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How democratic regimes should engage with authoritarian regimes, or self-proclaimed authorities in states under occupation, has long been a subject of debate. The work examines Canada's relations with member-states of the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War. Central and East European communist states were nominally independent but established under occupation. Canadian leaders explored whether engaging in foreign relations with these countries would encourage liberalization or embolden dictatorships. Over time, Canada's position evolved as a policy of encouraging bilateral and multilateral diplomacy, while calling for the respect of human rights. However, Canada's economic relationship with East European states was at times at cross-purposes with its democratic principles. Andrea Chandler concludes that while Canada did play a role in encouraging democratization, the country's leaders did not sufficiently consider the impact of these policies on the citizens of Warsaw Pact countries.

This book treats Canada’s engagement with Hungary, Poland, the German Democratic Republic, Romania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakiaduring the Cold War, in which the Western countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (including Canada) had an adversarial relation with the Soviet bloc nations.

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.

The growing influence of sport has created a unique opportunity to build international relationships for a number of purposes, including cultural, economic, shared humanitarian, and increasingly, political diplomacy.  Case Studies in Sport Diplomacy explores the influence and effectiveness of sport diplomacy in improving long-term relations between nations by opening a dialogue with international leaders, raising awareness of host countries and to bridging cultural differences, and in building international relationships through ambassadors that could increase trade and legislative agreements, and even bring peace to nations in conflict.

Authored by talented scholars from all over the world, many of whom served as sport diplomats, their unique perspective in each case sheds light on the ways in which sport diplomacy can succeed or falter in achieving strategic objectives between influential – and in some cases historically adversarial – countries.

A thoroughly intriguing look at sport diplomacy’s past and ongoing efforts to improve relations with countries such as Brazil, Russia, Iran and China, Case Studies in Sport Diplomacy brings to the forefront an area in which sport has been able to open up and increase opportunities to build relationships between people, communities, governments and countries.

A thorough reassessment of how domestic factors do and do not constrain the use of American military force abroad in the early twenty-first century.

More than two decades have passed since the September 11th terrorist attacks resuscitated debates about the “imperial presidency” within the United States. During that same time, the United States has fought costly and inconclusive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, pivoted to the Pacific to counter China, and pulled its gaze back to Europe and the Middle East in response to wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Moreover, new technologies and ways of funding and staffing wars have made the costs of war less visible to the public while polarization has increased and a new legal doctrine of presidential power has gained force.

Against this backdrop, Checking the Costs of War reassesses how domestic factors have both constrained and failed to constrain the use of military power across different contexts and over time. Richly empirical chapters explore the varying effects of different kinds of potential checks: legislative, public opinion, and bureaucratic. Collectively, chapters offer new insight into the prospects for war and peace today.

China is fast emerging as a powerful player on the world stage. This book takes a closer look at the country's stance on a range of global issues, arguing that its multipolar diplomacy offers a concrete strategy to constrain the US pursuit of unipolar primacy.

Many people assume that China will follow an imperialistic strategy and therefore be in direct conflict with the American empire in a quest for world domination. Jenny Clegg shows that China is in fact taking a multilateral approach, offering real assistance to developing countries and helping to build the institutions required to run a multipolar world. Without glossing over China's own internal difficulties, the book argues that its international consensus-building strategy could lead to a more peaceful and equitable world.

This book offers a refreshing perspective on China that will be of great value to those interested in the big political questions of how to tackle war and imperialism, globalisation and development as well as to undergraduate students of politics, economics and international relations.

China’s Challenges and International Order Transition introduces an integrated conceptual framework of “international order” categorized by three levels (power, rules, and norms) and three issue-areas (security, political, and economic). Each contributor engages one or more of these analytical dimensions to examine two questions: (1) Has China already challenged this dimension of international order? (2) How will China challenge this dimension of international order in the future?

The contested views and perspectives in this volume suggest it is too simple to assume an inevitable conflict between China and the outside world. With different strategies to challenge or reform the many dimensions of international order, China’s role is not a one-way street. It is an interactive process in which the world may change China as much as China may change the world.

The aim of the book is to broaden the debate beyond the “Thucydides Trap” perspective currently popular in the West. Rather than offering a single argument, this volume offers a platform for scholars, especially Chinese scholars vs. Western scholars, to exchange and debate their different views and perspectives on China and the potential transition of international order.

