BiblioVault - Books about Alignment

Alignment, Alliance, and American Grand Strategy

Zachary Selden

University of Michigan Press, 2016

Although US foreign policy was largely unpopular in the early 2000s, many nation-states, especially those bordering Russia and China, expanded their security cooperation with the United States. In Alignment, Alliance, and American Grand Strategy, Zachary Selden notes that the regional power of these two illiberal states prompt threatened neighboring states to align with the United States. Gestures of alignment include participation in major joint military exercises, involvement in US-led operations, the negotiation of agreements for US military bases, and efforts to join a US-led alliance. By contrast, Brazil is also a rising regional power, but as it is a democratic state, its neighbors have not sought greater alliance with the United States.

Amid calls for retrenchment or restraint, Selden makes the case that a policy focused on maintaining American military preeminence and the demonstrated willingness to use force may be what sustains the cooperation of second-tier states, which in turn help to maintain US hegemony at a manageable cost.

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The Limits of Alignment

Southeast Asia and the Great Powers since 1975

John D. Ciorciari

Georgetown University Press, 2011

The Limits of Alignment is an engaging and accessible study that explores how small states and middle powers of Southeast Asia ensure their security in a world where they are overshadowed by greater powers. John D. Ciorciari challenges a central concept in international relations theory—that states respond to insecurity by either balancing against their principal foes, “bandwagoning” with them, or declaring themselves neutral. Instead, he shows that developing countries prefer limited alignments that steer between strict neutrality and formal alliances to obtain the fruits of security cooperation without the perils of undue dependency.

Ciorciari also shows how structural and normative shifts following the end of the Cold War and the advent of U.S. primacy have increased the prevalence of limited alignments in the developing world and that these can often place constraints on U.S. foreign policy. Finally, he discusses how limited alignments in the developing world may affect the future course of international security as China and other rising powers gather influence on the world stage.

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Structure, Alignment and Optimality in Swedish

Peter Sells

CSLI, 2001

Very little research has been performed on the grammatical structure of sentences in Swedish. Structure, Alignment and Optimality in Swedish is one of the first books to explore the Swedish sentence structure, presenting an account of the order of the words and phrases within the sentence. The book uses the theoretical framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), which provides syntactic analysis in terms of subject, object, topic, and focus, as well as part-of-speech analysis in terms of noun phrase and verb phrase. The book also uses Optimality Theory, a theory of constraint interpretation that allows constraints to conflict by allowing the satisfaction of certain constraints or requirements to lead to a grammatical structure even if less important constraints are violated.

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