front cover of Alignment, Alliance, and American Grand Strategy
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 Anomie of the Earth
Philosophy, Politics, and Autonomy in Europe and the Americas
Federico Luisetti, John Pickles, and Wilson Kaiser, eds.
Duke University Press, 2015
The contributors to The Anomie of the Earth explore the convergences and resonances between Autonomist Marxism and decolonial thinking. In discussing and rejecting Carl Schmitt's formulation of the nomos—a conceptualization of world order based on the Western tenets of law and property—the authors question the assumption of universal political subjects and look towards politics of the commons divorced from European notions of sovereignty. They contrast European Autonomism with North and South American decolonial and indigenous conceptions of autonomy, discuss the legacies of each, and examine social movements in the Americas and Europe. Beyond orthodox Marxism, their transatlantic exchanges point to the emerging categories disclosed by the collapse of the colonial and capitalist frameworks of Western modernity.

Contributors. Joost de Bloois, Jodi A. Byrd, Gustavo Esteva, Silvia Federici, Wilson Kaiser, Mara Kaufman, Frans-Willem Korsten, Federico Luisetti, Sandro Mezzadra, Walter D. Mignolo, Benjamin Noys, John Pickles, Alvaro Reyes, Catherine Walsh, Gareth Williams, Zac Zimmer
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The Apathy of Empire
Cambodia in American Geopolitics
James A. Tyner
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

What America’s intervention in Cambodia during the Vietnam War reveals about Cold War–era U.S. national security strategy
 

The Apathy of Empire reveals just how significant Cambodia was to U.S. policy in Indochina during the Vietnam War, broadening the lens to include more than the often-cited incursion in 1970 or the illegal bombing after the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. This theoretically informed and thoroughly documented case study argues that U.S. military intervention in Cambodia revealed America’s efforts to construct a hegemonic spatial world order. 

 

James Tyner documents the shift of America’s post-1945 focus from national defense to national security. He demonstrates that America’s expansionist policies abroad, often bolstered by military power, were not so much about occupying territory but instead constituted the construction of a new normal for the exercise of state power. During the Cold War, Vietnam became the geopolitical lodestar of this unfolding spatial order. And yet America’s grand strategy was one of contradiction: to build a sovereign state (South Vietnam) based on democratic liberalism, it was necessary to protect its boundaries—in effect, to isolate it—through both covert and overt operations in violation of Cambodia’s sovereignty. The latter was deemed necessary for the former. 

 

Questioning reductionist geopolitical understandings of states as central or peripheral, Tyner explores this paradox to rethink the formulation of the Cambodian war as sideshow, revealing it instead as a crucial site for the formation of this new normal.

 

 

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

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An Aqueous Territory
Sailor Geographies and New Granada's Transimperial Greater Caribbean World
Ernesto Bassi
Duke University Press, 2017
In An Aqueous Territory Ernesto Bassi traces the configuration of a geographic space he calls the transimperial Greater Caribbean between 1760 and 1860. Focusing on the Caribbean coast of New Granada (present-day Colombia), Bassi shows that the region's residents did not live their lives bounded by geopolitical borders. Rather, the cross-border activities of sailors, traders, revolutionaries, indigenous peoples, and others reflected their perceptions of the Caribbean as a transimperial space where trade, information, and people circulated, both conforming to and in defiance of imperial regulations. Bassi demonstrates that the islands, continental coasts, and open waters of the transimperial Greater Caribbean constituted a space that was simultaneously Spanish, British, French, Dutch, Danish, Anglo-American, African, and indigenous. Exploring the "lived geographies" of the region's dwellers, Bassi challenges preconceived notions of the existence of discrete imperial spheres and the inevitable emergence of independent nation-states while providing insights into how people envision their own futures and make sense of their place in the world.
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Area Impossible
The Geopolitics of Queer Studies
Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel, special issue editors
Duke University Press

Staging a much-needed conversation between two often-segregated fields, this issue addresses the promising future of queer and area studies as collaborative formations. Within queer studies, the turn to geopolitics has challenged the field's logics of time, space, and culture, which have routinely been rooted in the United States. For area studies, the focus on diaspora, forced migration, and other transnational trajectories has unmoored the geopolitical from the stability of nations as organizing concepts. The contributors to this issue seek to imagine and broker conversations between the two fields in which "area" becomes the form through which epistemologies of empire and market are critiqued. Histories of debt bondage; sexuality, and indentured labor; Afro-pessimism in African studies; trans theater facing obdurate transits; religion and the politics of Dalit modernity; the biopolitics of maiming: these are some of the conduits through which the authors approach a queer geopolitics.

Contributors: Anjali Arondekar, Ashley Currier, Aliyah Khan, Keguro Macharia, Thérèse Migraine-George, Maya Mikdashi, Geeta Patel, Jasbir K. Puar, Lucinda Ramberg, Neferti Tadiar, Diana Taylor, Ronaldo Wilson

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Basque Immigrants and Nevada's Sheep Industry
Geopolitics and the Making of an Agricultural Workforce, 1880-1954
Iker Saitua
University of Nevada Press, 2019
Basque Immigrants and Nevada’s Sheep Industry is a rich and complex exploration of the history of Basque immigration to the rangelands of Nevada and the interior West. It looks critically at the Basque sheepherders in the American West and more broadly at the modern history of American foreign relations with Spain after the Second World War.

Between the 1880s and the 1950s, the western open-range sheep industry was the original economic attraction for Basque immigrants. This engaging study tracks the development of the Basque presence in the American West, providing deep detail about the sheepherders’ history, native and local culture, the challenges they faced, and the changing conditions under which the Basques lived and worked. Saitua also shows how Basque immigrant sheepherders went from being a marginalized labor group to a desirable, high-priced workforce in response to the constant demand for their labor power.

As the twentieth century progressed, the geopolitical tide in America began to change. In 1924, the Restrictive Immigration Act resulted in a truncated labor supply from the Basque Country in Spain. During the Great Depression and the Second World War, the labor shortage became acute. In response, Senator Patrick McCarran from Nevada lobbied on behalf of his wool-growing constituency to open immigration doors for Basques, the most desirable laborers for tending sheep in remote places. Subsequently, Cold War international tensions offered opportunities for a reconciliation between the United States and Francisco Franco, despite Spain’s previous sympathy with the Axis powers.

This fresh portrayal shows how Basque immigrants became the backbone of the sheep industry in Nevada. It also contributes to a wider understanding of the significance of Basque immigration by exploring the role of Basque agricultural labor in the United States, the economic interests of Western ranchers, and McCarran’s diplomacy as catalysts that eventually helped bring Spain into the orbit of western democracies.

 
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Beaches, Ruins, Resorts
The Politics of Tourism in the Arab World
Waleed Hazbun
University of Minnesota Press, 2008

How Arab states use tourism for their own ends

Despite being viewed as a dangerous region to visit, leisure travel across the Middle East has thrived even in the post–9/11 era. In Beaches, Ruins, Resorts, Waleed Hazbun investigates this overlooked industry to show how tourism is shaping the economic development and international relations of the region in dramatic ways.

Following Europeans seeking Mediterranean beaches, Israelis crossing into Jordan as leisure tourists, and visitors discovering Dubai, Hazbun offers an original perspective on the Middle East and North Africa and challenges common portrayals of Arab nations as disconnected from the rest of the world. Rather, Hazbun reveals how government elites are using tourism to take part in globalization while, at the same time, crafting it to serve state interests. Paradoxically, the expansion of travel in the region has allowed states to encourage integration into the global economy while simultaneously expanding control over their society. Beaches, Ruins, Resorts also explores tourism’s broader beneficial effects on the region, such as aiding the peace process between Israel and Jordan, fostering Tunisia’s economic connection with Europe, and transforming Arab cities into hubs of international travel.Hazbun tells the new and surprising story of how the draw of glittering beaches, luxury hotels and resorts, and sightseeing at ancient ruins impacts the Arab world—promoting both economic globalization and political authoritarianism. In doing so, Beaches, Ruins, Resorts provides a much-needed guide for those interested in the changing nature of this fraught region and its place in the world.
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Beyond Britannia
Reshaping UK Foreign Policy
Simon McDonald
Haus Publishing, 2023
An argument for a new approach to foreign policy in the United Kingdom.

What should the future of British foreign policy look like? For too long, successive governments have shied away from acknowledging uncomfortable truths about the decline of Britain’s military capabilities. As we approach the middle years of the twenty-first century, a new set of urgent and daunting challenges lie ahead, including climate change, technological development, the rise of AI, and a growing threat from China. The need for us to reconcile ourselves with our position in the world has never been more acute. In Beyond Britannia: Reshaping UK Foreign Policy, Simon McDonald persuasively argues that the United Kingdom’s significant soft-power strengths can be harnessed to expand its international influence. Such a shift will only be possible, he says, if we first acknowledge the challenges of Brexit and the need to reduce our unrealistic hard-power ambitions. Excellence in areas that other countries care about will keep the United Kingdom internationally relevant in the second half of the century in a way that nostalgia for a lost pre-eminence will not.
 
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Beyond Britannia
Reshaping UK Foreign Policy
Simon McDonald
Haus Publishing, 2023
An argument for a new approach to foreign policy in the United Kingdom.

What should the future of British foreign policy look like? For too long, successive governments have shied away from acknowledging uncomfortable truths about the decline of Britain’s military capabilities. As we approach the middle years of the twenty-first century, a new set of urgent and daunting challenges lie ahead, including climate change, technological development, the rise of AI, and a growing threat from China. The need for us to reconcile ourselves with our position in the world has never been more acute. In Beyond Britannia: Reshaping UK Foreign Policy, Simon McDonald persuasively argues that the United Kingdom’s significant soft-power strengths can be harnessed to expand its international influence. Such a shift will only be possible, he says, if we first acknowledge the challenges of Brexit and the need to reduce our unrealistic hard-power ambitions. Excellence in areas that other countries care about will keep the United Kingdom internationally relevant in the second half of the century in a way that nostalgia for a lost pre-eminence will not.
 
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Big Bend National Park
Mexico, the United States, and a Borderland Ecosystem
Michael Welsh
University of Nevada Press, 2021
Known as a place of stark beauty, dramatic geographic dimension, and challenging desert terrain, Big Bend National Park is located in West Texas on the north bank of the Rio Grande, adjacent to the Mexican states of Coahuila and Chihuahua. Although a place of natural grandeur, the unique location of this 118-mile long, 1.5 million-acre corridor has led to many challenges between the United States and Mexico, two nations who share one ecosystem but inhabit different political worlds.

Big Bend National Park explores the cultural and diplomatic history of this transborder region that was designated a national park on the US side and the site of a long-hoped-for “international peace park” on the other. Michael Welsh demonstrates the challenges faced and lessons learned by both the US and Mexico as they struggled against political and environmental vicissitudes in their attempts to realize the creation of a shared frontier.

Geopolitical and environmental conflicts such as Cold War fears, immigration, the war on drugs, international water rights, and more stringent American border security measures after 9/11 all hindered relations between the two countries. But more recently, renewed cooperation and ongoing diplomatic relations have led to new developments. Mexican park personnel began assisting American officials with efforts to re-wild the American side of the river with animal species that had been eliminated, and the Obama administration relaxed some post-9/11 restrictions, allowing American visitors to cross over to the Mexican park and its nearby towns.

The ambition of developing a park for peace has yet to materialize, even as individuals and their governments continue to work toward an accord. Big Bend National Park provides a greater understanding of this complex borderland and hopes to help fulfill the aspiration of creating a shared ecosystem and the dream of a park for peace.
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Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Life
Settler States and Indigenous Presence
René Dietrich and Kerstin Knopf, editors
Duke University Press, 2023
The contributors to Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Life investigate biopolitics and geopolitics as two distinct yet entangled techniques of settler-colonial states across the globe, from the Americas and Hawai‘i to Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Drawing on literary and cultural studies, social sciences, political theory, visual culture, and film studies, they show how biopolitics and geopolitics produce norms of social life and land use that delegitimize and target Indigenous bodies, lives, lands, and political formations. Among other topics, the contributors explore the representations of sexual violence against Native women in literature, Indigenous critiques of the carceral state in North America, Indigenous elders’ refusal of dominant formulations of aging, the governance of Indigenous peoples in Guyana, the displacement of Guaraní in Brazil, and the 2016 rule to formally acknowledge a government-to-government relationship between the US federal government and the Native Hawaiian community. Throughout, the contributors contend that Indigenous life and practices cannot be contained and defined by the racialization and dispossession of settler colonialism, thereby pointing to the transformative potential of an Indigenous-centered decolonization. 

