Collection: Politics and International Relations
One of the newest collections, the Politics and International Relations list comes with a truly diverse and international perspective and will grow significantly over the next few years. With over 150 books in the collection, series include: Bristol Studies in East Asian International Relations; Bristol Studies in International Theory; Gender, Sexuality and Global Politics; Spaces of Peace, Security and Development; Transnational Administration and Global Policy.
Politics and International Relations Collection
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What role does dialogue play in peacebuilding? How can community-based activities contribute to broader peace processes? What can participatory research methods add to local efforts to build peace?
In this book the authors examine these questions through their work with two different Colombian communities who have pursued dialogue amidst ongoing violence, environmental injustice and socio-economic challenges. By reflecting on what people in these contrasting places have achieved through participatory peacebuilding, the authors explore different forms of local agency, the prospects for non-extractive academic engagement, and practical and theoretical lessons for participating in peace in other conflict-affected settings.
Why do international actors, including powerful states, often fail to develop clear foreign policies and instead adopt indecisive, ‘muddling-through’ approaches?
This book develops a concept and a theory of reluctance in world politics. Applying it to the study of regional crisis management by leading powers, it finds that reluctance emerges when governments fail to devise clear foreign policy preferences and face competing international pressures.
The study of reluctance in world politics sheds new light on some of the most pressing problems of our time, from weak crisis management to cooperation deficits in global governance.
This book explores the relationship between the state and war within the context of seismic technological change.
As we experience a fourth industrial revolution, technology already exerts a huge impact on the character of war and military strategies in the form of drones and other types of ‘remote’ warfare. However, technological developments are not confined to the defence sector, and the diffusion of military technology inevitably also affects the wider economy and society.
This book investigates these possible developments and speculates on their ramifications for the future. Through its analysis, the book questions what will happen to war and the state and whether we will reach a point where war leads to the unmaking of the state itself.
This book examines Japan’s relationship with Myanmar from the passage of its constitution in May 2008 to the February 2021 coup d’état that finished its transition to a ‘disciplined democracy.’
It explores the nexus between security and political economy in the context of changing regional dynamics characterized by ‘Great Power’ competition and cooperation. Focusing on the impact of Japan’s relations with Myanmar on people in Myanmar and beyond, the author argues that the Japanese government and businesses side lined ‘universal values’ for profit at the expense of human security.
This text develops a unique Area Studies approach that critiques how Japan’s foreign policy elites perceive Japan’s role in the liberal international order.
During the second half of the 20th century, Colombia suffered extreme levels of political violence. This book explores the involvement of the international community in peacebuilding efforts in Colombia since 2016. In particular, it examines how the interventions were framed in order to promote and sustain their involvement and questions whether these frames reflected the true reality within Colombia.
The book focuses on key donors, including US, the EU, Canada, Sweden and the UK, as well as multinational actors, such as the UN and the World Bank, to demonstrate how their framing of local issues for international consumption can have real world implications for peacebuilding efforts on the ground.
The Disney Princesses are a billion-dollar industry, known and loved by children across the globe.
Robyn Muir provides an exploratory and holistic examination of this worldwide commercial and cultural phenomenon in its key representations: films, merchandising and marketing, and park experiences. Muir highlights the messages and images of femininity found within the Disney Princess canon and provides a rigorous and innovative methodology for analysing gender in media.
Including an in-depth examination of each princess film from the last 83 years, the book provides a lens through which to view and understand how Disney Princesses have contributed to the depiction of femininity within popular culture.
Through two Colombian case studies, Sanne Weber identifies the ways in which conflict experiences are defined by structures of gender inequality, and how these could be transformed in the post-conflict context.
The author reveals that current, apparently gender-sensitive, transitional justice (TJ) and disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) laws and policies ultimately undermine rather than transform gender equality and, consequently, weaken the chances of achieving holistic and durable peace. To overcome this, Weber offers an innovative approach to TJ and DDR that places gendered citizenship as both the starting point and the continued driving force of post-conflict reconstruction.
The frequent failure of military or armed interventions to protect civilians is well known. This edited collection provides a comprehensive account of a different, effective paradigm: unarmed civilian protection (UCP).
The principles and methods of UCP have been used for many decades to protect both specific, threatened individuals as well as whole communities. Featuring contributions from around the world, this book brings together a wide range of UCP practices in order to examine their underlying theory and interrelated strategies.
The book provides an important illustration of the contributions UCP can make, while also discussing its limitations and failures.
This book introduces the concept of ‘knowledge alchemy’ to capture the generic process of transforming mundane practices and policies of governance into competitive ones following imagined global gold standards. Using examples from North America, Europe and Asia, it explores how knowledge alchemy increasingly informs national and institutional policies and practices on economic performance, higher education, research and innovation.
The book examines how governments around the world have embraced global models of world-class university, human capital and talent competition as essential in ensuring national competitiveness. Through its analysis, the book shows how this strongly future-oriented and anticipatory knowledge governance is steered by a surge of global classifications, rankings and indicators, resulting in numerous comparisons of various domains that today form more constraining global policy scripts.
Bringing together eminent International Relations (IR) scholars from China and the West, this book examines moral realism from a range of different perspectives. Through its analyses, it verifies the robustness of moral realism in IR theory.
The first section of the book is written by Chinese scholars and dedicated to debates about how moral realism relates to traditional schools of IR theory. The latter portion, provided by Western contributors, critically investigates both the universal and practical values of moral realism. Finally, Yan Xuetong concludes by responding constructively to all criticisms and further exploring the nature and characteristics of interstate leadership in moral realism.
