-generational politics as well as social and cultural resurgence. In foregrounding West Papuans' perspectives, the author shows that it is the body politic's unflagging determination and hope, rather than military might or influential allies, that form the movement's most unifying and powerful force for independence. This book examines the many intertwining strands of decolonization in Melanesia. Differences in cultural performance and political diversity throughout the region are generating new, fruitful trajectories. Simultaneously, Black and Indigenous solidarity and a shared Melanesian identity have forged a transnational grassroots power-base from which the movement is gaining momentum. Relevant beyond its West Papua focus, this book is essential reading for those interested in Pacific studies, Native and Indigenous studies, development studies, activism, and decolonization.
Examines Naval co-operation between Britain and Russia and the often underappreciated prowess of the Russian navy. Naval co-operation between Britain and Russia continued throughout the eighteenth century, with Britain providing huge assistance to the growth of Russia's navy, and Russia making an essential but often overlooked contribution to Britain's maritime power in the period. From 1698 when Tsar Peter the Great served briefly as a trainee shipwright at Deptford dockyard Russia recruited British, often Scottish, shipwrights, engineers, naval officers and naval surgeons who both helped build up the Russian navy and who were also key advisers to the Russian navy at sea. At the same time, naval stores from Russia, especially after Britain lost the American colonies, were vital for the maintenance of Britain's fleet. Moreover, as this book argues, Russian naval power was much more formidable than is often realised, with the Russian navy active alongside the British fleet in the North Sea and winning decisive battles against the Ottoman navy in the Mediterranean, including the battles of Cesme in 1770 and Navarino in 1827. Britain did well to have Russia as a naval ally rather than an enemy. This book provides a comprehensive overview of this important subject, at a time when Britain's relationship with Russia is of considerable concern.
Representing Europeans takes a fresh and quizzical look at the problems facing the European Union. Bringing decades of experience to bear on the deep, structural problems currently facing the EU, Richard Rose spells out why it can no longer carry on with integration by stealth. Extraordinary challenges - such as saving the Eurozone and maintaining the free movement of peoples - now impose high-profile economic and political costs. These create huge political strains which EU institutions struggle to cope with. Rose shows the ways in which Europe's institutions do and do not represent its citizens, sometimes equally and sometimes unequally. This threatens worse crises of EU authority because people retain the power as national citizens to protest against their government making commitments in Brussels that they do not accept. The book's pragmatic approach rejects the assumption that more European integration is the solution for all of Europes problems. Likewise, it rejects UK withdrawal from the European Union because Britain cannot stop the world and get off. Instead, it suggests a pragmatic approach that asks about proposals emanating from Brussels: What problem does it address? How will this policy work? What are its visible costs and benefits? Instead of 'one size fits all' policies being imposed on 27 diverse countries, Rose recommends that enhanced European cooperation should be based on coalitions of the willing. Moreover, the active use of pan-European referendums on major reforms can test popular commitment to EU treaties that permanently advance European integration. Both European federalists and diehard Eurosceptics will alternately agree and disagree with the argument of this book. But they cannot ignore the challenge it raises to pay more attention to the concerns of the half a billion Europeans whom they claim to represent.
This book uses several fantasy movies or movie series and television series to explain political and international relations (IR) concepts and theories. It begins with an overview of the importance of fantasy in literature, film and television, and its increasing impact on the field of International Relations. It then presents the political, IR, and social issues in each franchise, and in five chapters uses these tales' key story arcs or plot points to illustrate major political and IR themes. The volume pays particular attention to such fantasy franchises as Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, the Harry Potter films, recent fairytale and children's stories, and female-led fantasy projects.