Chomsky is as controversial as he is influential. Admirers see him as a courageous teller of unpleasant truths about political power and those who wield it in the United States. Critics view him as a propagandist and ideologue who sees only black and white where there are multiple shades of gray. While Chomsky's fans tend to view him uncritically, his critics often don't take him seriously. Unlike any previous work, this book takes Chomsky seriously while treating him critically. The author gives Chomsky credit for valuable contributions to our understanding of the contemporary political world, but spares no criticism of the serious deficiencies he sees in Chomsky's political analyses.

While the view that only states act as global actors is conventional, significant diplomatic and cross-cultural activity is taking place in cities today. Economic growth and fiscal experiments all occur in urban contexts. Political reforms, social innovation, and protests and revolutions generate in cities. Criminal activities, terrorist actions, counterinsurgency, missile attacks (indeed, atomic bombs), and wars are centered in big cities. They are sources of global pollution as well as of environmental transformations such as urban gardening. Knowledge production, big data collection, and tech innovation all spur from intense interaction in cities. They are the meeting points between different cultures, religions, and identities.

These increasingly international cities develop twinning networks and projects, share information, sign cooperation agreements, contribute to the drafting of national and international policies, provide development aid, promote assistance to refugees, and do territorial marketing through decentralized city-city or district-district cooperation. Cities do what “municipalities” used to do many centuries ago: they cooperate but also enter into intense competitive dynamics. To understand current sociopolitical dynamics on a planetary level, we need to have two mental maps in mind: the state-centered map and the nonstate centered map. We must take into account the existence of a complex diplomatic regime based on different overlapping levels—the urban and the state.

Every day, coalition cabinets make policy decisions critical to international politics. Juliet Kaarbo examines the dynamics of these multiparty cabinets in parliamentary democracies in order to assess both the quality of coalition decision making and the degree to which coalitions tend to favor peaceful or military solutions. Are coalition cabinets so riddled by conflict that they cannot make foreign policy effectively, or do the multiple voices represented in the cabinet create more legitimate and imaginative responses to the international system? Do political and institutional constraints inherent to coalition cabinets lead to nonaggressive policies? Or do institutional and political forces precipitate more belligerent behavior?

Employing theory from security studies and political psychology as well as a combination of quantitative cross-national analyses and twelve qualitative comparative case studies of foreign policy made by coalition cabinets in Japan, the Netherlands, and Turkey, Kaarbo identifies the factors that generate highly aggressive policies, inconsistency, and other policy outcomes. Her findings have implications not merely for foreign policy but for all types of decision making and policy-making by coalition governments.

Explores the circumstances and elements that make for a successful Southeast Asian entrepôt.

What made modern Singapore and fifteenth-century Malacca so exceptional in their success in trade, and why did so many other attempts fail to coalesce? Coming Together recasts the founding of modern Singapore as the culmination of a long tradition of alliance-building within the “straits and peninsula,” that sliver of maritime Southeast Asia that connects the Indian Ocean with the China Seas. From abortive Franco-Siamese projects in the 1680s, through lonely failure at Poulo Condor and stubborn frustration on the Burmese “Eastern Coast,” to the persistent enterprise of Bugis and Malay rulers during the 1770s and 1780s, Coming Together follows an evolving cast of princes, captains, merchants, and missionaries drawn together by a powerful idea: that the trade of Asia could be concentrated at a single and wildly prosperous place.

Long-neglected French archival materials illuminate events long distorted by colonial historiography, revealing the entrepôt as a transcultural project sustained by tributary diplomacy, treaty-making, and the pragmatic exchange of protection for commercial privilege. The result is a fundamental reinterpretation of the origins of Penang and Singapore—and of the alliance-building that lies at the core of modern Singapore.

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.

When does a reigning great power of the international system supplement military containment of a challenging power by restricting its economic exchanges with that state? Scholars of great power politics have traditionally focused on examining a reigning power’s military containment of a challenging power. In direct contrast, Compound Containment demonstrates that these conventional studies are flawed without a sound understanding of the multilayered aspects of containment strategy in great power politics. Since economic capacity and military power are intimately linked to one another, countering a challenging power requires addressing both economic and military dimensions. Nonetheless, this nexus of security and economy in a reigning power’s response to a challenging power cannot be explained by traditional theories that dominate research in international security. Author Dong Jung Kim fills a gap in the scholarship on great power competition by investigating when a reigning power will make its military containment of a challenging power “compound” by simultaneously employing restrictive economic measures. Its main theoretical claims are corroborated by an analysis of key historical cases of reigning power-challenging power competition. This book also offers policy prescriptions for the United States by examining whether the United States is in a position to complement military containment of China with restrictive economic measures.