Contributors René Dietrich, Jacqueline Fear-Segal, Mishuana Goeman, Alyosha Goldstein, Sandy Grande, Michael R. Griffiths, Shona N. Jackson, Kerstin Knopf, Sabine N. Meyer, Robert Nichols, Mark Rifkin, David Uahikeaikaleiʻohu Maile
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Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human
Forensic Ecologies of Violence
Joseph Pugliese
Duke University Press, 2020
In Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human Joseph Pugliese examines the concept of the biopolitical through a nonanthropocentric lens, arguing that more-than-human entities—from soil and orchards to animals and water—are actors and agents in their own right with legitimate claims to justice. Examining occupied Palestine, Guantánamo, and sites of US drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, Pugliese challenges notions of human exceptionalism by arguing that more-than-human victims of war and colonialism are entangled with and subject to the same violent biopolitical regimes as humans. He also draws on Indigenous epistemologies that invest more-than-human entities with judicial standing to argue for an ethico-legal framework that will enable the realization of ecological justice. Bringing the more-than-human world into the purview of justice, Pugliese makes visible the ecological effects of human war that would otherwise remain outside the domains of biopolitics and law.
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The Black Pacific Narrative
Geographic Imaginings of Race and Empire between the World Wars
Etsuko Taketani
Dartmouth College Press, 2014
The Black Pacific Narrative: Geographic Imaginings of Race and Empire between the World Wars chronicles the profound shift in geographic imaginings that occurred in African American culture as the United States evolved into a bioceanic global power. The author examines the narrative of the “black Pacific”?the literary and cultural production of African American narratives in the face of America’s efforts to internationalize the Pacific and to institute a “Pacific Community,” reflecting a vision of a hemispheric regional order initiated and led by the United States. The black Pacific was imagined in counterpoint to this regional order in the making, which would ultimately be challenged by the Pacific War. The principal subjects of study include such literary and cultural figures as James Weldon Johnson, George S. Schuyler, artists of the black Federal Theatre Project, Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Walter White, all of whom afford significant points of entry to a critical understanding of the stakes of the black Pacific narrative. Adopting an approach that mixes the archival and the interpretive, the author seeks to recover the black Pacific produced by African American narratives, narratives that were significant enough in their time to warrant surveillance and suspicion, and hence are significant enough in our time to warrant scholarly attention and reappraisal. A compelling study that will appeal to a broad, international audience of students and scholars of American studies, African American studies, American literature, and imperialism and colonialism.
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The Blood of Abraham
Insights into the Middle East
Jimmy Carter
University of Arkansas Press, 2007
In The Blood of Abraham, originally published in 1985 with updates to the afterword in 1993 and 2007, President Carter explains his understanding of the Middle East and seeks to provide an enlightening and reconciling vision for greater peace in the region.
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Capital, the State, and War
Class Conflict and Geopolitics in the Thirty Years' Crisis, 1914-1945
Alexander Anievas
University of Michigan Press, 2014

The history of the modern social sciences can be seen as a series of attempts to confront the challenges of social disorder and revolution wrought by the international expansion of capitalist social relations. Alexander Anievas focuses on one particularly significant aspect of this story: the intersocietal or geosocial origins of the two world wars, and, more broadly, the confluence of factors behind the Thirty Years’ Crisis between 1914 and 1945.

Anievas presents the Thirty Years’ Crisis as a result of the development of global capitalism with all its destabilizing social and geopolitical consequences, particularly the intertwined and co-constitutive nature of imperial rivalries, social revolutions, and anti-colonial struggles. Building on the theory of uneven and combined development, he unites geopolitical and sociological explanations into a single framework, thereby circumventing the analytical stalemate between primacy of domestic politics and primacy of foreign policy approaches.

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Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero
Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics
Jason Dittmer
Temple University Press, 2012

Nationalist superheroes—such as Captain America, Captain Canuck, and Union Jack—often signify the “nation-state” for readers, but how do these characters and comic books address issues of multiculturalism and geopolitical order? In his engaging book Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero, geographer Jason Dittmer traces the evolution of the comic book genre as it adapted to new national audiences. He argues that these iconic superheroes contribute to our contemporary understandings of national identity, the righteous use of power, and the role of the United States, Canada, and Britain in the world.

Tracing the nationalist superhero genre from its World War II origins to contemporary manifestations throughout the world, Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero analyzes nearly one thousand comic books and audience responses to those books. Dittmer also interviews key comic book writers from Stan Lee and J. M. DeMatteis to Steve Englehart and Paul Cornell.

At a time when popular culture is saturated with superheroes and their exploits, Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero highlights the unique relationship between popular culture and international relations.

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Central Peripheries
Nationhood in Central Asia
Marlene Laruelle
University College London, 2021
A comprehensive study of nation-building in post-Soviet Central Asia.
 
Committed to internationalism, Kazakhstan and other central Asian states nevertheless embrace classically nationalist conceptions of the nation-state. Their unabashed celebration of borders and citizenship challenges Western views of nationalism as a dying ideology transcended by cosmopolitanism. Drawing on twenty years of fieldwork, Central Peripheries reveals the origin of central Asian national consciousness in imaginary and ritualized efforts to grapple with the Soviet past.
 
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Champassak Royalty and Sovereignty
Within and between Nation-States in Mainland Southeast Asia
Ian G. Baird
University of Wisconsin Press, 2024
The Kingdom of Champassak was founded in 1713 in what is now southern Laos, and its royal lineage, the House of Champassak, continues to the present. In this historical study of Champassak, Ian G. Baird explores the ways it has asserted its sovereignty across time and through monumental historical shifts, including the delineation of national boundaries for Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In re-creating this story, Baird draws not only on a dazzling variety of primary sources in English, French, Lao, and Thai but also on many years spent in conversation with members of the Na Champassak family, who are now spread across a wide geographical area, from Laos and Thailand to France and the United States. Each chapter treats one historical period, identifying the Champassak approach to sovereignty during that time. Through this deep history, Baird shows how sovereign power, even within one case, takes a wide range of forms, always contingent, contested, and uneven across space and time.
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Checkerboards and Shatterbelts
The Geopolitics of South America
By Philip Kelly
University of Texas Press, 1997

Geography has always played a major role in world politics. In this study, Philip Kelly maps the geopolitics of South America, a continent where relative isolation from the power centers in North America and Eurasia and often forbidding internal terrain have given rise to a fascinating and unique geopolitical structure.

Kelly uses the geographical concepts of "checkerboards" and "shatterbelts" to characterize much of South America's geopolitics and to explain why the continent has never been unified nor dominated by a single nation. This approach accounts for both historical relationships among South American countries and for such current situations as Brazil's inability to extend its authority across the continent from Atlantic to Pacific, its traditional competition with Argentina, its territorial expansion toward the continental heartlands, its encirclement by neighbors fearful of such expansion, and its recent rapprochement with Argentina.

An important component of this book is the incorporation of the thinking and writing of South American geopolitical analysts, which leads to an interesting inventory of viewpoints on frontier conflicts, territorial expansion, industrial development, economic cooperation, and United States and European relations. Kelly's findings will be important reading for geographers, political scientists, and students and scholars of Latin American history.

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Coalition of the unWilling and unAble
European Realignment and the Future of American Geopolitics
John R. Deni
University of Michigan Press, 2022

Why does the United States need European allies, and why is it getting more difficult for those allies to partner with Washington in standing up to China, pushing back against Russia, and pursuing other common interests around the world? This book addresses the economic, demographic, political, and military trends that are fundamentally upending the ability and willingness of European allies to work with Washington. Brexit and its impact on Britain’s economy and its military, Germany’s seemingly relentless economic and political rise, France’s continuing economic malaise, Italy’s aging population and its withdrawal from major overseas operations, and Poland’s demographic decline and single-minded obsession with Russia will combine to make partnership with Washington nearly impossible. In short, the constellation of allies and partners the United States has relied on since 9/11 will look very different a decade from now. How should Washington respond? It doesn’t hold all the cards, but this book offers an array of practical recommendations for American leaders. By leveraging these proposals, U.S. policy-makers can avoid the worst-case scenarios and make the most of limited opportunities.

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Cold War Broadcasting
Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe
R. Eugene Parta
Central European University Press, 2010
The book examines the role of Western broadcasting to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the Cold War, with a focus on Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. It includes chapters by radio veterans and by scholars who have conducted research on the subject in once-secret Soviet bloc archives and in Western records. It also contains a selection of translated documents from formerly secret Soviet and East European archives, most of them published here for the first time.
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Communications in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire
A Critical History
Burçe Çelik
University of Illinois Press, 2023
De-Westernizing the communications history of Turkey and its imperial predecessor

The history of communications in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey contradicts the widespread belief that communications is a byproduct of modern capitalism and other Western forces. Burçe Çelik uses a decolonial perspective to analyze the historical commodification and militarization of communications and how it affected production and practice for oppressed populations like women, the working class, and ethnic and religious minorities. Moving from the mid-nineteenth century through today, Çelik places networks within the changing geopolitical landscape and the evolution of modern capitalism in relationship to struggles involving a range of social and political actors. Throughout, she challenges Anglo- and Eurocentric assumptions that see the non-West as an ahistorical imitation of, or aberration from, the development of Western communications.

Ambitious and comprehensive, Communications in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire merges political economy with social history to challenge Western-centered assumptions about the origins and development of modern communications.

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Complex Rivalry
The Dynamics of India-Pakistan Conflict
Surinder Mohan
University of Michigan Press, 2022

While a substantial body of research explains how the conflict between India and Pakistan originated and developed over time, a systematic and multivariate inquiry cutting across different IR paradigms to understand this rivalry is rare or limited. Surinder Mohan contributes to the understanding of India and Pakistan’s rivalry by presenting a new type of framework, also known as complex rivalry model. This comprehensive model, by not limiting its theoretical tool-kit to any single paradigm, is unique in its approach and better positioned to debate and answer baffling questions that the single-paradigm-based studies address rather inadequately and in isolation.

This book, through an examination of fifty-seven militarized disputes between 1947 and 2021, explains the life cycle of India-Pakistan rivalry in four phases: initiation; development; maintenance; and a possible transformation/termination. Mohan delineates five specific conditions that evolved the subcontinental conflict into a complex rivalry: first, its survival in spite of the Bangladesh War and the end of the Cold War; second, its linkage with other rivalries; third, the inclusion of nuclear factor; fourth, the dyadic stability in the militarized disputes and hostility level despite changes in the regime type; and fifth, the dyad’s involvement in a multilayered conflict pattern. To break this deadlock and mitigate their longstanding differences, Mohan proposes that India and Pakistan must reframe their national priorities and political goals so that the new situation or combinations of conditions would assist their peace strategists to downgrade the dyadic hostility and implement risky policies to make headway to a promising transformation.

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Concrete Revolution
Large Dams, Cold War Geopolitics, and the US Bureau of Reclamation
Christopher Sneddon
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Water may seem innocuous, but as a universal necessity, it inevitably intersects with politics when it comes to acquisition, control, and associated technologies. While we know a great deal about the socioecological costs and benefits of modern dams, we know far less about their political origins and ramifications. In Concrete Revolution, Christopher Sneddon offers a corrective: a compelling historical account of the US Bureau of Reclamation’s contributions to dam technology, Cold War politics, and the social and environmental adversity perpetuated by the US government in its pursuit of economic growth and geopolitical power.

Founded in 1902, the Bureau became enmeshed in the US State Department’s push for geopolitical power following World War II, a response to the Soviet Union’s increasing global sway. By offering technical and water resource management advice to the world’s underdeveloped regions, the Bureau found that it could not only provide them with economic assistance and the United States with investment opportunities, but also forge alliances and shore up a country’s global standing in the face of burgeoning communist influence. Drawing on a number of international case studies—from the Bureau’s early forays into overseas development and the launch of its Foreign Activities Office in 1950 to the Blue Nile investigation in Ethiopia—Concrete Revolution offers insights into this historic damming boom, with vital implications for the present. If, Sneddon argues, we can understand dams as both technical and political objects rather than instruments of impartial science, we can better participate in current debates about large dams and river basin planning.
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Constructing the Pluriverse
The Geopolitics of Knowledge
Bernd Reiter, editor
Duke University Press, 2018
The contributors to Constructing the Pluriverse critique the hegemony of the postcolonial Western tradition and its claims to universality by offering a set of “pluriversal” approaches to understanding the coexisting epistemologies and practices of the different worlds and problems we inhabit and encounter. Moving beyond critiques of colonialism, the contributors rethink the relationship between knowledge and power, offering new perspectives on development, democracy, and ideology while providing diverse methodologies for non-Western thought and practice that range from feminist approaches to scientific research to ways of knowing expressed through West African oral traditions. In combination, these wide-ranging approaches and understandings form a new analytical toolbox for those seeking creative solutions for dismantling Westernization throughout the world.

