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Until relatively recently, little had been written about gender issues in international relations despite the increased importance of the study of gender in other areas of the social sciences. Gender and International Relations fills that gap, providing a clear and accessible guide to the study of gender issues, feminist theories, and international relations. Steans illustrates how gender is central to nationalisms and political identity, the state, citizenship and conceptions of political community, security, and global political economy and development. Drawing on feminist scholarship from across the social sciences, she demonstrates the uses of feminism as critique. She also introduces readers to contemporary theoretical debates in international relations using concrete concerns and easily understandable issues to ground the discussion.

The book does not construct a single feminist theory of international relations nor does it advance a particular perspective of how gender can best be understood in an international or global context. Rather, the book argues that feminist theories have collectively produced insights crucial to the study of international relations and that these insights can be used to challenge conventional approaches to the discipline.

Until relatively recently, little had been written about gender issues in international relations despite the increased importance of the study of gender in other areas of the social sciences. Gender and International Relations fills that gap, providing a clear and accessible guide to the study of gender issues, feminist theories, and international relations. Steans illustrates how gender is central to nationalisms and political identity, the state, citizenship and conceptions of political community, security, and global political economy and development. Drawing on feminist scholarship from across the social sciences, she demonstrates the uses of feminism as critique. She also introduces readers to contemporary theoretical debates in international relations using concrete concerns and easily understandable issues to ground the discussion.

The book does not construct a single feminist theory of international relations nor does it advance a particular perspective of how gender can best be understood in an international or global context. Rather, the book argues that feminist theories have collectively produced insights crucial to the study of international relations and that these insights can be used to challenge conventional approaches to the discipline.

Launched in 2013, China's Belt and Road Initiative is forging connections in infrastructure, trade, energy, finance, tourism, and culture across Eurasia and Africa. This extraordinarily ambitious strategy places China at the center of a geography of overland and maritime connectivity stretching across more than sixty countries and incorporating almost two-thirds of the world’s population. But what does it mean to revive the Silk Roads for the twenty-first century?
 
Geocultural Power explores this question by considering how China is couching its strategy for building trade, foreign relations, and energy and political security in an evocative topography of history. Until now Belt and Road has been discussed as a geopolitical and geoeconomic project. This book introduces geocultural power to the analysis of international affairs. Tim Winter highlights how many countries—including Iran, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, and others—are revisiting their histories to find points of diplomatic and cultural connection. Through the revived Silk Roads, China becomes the new author of Eurasian history and the architect of the bridge between East and West. In a diplomatic dance of forgetting, episodes of violence, invasion, and bloodshed are left behind for a language of history and heritage that crosses borders in ways that further the trade ambitions of an increasingly networked China-driven economy.

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.

In 1945 the United States saw the Soviet Union as its principal ally. By 1947, it saw the Soviet Union as its principal opponent. How did this happen? Historian John Lukacs has provided an answer to this question through an exchange of letters with George F. Kennan. Their correspondence deals with the antecedents of containment between 1944 and 1946, during most of which time Kennan was at the American embassy in Moscow.

Kennan had strong opinions about America's appropriate role during and after World War II and is perhaps best known as the architect of America's containment policy. Much has been written about Kennan and containment, but relatively little is known about the events that made him compose and send the Long Telegram in 1946 that ultimately became the draft for foreign policy dealing with the Soviets in the following forty years.

These letters show Kennan's fear of the extent to which the United States misunderstood the Soviet regime. Especially in 1944, at the time of the Russians' betrayal of the Warsaw Uprising, it became evident that the Soviets were interested in establishing their rigid domination of Eastern and Central Europe and dividing the continent.

Kennan's letters to Lukacs are thorough and detailed, suggesting that the Truman administration was not in the least premature in opposing the Soviet Union. Indeed, both correspondents suggest that these decisions should have been made earlier. This series of letters will add greatly to our understanding of what preceded containment and the Cold War in 1947.

