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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Peace studies
Harle focuses on the perennial issue of social order by providing a comparative analysis of ideas on social order in the classical Chinese political philosophy, the Indian epic and political literature, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, the classical Greek and Roman political thought, and early Christianity. His analysis is based on the religious, political, and literary texts that represent their respective civilizations as both their major achievements and sources of shared values. Harle maintains that two major approaches to establishing and maintaining social order exist in all levels and types of social relations: moral principles and political power. According to the principle-oriented approaches, social order will prevail if and when people follow strict moral principles. According to the contending power-oriented approach, orderly relations can only be based on the application of power by the ruler over the ruled. The principle-oriented approaches introduce a comprehensive civil society of individuals; the power-oriented approaches give major roles to the city-state, its government and relationships between them. The question of morality can be recognized also within the power-oriented approaches which either submit politics to morality or maintain that politics must be taken as nothing else than politics. This book is a contribution to peace and international studies as well as political theory and international relations.
This book offers a rationale for and ways of reading popular culture for peace. It argues that we can improve peacebuilding theory and practice through examining popular culture's youth revolutionaries and their outcomes - from their digital and plastic renderings to their living embodiments in local struggles for justice. The study combines insights from post-structural, post-colonial, feminist, youth studies and peace and conflict studies theories to analyze the literary themes, political uses, and cultural impacts of two hit book series - Harry Potter and The Hunger Games - tracing how these works have been transformed into visible political practices, including social justice advocacy and government propaganda in the War on Terror. Pop culture production and consumption help maintain global hierarchies of inequality and structural violence but can also connect people across divisions through fandom participation. Including chapters on fan activism, fan fiction, Guantanamo Bay detention center, youth as a discursive construct in IR, and the merchandizing and tourism opportunities connected with The Hunger Games, the book argues that through taking youth-oriented pop culture seriously, we can better understand the local, global and transnational spaces, discourses, and the relations of power, within which meanings and practices of peace are known, negotiated, encoded and obstructed.
Why do people turn to personal connections to get things done? Exploring the role of favors in social welfare systems in postwar, postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, this volume provides a new theoretical angle on links between ambiguity and power. It demonstrates that favors were not an instrumental tactic of survival, nor a way to reproduce oneself as a moral person. Instead, favors enabled the insertion of personal compassion into the heart of the organization of welfare. Managing Ambiguity follows how neoliberal insistence on local community, flexibility, and self-responsibility was translated into clientelist modes of relating and back, and how this fostered a specific mode of power.
In settler societies, some conflicts have roots that are both ethnic and colonial in nature. These are conflicts between an indigenous ethnic group and groups and between an ethnic group and groups of settlers who have been transplanted to a territory by a colonial power as part of a colonizing effort. This study examines the role that liberal parties have played and can play in recent conflicts in Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland, and South Africa. Typically, such parties reject the conventional wisdom of the settler population regarding the nature of the conflict. They also reject the radical thinking of the liberation movements and offer, instead, a third alternative. Mitchell hopes that this study will provide useful information for current liberal parties in Central and Eastern Europe and Israel. Ultimately, many of the liberal party's ideas are adopted by the main settler parties, allowing for a resolution of the conflict, generally through a compromise between the liberal and indigenous positions. However, before such resolution can occur, the liberals must achieve an electoral breakthrough that gives them a minimum of between five and ten percent of votes; they must also obtain significant stable representation in parliament. Liberal leadership must be innovative, offering new solutions that depart from the conventional wisdom of both sides. Mitchell provides the most detailed account yet published on the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland. He also includes extensive information on the KwaZulu/Natal Indaba of 1986 and analysis of the electoral fortunes of the Progressive Federal Party in South Africa.
This book analyses the film industries and cinema cultures of Nazi-occupied countries (1939-1945) from the point of view of individuals: local captains of industry, cinema managers, those working for film studios and officials authorized to navigate film policy. The book considers these people from a historical perspective, taking into account their career before the occupation and, where relevant, pays attention to their post-war lives. The perspectives of these historical agents" contributes to an understanding of how top-down orders and haphazard signals from the occupying administration were moulded, adjusted and distorted in the process of their translation and implementation. This edited collection offers a more dynamic and less deterministic approach to research on the international expansion of Third-Reich cinema in World War Two; an approach that strives to balance the role of individual agency with the structural determinants. The case studies presented in this book cover the territories of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and the Soviet Union.