Contributors. Zaid Ahmad, Manuela Boatcă, Hans-Jürgen Burchardt, Raewyn Connell, Arturo Escobar, Sandra Harding, Ehsan Kashfi, Venu Mehta, Walter D. Mignolo, Ulrich Oslender, Issiaka Ouattara, Bernd Reiter, Manu Samnotra, Catherine E. Walsh, Aram Ziai
 
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The Critic in the World
Essays in Honor of Fernando F. Segovia
Amy Lindeman Allen
SBL Press, 2024

A Pact of Love with Criticism, A Pact of Blood with the World

Building on the legacy of Fernando F. Segovia, the pioneering essays in this volume redefine the intersection of biblical studies and geopolitics. Through a thorough exploration of how ancient texts and modern readers influence and reflect geopolitical dynamics, each contributor reveals how biblical narratives have shaped and been shaped by historical power structures, territorial conflicts and climate changes, and cultural exchanges. Essays employ contemporary geopolitical concepts that move beyond traditional readings to offer fresh insights into the strategic and ideological forces behind scriptural texts. An annotated interview with Fernando F. Segovia traces his immigration journey as an adolescent and its indelible imprint on his scholarship as a postcolonial critic. Contributors include Efraín Agosto, Amy Lindeman Allen, Reimund Bieringer, Mark G. Brett, Ahida Calderón Pilarski, Greg Carey, Jorge E. Castillo Guerra, Jin Young Choi, Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, Gregory L. Cuéllar, Musa W. Dube, Neil Elliott, Eleazar S. Fernandez, Bridgett A. Green, Leticia A. Guardiola-Sáenz, Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, Knut Holter, Ma. Maricel S. Ibita, Ma. Marilou S. Ibita, John F. Kutsko, Sung Uk Lim, Francisco Lozada Jr., Luis Menéndez-Antuña, Rubén Muñoz-Larrondo, Robert Myles, Wongi Park, Mitri Raheb, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Fernando F. Segovia, Yak-hwee Tan, Ekaputra Tupamahu, Gerald O. West, Hans (J. H.) de Wit, and H. Daniel Zacharias.

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Critical Geopolitics
The Politics of Writing Global Space
Gearoid O'Tuathail
University of Minnesota Press, 1996

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The Cunning of Gender Violence
Geopolitics and Feminism
Lila Abu-Lughod, Rema Hammami, and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, editors
Duke University Press, 2023
The Cunning of Gender Violence focuses on how a once visionary feminist project has folded itself into contemporary world affairs. Combating violence against women and gender-based violence constitutes a highly visible and powerful agenda enshrined in international governance and law and embedded in state violence and global securitization. Case studies on Palestine, Bangladesh, Iran, India, Pakistan, Israel, and Turkey as well as on UN and US policies trace the silences and omissions, along with the experiences of those subjected to violence, to question the rhetoric that claims the agenda as a “feminist success story.” Because religion and racialized ethnicity, particularly “the Muslim question,” run so deeply through the institutional structures of the agenda, the contributions explore ways it may be affirming or enabling rationales and systems of power, including civilizational hierarchies, that harm the very people it seeks to protect.

Contributors. Lila Abu-Lughod, Nina Berman, Inderpal Grewal, Rema Hammami, Janet R. Jakobsen, Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Vasuki Nesiah, Samira Shackle, Sima Shakhsari, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Dina M Siddiqi, Shahla Talebi, Leti Volpp, Rafia Zakaria
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Currency Statecraft
Monetary Rivalry and Geopolitical Ambition
Benjamin J. Cohen
University of Chicago Press, 2018
At any given time, a limited number of national currencies are used as instruments of international commerce, to settle foreign trade transactions or store value for investors and central banks. How countries whose currencies gain international appeal choose to use this status forms their strategy of currency statecraft. In different circumstances, issuing governments may welcome and promote the internationalization of their currency, tolerate it, or actively oppose it. Benjamin J. Cohen offers a provocative explanation of the strategic policy choices at play.
           
In a comprehensive review that ranges from World War II to the present, Cohen convincingly argues that one goal stands out as the primary motivation for currency statecraft: the extent of a country’s geopolitical ambition, or how driven it is to build or sustain a prominent place in the international community. When a currency becomes internationalized, it generally increases the power of the nation that produces it. In the persistent contestation that characterizes global politics, that extra edge can matter greatly, making monetary rivalry an integral component of geopolitics. Today, the major example of monetary rivalry is the emerging confrontation between the US dollar and the Chinese renminbi. Cohen describes how China has vigorously promoted the international standing of its currency in recent years, even at the risk of exacerbating relations with the United States, and explains how the outcome could play a major role in shaping the broader geopolitical engagement between the two superpowers. 
 
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Cyprus
The Post-Imperial Constitution
Vassilis K. Fouskas and Alex O. Tackie
Pluto Press, 2009

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Debating Moderate Islam
The Geopolitics of Islam and the West
M A Muqtedar Khan
University of Utah Press, 2007
Utah Series in Middle East Studies

After 9/11, many Americans took the view that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were the leading edge of a new war: Islam versus the West. Yet the attacks were also part of the current struggle within Islam between fundamentalist and moderate approaches and were staged for maximum effect in the Muslim world.

This book is based on a special-topic issue of the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences (Fall 2005), and brings together prominent Muslim voices from the policy and academic communities to debate the nature of moderate Islam and what moderation means in both a theological and a geopolitical sense. Participants reflect on the future of political Islam, its role in Muslim politics, western policies in the Muslim world, and the future of American-Muslim relations. This book and the debate it presents are vital to understanding these complex issues.
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Defining the National Interest
Conflict and Change in American Foreign Policy
Peter Trubowitz
University of Chicago Press, 1998
The United States has been marked by a highly politicized and divisive history of foreign policy-making. Why do the nation's leaders find it so difficult to define the national interest?

Peter Trubowitz offers a new and compelling conception of American foreign policy and the domestic geopolitical forces that shape and animate it. Foreign policy conflict, he argues, is grounded in America's regional diversity. The uneven nature of America's integration into the world economy has made regionalism a potent force shaping fights over the national interest. As Trubowitz shows, politicians from different parts of the country have consistently sought to equate their region's interests with that of the nation. Domestic conflict over how to define the "national interest" is the result. Challenging dominant accounts of American foreign policy-making, Defining the National Interest exemplifies how interdisciplinary scholarship can yield a deeper understanding of the connections between domestic and international change in an era of globalization.
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The Dying Sahara
US Imperialism and Terror in Africa
Jeremy Keenan
Pluto Press, 2013

In The Dark Sahara (Pluto, 2009), Jeremy Keenan exposed the collusion between the US and Algeria in fabricating terrorism to justify a new ‘Saharan front’ in Washington’s War on Terror. Now, in The Dying Sahara, he reveals how the designation of the region as a ‘Terror Zone’ has destroyed the lives and livelihoods of thousands of innocent people.

Beginning in 2004, with what local people called the US ‘invasion’ of the Sahel, The Dying Sahara shows how repressive, authoritarian regimes - cashing in on US terrorism ‘rents’ - provoked Tuareg rebellions in both Niger and Mali. Further, he argues that US activity has unleashed a new, narco-trafficking branch of Al-Qaeda.

Keenan's chillingly detailed research shows that the US and its new combatant African command (AFRICOM) have created instability in a region the size of western Europe.

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The Dynamics of European Integration
Causes and Consequences of Institutional Choices
Thomas König
University of Michigan Press, 2024
In Europe’s recent history, there have been several challenges to the strength of the European Union—Brexit, COVID, financial crises, and global tensions—bringing an increased need to understand the ways that the European Union (EU) could successfully stay together or fall apart. In examining how the European Union has changed since 1993, important puzzles have emerged, including how national government functions are transferred to the EU without reforming the EU, how increased transparency is announced while decisions are approved in informal meetings, and how the effects of the polarizing rise of Euroscepticism can be managed to still promote the formation of solidarity and trust among Europeans. To understand these puzzles, Thomas König introduces a new theory of (supra)national partyism to help explain the causes and consequences of choices made by political leaders for Europe. He uses a game-theoretical perspective to look at how conditions for leaders change through accessions of new members, shocks, and crises, and separates institutional choices into two different games played by office- and policy-seeking political leaders—the interstate summit game and the national game of party competition. The Dynamics of European Integration reveals how the reorganization of electoral systems can harness dissensus and polarization among diverse national constituencies to enable the promotion of solidarity and trust in the EU.
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“Eastern Europe” and War
A New Kidnapping?
Aliaksei Kazharski
Central European University Press, 2026
This edited volume focuses on the effects that Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine had on Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It includes chapters covering fourteen countries situated in different corners of the broader region. Individual contributions shed light on how these CEE countries positioned themselves vis-à-vis the war and (re)defined their own regional identities and geopolitical belonging. The chapters offer a rich survey of the local discourses and perspectives, grasping the region in its persisting complexity and diversity.
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The Endless Periphery
Toward a Geopolitics of Art in Lorenzo Lotto's Italy
Stephen J. Campbell
University of Chicago Press, 2019
While the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance are usually associated with Italy’s historical seats of power, some of the era’s most characteristic works are to be found in places other than Florence, Rome, and Venice. They are the product of the diversity of regions and cultures that makes up the country. In Endless Periphery, Stephen J. Campbell examines a range of iconic works in order to unlock a rich series of local references in Renaissance art that include regional rulers, patron saints, and miracles, demonstrating, for example, that the works of Titian spoke to beholders differently in Naples, Brescia, or Milan than in his native Venice. More than a series of regional microhistories, Endless Periphery tracks the geographic mobility of Italian Renaissance art and artists, revealing a series of exchanges between artists and their patrons, as well as the power dynamics that fueled these exchanges. A counter history of one of the greatest epochs of art production, this richly illustrated book will bring new insight to our understanding of classic works of Italian art.
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Eurasian Integration and the Russian World
Regionalism as an Identitiary Enterprise
Aliaksei Kazharski
Central European University Press, 2019

This volume examines Russian discourses of regionalism as a source of identity construction practices for the country's political and intellectual establishment. The overall purpose of the monograph is to demonstrate that, contrary to some assumptions, the transition trajectory of post-Soviet Russia has not been towards a liberal democratic nation state that is set to emulate Western political and normative standards. Instead, its foreign policy discourses have been constructing Russia as a supranational community which transcends Russia's current legally established borders.

The study undertakes a systematic and comprehensive survey of Russian official (authorities) and semi-official (establishment affiliated think tanks) discourse for a period of seven years between 2007 and 2013. This exercise demonstrates how Russia is being constructed as a supranational entity through its discourses of cultural and economic regionalism. These discourses associate closely with the political project of Eurasian economic integration and the "Russian world" and "Russian civilization" doctrines. Both ideologies, the geoeconomic and culturalist, have gained prominence in the post-Crimean environment. The analysis tracks down how these identitary concepts crystallized in Russia's foreign policies discourses beginning from Vladimir Putin's second term in power.

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The Flash of Capital
Film and Geopolitics in Japan
Eric Cazdyn
Duke University Press, 2002
The Flash of Capital analyzes the links between Japan’s capitalist history and its film history, illuminating what these connections reveal about film culture and everyday life in Japan. Looking at a hundred-year history of film and capitalism, Eric Cazdyn theorizes a cultural history that highlights the spaces where film and the nation transcend their customary borders—where culture and capital crisscross—and, in doing so, develops a new way of understanding historical change and transformation in modern Japan and beyond.