Concepts are socially and linguistically constructed and used for multiple purposes, such as justifying war in the name of democracy; or, using the idea of democracy to resist Western intervention and influence. In this fascinating and novel edited collection, Piki Ish-Shalom and the contributors interrogate the “conceptions of concepts” in international relations. Using theoretical frameworks from Gramsci and Bourdieu, among others, the authors show that not interrogating the meaning of the language we use to talk about international relations obscures the way we understand (or portray) IR.  The authors examine self-determination, winning in war, avoidance of war, military design and reform agenda, vagueness in political discourse, “blue economy,” friendship, and finally, the very idea of the “international community” itself. As the author asserts, Bourdieu’s sociology of field and Gramsci’s political theory, combined, “offer us a socio-political theory of relations of power and domination concealed by doxic knowledge and taken-for-granted rules, in which essential contested concepts and political-serving conceptions can and do play an important role.”

Conflict Resolution in the Twenty-first Centuryis not only an essential introduction for students and scholars, it is a must-have guide for the men and women entrusted with creating stability and security in our changing world.

In 2004, the United States, five Central American countries, and the Dominican Republic signed the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), signaling the region’s commitment to a neoliberal economic model. For many, however, neoliberalism had lost its luster as the new century dawned, and resistance movements began to gather force. Contesting Trade in Central America is the first book-length study of the debate over CAFTA, tracing the agreement’s drafting, its passage, and its aftermath across Central America.

Rose J. Spalding draws on nearly two hundred interviews with representatives from government, business, civil society, and social movements to analyze the relationship between the advance of free market reform in Central America and the parallel rise of resistance movements. She views this dynamic through the lens of Karl Polanyi’s “double movement” theory, which posits that significant shifts toward market economics will trigger oppositional, self-protective social countermovements. Examining the negotiations, political dynamics, and agents involved in the passage of CAFTA in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, Spalding argues that CAFTA served as a high-profile symbol against which Central American oppositions could rally. Ultimately, she writes, post-neoliberal reform “involves not just the design of appropriate policy mixes and sequences, but also the hard work of building sustainable and inclusive political coalitions, ones that prioritize the quality of social bonds over raw economic freedom.”

2026 Sussex International Theory Prize Honorable Mention

While the idea of a cosmopolitan order embracing all humankind is ancient, after the Cold War it was widely believed to be an emerging future. As global interdependence and interaction through new technologies increased, literature of cosmopolitan globalization argued that these changes were setting the stage for a structural transformation of world politics. Yet, a revolt against globalism and increasingly divisive and unstable international order has dramatically contradicted this idea. This presents a puzzle for International Relations theory: Why have attempts to construct cosmopolitan order struggled to emerge in the modern global world? 

Cosmopolitan Imaginaries and International Disorder argues that advocacy for cosmopolitan order reform in the modern world has struggled to recognize the political identities of states and populations and to legitimize its proposed political hierarchies. As a result, these efforts have been overwhelmed by states shoring up their power and remobilizing exclusionary nationalist identities, especially when struggles are intensified in contexts of international instability and economic turmoil. In developing a theory to explain these patterns of cosmopolitan politics, this book offers insight into the limits and role of cosmopolitanism in a dividing international order after liberal globalism.

When Cuba threw off the yoke of Spanish rule at the end of the nineteenth century, it did so with the help of another foreign power, the United States. Thereafter, the United States became involved in Cuban affairs, intervening twice militarily (1898-1902 and 1906-1909). What was the effect of U.S. intervention?

Conventional wisdom indicates that U.S. intervention hindered the rise of militarism in Cuba in the early years of statehood. This pathfinding study, however, takes just the opposite view. Jose M. Hernández argues that while U.S. influence may have checked the worst excesses of the Independence-war veterans who assumed control of Cuba's government, it did not completely deter them from resorting to violence. Thus, a tradition of using violence as a method for transferring power developed in Cuba that often made a mockery of democratic processes.

In substantiating this innovative interpretation, Hernández covers a crucial phase in Cuban history that has been neglected by most recent U.S. historians. Correcting stereotypes and myths, he takes a fresh and dispassionate look at Cuba's often romanticized struggle for political emancipation, describing and analyzing in persuasive detail civilmilitary relations throughout the period. This puts national hero Jose Martí's role in the 1895-1898 war of independence in an unusual perspective and sets in bold relief the historical forces that went underground in 1898-1902, only to resurface a few years later.

This study will be of interest to all students of hemispheric relations. It presents not only a more accurate picture of the Cuba spawned by American intervention, but also the Cuban side of a story that too frequently has been told solely from the U.S. point of view.