Sitting around one oval table for the first time at the Madrid Conference in 1991, historic Arab and Israeli enemies pledge to work toward regional peace and security. From Madrid onward, Middle East diplomacy has been pursued on two tracks--between Israel and its immediate neighbors, and among all the countries of the region. This book reveals, for the first time, an insider's account of the true significance of the Madrid Conference and how a revolution in Middle Eastern affairs was wrought there. "Making Peace" details the debates, doubts, reversals, and accomplishments that crystallized at the Madrid Peace Conference in October 1991. In the months leading up to this historic event, Eytan Bentsur, today Director-General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, worked closely with his counterparts from other countries to find a formula that might bridge the bitter and seemingly intractable rivalry between Israelis and Arabs. This formula was to become known as the famous two-track approach and is an important source of the incredible progress made toward regional peace and security in recent times. Arguing persuasively that the Middle East peace revolution was triggered by the Madrid gathering, Bentsur sheds new light on the leading personalities and ideas that made the conference a success and a foundation for future progress. An Israeli official who belonged to an avowed peace group within a hesitant government, Bentsur devised new formulas that made the advantages of peace more palpable to a national leadership and public that were sometimes obsessed with the problems of the peace process. The book elucidates the origins, rationale, and impact of the two-track approach. It is a gripping, behind-the-scenes account of diplomatic efforts in the cause of peace in a war-torn part of the globe.
We know of the blood and tears provoked by the projects of transformation of the world through war or revolution. Starting from the essay published in 1921 by Walter Benjamin, twentieth century philosophy has been committed to the criticism of violence, even when it has claimed to follow noble ends. But what do we know of the dilemmas, of the "betrayals," of the disappointments and tragedies which the movement of non-violence has suffered? This book tells a fascinating history: from the American Christian organizations in the first decades of the nineteenth century who wanted to eliminate slavery and war in a non-violent way, to the protagonists of movements-Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Capitini, M. L. King, the Dalai Lama-who either for idealism or for political calculation flew the flag of non-violence, up to the leaders of today's "color revolutions."
What are the causes of war? Wars are generally begun by a revisionist state seeking to take territory. The psychological root of revisionism is the yearning for glory, honor and power. Human nature is the primary cause of war, but political regimes can temper or intensify these passions. This book examines the effects of six types of regime on foreign policy: monarchy, republic and sultanistic, charismatic, and military and totalitarian dictatorship. Dictatorships encourage and unleash human ambition, and are thus the governments most likely to begin ill-considered wars. Classical realism, modified to incorporate the impact of regimes and beliefs, provides a more convincing explanation of war than neo-realism.
This book discusses the moral and legal issues relating to military drones, focusing on how these machines should be judged according to the principles of just war theory. The author analyses existing drones, like the Predator and Reaper, but also evaluates the many types of drones in development. The book presents drones as not only morally justifiable but having the potential to improve compliance with the principles of just war and international law. Realizing this potential would depend on developing a sound regulatory framework, which the book helps to develop by considering what steps governments and military forces should take to promote ethical drone use. It also critically evaluates the arguments against drones to show which should be abandoned and which raise valid concerns that can inform regulations.
Don't Drink the Water is not a book trying to promote any existing religious, spiritual or national agenda. It does not attempt to blame anyone for the current state of human affairs. It is the story of how the author combined his personal experience with the thoughts of many of our more renown philosophers, states-men, scientists and long term thinkers from around the world to conclude that the goal of a secure and sustainable world for all humans is not an unattainable "Utopia." Don't Drink the Water makes a compelling case - Living in a time when we have secure and stable relations with each other and our environment is simply the logical outcome of the ongoing evolution of human intelligence.
