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From Networks to Scales: Rethinking Advocacy Power in Global Politics.

Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink introduced the boomerang theory in their 1998 book, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. It remains one of the first broadly applicable theories for why groups of NGOs and interested individuals form transnational advocacy networks. Since its publication, however, the empirical conditions that prompted their theory have changed. The types of actors involved in transnational advocacy have diversified. Northern NGOs have lost power and influence and have been restricted in their access to southern states. Southern NGOs have developed the capacity to undertake advocacy on their own and often built closer relationships with their own governments. The architecture of global governance has likewise changed, providing new avenues of access and influence for southern voices.

In Beyond the Boomerang: From Transnational Advocacy Networks to Transcalar Advocacy in International Politics, editors Christopher L. Pallas and Elizabeth A. Bloodgood offer cutting-edge scholarship that synthesizes a new theoretical framework to develop a coherent, integrated picture of the current dynamics in global advocacy. This new theory of transcalar advocacy focuses on advocacy activities and policy impacts that transcend different levels or scales of political action. In transcalar advocacy, all NGOs–northern and southern–are treated as strategic actors, choosing the targets, scales of advocacy, and partnerships that best suit their capacities and goals. The case studies in the volume develop the empirical grounding of this theory using data from Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia, with several chapters featuring cross-national comparison. The chapters highlight the wide variety of actors involved in advocacy work, including NGOs, social movements, international institutions, governments, and businesses. Contributors use both qualitative and quantitative methodologies and bring to bear insights from political science, international relations, and sociology. The case studies also include diverse issue areas, from women’s rights to environmental protection, sustainable agriculture, health policy, and democracy promotion.
 

A timely exposé of the efforts of the religious right to influence global policy

With little fanfare and profound effect, “family values” have gone global, and the influence of the Christian Right is increasingly felt internationally. This is the first comprehensive study of the Christian Right’s global reach and its impact on international law and politics.

Despite their seeming relegation to the digital world, code and software can have material, large-scale, and even violent effects. In just one example, the NotPetya ransomware paralyzed one-fifth of world maritime trade in 2017. Mechanicity is a philosophical investigation of what happens when the force of language merges with material force, and what this means for the great ideas of politics: political action, international anarchy, and the very concept of sovereign state.

In this book, Vic Castro returns to Thomas Hobbes’s idea of the mechanical as a force both determinate and unruly, just like machines and software, and examines the human body—both in Hobbes’s political philosophy and in mishaps of genetic code—as that which brings together language and materiality in political society. To develop the framework of mechanicity, Castro also revives the Copenhagen School’s poststructuralist realism, the Derridian approach to traditional International Relations, and particularly actor-network theory (ANT). Using the case studies on Apple’s 2016 encrypted iPhone and NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, Mechanicity shows how software is not just constrained to immaterial cyberspace; it also reshapes the physical world and the politics possible therein.

Risk plays a dramatic role in international relations as leaders make decisions about such issues as war and peace, disarmament, and about lowering economic barriers to trade and investment. How a country's leaders think about risk in making foreign policy decisions is important in understanding why and how they make decisions. Rose McDermott applies prospect theory, a theory developed by psychologists to understand decisionmaking under conditions of risk, to four cases in American foreign policy. Prospect theory suggests that decisionmakers who are confronting losses are more likely to take risks than are those decisionmakers who are satisfied with the status quo. The cases used to demonstrate this dynamic include: the Suez Crisis, the U-2 affair, the decisions surrounding the admission of the Shah of Iran to the United States in 1979, and the attempted rescue of the American hostages in Iran in 1980. McDermott shows how prospect theory enables us to understand cases that are otherwise inexplicable. Risk Taking in International Relations offers a unique application of a sophisticated psychological model to international relations theory. The book will be of interest to political scientists and psychologists interested in decision making, in international relations and in American foreign policy.

A timely consideration of the meaning of transnational cultural interactions today

In an era of increasing globalization, the cultural and the international have borders as permeable as most nations’s—and an understanding of one requires making sense of the other. Foregrounding the role of mediation—understood here as a site of representation, transformation, and pluralization—the authors engage two specific questions: How might we make theoretical and practical sense of transnational cultural interactions? And how are we to understand the ways in which the sites of mediation represent, transform, and remediate internationals? Accordingly, the authors consider international issues like security, development, political activism, and the war against terrorism through the lens of cultural practices such as traveling through airports, exhibiting art and photography, logging on to the Internet, and spinning news stories.

War and the State exposes the invalid arguments employed in the unproductive debate about Realism among international relations scholars, as well as the common fallacy of sharply distinguishing between conflict among states and conflict within them. As R. Harrison Wagner demonstrates, any understanding of international politics must be part of a more general study of the relationship between political order and organized violence everywhere--as it was in the intellectual tradition from which modern-day Realism was derived. War and the State draws on the insights from Wagner's distinguished career to create an elegantly crafted essay accessible to both students and scholars.

"Possibly the most important book on international relations theory since Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics."
---James Fearon, Stanford University

"This is one of the best books on international relations theory I have read in a very long time. It is required reading for any student of modern IR theory. Once again, Wagner has shown himself to be one of the clearest thinkers in the field today."
---Robert Powell, Robson Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley

"Painting on a vast canvas, and tackling and integrating topics such as state formation, domestic politics, and international conflict, R. Harrison Wagner's War and the State offers many brilliant insights into the nature of international relations and international conflict. War and the State compellingly highlights the importance of constructing rigorous and valid theorizing and sets a high standard for all students of international relations. The field has much to gain if scholars follow the trail blazed by Wagner in this book."
---Hein Goemans, University of Rochester

R. Harrison Wagner is Professor of Government at the University of Texas.