Cazdyn focuses on three key moments of historical contradiction: colonialism, post-war reconstruction, and globalization. Considering great classics of Japanese film, documentaries, works of science fiction, animation, and pornography, he brings to light cinematic attempts to come to terms with the tensions inherent in each historical moment—tensions between the colonizer and the colonized, between the individual and the collective, and between the national and the transnational. Paying close attention to political context, Cazdyn shows how formal inventions in the realms of acting, film history and theory, thematics, documentary filmmaking, and adaptation articulate a struggle to solve implacable historical problems. This innovative work of cultural history and criticism offers explanations of historical change that challenge conventional distinctions between the aesthetic and the geopolitical.
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Floating Power
Energy, Infrastructure, and South-South Relations
Gökçe Günel
Duke University Press, 2026
Floating Power considers the role of energy production on an international scale, challenging the idea that new infrastructures wholly replace older sources of energy. Shifting the discussion from energy transition to energy accumulation, Gökçe Günel engages with a range of electricity producers including hydroelectric, heavy fuel oil, natural gas, and solar power plants, noting their intersections as societies work to expand their supply at large rather than focus on one type of source. Günel uses the Ayşegül Sultan, a Turkish-built floating power plant in Ghana, as a prime example and vehicle to explore how state and corporate intervention impact energy technologies as every nation strives toward infrastructural expansion. Floating Power challenges the linear thinking and substitutive logic of mainstream energy discourse, instead showing how various power sources often expand and grow symbiotically.
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From Borderland to Burgenland
Science, Geopolitics, Identity, and the Making of a Region
Ferenc Jankó
Central European University Press, 2024

The area that constitutes the Austrian federal province of Burgenland belonged to the Hungarian part of the Habsburg empire until the end of World War I. This book helps us realize that geographical knowledge does not come ready-made. Instead, it is created by knowledge makers: geographers, historians, statisticians etc. This knowledge-making helped to legitimatize the area transferred between Austria and Hungary, shape the Burgenland identity, and depict its geopolitical role in the rise of national socialism. This book is about how those studying Burgenland, the creators of its geographical knowledge, saw and represented the province. It explores how they grasped the geographical characteristics of the region through their own perspective, influenced by their own professional positions, individual careers, motivations, and by the broader historical and social medium.

The way the area between the provinces of Lower Austria and Styria came about as Burgenland is enthralling, as is how the people there experienced this change of sovereignty and how everyday social and economic relationships were transformed. Tracing the geographical discourses in the interwar period and beyond, the book argues that Burgenland became a successful geographical project, and departs from thoughts of subdivision, unviability, and backwardness, concentrating instead on fertility, unity, and modernization.

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Geopolitical Economy
After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire
Radhika Desai
Pluto Press, 2013

Geopolitical Economy radically reinterprets the historical evolution of the world order, as a multi-polar world emerges from the dust of the financial and economic crisis.

Radhika Desai offers a radical critique of the theories of US hegemony, globalisation and empire which dominate academic international political economy and international relations, revealing their ideological origins in successive failed US attempts at world dominance through the dollar.

Desai revitalizes revolutionary intellectual traditions which combine class and national perspectives on ‘the relations of producing nations’. At a time of global upheavals and profound shifts in the distribution of world power, Geopolitical Economy forges a vivid and compelling account of the historical processes which are shaping the contemporary international order.

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Geopolitical Exotica
Tibet in Western Imagination
Dibyesh Anand
University of Minnesota Press, 2008

Geopolitical Exotica examines exoticized Western representations of Tibet and Tibetans and the debate over that land’s status with regard to China. Concentrating on specific cultural images of the twentieth century—promulgated by novels, popular films, travelogues, and memoirs—Dibyesh Anand lays bare the strategies by which “Exotica Tibet” and “Tibetanness” have been constructed, and he investigates the impact these constructions have had on those who are being represented.

Although images of Tibet have excited the popular imagination in the West for many years, Geopolitical Exotica is the first book to explore representational practices within the study of international relations. Anand challenges the parochial practices of current mainstream international relations theory and practice, claiming that the discipline remains mostly Western in its orientation. His analysis of Tibet’s status with regard to China scrutinizes the vocabulary afforded by conventional international relations theory and considers issues that until now have been undertheorized in relation to Tibet, including imperialism, history, diaspora, representation, and identity.

In this masterfully synthetic work, Anand establishes that postcoloniality provides new insights into themes of representation and identity and demonstrates how IR as a discipline can meaningfully expand its focus beyond the West.

Dibyesh Anand is a reader in international relations at the University of Westminster, London.

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Geopolitics in the Danube Region
Hungarian Reconciliation Efforts, 1848–1998
Ignác Romsics
Central European University Press, 1998

Central and Eastern Europe has a long history of, on the one hand, ethnic conflicts and, on the other, of a revolutionary tradition against expansionism. Both have their roots in the geographical situation and ethnic composition of the region. All these problems have surfaced at times when the political status quo has been upset for some reason, such as after the two world wars and after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Both great powers bordering the Danube region-Germany and Russia-have strived to develop their own versions of confederations (Mitteleuropa and Pan-Slavic movements). Also, politicians and intellectuals of the countries affected have proposed various theories, and made initiatives for different forms of closer or looser confederative formations.

This book examines the reasons for the failure of these initiatives, these reasons including such factors as ethnically-motivated political antagonism, and the lack of economic complementarity. Contributing valuable information on the problems of political and economic integration, which should not be forgotten in a period when the countries of the region are looking towards the European Union, expecting-realistically or not-the solution of their various conflicts.

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Georgia
Pawn in the New Great Game
Per Gahrton
Pluto Press, 2010

The 2008 Ossetia War underlined the fact that Georgia is caught in a political struggle between East and West. Per Gahrton analyses American and Russian policy towards the country and provides a firsthand account of the Rose Revolution of 2003, its origin and aftermath.

The book traces the increasing US involvement in Georgia and the Russian reaction of anger, sanctions and, eventually, invasion. Gahrton's analysis is based on interviews with key politicians and his experience as the rapporteur of the European Parliament on South Caucasus. At centre stage is the growing opposition against authoritarian aspects of President Mikheil Saakashvili’s regime and the mysterious death of Prime Minister Zhvania in 2005. The book also asks if the Rose Revolution was a conspiracy or a genuine popular uprising.

This truly authoritative account of Georgia is a must for students studying international relations in the aftermath of The Cold War.

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Global Health
Why Cultural Perceptions, Social Representations, and Biopolitics Matter
Mark Nichter
University of Arizona Press, 2008
In this lesson-packed book, Mark Nichter, one of the world’s leading medical anthropologists, summarizes what more than a quarter-century of health social science research has contributed to international health and elucidates what social science research can contribute to global health and the study of biopolitics in the future. Nichter focuses on our cultural understanding of infectious and vector-borne diseases, how they are understood locally, and how various populations respond to public health interventions.

The book examines the perceptions of three groups whose points of view on illness, health care, and the politics of responsibility often differ and frequently conflict: local populations living in developing countries, public health practitioners working in international health, and health planners/policy makers. The book is written for both health social scientists working in the fields of international health and development and public health practitioners interested in learning practical lessons they can put to good use when engaging communities in participatory problem solving.

Global Health critically examines representations that frame international health discourse. It also addresses the politics of what is possible in a world compelled to work together to face emerging and re-emerging diseases, the control of health threats associated with political ecology and defective modernization, and the rise of new assemblages of people who share a sense of biosociality. The book proposes research priorities for a new program of health social science research. Nichter calls for greater involvement by social scientists in studies of global health and emphasizes how medical anthropologists in particular can better involve themselves as scholar activists.
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Global Rivalries From the Cold War to Iraq
Kees van der Pijl
Pluto Press, 2006
This book offers a highly original analysis of world events in the light of the Iraq War. It explores the history and development of relations between major countries in the international community and the impact that successive wars and changes in the global political economy have had on the way states relate to each other today.

Tracing the liberal state structure back to the closing stages of the English Civil War and settlement in North America, it argues that the rise of the English-speaking West has created rivalries between contender states that are never entirely put to rest. With each round of Western expansion, new rivalries are created.

Offering a truly global analysis that covers every area of the world - from Europe and America to China, the Middle East, Latin America and Russia -- he analyses the development of international relations post WWII, and questions whether the neoliberal project and its human rights ideology have collapsed back into authoritarianism under the guise of the 'war on terror'.
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Governing the Global Polity
Practice, Mentality, Rationality
Iver B. Neumann and Ole Jacob Sending
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"There have been many attempts to adapt Foucault's arguments to the study of international relations, but this powerful and provocative book is the most sustained, and arguably the most successful in showing how the governmentality approach can be adapted to the analysis of global politics."
---Barry Hindess, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University

A highly welcome and original contribution to contemporary debates on the shape and future of the international system and on the possibility of reconfiguring IR theory as social theory."
---Mathias Albert, Bielefeld University, Germany

"Iver Neumann and Ole Jacob Sending have put meat on the bones of Michel Foucault's notion of governmentality, fulfilling the hopes of long-famished students and scholars of global governance. Through their focus on specific case studies, the authors have provided a much-needed contribution to the international relations literature, one that is sure to become a staple of courses and seminars throughout the world."
---Ronnie D. Lipschutz, University of California, Santa Cruz

What does globalization mean for the principle of state sovereignty and for the power and functioning of states? Whereas realists assert the continued importance of states, constructivists contend that various political entities as well as the logic of globalization itself undermine state sovereignty.

Drawing on the state formation literature and on social theory, particularly the works of Weber and Foucault, Iver B. Neumann and Ole Jacob Sending question the terms of the realist-constructionist debate. Through detailed case studies, they demonstrate that states use nongovernmental organizations and international organizations indirectly to enforce social order and, ultimately, to increase their own power. At the same time, global politics is dominated by a liberal political rationality that states ignore at their peril. While states remain as strong as ever, they operate within a global polity of new hierarchies among states and between states and other actors.

Iver B. Neumann is Director of Research at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Oslo.

Ole Jacob Sending is Senior Researcher at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, where he heads the Research Programme on Global Governance and International Organizations.

Cover art credit: © iStockphoto.com/Will Evans

Also available as an e-book.

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Greenland in Arctic Security
(De)securitization Dynamics under Climatic Thaw and Geopolitical Freeze
Marc Jacobsen, Ole Wæver, and Ulrik Pram Gad, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Greenland has increasingly captivated imaginations around the globe. Yet, while it is central to the Arctic region, its role has been poorly understood. Greenland in Arctic Security delivers a comprehensive overview of how security dynamics unfold in and in relation to Greenland. Each individual chapter analyzes specific discourses and dynamics pertaining to hard or soft security questions. These span from great power interests in geostrategic infrastructure to domestic debates centered on promoting and protecting Greenland identity when engaging with the outside world. In addition, the book offers perspectives on other security questions that have been catalyzed by the effects of climate change.

By combining these different analyses, Greenland in Arctic Security provides new, theoretically informed discussions on how security politics can manifest across different scales and territorial borders. At times, these politics can have consequences beyond their original intent. With Greenland geopolitics and securitization theory of current interest to political and academic debates, this book offers timely insights for readers.
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Hegemony
The New Shape Of Global Power
John Agnew
Temple University Press, 2005
Hegemony tells the story of the drive to create consumer capitalism abroad through political pressure and the promise of goods for mass consumption. In contrast to the recent literature on America as empire, it explains that the primary goal of the foreign and economic policies of the United States is a world which increasingly reflects the American way of doing business, not the formation or management of an empire. Contextualizing both the Iraq war and recent plant closings in the U.S., noted author John Agnew shows how American hegemony has created a world in which power is no longer only shaped territorially. He argues in a sobering conclusion that we are consequently entering a new era of global power, one in which the world the US has made no longer works to its singular advantage.
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Holidays in the Danger Zone
Entanglements of War and Tourism
Debbie Lisle
University of Minnesota Press, 2016

Holidays in the Danger Zone exposes the mundane and everyday interactions between two seemingly opposed worlds: warfare and tourism. Debbie Lisle shows how a tourist sensibility shapes the behavior of soldiers in war—especially the experiences of Western military forces in “exotic” settings. This includes not only R&R but also how battlefields become landscapes of leisure and tourism. She further explores how a military sensibility shapes the development of tourism in the postwar context, from “Dark Tourism” (engaging with displays of conflict and atrocity) to exhibitions of conflict in museums and at memorial sites, as well as advertising, film, journals, guidebooks, blogs, and photography. 