In his "Complaint of Peace, the great sixteenth-century humanist Erasmus allows "Peace" to talk. Peace speaks as a plantiff, protesting her shabby treatment at the hands of humankind and our every-ready inclination to launch wars. Against this lure of warfare, Erasmus pits the higher task of peace-building, which can only succeed through the cultivation of justice and respect for all human life. First articulated in 1517, the complaint of Peace has echoed through subsequent centuries and down to our age--an age convulsed by world wars, holocausts, and ethnic cleansings. Distinguished political scientist Fred Dallmayr traces this complaint from the writings of Erasmus through the evolution of the "law of nations" to recent and comtemporary co-plaintiffs in the West. He also highlights the role of non-Western thinkers and teachings in giving voice to "Peace." In addition to Erasmus, Dallmayr engages major thinkers such as Francisco de Vitoria, Hugo Grotius, Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Mahatma Ghandi, the Dalai Lama, John Rawls, and Martha Nussbaum. This timely book urgently pleads for greater attentiveness to Peace's complaint as an antidote to the prevailing culture of violence and the escalating danger of nuclear catastrophe. Dallmayr offers not only a compelling historical narrative, but powerful ethical and religious arguments vindicating the primacy of peace over violence and war.
This book discusses African migration and the refugee crisis. Economic, political and social tension in the Middle East and in many parts of the Global South has induced historic mass migration across national and international borders. The situation is especially dire in Africa, where a sizable number of Africans have chosen or have been forced to leave their countries of origin for Europe and North America. Written by an international team of scholars, this edited book traces the refugee crisis around the world, telling the necessary story of forced migration, intentional exclusion, and human insecurity from an Afrocentric lens. The volume is divided into three sections. Section I places African migration within the broader contexts of international history, law, economics, and policy. Section II discusses cases of African migration to Europe, Latin America, and the Mediterranean. Section III considers negative consequences of mass African migration, including the restriction and criminalization of migration, post-traumatic stress disorder, and gender-based violence. A compelling account of risk, resilience, and global power dynamics, this volume will be useful to students and researchers interested in African studies, migration, peace and conflict studies, and policy as well as professionals, practitioners, NGOs, IGOs, governmental and humanitarian organizations.
This book examines changes in the Persian Gulf security complex following the United States (US) invasion of Iraq in 2003, focusing on threats to the collective identities of two religious sects - Shia and Sunni. Although there is a growing body of literature examining security in the Persian Gulf, little focus has been given to the theoretical and methodological aspects of the problem. In this volume, Shayan analyses the causes behind the security changes which occurred in the region since 2003 and demonstrates how regional security dynamics are interlinked to perceived sectarian threats on the Shia and Sunni religious identities. This text is essential reading for political scientists, policy makers and scholars of international relations.
This edited volume critically assesses emerging trends in contemporary warfare and international interventionism as exemplified by the 'local turn' in counterinsurgent warfare. It asks how contemporary counterinsurgency approaches work and are legitimized; what concrete effects they have within local settings, and what the implications are for how we can understand the means and ends of war and peace in our post 9/11 world. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding recent changes in global liberal governance as well as the growing convergence of military and seemingly non-military domains, discourses and practices in the contemporary making of global political order.
This book offers a fresh perspective on the impact of the US intervention in Lebanon in 1982 and the decision-making drivers that led the Reagan Administration into the Lebanese Civil War. Based on newly released archival materials from high level Washington officials such as President Reagan, Secretary of State Shultz and Secretary of Defense Weinberger, it argues that the failure of the Reagan Administration to accurately understand the complex political landscape of the Lebanese Civil War resulted in the US-led Multinational Force becoming militarily intertwined in the conflict. This book challenges the notion that Reagan deployed US Marines under the ideals of international peacekeeping, asserting that the US Administration hoped that the Multinational Force would create the political capital that Reagan needed to strengthen the US' position both in the Middle East and globally. Ultimately, the peacemakers were forced to withdraw as they evolved into antagonists. A case study in the foreign policy doctrines of key Washington decision-makers throughout the 1980s, this project is perfect for any International Relations scholar or interested reader seeking to understand the links between the mistakes of the Reagan Administration and contemporary US interventions in the Middle East.
