Results by title

97 books match the query 'Geopolitics' and 22 start with t

cover of Technology in Russian Strategic Culture: From the Nineteenth Century to the Present Day

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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cover of The Anomie of the Earth: Philosophy, Politics, and Autonomy in Europe and the Americas

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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cover of The Apathy of Empire: Cambodia in American Geopolitics

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.

 

 

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cover of The Black Pacific Narrative: Geographic Imaginings of Race and Empire between the World Wars

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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cover of The Blood of Abraham: Insights into the Middle East

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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cover of The Critic in the World: Essays in Honor of Fernando F. Segovia

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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cover of The Cunning of Gender Violence: Geopolitics and Feminism

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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cover of The Dying Sahara: US Imperialism and Terror in Africa

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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cover of The Dynamics of European Integration: Causes and Consequences of Institutional Choices

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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cover of The Endless Periphery: Toward a Geopolitics of Art in Lorenzo Lotto's Italy

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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cover of The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan

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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cover of The Kowoj: Identity, Migration, and Geopolitics in Late Postclassic Petén, Guatemala

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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cover of The Last Drop: The Politics of Water

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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cover of The Nazi Olympics: Sport, Politics, and Appeasement in the 1930s

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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cover of The Power of Small States: Diplomacy in World War II

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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cover of The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy

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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cover of The Roots of Cooperation: Constructing Interstate Alliances in Ancient Greece

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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cover of The Syrian Revolution: Between the Politics of Life and the Geopolitics of Death

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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cover of The Toledo War: The First Michigan-Ohio Rivalry

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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cover of Tourism Geopolitics: Assemblages of Infrastructure, Affect, and Imagination

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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cover of Transmedia Geographies: Decoloniality, Democratization, Cultural Citizenship, and Media Convergence

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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cover of Turkey and the Kurdish Peace Process: Actors, Issues, and Context

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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