Focused on how war and tourism reinforce prevailing modes of domination, Holidays in the Danger Zone critically examines the long historical arc of the war–tourism nexus—from nineteenth-century imperialism to World War I and World War II, from the Cold War to globalization and the War on Terror.

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How the West Came to Rule
The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism
Alex Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu
Pluto Press, 2015
***Winner, International Studies Association International Political Sociology Best Book Prize 2017***
***Winner, British International Studies Association International Political Economy Working Group Book Prize 2016***

 
Mainstream historical accounts of the development of capitalism describe a profess which is fundamentally European—a system that was born in the mills and factories of English and under the guillotines of the French Revolution. This groundbreaking book tells a very difference story.
 
How the West Came to Rule offers a unique interdisciplinary and international historical account of the origins of capitalism. It argues that, contrary to dominant wisdom, capitalism’s origins should not be understood as a development confined to the geographically and culturally sealed borders of Europe, but the outcome of a wider array of global processes in which non-European societies played a decisive role.
 
Here is a provocative, incisive explanation of how capitalism emerged in England and Europe through a dialectical intersocietal and geopolitical process. The authors’ aim to undermine a Eurocentric bias that has been prominent in the debate about capitalisms rise to supremacy, and their case is remarkably convincing. They provide a fundamental rethinking. Anievas and Nisancioglu contend that often cited assumptions are neither theoretically nor empirically tenable and deny the agency of non-Western societies to the emergence of capitalism. Topics covered include:
 
*The Problem of Eurocentrism
*The Problem of Historical Specificity
*The Brenner Thesis: Explanation and Critique
*The Geopolitical in the Making of Capitalism
*The Political Marxist Conception of Capitalism
*Rethinking the Origins of Capitalism
*And much more!
 
Through an outline of the uneven histories of Mongolian expansion, New World discoveries, Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry, the development of the colonies, and bourgeois revolutions, Alex Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu offer an account of capitalism’s origins that convincingly argues against the prevailing Eurocentric narratives. It will change minds and open the eyes of historians, economists, and political thinkers.
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Humanity's Last Stand
Confronting Global Catastrophe
Mark Schuller
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Are we as a species headed towards extinction? As our economic system renders our planet increasingly inhospitable to human life, powerful individuals fight over limited resources, and racist reaction to migration strains the social fabric of many countries. How can we retain our humanity in the midst of these life-and-death struggles?
 
Humanity’s Last Stand dares to ask these big questions, exploring the interconnections between climate change, global capitalism, xenophobia, and white supremacy. As it unearths how capitalism was born from plantation slavery and the slaughter of Indigenous people, it also invites us to imagine life after capitalism. The book teaches its readers how to cultivate an anthropological imagination, a mindset that remains attentive to local differences even as it identifies global patterns of inequality and racism.
 
Surveying the struggles of disenfranchised peoples around the globe from frontline communities affected by climate change, to #BlackLivesMatter activists, to Indigenous water protectors, to migrant communities facing increasing hostility, anthropologist Mark Schuller argues that we must develop radical empathy in order to move beyond simply identifying as “allies” and start acting as “accomplices.” Bringing together the insights of anthropologists and activists from many cultures, this timely study shows us how to stand together and work toward a more inclusive vision of humanity before it’s too late.

More information and instructor resources (https://humanityslaststand.org)
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Identities, Borders, Orders
Rethinking International Relations Theory
Mathias Albert
University of Minnesota Press, 2001

An interdisciplinary exploration of the role of sovereignty, national identity, and borders in international politics.

Political Science

An interdisciplinary exploration of the role of sovereignty, national identity, and borders in international politics.Informed by current debates in social theory, Identities, Borders, Orders brings together a multinational group of respected scholars to seek and encourage imaginative adaptations and recombinations of concepts, theories, and perspectives across disciplinary lines. These contributors take up a variety of substantive, theoretical, and normative issues such as migration, nationalism, citizenship, human rights, democracy, and security. Together, their essays contribute significantly to our understanding of sovereignty, national identity, and borders. Contributors: Didier Bigo, Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris; Lothar Brock, U of Frankfurt am Main; Chris Brown, London School of Economics; Neil Harvey, New Mexico State U; Martin O. Heisler, U of Maryland; Rey Koslowski, Rutgers U; Friedrich Kratochwil, Ludwig Maximilians U, Munich; Ronnie D. Lipschutz, UC Santa Cruz; Richard W. Mansbach, Iowa State U; David Newman, Ben Gurion U of the Negev, Israel; Antje Wiener, Queen’s U of Belfast; and Frankie Wilmer, Montana State U.
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In from the Cold
Latin America's New Encounter with the Cold War
Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser, eds.
Duke University Press, 2008
Over the last decade, studies of the Cold War have mushroomed globally. Unfortunately, work on Latin America has not been well represented in either theoretical or empirical discussions of the broader conflict. With some notable exceptions, studies have proceeded in rather conventional channels, focusing on U.S. policy objectives and high-profile leaders (Fidel Castro) and events (the Cuban Missile Crisis) and drawing largely on U.S. government sources. Moreover, only rarely have U.S. foreign relations scholars engaged productively with Latin American historians who analyze how the international conflict transformed the region's political, social, and cultural life. Representing a collaboration among eleven North American, Latin American, and European historians, anthropologists, and political scientists, this volume attempts to facilitate such a cross-fertilization. In the process, In From the Cold shifts the focus of attention away from the bipolar conflict, the preoccupation of much of the so-called "new Cold War history," in order to showcase research, discussion, and an array of new archival and oral sources centering on the grassroots, where conflicts actually brewed.

The collection's contributors examine international and everyday contests over political power and cultural representation, focusing on communities and groups above and underground, on state houses and diplomatic board rooms manned by Latin American and international governing elites, on the relations among states regionally, and, less frequently, on the dynamics between the two great superpowers themselves. In addition to charting new directions for research on the Latin American Cold War, In From the Cold seeks to contribute more generally to an understanding of the conflict in the global south.

Contributors. Ariel C. Armony, Steven J. Bachelor, Thomas S. Blanton, Seth Fein, Piero Gleijeses, Gilbert M. Joseph, Victoria Langland, Carlota McAllister, Stephen Pitti, Daniela Spenser, Eric Zolov

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In Space We Read Time
On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics
Karl Schlögel
Bard Graduate Center, 2016
History is usually thought of as a tale of time, a string of events flowing in a particular chronological order. But as Karl Schlögel shows in this groundbreaking book, the where of history is just as important as the when. Schlögel relishes space the way a writer relishes a good story: on a quest for a type of history that takes full account of place, he explores everything from landscapes to cities, maps to railway timetables. Do you know the origin of the name “Everest”? What can the layout of towns tell us about the American Dream? In Space We Read Time reveals this and much, much more.

Here is both a model for thinking about history within physical space and a stimulating history of thought about space, as Schlögel reads historical periods and events within the context of their geographical location. Discussions range from the history of geography in France to what a town directory from 1930s Berlin can say about professional trades that have since disappeared. He takes a special interest in maps, which can serve many purposes—one poignant example being the German Jewish community’s 1938 atlas of emigration, which showed the few remaining possibilities for escape. Other topics include Thomas Jefferson’s map of the United States; the British survey of India; and the multiple cartographers with Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference, where the aim was to redraw Europe’s boundaries on the basis of ethnicity. Moving deftly from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to 9/11 and from Vermeer’s paintings to the fall of the Berlin Wall, this intriguing book presents history from a completely new perspective.
 
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India as Kingmaker
Status Quo or Revisionist Power
Michael O. Slobodchikoff and Aakriti A. Tandon
University of Michigan Press, 2022

As India finds itself in the envious position of kingmaker, both the status quo and revisionist major powers are jockeying for India’s support for either upholding or revising the current world order. Using India’s bilateral treaties as a proxy measure of the strength of its relationship with other major powers, Slobodchikoff and Tandon determine whether India will remain neutral in its foreign policy approach or adopt a more assertive role in shaping the future global order. This book provides an in-depth analysis of India’s bilateral ties with major powers that include the United States, Russia, China, Japan, as well as the European Union (including the United Kingdom, France, and Germany) and uses network analysis to study India’s foreign policy positions with other major powers.

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Inter-imperiality
Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance
Laura Doyle
Duke University Press, 2020
In Inter-imperiality Laura Doyle theorizes the co-emergence of empires, institutions, language regimes, stratified economies, and literary cultures over the longue durée. Weaving together feminist, decolonial, and dialectical theory, she shows how inter-imperial competition has generated a systemic stratification of gendered, racialized labor, while literary and other arts have helped both to constitute and to challenge this world order. To study literature is therefore, Doyle argues, to attend to world-historical processes of imaginative and material co-formation as they have unfolded through successive eras of vying empires. It is also to understand oral, performed, and written literatures as power-transforming resources for the present and future. To make this case, Doyle analyzes imperial-economic processes across centuries and continents in tandem with inter-imperially entangled literatures, from A Thousand and One Nights to recent Caribbean fiction. Her trenchant interdisciplinary method reveals the structural centrality of imaginative literature in the politics and possibilities of earthly life.
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Intimate Geopolitics
Love, Territory, and the Future on India’s Northern Threshold
Sara Smith
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Winner of the 2021 Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award from the American Association of Geographers​
2021 Foreword Indies Finalist - Politics and Social Sciences

Intimate Geopolitics begins with a love story set in the Himalayan region of Ladakh, in India’s Jammu and Kashmir State, but this is also a story about territory, and the ways that love, marriage, and young people are caught up in contemporary global processes. In Ladakh, children grow up to adopt a religious identity in part to be counted in the census, and to vote in elections. Religion, population, and voting blocs are implicitly tied to territorial sovereignty and marriage across religious boundaries becomes a geopolitical problem in an area that seeks to define insiders and outsiders in relation to borders and national identity. This book populates territory, a conventionally abstract rendering of space, with the stories of those who live through territorial struggle at marriage and birth ceremonies, in the kitchen and in the bazaar, in heartbreak and in joy. Intimate Geopolitics argues for the incorporation of the role of time–temporality–into our understanding of territory.
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Israel and the American National Interest
A Critical Examination
Cheryl A. Rubenberg
University of Illinois Press, 1986
"Israel's special relationship with the united States has come under close public scrutiny in recent months following revelations about Israeli involvement in the Iran-Contra and Jonathan Pollard spy scandals. Cheryl Rubenberg's controversial new book traces the evolution of that relationship from the Truman through the Reagan administrations and challenges the widely held view that close ties between Tel Aviv and Washington have served U. S. interests well in the Middle East. Indeed, she makes a convincing case that, in the two decades since 1967, U.S. policymakers have tended to confuse what is best for Israel with what is best for the United States and to ignore what she regards as the most pressing problem in the Middle East, the quest for a Palestinian homeland." -- Douglas Little, International History Review
 
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The Kowoj
Identity, Migration, and Geopolitics in Late Postclassic Petén, Guatemala
Prudence M. Rice
University Press of Colorado, 2009
Neighbors of the better-known Itza in the central Petén lakes region of Guatemala, the Kowoj Maya have been studied for little more than a decade. The Kowoj: Identity, Migration, and Geopolitics in Late Postclassic Petén, Guatemala summarizes the results of recent research into this ethno-political group conducted by Prudence Rice, Don Rice, and their colleagues.

Chapters in The Kowoj address the question "Who are the Kowoj?" from varied viewpoints: archaeological, archival, linguistic, ethnographic, and bioarchaeological. Using data drawn primarily from the peninsular site of Zacpetén, the authors illuminate Kowoj history, ritual components of their self-expressed identity, and their archaeological identification. These data support the Kowoj claim of migration from Mayapán in Yucatán, where they were probably affiliated with the Xiw, in opposition to the Itza. These enmities extended into Petén, culminating in civil warfare by the time of final Spanish conquest in 1697.

The first volume to consider Postclassic Petén from broadly integrative anthropological, archaeological, and historical perspectives, The Kowoj is an important addition to the literature on late Maya culture and history in the southern lowlands. It will be of particular interest to archaeologists, historians, ethnohistorians, art historians, and epigraphers.

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The Last Drop
The Politics of Water
Mike Gonzalez and Marianella Yanes
Pluto Press, 2015
The one indispensable resource, water is increasingly controlled and even owned by private capital. By 2012, water was a trillion-dollar industry—and as population growth, industrial production, and ecological change make scarcity ever-more common, water may well become the source of military and political conflict in the years to come.
 