This book documents the current global refugee crisis and examines the interrelated factors of immigration enforcement, international human rights law, political violence, and refugee protection. There are two disparate components to the global refugee crisis: first, there are about 46 million refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), most of whom are struggling to survive in the poorest and most violent countries in the world, and second, our interpretation of international human rights law allows this state of affairs to worsen. Refugee protection has been a longstanding policy that ostensibly protects victims of human rights violations from other countries. In actuality, protection is largely negated by systematic efforts by industrialized states to reduce the number of refugees arriving at the borders. This book provides a comprehensive examination of this worldwide problem and rejects the idea that the majority of asylum seekers abuse the system to gain entrance into the country. Provides the latest empirical data covering the last 30 years, analyzing the human rights practices of the states that produce the majority of the world's asylum seekers Includes a chapter of over 40 biographies of distinguished refugees from all over the world. Contains primary source documents of international treaties and protocols related to refugees, as well as data figures revealing statistical trends of asylum seekers and displaced persons
The twenty-first century has been significantly shaped by the growing importance of religion in international politics resulting in rising polarization among nation states. This new dynamic has presented new challenges to international human rights principles. This book deals with some of these new challenges, particularly the growing demand by Muslim states for protection of Islamic religion from blasphemy and defamation. Member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), through resolutions at the United Nations, made efforts to introduce laws that globally protect Islamic religion from blasphemy and defamation. The bid by OIC member states faced opposition from Western countries. The conflicting claims of the two sides are discussed in this book. The book clearly shows the impact of blasphemy and defamation of religion laws on certain aspects of fundamental human rights principles.
This book aims to highlight the efforts by the international community to facilitate solutions to the conflicts in the South Caucasus, and focuses particularly on the existing challenges to these efforts. The South Caucasus region has long been roiled by the lingering ethno-national conflicts-Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Abkhazia and South Ossetia conflicts within Georgia-that continue to disrupt security and stability in the entire region. Throughout different phases of the conflicts the international community has shown varying degrees of activism in conflict resolution. For clarity purposes, it should be emphasized that the notion of "international community" will be confined to the relevant organizations that have palpable share in the process-the UN, the OSCE, and the EU-and the states that have the biggest impact on conflict resolution and the leverage on the conflicting parties-Russia, Turkey, and the United States.
Based on twenty-five years of fieldwork, Rural Women's Sexuality, Reproductive Health, and Illiteracy: A Critical Perspective on Development examines rural women's behaviors towards health in several developing countries. These women are confronted with many factors: gender inequalities, violence from partners, and lack of economic independence. The book also gives insight into the general weakness of the health systems in place and questions the progress of numerous international conferences ICPD (International Conference on Population and Development) and MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) along with WHO (The World Health Organization) Frame Work for Action, UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) and CEDAW (Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women) all supporting women's empowerment as related to violence, education, and reproductive health. Chapters provide numerous concrete examples and vignettes describing constraints on women in a variety of countries related to their intimate lives and their struggle between traditional and modern medicine. Widely practiced clandestine sex work is a challenge to HIV/AIDS programs. The book examines the women who choose clandestine sex work and their clients' sexual behavior and attitudes toward prostitution and HIV prevention. It also explores the negotiations between promiscuous, migratory men, and the ties of sexuality and fertility that women use to tie them to a male partner. The book argues for effective delivery of healthcare programs accompanied by multi-lateral responses from the civil society, governments, donors and agencies. Rural Women's Sexuality, Reproductive Health, and Illiteracy is a useful resource scholars, as well as consultants and staff working in development agencies and public health.
This book explores Hobbes's ideas about the internal pacification of states, the prospect of a peaceful international order, and the connections between civil and international peace. It questions the notion of a negative Hobbesian peace, which is based on the mere suppression of violence, and emphasises his positive vision of everlasting peace in a well-governed commonwealth. The book also highlights Hobbes's ideas about international coexistence and cooperation, which he considers integral to good government. In examining Hobbes's conception of peace, it provides a fresh perspective on his international political thought. The findings also have wider implications for the ways in which we think about Hobbes's relationship to the realist and liberal traditions of international thought, and will appeal to students and scholars of political theory and international relations.
This book articulates a practice and theory of education that aims to facilitate the emergence of sustainable peace and conflict-resilient communities in societies plagued by conflict. It does so by examining the agency of conflict-resilient communities and the dynamic processes of their interactions with larger societal structure. Although education is seen as a human right, the design of education policies, schooling models and curricula has primarily been the prerogative of elites, be they governments, academics or international actors. This book argues for a different approach to education, contending for more inclusivity and open deliberation in modeling education frameworks. Drawing on case studies and interviews with practitioners, scholars, activists, and policymakers, it applies the lenses of conflict resolution to a variety of education issues within fragile societies.