Maritime piracy's improbable re-emergence following the end of the Cold War was surprising as the image of pirates evokes masted galleons and cutlasses. Yet, the number of incidents and their intensity skyrocketed in the 1990s and 2000s off of the coasts of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Somalia. As Ursula Daxecker and Brandon Prins demonstrate in Pirate Lands, Maritime piracy-like civil war, terrorism, and organized crime-is a problem of weak states. Surprisingly, though, pirates do not operate in the least governed areas of weak states. Daxecker and Prins address this puzzle by explaining why some coastal communities experience more pirate attacks in their vicinity than others. They find that pirates do well in places where elites and law enforcement can be bribed, but they also need access to functioning roads, ports, and markets. Using statistical analyses of cross-national and sub-national data on pirate attacks in Indonesia, Nigeria, and Somalia, Daxecker and Prins detail how governance at the state and local level explain the location of maritime piracy. Additionally, they employ geo-spatial tools to rigorously measure how local political capacity and infrastructure affect maritime piracy. Drawing upon interviews with former pirates, community members, and maritime security experts, Pirate Lands offers the first comprehensive, social-scientific account of a phenomenon whose re-appearance after centuries of remission took almost everyone by surprise.
The Delphic Oracle on Europe brings together leading thinkers and
policy-makers from different academic disciplines and
policy-oriented backgrounds from all over Europe. The chapters
reflect on ways forward for the European Union in a time of global
crisis and profound change. Contributors debate the institutional
and political consequences of the Lisbon Treaty, the reform of
economic governance in light of the economic and financial crisis,
and Europe's global role in a rapidly changing international and
regional environment.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) is one the pioneering experiments in international criminal justice. It has left a rich legal, institutional, and non-judicial legacy. This edited collection provides a broad perspective on the contribution of the tribunal to law, memory, and justice. It explores some of the accomplishments, challenges, and critiques of the ICTY, including its less visible legacies. The book analyses different sites of legacy: the expressive function of the tribunal, its contribution to the framing of facts, events, and narratives of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and investigative and experiential legacies. It also explores lesser known aspects of legal practice (such as defence investigative ethics, judgment drafting, contempt cases against journalists, interpretation and translation), outreach, approaches to punishment and sentencing, the tribunals' impact on domestic legal systems, and ongoing debates over impact and societal reception. The volume combines voices from inside the tribunal with external perspectives to elaborate the rich history of the ICTY, which continues to be written to this day.
Moving beyond state-centric and elitist perspectives, this volume examines everyday security in the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and written by scholars from Central Asia and beyond, it shows how insecurity is experienced, what people consider existential threats, and how they go about securing themselves. It concentrates on individuals who feel threatened because of their ethnic belonging, gender or sexual orientation. It develops the concept of 'securityscapes', which draws attention to the more subtle means that people take to secure themselves - practices bent on invisibility and avoidance, on disguise and trickery, and on continually adapting to shifting circumstances. By broadening the concept of security practice, this book is an important contribution to debates in Critical Security Studies as well as to Central Asian and Area Studies.
By 1945, both the US State Department and US Intelligence saw Czechoslovakia as the master key to the balance of power in Europe and a chessboard for the power-game between East and West. In this book, Igor Lukes illuminates the early stages of the Cold War in postwar Prague. He paints a critical portrait of Ambassador Laurence Steinhardt and shows that although Washington understood that the outcome of the crisis in Prague might shape the political trends elsewhere in Europe, it ignored signs that democracy in Czechoslovakia was in trouble. A large section of the book deals with US Intelligence in postwar Prague. The American intelligence officials who served in Czechoslovakia from 1945 to 1948 were committed to the mission of gathering information and protecting democracy. Yet they were defeated by the Czech and Soviet clandestine services that proved to be more shrewd and better informed. Indeed, Lukes reveals that a key American officer may have been turned by the Russians. Consequently, as the Communists moved to impose their dictatorship, the American Embassy was unprepared and helpless.
The book analyses modern tendencies in the development of regional economic cooperation in East Asia which is considered by regional countries as their response to growing challenges of globalization. Trying to protect their national interests by collective efforts they are promoting regional commercial, investment, and financial cooperation as measures aimed at improving the efficiency of their economies. These steps however are not regarded as a counterweight to globalization but merely directed against most negative manifestations of the latter and in fact are realized as one of the forms of globalization at the regional level. |
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