This book looks at how we got here and what we can and should do next. Laying out the complex arguments surrounding water, its ownership and access to it, Mike Gonzalez and Marianella Yanes make the technical and scientific aspects of the discussion clear and accessible—and thereby enable themselves to make the political questions more urgent. Pushing back against the market fundamentalists, the authors argue that it is both possible and necessary that considerations of equity and social justice prevail in the debates about water. Powerful and polemical, The Last Drop will be a vital resource for water activists worldwide.
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Life, Earth, Colony
Friedrich Ratzel's Necropolitical Geography
Ian Klinke
University of Michigan Press, 2023
Life, Earth, Colony explores the ideas, life, and historical significance of German zoologist turned geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), famous for developing the foundations of geopolitical thought. Ratzel produced a remarkable body of work that revolutionized the study of space, movement, colonization, and war. He also served as a source of intellectual inspiration for national socialism, particularly through his Lebensraum (living space) concept, which understood all life as being caught in an eternal struggle for space. This book closely analyzes this radical conservative intellectual, focusing on his often-overlooked ethnography, biogeography, travel, and creative writing, and colonial activism as well as his more widely-known political geography.

Life, Earth, Colony finds that there is an as yet unexplored necropolitical impulse at the heart of Ratzel’s entire oeuvre, a preoccupation with death and dying, which had a profound impact on twentieth-century history.
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Machine and Sovereignty
For a Planetary Thinking
yuk
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

Developing a new political thought to address today’s planetary crises

What is “planetary thinking” today? Arguing that a new approach is urgently needed, Yuk Hui develops a future-oriented mode of political thought that encompasses the unprecedented global challenges we are confronting: the rise of artificial intelligence, the ecological crisis, and intensifying geopolitical conflicts.

Machine and Sovereignty starts with three premises. The first affirms the necessity of developing a new language of coexistence that surpasses the limits of nation-states and their variations; the second recognizes that political forms, including the polis, empire, and the state, are technological phenomena, which Lewis Mumford terms “megamachines.” The third suggests that a particular political form is legitimated and rationalized by a corresponding political epistemology. The planetary thinking that this book sketches departs from the opposition between mechanism and organism, which characterized modern thought, to understand the epistemological foundations of Hegel’s political state and Schmitt’s Großraum and their particular ways of conceiving the question of sovereignty. Through this reconstruction, Hui exposes the limits of the state and reflects on a new theoretical matrix based on the interrelated concepts of biodiversity, noodiversity, and technodiversity.

Arguing that we are facing the limit of modernity, of the eschatological view of history, of globalization, and of the human, Hui conceives necessary new epistemological and technological frameworks for understanding and rising to the crises of our present and our future.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

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Making the World Safe for Capitalism
How Iraq Threatened the US Economic Empire and had to be Destroyed
Christopher Doran
Pluto Press, 2012

The Iraq war defined the first decade of the twenty-first century – leading to mass protests and raising profound questions about domestic politics and the use of military force. Yet most explanations of the war have a narrow focus either on political personalities or oil.

Christopher Doran provides a unique perspective, arguing that the drive to war came from the threat Iraq might pose to American economic hegemony if the UN sanctions regime was ended. Doran argues that this hegemony is rooted in third world debt and corporate market access. It was protection of these arrangements that motivated US action, not Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction or a simplistic desire to seize its oil.

This book will provide new insights on the war which still casts a shadow over global politics, and will have wide appeal to all those concerned about the Middle East, world peace and global development.

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Media, Geopolitics, and Power
A View from the Global South
Herman Wasserman
University of Illinois Press, 2018
The end of apartheid brought South Africa into the global media environment. Outside companies invested in the nation's newspapers while South African conglomerates pursued lucrative tech ventures and communication markets around the world. Many observers viewed the rapid development of South African media as a roadmap from authoritarianism to global modernity.

Herman Wasserman analyzes the debates surrounding South Africa's new media presence against the backdrop of rapidly changing geopolitics. His exploration reveals how South African disputes regarding access to, and representation in, the media reflect the domination and inequality in the global communication sphere. Optimists see post-apartheid media as providing a vital space that encourages exchanges of opinion in a young democracy. Critics argue the public sphere mirrors South Africa's past divisions and privileges the viewpoints of the elite. Wasserman delves into the ways these simplistic narratives obscure the country's internal tensions, conflicts, and paradoxes even as he charts the diverse nature of South African entry into the global arena.

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Media in New Turkey
The Origins of an Authoritarian Neoliberal State
Bilge Yesil
University of Illinois Press, 2016
In Media in New Turkey, Bilge Yesil unlocks the complexities surrounding and penetrating today's Turkish media. Yesil focuses on a convergence of global and domestic forces that range from the 1980 military coup to globalization's inroads and the recent resurgence of political Islam. Her analysis foregrounds how these and other forces become intertwined, and she uses Turkey's media to unpack the ever-more-complex relationships.
 
Yesil confronts essential questions regarding: the role of the state and military in building the structures that shaped Turkey's media system; media adaptations to ever-shifting contours of political and economic power; how the far-flung economic interests of media conglomerates leave them vulnerable to state pressure; and the ways Turkey's politicized judiciary criminalizes certain speech.
 
Drawing on local knowledge and a wealth of Turkish sources, Yesil provides an engrossing look at the fault lines carved by authoritarianism, tradition, neoliberal reform, and globalization within Turkey's increasingly far-reaching media.
 
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National Parks and the Supreme Court
Groundbreaking Legal Battles
Carla Chung Mattix
University of Nevada Press, 2026
Many Americans revere their national parks as places of natural beauty and cultural significance—but few realize how often these landscapes have been shaped by the courtroom as much as by conservation policy. With more than 3,500 lawsuits involving the National Park Service, litigation has defined, defended, and sometimes even threatened the character of the parks. Without these legal fights, the Gettysburg battlefield might be covered with strip malls and the Grand Canyon reduced to a mining site.

This book examines five landmark Supreme Court cases involving national parks—Gettysburg, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Death Valley, and the National Mall. Each chapter blends legal analysis with historical context, tracing the origins of the parks and the disputes that brought them before the nation’s highest court. Spanning nearly a century, these cases reveal how the Court has shaped park policy, land use, Native American rights, water law, and free speech.

Through these pivotal decisions, National Parks and the Supreme Court offers a new lens on the contested terrain of the national parks, where legal, environmental, and cultural values collide. By exploring the courts’ influence on public lands, it deepens our understanding of the complexities of managing America’s most cherished landscapes.
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The Nazi Olympics
Sport, Politics, and Appeasement in the 1930s
Edited by Arnd Krüger and William Murray
University of Illinois Press, 2003

The 1936 Olympic Games played a key role in the development of both Hitler’s Third Reich and international sporting competition. The Nazi Olympics gathers essays by modern scholars from prominent participating countries and lays out the issues--sporting as well as political--surrounding the involvement of individual nations. 

The volume opens with an analysis of Germany’s preparations for the Games and the attempts by the Nazi regime to allay the international concerns about Hitler’s racist ideals and expansionist ambitions. Essays follow on the United States, Great Britain, and France--top-tier Olympian nations with misgivings about participation--as well as Germany's future Axis partners Italy and Japan. Other contributions examine the issues involved for Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Throughout, the authors reveal the high political stakes surrounding the Games and how the Nazi Olympics distilled critical geopolitical issues of the time into a spectacle of sport.

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New Deep Territories
A Story of France’s Exploration of the Seafloor
Beatriz Martinez-Rius
University of Chicago Press, 2026
How France integrated the seafloor into its national territory through an interplay of science, technology, and geopolitical ambition during the Cold War.
 
Beneath the surface of the seas and oceans lies a territory as important for human societies as the exposed land and the airspace above them: the seafloor. Our daily life is inextricably linked to the seafloor and its resources, from global telecommunications infrastructure to offshore oil and gas extraction to strategic mineral mining.
 
By focusing on France, a country with an underwater territory seventeen times larger than its emerged lands, New Deep Territories explains how the seafloor emerged as a territory during the second half of the twentieth century. Beatriz Martinez-Rius traces the evolution of the country’s seafloor exploration and the motivations that fueled it from the aftermath of World War I to the late 1970s. In the early 1960s, the seafloor, instead of colonial territories, came to be seen as a source of natural resources. The French government, corporations such as oil companies, and scientists all imagined future uses of the seafloor, and these ever-evolving aspirations drove the development of technologies, techniques, and scientific fields that built up the submerged territory. Government officers and industrial stakeholders massively invested in technoscientific development to prepare for a future reliant on seafloor resources, including oil, gas, and minerals, well before it was technologically possible, economically feasible, and legally acceptable to extract them. The future they envisioned did not arrive, but their investment resulted in an unprecedented understanding of the ocean’s crust. Today, once again, national governments, international organizations, and private stakeholders are turning their attention to the seafloor.
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New World Orderings
China and the Global South
Lisa Rofel and Carlos Rojas, editors
Duke University Press, 2022
The contributors to New World Orderings demonstrate that China’s twenty-first-century rise occurs not only through economics and state politics but equally through the mutual entanglements of overlapping social, economic, and cultural worlds in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. They show how the Chinese state has sought to reconfigure the nation’s position in the world and the centrality of trade, labor, religion, migration, gender, race, and literature to this reconfiguration. Among other topics, the contributors examine China’s post-Bandung cultural diplomacy with African nations, how West African “pastor-entrepreneurs” in China interpreted and preached the prosperity doctrine, the diversity of Chinese-Argentine social relations in the soy supply chain, and the ties between China and India within the complex history of inter-Asian exchange and Chinese migration to Southeast Asia. By examining China’s long historical relationship with the Global South, this volume presents a non-state-centric history of China that foregrounds the importance of transnational communicative and imaginative worldmaking processes and interactions.

Contributors. Andrea Bachner, Luciano Damián Bolinaga, Nellie Chu, Rachel Cypher, Mingwei Huang, T. Tu Huynh, Yu-lin Lee, Ng Kim Chew, Lisa Rofel, Carlos Rojas, Shuang Shen, Derek Sheridan, Nicolai Volland
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Olimpismo
The Olympic Movement in the Making of Latin America and the Caribbean
Antonio Sotomayor
University of Arkansas Press, 2020
The Olympic Games are a phenomenon of unparalleled global proportions. This book examines the rich and complex involvement of Latin America and the Caribbean peoples with the Olympic Movement, serving as an effective medium to explore the making of this region. The nine essays here investigate the influence, struggles, and contributions of Latin American and Caribbean societies to the Olympic Movement. By delving into nationalist political movements, post-revolutionary diplomacy, decolonization struggles, gender and disability discourses, and more, they define how the nations of this region have shaped and been shaped by the Olympic Movement.
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The Power of Small States
Diplomacy in World War II
Annette Baker Fox
University of Chicago Press, 1959
An explosive study into World War II diplomacy and how smaller nations resisted the pressure of Axis and Allied Powers.

As World War II ravaged Europe and Asia, smaller nations such as Turkey, Spain, Finland, and Portugal emerged virtually unscathed. How did these smaller powers, which most wrongly viewed as mere political pawns, survive one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century?

From the World War II diplomatic history of Turkey, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Spain, Annette Baker Fox walks us through backrooms and intense negotiations to illustrate how smaller nations balanced an ever-shifting political landscape to maintain their neutrality. Heavily researched and well-wrought, this book draws upon primary material and interviews with public figures and scholars to give a new historical dimension into lesser-known nations during a time of great political upheaval.
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A Radical History of the World
Neil Faulkner
Pluto Press, 2018

“Staggeringly ambitious.”―New Internationalist

“One of the finest historians on the left.”—John Newsinger, author, The Blood Never Dried



Rejecting the top-down approach of conventional history, Neil Faulkner contends that it is the mass action of ordinary people that drives the transformative events of our many histories. This is a history of power, abuse, and greed, but also one of liberation, progress, and solidarity.            
 
From the hunter-gatherers two million years ago to the ancient empires of Persia and China, and from the Russian Revolution to modern imperialism, humans have always struggled to create a better society than what came before. All over the world at numerous points in the past, a different way of life has become an absolute necessity, over and over again. This is a history of the humans in these struggles—the hominid and the hunter, the emperor and the slave, the dictator and the revolutionary.
 