The twentieth-century history of few countries has been so profoundly marked by breaks, discontinuities, and ruptures as has Germany’s—the radical breaks between the Wilhelmine empire, the Weimar Republic, and the National Socialist period; the “end of history” in 1945 and the dual reconstruction from “Year Zero,” followed by the reunification of post-1989 German. This special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly focuses on the many dimensions of these discontinuities—social, political, cultural, aesthetic, psychological, and physical—as well as the continuities that are equally, if less apparently, implied by them.
The contributions presented here include Fredric Jameson’s “Ramblings in Old Berlin,” Günter Grass’s “Lonesome Capitalism,” and Peter Weiss’s “Aesthetics of Resistance.” Among the topics discussed in the volume are the debate over Holocaust memorials in Germany and the significance of their connections to the German past, the problematic continuity that identifies the new unified Germany with the former Federal Republic; the dangers to women posed by the neoliberal project; the legacy of the avant-garde in today’s media theory; Ars nova and Doktor Faustus; nostalgia for the old German Democratic Republic; and reflections on traumatic memory and history as trauma.

Contributors. Ulrich Baer, Michael Geyer, Günter Grass, Frigga Haug, Julia Hell, Fredric Jameson, Juliet Koss, Andreas Michel, Martin Morris, Arkady Plotnitsky, Pierra Vidal-Naquet, Peter Weiss, James E. Young

In the fading evening light of August 4, 1914, Great Britain’s H.M.S. Telconia set off on a mission to sever the five transatlantic cables linking Germany and the United States. Thus Britain launched its first attack of World War I and simultaneously commenced what became the war’s most decisive battle: the battle for American public opinion.

In this revealing study, Chad Fulwider analyzes the efforts undertaken by German organizations, including the German Foreign Ministry, to keep the United States out of the war. Utilizing archival records, newspapers, and “official” propaganda, the book also assesses the cultural impact of Germany’s political mission within the United States and comments upon the perception of American life in Europe during the early twentieth century.

Analyzes the German role in Central American domestic and international relations

Using previously untapped resources including private collections, the records of cultural institutions, and federal and state government archives, Schoonover analyzes the German role in Central American domestic and international relations.Of the four countries most active in independent Central America-Britain, the United States, France, and Germany- historians know the least about the full extent of the involvement of the Germans.
 
German colonial expansion was based on its position as an industrialized state seeking economic well-being and security in a growing world market. German leaders were quick to recognize that ties to the cheap labor of overseas countries could compensate for some of the costs and burdens of conceding material and social privileges to their domestic labor force. The Central American societies possessed limited resource bases; smaller and poorly educated populations; and less capital, communications, and technological development than Germany. They saw the borrowing of development as a key to their social, economic, and political progress. Wary Central American leaders also saw the influx of German industrialists as assurance against excessive U.S. presence in their political economies and cultures.
 
Although the simplistic bargain to trade economic development for cheap labor appeared to succeed in the short term, complex issues of German domestic unemployment and social disorder filtered to Central American countries and added to their own burdens. By 1929, Germany had recovered most of its pre-World War I economic position.
 

This book shows how to predict wars. More specifically, it tells us how to anticipate in a timely fashion the scope and extent of interstate conflict. By focusing on how all governments--democratic or not--seek to secure public support before undertaking risky moves such as starting a war, Getting to War provides a methodology for identifying a regime's intention to launch a conflict well in advance of the actual initiation.

The goal here is the identification of leading indicators of war. Getting to War develops such a leading political indicator by a systematic examination of the ways in which governments influence domestic and international information flows. Regardless of the relative openness of the media system in question, we can accurately gauge the underlying intentions of those governments by a systematic analysis of opinion-leading articles in the mass media. This analysis allows us to predict both the likelihood of conflict and what form of conflict--military or diplomatic/economic--will occur.

Theoretically, this book builds on a forty-year-old insight by Karl Deutsch--that all governments seek to mobilize public opinion through mass media and that careful analysis of such domestic media activity could provide an "early warning network" of international conflict. By showing how to tap the link between conflict initiation and public support, this book provides both a useful tool for understanding crisis behavior as well as new theoretical insights on how domestic politics help drive foreign policy.

Getting to War will be of interest to political scientists who study international disputes and national security as well as social scientists interested in media studies and political communication. General readers with an interest in military or diplomatic history--particularly U.S. history--will find that Getting to War provides an entirely new perspective on how to understand wars and international crises.