Environmental and natural resource policy decision making is changing. Increasingly citizens and management agency personnel are seeking ways to do things differently; to participate meaningfully in the decision making process as parties work through policy conflicts. Doing things differently has come to mean doing things collaboratively. Daniels and Walker examine collaboration in environmental and natural resource policy decision making and conflict management. They address collaboration by featuring a method collaborative learning, that has been designed to address decision making and conflict management needs in complex and controversial policy settings. As they illustrate, collaborative learning differs in some significant ways from existing approaches for dealing with policy decision making, public participation, and conflict management. First, it is a hybrid of systems thinking and alternative dispute resolution concepts. Second, it is grounded explicitly in experiential, team-or organizational-and adult learning theories. It is a theory-based framework through which parties can make progress in the management of controversial environmental policy situations. They discuss both the theory and technique of collaborative learning and present cases where it has been applied. This is a professional and teaching tool for scholars, students, and researchers involved with environmental issues as well as dispute resolution.
Why do some civil wars last a long time, while others end relatively quickly? Trust and Fear in Civil Wars examines the conditions under which individuals are willing to lay down their weapons under a settlement agreement. The author argues that wars are easiest to resolve when combatants believe that their adversaries will uphold a deal or that the costs of renewed war will be low. Several key sources of information inform this calculation. Drawing on both cross-national and case study data, including detailed interviews, the book demonstrates that when information suggests either that a peace agreement is likely to break down or that the results of a broken deal will be especially deadly, a settlement leaves combatants too vulnerable to countenance, resulting in wars lasting longer.
This book examines a new type of state formation evoked by the rise of transnational rule, what Schia calls franchised states. Drawing on anthropological studying-through fieldwork within the UN organization, he demonstrates how peacebuilding activities turned Liberia into an object of governing, whereby the UN, in seeking to build the state, also became the state. The sovereign state of Liberia here emerges as a franchise rather than a self-contained entity. Two implications follow: First, that international peacebuilding turns post-conflict countries into clients of the international community. Second, that "sovereignty" is no longer exclusively associated with the state: it is organized in and through specific practices of governing where a state actor is only one among a range of actors. With these findings, the book moves beyond previous work on peacebuilding by focusing on the unbundling of sovereignty. It contributes to the literature on the changing forms of sovereignty by showing the specific ways in which sovereignty is organized, packaged and enacted, often by actors working under international auspices. This book will be of interest to practitioners and students interested in international organizations, international relations, the study of international practices, UN, and peacebuilding.
One of the outstanding mysteries of the twentieth century, and one with huge political resonance, is the death of Dag Hammarskjold and his UN team in a plane crash in central Africa in 1961. Just minutes after midnight, his aircraft plunged into thick forest in the British colony of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), abruptly ending his mission to bring peace to the Congo. Across the world, many suspected sabotage, accusing the multi-nationals and the governments of Britain, Belgium, the USA and South Africa of involvement in the disaster. These suspicions have never gone away. British High Commissioner Lord Alport was waiting at the airport when the aircraft crashed nearby. He bizarrely insisted to the airport management that Hammarskjold had flown elsewhere - even though his aircraft was reported overhead. This postponed a search for so long that the wreckage of the plane was not found for fifteen hours. White mercenaries were at the airport that night too, including the South African pilot Jerry Puren, whose bombing of Congolese villages led, in his own words, to 'flaming huts . . . destruction and death'. These soldiers of fortune were backed by Sir Roy Welensky, Prime Minister of the Rhodesian Federation, who was ready to stop at nothing to maintain white rule and thought the United Nations was synonymous with the Nazis. The Rhodesian government conducted an official inquiry, which blamed pilot error. But as this book will show, it was a massive cover-up that suppressed and dismissed a mass of crucial evidence, especially that of African eyewitnesses. A subsequent UN inquiry was unable to rule out foul play - but had no access to the evidence to show how and why. Now, for the first time, this story can be told. Who Killed Hammarskjoeld? follows the author on her intriguing and often frightening journey of research to Zambia, South Africa, the USA, Sweden, Norway, Britain, France and Belgium, where she unearthed a mass of new and hitherto secret documentary and photographic evidence. |
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