Reading against the grain of mainstream histories, Neil Faulkner reveals that what happened in the past has never been predetermined. From antiquity to feudalism, and from fascism to our precarious political present, choices have always been numerous and complex, and the possible outcomes have ranged broadly between liberation and barbarism. His chapters include:
 
*Hunters and Farmers
*The First Class Societies
*Ancient Empires
*The Medieval World
*European Feudalism
*The First Wave of Bourgeois Revolutions
*Absolutist Europe and Capitalist Globalization
*The Rise of Industrial Capitalism
*The Revolutionary Wave
*The Great Depression and the Rise of Fascism
*World War and Cold War
*The New World Disorder
*Capitalism’s Greatest Crisis? The Early Twenty-First Century
 
In our fraught political present—as we face the loss of civil liberties and environmental protections, the rise of ethnonationalism, and the looming threat of nuclear war—we need the perspective of these histories now more than ever. The lesson of A Radical History of the World is that, if we created our past, we can also create a better future.  
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Reconciling Rwanda
Unity, Nationality and State Control
Jennifer Melvin
University of London Press, 2015
In July 1994, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) set out to stabilise and secure Rwanda, a country decimated by genocide. This mandate was later extended to include the herculean task of promoting unity and reconciliation to a population torn apart by violence. More than two decades later, these goals appear to have been achieved. Beneath the veneer of reconciliation lies myriad programmes and legislation that do more than seek to unite the population - they keep the RPF in power. In Reconciling Rwanda: Unity, Nationality and State Control, Jennifer Melvin analyses the highly controversial RPF and its vision of reconciliation to determine who truly benefits from the construction of the new post-genocide Rwanda.
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Religious Failure, Geopolitics, and Forced Displacement in Russia, Eastern Europe, and the South Caucasus
Lucian N. Leustean
Central European University Press, 2026
What happens when states fail to provide support to populations in need? What are the mechanisms of religious and political engagement with populations affected by organized violence, displacement, and resettlement? The book argues that when state structures fail to respond to violence, religious institutions are often among the first actors to assist and empower forcibly displaced populations. Establishing humanitarian initiatives, fostering transnational conservative networks, and promoting geopolitical interests has defined the interplay between religion, politics, and society in the Eastern Christian world from the end of the Cold War to the present day. This book advances a Religious Failure Index, which highlights the ways in which religious institutions engage with state governance, geopolitics, and international affairs. It offers a rigorous narrative of the ways in which Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Christian communities exert authority in a multi-faith geographical space marked by political rivalry, conflict, inequality, and forced displacement in Armenia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldova, Russia, Serbia, and Ukraine.
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The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy
Minqi Li
Pluto Press, 2008
China's increasing power in the global economy is destabilizing the established system. This book analyses the possible historical trajectories of China and the capitalist world-economy in the twenty-first century.

Minqi Li examines the future global prospects from the perspectives of Marxism, world-system theories, and ecological limits to growth. He argues that China is likely to exacerbate many of the major contradictions of world capitalism, which could lead to the demise of the existing world-system.

This is an essential text for students of political economy, economics and global politics.
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The Roots of Cooperation
Constructing Interstate Alliances in Ancient Greece
Nicholas D. Cross
University of Michigan Press, 2026

Nicholas D. Cross’s The Roots of Cooperation reinterprets how the Greeks conceived, enacted, and displayed their alliances, offering a socially grounded understanding of interstate relations in antiquity. Following the international relations model of constructivism, Cross emphasizes the social features of Greek alliances including words used to articulate agreements, ceremonial acts they performed during the formation process, and the symbols they employed to illustrate how the alliances contributed to the creation of shared goals, ideas, and identities. The study covers the proposals for alliances, the articulation of alliance treaties, the ratification of alliances by means of religious ceremonies, the public display of the agreements in visual media, and the implications of terminated alliances. While alliances had political and military objectives, the Greeks represented them as collective and consensual achievements. Relying as much on epigraphic and numismatic evidence as on the literary record, this study recontextualizes interstate activity by analyzing how contemporaries imagined and depicted their formal interstate agreements. The Roots of Cooperation offers fresh insights that go beyond just alliances and can deepen our understanding of interstate relations, broadly speaking, in the ancient world.

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Russia's Imperial Endeavor and Its Geopolitical Consequences
The Russia-Ukraine War, Volume Two
Bálint Madlovics
Central European University Press, 2024

Aside from the near-complete devastation of a sovereign state and reversal of the global balance of power, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is leading to a radical transformation in the Eastern European and Eurasian regions – including Russia itself.

The 13 chapters in this volume examine the main geopolitical consequences of the resurgent imperialist aspirations of the Russian Federation. They examine the ideological tools of history falsification as an integral part of hybrid warfare. Turning to the economy, the book discusses how the war and economic sanctions imposed on Russia are redrawing the geopolitical map and how economic relations would change following a regime transformation. The book discusses the reactions of members of the international community to the invasion, whether threatened or neutral parties or allies. The collection therefore offers a comprehensive picture of the main consequences of the resurgent imperialist aspirations of the Russian Federation. Equipped with the conceptual tools of the analysis with a focus on the patronal features of the political-economic system, the book considers the aftermath of the war. This collection complements the book entitled Ukraine. Patronal Democracy and the Russian Invasion.

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Savage Ecology
War and Geopolitics at the End of the World
Jairus Victor Grove
Duke University Press, 2019
Jairus Victor Grove contends that we live in a world made by war. In Savage Ecology he offers an ecological theory of geopolitics that argues that contemporary global crises are better understood when considered within the larger history of international politics. Infusing international relations with the theoretical interventions of fields ranging from new materialism to political theory, Grove shows how political violence is the principal force behind climate change, mass extinction, slavery, genocide, extractive capitalism, and other catastrophes. Grove analyzes a variety of subjects—from improvised explosive devices and drones to artificial intelligence and brain science—to outline how geopolitics is the violent pursuit of a way of living that comes at the expense of others. Pointing out that much of the damage being done to the earth and its inhabitants stems from colonialism, Grove suggests that the Anthropocene may be better described by the term Eurocene. The key to changing the planet's trajectory, Grove proposes, begins by acknowledging both the earth-shaping force of geopolitical violence and the demands apocalypses make for fashioning new ways of living.
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Scripts of Blackness
Race, Cultural Nationalism, and U.S. Colonialism in Puerto Rico
Isar P. Godreau
University of Illinois Press, 2015
The geopolitical influence of the United States informs the processes of racialization in Puerto Rico, including the construction of black places. In Scripts of Blackness, Isar P. Godreau explores how Puerto Rican national discourses about race--created to overcome U.S. colonial power--simultaneously privilege whiteness, typecast blackness, and silence charges of racism.
 
Based on an ethnographic study of the barrio of San Antón in the city of Ponce, Scripts of Blackness examines institutional and local representations of blackness as developing from a power-laden process that is inherently selective and political, not neutral or natural. Godreau traces the presumed benevolence or triviality of slavery in Puerto Rico, the favoring of a Spanish colonial whiteness (under a hispanophile discourse), and the insistence on a harmonious race mixture as discourses that thrive on a presumed contrast with the United States that also characterize Puerto Rico as morally superior. In so doing, she outlines the debates, social hierarchies, and colonial discourses that inform the racialization of San Antón and its residents as black.
 
Mining ethnographic materials and anthropological and historical research, Scripts of Blackness provides powerful insights into the critical political, economic, and historical context behind the strategic deployment of blackness, whiteness, and racial mixture.
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Securitizing Youth
Young People’s Roles in the Global Peace and Security Agenda
Marisa O. Ensor
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Securitizing Youth offers new insights on young people’s engagement in a wide range of contexts related to the peace and security field. It presents empirical findings on the challenges and opportunities faced by young women and men in their efforts to build more peaceful, inclusive, and environmentally secure societies. The chapters included in this edited volume examine the diversity and complexity of young people’s engagement for peace and security in different countries across the globe and in different types and phases of conflict and violence, including both conflict-affected and relatively peaceful societies. Chapter contributors, young peacebuilders, and seasoned scholars and practitioners alike propose ways to support youth’s agency and facilitate their meaningful participation in decision-making. The chapters are organized around five broad thematic issues that correspond to the 5 Pillars of Action identified by UN Security Council Resolution 2250. Lessons learned are intended to inform the global youth, peace, and security agenda so that it better responds to on-the-ground realities, hence promoting more sustainable and inclusive approaches to long-lasting peace.
 
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Somatic States
On Cartography, Geobodies, Bodily Integrity
Franck Billé
Duke University Press, 2025
In Somatic States, Franck Billé examines the conceptual link between the nation-state and the body, particularly the visceral and affective attachment to the state and the symbolic significance of its borders. Billé argues that corporeal analogies to the nation-state are not simply poetic or allegorical but reflect a genuine association of the individual body with the national outline—an identification greatly facilitated by the emergence of the national map. Billé charts the evolution of cartographic practices and the role that political maps have played in transforming notions of territorial sovereignty. He shows how states routinely and effectively mobilize corporeal narratives, such as framing territorial loss through metaphors of dismemberment and mutilation. Despite the current complexity of geopolitics and neoliberalism, Billé demonstrates that corporeality and bodily metaphors remain viscerally powerful because they offer a seemingly simple way to apprehend the abstract nature of the nation-state.
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Soviet Occupation of Romania, Hungary, and Austria 1944/45–1948/49
László Borhi
Central European University Press, 2015
This book compares the various aspects – political, military economic – of Soviet occupation in Austria, Hungary and Romania. Using documents found in Austrian, Hungarian, Romanian and Russian archives the authors argue that the nature of Soviet foreign policy has been misunderstood. Existing literature has focused on the Soviet foreign policy from a political perspective; when and why Stalin made the decision to introduce Bolshevik political systems in the Soviet sphere of influence. This book will show that the Soviet conquest of East-Central Europe had an imperial dimension as well and allowed the Soviet Union to use the territory it occupied as military and economic space. The final dimension of the book details the tragically human experiences of Soviet occupation: atrocities, rape, plundering and deportations.
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Spectres of Fascism
Historical, Theoretical and International Perspectives
Samir Gandesha
Pluto Press, 2020
Concerns over the rise of fascism have been preoccupied with the Trump presidency and the Brexit vote in the UK, yet, globally, we are witnessing a turn towards anti-democratic and illiberal forces. From the tragic denouement of the Egyptian Revolution to the consolidation of the so-called Gujarat Model in India under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the consolidation of the power of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to the recent election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, fascist ideology, aesthetics and fascist personalities appear across the globe. Spectres of Fascism makes a significant contribution to the unfolding discussion on whether what we are witnessing today is best understood as a return to classic twentieth-century ‘fascism,’ or some species of what has been called ‘post-fascism.’ Applying a uniquely global perspective, it combines analyses of historical contexts, theoretical approaches and contemporary geopolitics.
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Surplus Citizens
Struggle and Nationalism in the Greek Crisis
Dimitra Kotouza
Pluto Press, 2018
The crisis in Greece has elicited the full spectrum of responses - from optimism for a left parliamentary politics inspired by Syriza's electoral victory, to pessimism about the intransigence of the EU and calls for the reinstatement of full national sovereignty in Europe. In Surplus Citizens, Dimitra Kotouza questions the terms of the debate by demonstrating how the national framing of social contestation posed obstacles to transformative collective action, but also how this framing has been challenged. Analysing the increasing superfluousness of subordinate classes in Greece as part of a global phenomenon with racialised and gendered dimensions, the book interrogates the strengths, contradictions and limits of collective action and identity in the crisis, from the movement of the squares and neighbourhood assemblies, to new forms of labour activism, environmental struggles, immigrant protests, anti-fascism and pro-refugee activism. Arguing against the strategic fixation on unified identities and pointing instead to the transformative potential of internal dispute within movements, Surplus Citizens highlights the relevance of a discussion of Greece to collective action beyond it, as we continue to traverse a global financial crisis that has provoked conflicts over nationalism, immigration and the rise of neo-fascism.
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The Syrian Revolution
Between the Politics of Life and the Geopolitics of Death
Yasser Munif
Pluto Press, 2020
Understanding the Syrian revolution is unthinkable without an in-depth analysis from below. Paying attention to the complex activities of the grassroots resistance, this book demands we rethink the revolution.

Having lived in Syria for over fifteen years, Yasser Munif is expert in exploring the micropolitics of revolutionary forces. He uncovers how cities are managed, how precious food is distributed and how underground resistance thrives in regions controlled by regime forces. In contrast, the macropolitics of the elite Syrian regime are undemocratic, destructive and counter-revolutionary. Regional powers, Western elites, as well as international institutions choose this macropolitical lens to apprehend the Syrian conflict. By doing so, they also choose to ignore the revolutionaries' struggles.