W. Ben Hunt is Assistant Professor of Politics, New York University

The fragile forest ecosystems in Latin America have long served domestic economic interests through timber production, mining, land resettlement, and cattle ranching. Over the past two decades, the demands on this natural resource base have been exacerbated by transnational commercial and political forces. These forces include MERCOSUR (the world's second largest customs union, composed of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay), the Kyoto Protocol, and international environmental organizations. As threats to the region's endangered ecosystems have grown, so have new approaches to stem the damage by incorporating local populations in decentralized systems of resource management. This volume examines several of the innovative strategies being tested in the Amazon rainforest. These attempts, involving multi-institutional responses to environmental threats, are showing initial results that offer cautious hope for the future.
Contributors include Martin Coy (Geographical Institute, University of Innsbruck, Austria), Herve Thery (Ecole Normal Superieur, Paris and Centre for Sustainable Development, University of Brasilia), David Cleary (Nature Conservancy, Brazil), Phil Fearnside (National Institute for Amazonian Studies, Brazil), Neli Aparecida de Mello (Centre for Sustainable Development, University of Brasilia), John Redwood (Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development for Latin America and the Caribbean, World Bank), Martina Neuburger (University of Tuebingen, Germany), Dan Pasca (University of Tuebingen), Judith Lisansky (World Bank), Sergio Rosendo (Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, University of East Anglia, UK), Fabio de Castro (Anthropological Center for Training and Research on Global Environmental Change, Indiana University, and Nucleo de Estudos e Pesquisa Ambiental, University of Campinas, Brazil), and Larissa Chermont (London School of Economics and Political Science, and Federal University of Para, Belem, Brazil).

As the economies of China, India, and other Asian nations continue to grow, these countries are seeking greater control over the rules that govern international trade. Setting the rules carries with it the power to establish advantage, so it’s no surprise that everyone wants a seat at the table—or that negotiations over rules often result in stalemates at meeting of the World Trade Organization.

Nowhere is the conflict over rule setting more evident than in the simmering “standards wars” over the rules that define quality and enable the adjudication of disputes. In Global Rivalries, Amy A. Quark explores the questions of how rules are made, who makes them, and how they are enforced, using the lens of cotton—a simple commodity that has become a poignant symbol of both the crisis of Western rule making power and the potential for powerful new rivals to supplant it. Quark traces the strategies for influencing rule making processes employed not only by national governments but also by transnational corporations, fiber scientists, and trade associations from around the globe. Quark analyzes the efficacy of their approaches and the implications for more marginal actors in the cotton trade, including producers in West Africa.

By placing the current contest within the historical development of the global capitalist system, Global Rivalries highlights a fascinating interaction of politics and economics.

Both on the continent and off, “Africa” is spoken of in terms of crisis: as a place of failure and seemingly insurmountable problems, as a moral challenge to the international community. What, though, is really at stake in discussions about Africa, its problems, and its place in the world? And what should be the response of those scholars who have sought to understand not the “Africa” portrayed in broad strokes in journalistic accounts and policy papers but rather specific places and social realities within Africa?

In Global Shadows the renowned anthropologist James Ferguson moves beyond the traditional anthropological focus on local communities to explore more general questions about Africa and its place in the contemporary world. Ferguson develops his argument through a series of provocative essays which open—as he shows they must—into interrogations of globalization, modernity, worldwide inequality, and social justice. He maintains that Africans in a variety of social and geographical locations increasingly seek to make claims of membership within a global community, claims that contest the marginalization that has so far been the principal fruit of “globalization” for Africa. Ferguson contends that such claims demand new understandings of the global, centered less on transnational flows and images of unfettered connection than on the social relations that selectively constitute global society and on the rights and obligations that characterize it.

Ferguson points out that anthropologists and others who have refused the category of Africa as empirically problematic have, in their devotion to particularity, allowed themselves to remain bystanders in the broader conversations about Africa. In Global Shadows, he urges fellow scholars into the arena, encouraging them to find a way to speak beyond the academy about Africa’s position within an egregiously imbalanced world order.

This groundbreaking collection focuses on what may be, for cultural studies, the most intriguing aspect of contemporary globalization—the ways in which the postnational restructuring of the world in an era of transnational capitalism has altered how we must think about cultural production. Mapping a "new world space" that is simultaneously more globalized and localized than before, these essays examine the dynamic between the movement of capital, images, and technologies without regard to national borders and the tendency toward fragmentation of the world into increasingly contentious enclaves of difference, ethnicity, and resistance.

