This book addresses key themes in the relationship between religion and international relations. Challenging widespread preconceptions, it offers new interpretations of the role of religion in world politics, examining current debates and hitherto neglected aspects. Areas discussed range from Europe to the Asia-Pacific region.

This book re-examines the character of the USA and re-evaluates its relationship to the post-Cold War international order. The USA has often been seen as a model of democratic liberty, a vehement opponent of colonialism and the 'lone superpower' of the post-Cold War world. This book challenges all these views. Unlike previous studies of the post-Cold War role of the USA it connects US domestic affairs to systemic changes often characterized entirely in terms of the 'fall of Communism'.

This book brings together new archaeological, historical and palaeoecological approaches to the transition from the Romano-British to medieval Celtic economy between the fourth and ninth centuries AD, re-examining well-known sources of evidence and introducing new material. While the emphasis is on the Celtic-speaking areas of Britain after AD 400, the geographical and chronological scope of the contributions is wide-ranging. The articles include a reassessment of the end of the Romano-British economy, suggesting that the conventional interpretation - a sudden collapse in production in the early fifth century - is incorrect; pollen analysis is a key approach in understanding the end of the agricultural economy, and here, for the first time, all relevant pollen sequences are catalogued and discussed. A fresh investigation into imported pottery and glass and inscribed stone monuments clarifies and understanding of these problematical sources, while the nature of the contacts which brought imports into Britain and Ireland is re-evaluated from new evidence which, together with archaeological material from shipwrecks of AD 400-600 (of which a catalogue is presented here) and historical data, indicate that Byzantine contacts with Britain are unlikely to have been on entirely commercial grounds.

Discussions of religion in international relations have often focused narrowly on religious fundamentalism and on the potentially negative consequences of religious differences. This book attempts to take a more balanced and much broader view of the subject, bringing together research based studies by specialists from international relations, history and theology. Case studies and thematic analyses examine both seldom discussed issues such as the political consequences of large scale religious change and review old themes in new ways.

Subtitled The identification of secular elite settlements in western Britain AD 400-700', this book presents the theory of historical archaeology in practice, seeing how new perspectives may be able to solve the problem of archaeologists' inability to recognise secular settlement sites in Celtic Britain. In four parts, the first chapter presents an outline of recent theory and historical archaeology. Subsequent chapters define high status' sites and secularity in the archaeology of western Britain, AD 400-700, and present an application and test of the models outlined in the first chapter using excavated evidence from western Britain, and an evaluation of hill-fort and castle sites.

Since the end of the Cold War, analysts of international politics have given much greater attention to issues of change. It has become increasingly clear to specialists from many fields that any understanding of large-scale political change must encompass far longer timescales than has been usual in the study of world politics, and must incorporate multi-disciplinary perspectives. This book evaluates and draws on relevant theoretical approaches from other disciplines such as sociology, economics, geography, history, anthropology and archaeology, as well as evolutionary theory and the mathematical study of complexity. Using an epistemological framework, Dark sets out a theory of long-term world political change: the theory of 'Macrodynamics'. This is then applied to historical, anthropological and archaeological data to explain the changing forms of political organization, from the earliest human societies to the late twentieth century. The resulting analysis is a reinterpretation of the processes of global political change in the past and present. This, in turn, opens new areas of enquiry in the study of international relations and has profound implications for how we understand the changing world of today.

Archaeology uses material data to study the past, but material remains are unable to speak for themselves. They need to be interpreted. All archaeology depends upon the logical framework used to understand data: the theory which underlies interpretation. Yet archaeological theory often seems inaccessible or even irrelevant, wrapped up in jargon and filled with obscure allusions. Written especially for those with no previous knowledge of theory, this book aims to introduce the subject in a way which is both readable and which shows its relevance, and without a specific theoretical stance. The range of theoretical views on some of the themes and problems most often encountered in archaeology is outlined, introducing a wide variety of concepts and approaches equally relevant to the professional or amateur archaeologist, student, or non-specialist reader of archaeological work.