By looking at the interplay between the two sides, case studies of Aleppo and Manbij and numerous firsthand interviews, Yasser Munif shows us that this macro and geopolitical authoritarianism only brings death, and that by looking at the smaller picture - the local, the grassroots, the revolutionaries - we can see the politics of life emerge.
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Technology in Russian Strategic Culture
From the Nineteenth Century to the Present Day
Anzhelika Solovyeva
Karolinum Press, 2024
A history of military-technological innovation in Russia.

This book traces the dynamics of military-technological innovation in Russia over the last hundred and fifty years, particularly focusing on three distinct periods: the introduction of rifled breech-loading weapons in Imperial Russia in the nineteenth century, the invention of nuclear weapons in the Soviet Union in the twentieth century, and the development of precision-guided weapons in post-Soviet Russia in the twenty-first century. The analysis relies extensively on primary data obtained from Russian archives, complemented by a series of expert interviews, and deciphers Russia’s distinct strategic cultural approach to military-technological innovation.
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The Toledo War
The First Michigan-Ohio Rivalry
Don Faber
University of Michigan Press, 2008

Most are familiar with the Michigan-Ohio football rivalry, an intense but usually good-natured contest that stretches back over one hundred years. Yet far fewer may know that in the early nineteenth century Michigan and Ohio were locked in a different kind of battle---one that began before Michigan became a state.

The conflict started with a long-simmering dispute over a narrow wedge of land called the Toledo Strip. Early maps were famously imprecise, adding to the uncertainty of the true boundary between the states. When Ohio claimed to the mouth of the Maumee River, land that according to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 fell in the territory of Michigan, the "Toledo War" began.

Today the fight may bring a smile to Michiganians and Ohioans because both states benefited: Ohioans won the war and Michigan got the Upper Peninsula. But back then passions about rightful ownership ran high, and it would take many years---and colorful personalities all the way up to presidents---to settle the dispute. The Toledo War: The First Michigan-Ohio Rivalry gives a well-researched and fascinating account of the famous war.

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Tourism Geopolitics
Assemblages of Infrastructure, Affect, and Imagination
Edited by Mary Mostafanezhad, Matilde Córdoba Azcárate, Roger Norum
University of Arizona Press, 2021
By the start of the century, nearly one billion international travelers were circulating the globe annually, placing tourism among the worlds’ most ubiquitous geopolitical encounters. While the COVID-19 pandemic brought the industry to a sudden halt, its geopolitical significance remained. With striking clarity, tourism desires and reinvented mobilities revealed the impermanence of Old World orders as new global alliances were forged. While scholars have critically examined tourism in the contexts of development, cultural change, and environmental crisis, much less attention has been paid to the geopolitical drivers and consequences of the world’s largest industry. This collection homes in on tourism and its geopolitical entanglements by examining its contemporary affects, imaginaries, and infrastructures. It develops the concept of tourism geopolitics to reveal the growing centrality of tourism in geopolitical life, as well as the geopolitical nature of the tourism encounter.

In Tourism Geopolitics, contributors show enacted processes such as labor migration, conservation, securitization, nation building, territorial disputes, ethnic cleansing, heritage revitalization, and global health crisis management, among others. These contended societal processes are deployed through tourism development initiatives that mobilize deeply uneven symbolic and material landscapes. The chapters reveal how a range of experiences are implicated in this process: museum visits, walking tours, architectonical evocations of the past, road construction, militarized island imaginations, gendered cultural texts, and official silences. Collectively, the chapters offer ethnographically rich illustrations from around the world that demonstrate the critical nature of tourism in formal geopolitical practices, as well as the geopolitical nature of everyday tourism encounters. This volume is a vital read for critical geographers, anthropologists, and political scientists, as well as scholars of tourism and cultural studies.

Contributors: Sarah Becklake, M. Bianet Castellanos, Matilde Córdoba Azcárate, Jason Dittmer, Klaus Dodds, Jamie Gillen, Simon Halink, Jordan Hallbauer, James Igoe, Debbie Lisle, Mary Mostafanezhad, Dieter K. Müller, Roger Norum, Alessandro Rippa, Ian Rowen, Robert Saunders, Juan Francisco Salazar, Tani Sebro, Mimi Sheller, Henry Szadziewski, Vernadette Vicuña González, Emma Waterton

 
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Transmedia Geographies
Decoloniality, Democratization, Cultural Citizenship, and Media Convergence
Kevin Glynn
Rutgers University Press, 2025
Looking at the US, New Zealand, and Central America, this book considers how cultural politics has been deeply reworked in our contemporary media environment. The authors analyze how rampant technological convergence has allowed stories to spill across media platforms as well as geographical borders and how those stories reemerge as transmediated events.    

The authors explore the cultural politics that have developed within this new media environment by moving across the mediated landscapes of the first, third, and fourth (Indigenous people’s) worlds, which are deeply intertwined and interconnected under contemporary conditions of neoliberal globalization and emergent regimes of authoritarian postdemocracy. The book attends both to the platforms and digital networks of the new media environment and to the cultural forms and practices that have constituted television as the dominant medium of communication throughout the second half of the twentieth century. In the new media environment, transmediation works on behalf not only of those corporate megaconglomerates that have become all too familiar to media consumers around the world but also of many communities that have previously been excluded from access to the means of electronic textual production and circulation. For the latter, grassroots transmediation has become an important technique for the production of cultural citizenship.
 
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Turkey and the Kurdish Peace Process
Actors, Issues, and Context
Arin Y. Savran
University of Michigan Press, 2022

After the fall of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, the Kurds in the Middle East became the largest ethnic group in the region without a state of their own. Divided between Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, the Kurds have fought for their right to exist as a distinct national group, as well as for governing themselves. Turkey and the Kurdish Peace Process provides a historical and conceptual account of events in order to detail the key conditions, factors, and events that gave rise to the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) conflict in Turkey, as well as the conditions influencing the emergence, management, and collapse of the peace talks. Drawing from conflict resolution theories, this book investigates the transformation of key conflict actors and changes, over time, in their approach to the main conflict issues.

Moreover, Arin Y. Savran expands the concept of conflict transformation to encompass the ideological transformation of a movement as a result of a rigorous and deep intellectual epiphany on the part of the political leaders—a phenomenon that is unusual and little is known about, making it all the more relevant to include in future theoretical approaches in peace process studies. Methodologically, she rethinks conflict transformation/resolution approaches to focus on shifts in beliefs and relationships that occur prior to a peace process or the start of peace negotiations, when often much focus on peace processes is on the post-agreement phase. This book is among the first comprehensive, scholarly accounts to date (in the English language) that analyzes the Kurdish peace process.

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Ukraine in the Crosshairs of Geopolitical Power Play
Edited by Peter W. Schulze and Winfried Veit
Campus Verlag, 2020
An overview of both European and Russian objectives in Ukraine.

Peace in Ukraine seemed possible following Volodymyr Zelensky’s 2019 election. The new president reopened conversations with both the European Union and separatist authorities, bringing an end to the Donbass conflict in sight. Such an achievement promised revitalized talks between Europe and Russia, and so the nearly forgotten conflict returned to global prominence. Ukraine in the Crosshairs of Geopolitical Power Play analyzes why European and Russian objectives in Ukraine place daunting limits of any potential compromise.
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Understanding and Teaching the Cold War
Edited by Matthew Masur
University of Wisconsin Press, 2016
For nearly a half century, from 1945 to 1991, the United States and the Soviet Union maneuvered to achieve global hegemony. Each forged political alliances, doled out foreign aid, mounted cultural campaigns, and launched covert operations. The Cold War also deeply affected the domestic politics, cultures, and economic policies of the two superpowers, their client states, and other nations throughout the world.
            Teaching the Cold War is both necessary and challenging. Understanding and Teaching the Cold War is designed to help collegiate and high school teachers navigate the complexity of the topic, integrate up-to-date research and concepts into their classes, and use strategies and tools that make this important history meaningful to students.
            The volume opens with Matthew Masur’s overview of models for approaching the subject, whether in survey courses or seminars. Two prominent historians, Carole Fink and Warren Cohen, offer accounts of their experience as longtime scholars and teachers of the Cold War from European and Asian perspectives. Sixteen essays dig into themes including the origins and end of the conflict, nuclear weapons, diplomacy, propaganda, fear, popular culture, and civil rights, as well as the Cold War in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, East Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the nonaligned nations. A final section provides practical advice for using relevant, accessible primary sources to implement the teaching ideas suggested in this book.
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When Roosevelt Planned to Govern France
Charles L. Robertson
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011

This book tells the story of a plan put forth by President Franklin Roosevelt during World War II for an Allied military occupation of France in the aftermath of liberation, and of General Charles de Gaulle's efforts as self-appointed leader of the Free French Movement to thwart FDR's intentions. Charles L. Robertson frames the narrative as a mystery in which he plays the role of detective. He begins at a dinner party thirty years ago, where he first learned of the alleged plan from an elderly former aide to de Gaulle. Yet it wasn't until 2004, when he heard the same story repeated during the 60th commemoration of D-Day, that he set out to investigate whether it was true.

Many French are aware of this episode and believe, on the basis of later Gaullist officials' writings, that until the last moment a military occupation of their country was imminent. This view, across the years, has helped darken relations between France and the United States. Yet few if any Americans have ever heard of this plan, and in the event, no Allied military government of France was ever established. 

How and why it never came to be, and why the French still believe it almost did, is the subject of this book. Robertson recounts how the president of the most powerful nation in the world was outmaneuvered in both his earlier plans for an occupation of France and his subsequent attempts to keep General de Gaulle from “seizing” power—in a France that ultimately, despite Roosevelt's intentions and expectations, regained its place among the victorious powers under de Gaulle's leadership.

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Women March for Peace
Black Radical Women’s Anti-Korean War Activism
Denise Lynn
University of Massachusetts Press, 2025
Highlighting hypocrisy of US Civil Rights oppression while fighting for Korean freedom

The Korean War is commonly known as the “forgotten war” because it supposedly had little impact on American culture in comparison to World War II or the American War in Vietnam. Yet from 1950–1953, the conflict produced vigorous anti-war activism, particularly among Black radical women. Informed by their experiences with racism and misogyny within the US, these women were convinced that peace was not just the absence of military aggression, but that it required the liberation of the most oppressed, including the end of capitalist exploitation of women and People of Color and the return of self-determination to colonized peoples—themes that later anti-war activists would echo and develop. Whether or not the Korean War has ever truly been forgotten, the visionary activism of these women has been largely overlooked.

In Women March for Peace, Denise Lynn examines the lives of seven Black women—Louise Thompson Patterson, Claudia Jones, Charlotta Bass, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Eslanda Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, and Beulah Richardson—and their resistance to domestic and foreign US policies during the height of anticommunist hysteria. While much peace scholarship focuses on the threat of nuclear conflict, Lynn instead explores how these women connected issues of civil rights at home with international military campaigns, highlights the hypocrisy of containment policies that sought to secure the freedom and rights for Koreans when US citizens were still oppressed. Lynn traces their peace advocacy through their personal papers, local and national articles, Progressive Party documents, and global conventions. Women March for Peace recovers the radical activism of these Black women to understand a crucial chapter in the fight against American imperialism and white supremacy.
 
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Written Here, Published There
How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain
Friederike Kind-Kovács
Central European University Press, 2015

Written Here, Published There offers a new perspective on the role of underground literature in the Cold War and challenges us to recognize gaps in the Iron Curtain. The book identifies a transnational undertaking that reinforced détente, dialogue, and cultural transfer, and thus counterbalanced the persistent belief in Europe's irreversible division.

It analyzes a cultural practice that attracted extensive attention during the Cold War but has largely been ignored in recent scholarship: tamizdat, or the unauthorized migration of underground literature across the Iron Curtain. Through this cultural practice, I offer a new reading of Cold War Europe's history. Investigating the transfer of underground literature from the 'Other Europe' to Western Europe, the United States, and back illuminates the intertwined fabrics of Cold War literary cultures. Perceiving tamizdat as both a literary and a social phenomenon, the book focuses on how individuals participated in this border-crossing activity and used secretive channels to guarantee the free flow of literature.

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