Ranging across issues involving film, literature, and theory, as well as history, politics, economics, sociology, and anthropology, these deeply interdisciplinary essays explore the interwoven forces of globalism and localism in a variety of cultural settings, with a particular emphasis on the Asia-Pacific region. Powerful readings of the new image culture, transnational film genre, and the politics of spectacle are offered as is a critique of globalization as the latest guise of colonization. Articles that unravel the complex links between the global and local in terms of the unfolding narrative of capital are joined by work that illuminates phenomena as diverse as "yellow cab" interracial sex in Japan, machinic desire in Robocop movies, and the Pacific Rim city. An interview with Fredric Jameson by Paik Nak-Chung on globalization and Pacific Rim responses is also featured, as is a critical afterword by Paul Bové.

Positioned at the crossroads of an altered global terrain, this volume, the first of its kind, analyzes the evolving transnational imaginary—the full scope of contemporary cultural production by which national identities of political allegiance and economic regulation are being undone, and in which imagined communities are being reshaped at both the global and local levels of everyday existence.

Edited by one of the most prominent scholars in the field and including a distinguished group of contributors, this collection of essays makes a striking intervention in the increasingly heated debates surrounding the cultural dimensions of globalization. While including discussions about what globalization is and whether it is a meaningful term, the volume focuses in particular on the way that changing sites—local, regional, diasporic—are the scenes of emergent forms of sovereignty in which matters of style, sensibility, and ethos articulate new legalities and new kinds of violence.

Seeking an alternative to the dead-end debate between those who see globalization as a phenomenon wholly without precedent and those who see it simply as modernization, imperialism, or global capitalism with a new face, the contributors seek to illuminate how space and time are transforming each other in special ways in the present era. They examine how this complex transformation involves changes in the situation of the nation, the state, and the city. While exploring distinct regions—China, Africa, South America, Europe—and representing different disciplines and genres—anthropology, literature, political science, sociology, music, cinema, photography—the contributors are concerned with both the political economy of location and the locations in which political economies are produced and transformed. A special strength of the collection is its concern with emergent styles of subjectivity, citizenship, and mobilization and with the transformations of state power through which market rationalities are distributed and embodied locally.

Contributors. Arjun Appadurai, Jean François Bayart, Jérôme Bindé, Néstor García Canclini, Leo Ching, Steven Feld, Ralf D. Hotchkiss, Wu Hung, Andreas Huyssen, Boubacar Touré Mandémory, Achille Mbembe, Philipe Rekacewicz, Saskia Sassen, Fatu Kande Senghor, Seteney Shami, Anna Tsing, Zhang Zhen

When violence broke out at the demonstrations surrounding the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, the authors of this book were there. The protests proved to be a critical moment in the global justice movement.

Presenting the first systematic empirical research on the global justice movement, Globalization from Below analyzes a movement from the viewpoints of the activists, organizers, and demonstrators themselves. The authors traveled to Genoa with anti-G8 protesters and collected data from more than 800 participants. A year later, they surveyed 2,400 activists at the European Social Forum in Florence. To understand how this cycle of global protest emerged, they examine the interactions between challengers and elites, and discuss how these new models of activism fit into current social movement work.

Globalization from Below places the protests within larger debates, revealing and investigating the forces that led to a clash between demonstrators and the Italian government, which responded with violence.

Donatella della Porta is professor of political science; Massimiliano Andretta is a researcher in political science and sociology; Lorenzo Mosca is a researcher in information and communication technologies; Herbert Reiter is a researcher in history, all at the European University Institute.

Border fixity—the proscription of foreign conquest and the annexation of homeland territory—has, since World War II, become a powerful norm in world politics. This development has been said to increase stability and peace in international relations. Yet, in a world in which it is unacceptable to challenge international borders by force, sociopolitically weak states remain a significant source of widespread conflict, war, and instability.

In this book, Boaz Atzili argues that the process of state building has long been influenced by external territorial pressures and competition, with the absence of border fixity contributing to the evolution of strong states—and its presence to the survival of weak ones. What results from this norm, he argues, are conditions that make internal conflict and the spillover of interstate war more likely. Using a comparison of historical and contemporary case studies, Atzili sheds light on the relationship between state weakness and conflict. His argument that under some circumstances an international norm that was established to preserve the peace may actually create conditions that are ripe for war is sure to generate debate and shed light on the dynamics of continuing conflict in the twenty-first century.

