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This book explores buffer states' agency beyond being highly interactive spaces for the competing strategic and security interests of larger powers. Analyzing 21 political events, the author offers a new conceptual framework for the buffer state, which emphasizes strategic utility and agency. Applying this to the case study of Nepal as a buffer state between India and China, he offers a systematic analysis of Sino-Indian interests in the wider region, and Nepal’s interactions with and reactions to them, and argues that the buffer state in contemporary international relations is characterized by intense competitive overtures from its contending neighboring states. However, the buffer state is not just a spectator but an active participant that consistently assesses and reassesses its geopolitical position in between much larger competing powers. This reading offers a new understanding of the buffer state as a highly dynamic political space wherein the levels of influence and strategies of bigger powers can be examined. Aimed at a multidisciplinary audience, this book will be of particular interest to scholars, practitioners and students of international relations, security studies, strategic studies, and Asian Studies.
This book examines China and Australia’s economic and security relations against the background of China’s increasing economic and political role. Utilizing the theory of complex interdependence, the authors consider whether greater interdependence between Beijing and Canberra augments closer economic cooperation and trade or prompts political leverage and a security challenge. Exploring China-Australia relations from the mainstream Chinese perspective this book will be of interest to scholars and students of international relations, Chinese studies, global political economy, governmental and intergovernmental organizations.
Until the late twentieth century, the majority of foreign-born children adopted in the United States came from Korea. In the absorbing book Reframing Transracial Adoption, Kristi Brian investigates the power dynamics at work between the white families, the Korean adoptees, and the unknown birth mothers. Brian conducts interviews with adult adopted Koreans, adoptive parents, and adoption agency facilitators in the United States to explore the conflicting interpretations of race, culture, multiculturalism, and family. Brian argues for broad changes as she critiques the so-called "colorblind" adoption policy in the United States. Analyzing the process of kinship formation, the racial aspects of these adoptions, and the experience of adoptees, she reveals the stifling impact of dominant nuclear-family ideologies and the crowded intersections of competing racial discourses. Brian finds a resolution in the efforts of adult adoptees to form coherent identities and launch powerful adoption reform movements.
This book explores the changing dynamics and challenges behind the rapid expanse of Africa’s urban population. Africa’s urban age is underway. With the world’s fastest growing urban population, the continent is rapidly transforming from one that is largely rural, to one that is largely urban. Often facing limited budgets, those tasked with managing African cities require empirical evidence on the nature of demands for infrastructure, escalating environmental hazards, and ever-expanding informal settlements. Drawing on the work of the African Urban Research Initiative, this book brings together contributions from local researchers investigating key themes and challenges within their own contexts. An important example of urban knowledge co-production, the book demonstrates the regional diversity that can be seen as the main feature of African urbanism, with even well-accepted concepts such as informality manifesting in markedly different ways from place to place. Providing an important nuanced perspective on the heterogeneity of African cities and the challenges they face, this book will be an important resource for researchers across development studies, African studies, and urban studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003008385, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license
This book highlights the emerging bidirectional interactions between Europe—primarily the EU—and Asia in the fields of political economy, development, environmental policy, security, diplomacy, and inter-institutional relations within the context of two recent global trends: the rise of China and the growing withdrawal of the U.S. from multilateral commitments. The volume incorporates nine different aspects and dimensions of Asian-European relations. In recent decades, Asia has (re-)gained rising importance on the world stage, which also entails closer interconnections with Europe. In an age of receding American global leadership and reduced commitments to its European allies, the EU and its member states have increasingly become more open to seeking and considering new partnerships. The rising economic prowess of Asia has made it of particular interest for European states. The book’s focus lies on potential challenges and opportunities in the bidirectional interactions between European and Asian states and institutions.
Discusses the way leaders deal with risk in making foreign policy decisions
“An excellent collection of essays that illustrate how EU member states’ wish to implement normatively inspired policies is confronted with the geopolitical realities of today’s world. The authors succeed in presenting an even-handed account of the way in which the tensions between norms and geopolitics play out, as well as of the responses given by EU policy makers.” —Wil Hout, International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University, the Netherlands The European Union (EU), while collectively constituting the world’s largest development provider, has come under internal and external pressures over the past decade. This book argues that the EU’s development policies are situated between the bloc’s normative ideals and the global geopolitical realities in which it is embedded. In order to investigate these tensions, it asks how far the 'normative power' Europe concept exists in EU development policies, and how far it is recognizable in the EU’s focus on human rights, the rule of law, and sustainability. In light of the tension in EU development policies between those ideals and the necessity to project neoliberal and geopolitical interests, how do receiving countries perceive the EU’s development efforts? This volume, complete with contributions from academics from a wide range of disciplines based all around the globe, provides answers to these essential questions.
Observing International Relations draws upon the modern systems theory of society, developed by Niklas Luhmann, to provide new perspectives on central aspects of contemporary world society and to generate theoretically informed insights on the possibilities and limits of regulation in global governance. The authors develop a Luhmannian theory of world society by contrasting it with competing notions of international society, critically discussing the use of modern systems theory in international relations theory and assessing its treatment of central concepts within international relations, such as power, sovereignty, governance and war.
Why do great powers accommodate the rise of some challengers but contain and confront others, even at the risk of war? When Right Makes Might proposes that the ways in which a rising power legitimizes its expansionist aims significantly shapes great power responses. Stacie E. Goddard theorizes that when faced with a new challenger, great powers will attempt to divine the challenger’s intentions: does it pose a revolutionary threat to the system or can it be incorporated into the existing international order? Goddard departs from conventional theories of international relations by arguing that great powers come to understand a contender’s intentions not only through objective capabilities or costly signals but by observing how a rising power justifies its behavior to its audience. To understand the dynamics of rising powers, then, we must take seriously the role of legitimacy in international relations. A rising power’s ability to expand depends as much on its claims to right as it does on its growing might. As a result, When Right Makes Might poses significant questions for academics and policymakers alike. Underpinning her argument on the oft-ignored significance of public self-presentation, Goddard suggests that academics (and others) should recognize talk’s critical role in the formation of grand strategy. Unlike rationalist and realist theories that suggest rhetoric is mere window-dressing for power, When Right Makes Might argues that rhetoric fundamentally shapes the contours of grand strategy. Legitimacy is not marginal to international relations; it is essential to the practice of power politics, and rhetoric is central to that practice.
This edited collection explores the ways in which our understanding of the past in Dutch history and culture can be rethought to consider not only how it forms part of the present but how it can relate also to the future. Divided into three parts – The Uses of Myth and History, The Past as Illumination of Cultural Context, and Historiography in Focus – this book seeks to demonstrate the importance of the past by investigating the transmission of culture and its transformations. It reflects on the history of historiography and looks critically at the products of the historiographic process, such as Dutch and Afrikaans literary history. The chapters cover a range of disciplines and approaches: some authors offer a broad view of a particular period, such as Jonathan Israel's contribution on myth and history in the ideological politics of the Dutch Golden Age, while others zoom in on specific genres, texts or historical moments, such as Benjamin Schmidt’s study of the doolhof, a word that today means ‘labyrinth’ but once described a 17th-century educational amusement park. This volume, enlightening and home to multiple paths of enquiry leading in different directions, is an excellent example of what a past-present doolhof might look like.