Lessons in Diplomacy from Colonial America to the Cold War

"In a time when negotiations, both great and small, continue to shape our world, this book provides an excellent opportunity to learn from the past and understand the present.”—Kofi Annan, Nobel Peace Prize Winner and former Secretary General of the United Nations

“A thought-provoking, informative book, highly recommended for all readers interested in international affairs.”—Library Journal

“For anyone with an interest in diplomacy and political history, Stanton's book is both entertaining and informative.” —Foreign Policy Watch

“Every professional concerned with dispute resolution and every student of negotiation has much to learn from Fredrik Stanton's lively stories of eight history-shaping negotiations.”—Robert H. Mnookin, Chair Program on Negotiation, Harvard Law School

“An excellent introduction into some of the great triumphs and failures of modern diplomacy.”—Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“An interesting, informative study well worth reading and pondering.” —American Diplomacy

“Stanton deftly illustrates that the power of haggling can easily rival that of any army or warhead.”—Roll Call

“Exhaustive research and careful thought have enabled Stanton to employ an extraordinary writing talent to produce a contribution to history and a source of enjoyable reading.”—New York Law Journal

“Stanton brings back to life both famous and some long forgotten personalities in the history of major American, European, and Asian negotiations. He persuasively makes his case for the importance of negotiators and negotiations both when wars can be kept from beginning and when wars end. He weaves in deft descriptions of the personal strengths and foibles of negotiators and homes in on the ability of the best to improvise when maneuvering on unfamiliar terrain.” —Ambassador Richard W. Murphy, Council on Foreign Relations

Words as much as weapons have shaped the course of history. Whether to avert, resolve, assist, or secure the outcome of a conflict, diplomacy in the modern age has had great triumphs and bitter failures, from the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, which narrowly spared humanity from a nuclear Armageddon, to the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, which created problems that still confront us today. Drawing on primary sources, transcripts, and interviews, Great Negotiations: Agreements that Changed the Modern World tells the stories of eight key episodes in modern diplomacy. From Benjamin Franklin securing crucial French support for the American revolution to Reagan and Gorbachev laying the groundwork to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons, Fredrik Stanton explains what each party brought to the negotiating table, the stakes, the obstacles to success, and how they were overcome.

“The authors make some very critical interventions in this debate and scholars engaged in the environmental ‘pollution haven’ and ‘race to the bottom’ debates will need to take the arguments made here seriously, re-evaluating their own preferred theories to respond to the insightful theorizing and empirically rigorous testing that Zeng and Eastin present in the book.”
—Ronald Mitchell, University of Oregon

China has earned a reputation for lax environmental standards that allegedly attract corporations more interested in profit than in moral responsibility and, consequently, further negate incentives to raise environmental standards. Surprisingly, Ka Zeng and Joshua Eastin find that international economic integration with nation-states that have stringent environmental regulations facilitates the diffusion of corporate environmental norms and standards to Chinese provinces. At the same time, concerns about “green” tariffs imposed by importing countries encourage Chinese export-oriented firms to ratchet up their own environmental standards. The authors present systematic quantitative and qualitative analyses and data that not only demonstrate the ways in which external market pressure influences domestic environmental policy but also lend credence to arguments for the ameliorative effect of trade and foreign direct investment on the global environment.

Following the launch of Sputnik, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization became a prominent sponsor of scientific research in its member countries, a role it retained until the end of the Cold War. As NATO marks sixty years since the establishment of its Science Committee, the main organizational force promoting its science programs, Greening the Alliance is the first book to chart NATO’s scientific patronage—and the motivations behind it—from the organization’s early days to the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Drawing on previously unseen documents from NATO’s own archives, Simone Turchetti reveals how its investments were rooted in the alliance’s defense and surveillance needs, needs that led it to establish a program prioritizing environmental studies. A long-overlooked and effective diplomacy exercise, NATO’s “greening” at one point constituted the organization’s chief conduit for negotiating problematic relations between allies. But while Greening the Alliance explores this surprising coevolution of environmental monitoring and surveillance, tales of science advisers issuing instructions to bomb oil spills with napalm or Dr. Strangelove–like experts eager to divert the path of hurricanes with atomic weapons make it clear: the coexistence of these forces has not always been harmonious. Reflecting on this rich, complicated legacy in light of contemporary global challenges like climate change, Turchetti offers both an eye-opening history of international politics and environmental studies and a thoughtful assessment of NATO’s future.