Over the past decades, living in proximity to an increasingly powerful China has gained new meanings. ‘Rising China’ – the nation, the notion, and the buzzword – sparks dreams and triggers fears. Borders that were closed during the Cold War era have again become zones of contact and exchange. Old trade routes are revived, new economic corridors established, and remote border …
Legitimacy is a common theme in political and social research. It is conventionallyseen to play a fundamental role in any political system. Discussions of what it doesto social and political life have occupied deep minds in sociology, philosophy, andpolitical science.¹ Yet the most commonly stated reason to care about legitimacy inpolitical analysis comes down to a belief about its effects. Le…
Each morning before sunrise an army of traders arrive at their desks,switch on their screens, and start fielding calls. On most days, the flow oftrades that pass through their hands represents the normal activity of anever-deepening, globally interdependent financial market. These traderscoordinate a complicated international marketplace, where orders usu-ally come from institutional investors …
This open access book aims to review the history, achievements, and challenges of trilateral cooperation among China, Japan, and South Korea in a systematic way. It offers numerous perspectives to explain the emergence of trilateral institution-building processes and the fluctuations of trilateral cooperation, and underscores three countries’ respective policy stances towards the building of …
The Suez Canal is one of the most important artificial waterways in the world. Since its opening in November 1869, it had proven to be vital for both trade and military affairs and for great and regional actors. It is one of the most significant and sensitive chokepoints in the world, and the latest events in March 2021 served as a token …
The Global Wireless charts a history of wireless beginning in the 1910s, when it was used as a tool for global communication, and ending as it declined and slowly fell from view after World War I. Examining the political negotiations and international communication networks, the book demonstrates how a wireless technology had already spread around the globe a century ago and prompted a radical …
Nuclear safety and security—the protection of nuclear facilities, weapons, technologies, and materials against accidents or attacks—is an under-studied area of international security studies.1 Periodically, the subject has received high levels of attention. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, for example, scholars and policymakers worried intense…
he first statement above is extracted from an interview with China’s incumbent ambassador to the United States (US), former Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai, at the 24th Post Pacific Islands Forum Dialogue in Auckland in August 2012 (Liu & Huang, 2012). The second statement is taken from the outcome list of the eighth China–US Strategic and Econo…
In 2007, in a speech before the Indian Parliament, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe brought back to light an ancient Asian geographical vision: the so-called “confluence of the two seas”. It referred to the idea of linking the Pacific with the Indian Ocean, as Japanese policymakers conceived the concept at the time. That would later become the “Indo-Pacific …
The early twenty- first century was in many ways the perfect unipolar moment. A decade after the end of the Cold War, major events such as the ideological triumph of liberal democracy, the resolution of violent conflicts in the Balkans and elsewhere and the declaration of the UN Millennium Development Goals promised a future in which the United States, as primus inter pares, would over-see the …
nhisautobiographyInterestingTimes,theeconomichistorianEricHobsbawmused an unforgettable image when he spoke of writing books. He referred to‘the desert island on which we usually sat, writing messages for unknown re-cipients in unknown destinations to be launched across the oceans in bottlesshapedlikebooks.’1IthasbeensohardtogetATaleofTwoUnionspublished,thatIfeellikesomeonewhosebottleislaun…
In recent years, images of migrants and refugees risking their lives to reachEurope from the Middle East and Africa havefilled the pages and screens ofEuropean media. Migration has turned into a highly politicized matter inEurope, galvanized by xenophobic movements and right-wing parties alike.Increasingly restrictive policies towards migrants and refugees, adopted bynumerous European countries…
Non-Western perspective on the international history of intellectual property rights. Politics in Publishing focuses on Japan's involvement in shaping international copyright law over a seventy-year period following the country's 1899 accession to the Berne Convention, the first multilateral copyright treaty. During this time, Japanese state officials collaborated with various stakeholders such…
Does ASEAN play a role in managing security issues in Southeast Asia and beyond? ASEAN is considered one of the most successful regional secu-rity institutions (RSIs), particularly after the end of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War created a power vacuum in East Asia, and there was political momentum in the region to establish multilater…
About 25 years after Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the ‘end of history’, ideological and strategic competition between democracies and autocra-cies has firmly reentered international relations. The rise of China has fuelled debates about the economic performance of authoritarian regimes compared with democratic ones (Zhao 2010; Acemoglu and Robinson 2012). Ques…
Covering topics such as foreign policy, the world economy, and globalization, this Very Short Introduction exemplifies the many disciplines that come together in the study of international events. Discussing not only the main academic theories, but also the practical problems and issues, Wilkinson considers key normative questions, such as how the international state system might be reformed so…
Despite progress since the Cold War in reaching negotiated settlements in civil wars, efforts to consolidate peace with effective governance have proven challenging in places as diverse as the Congo, Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq, Central Africa, and the Middle East. Two decades ago international peacebuilding was understood as a centrally coordinated package of inter-ventions aimed at …
Just two decades later, the world witnessed a very different divorce. Slo-vaks in what was then Czechoslovakia began clamoring for their own state, making their preferences clear in the 1992 election. Rather than use force, however, Czech politicians and leaders politely stepped aside in the face of Slovak nationalism and negotiated the secession of the Slovak Republic wit…
As Italy tends to be studied increasingly in transnational and transcultural perspective, there is an ever-greater need for studies that explore the country's relationship with other geographical areas and cultural configurations. Linetto Basilone's work is an important contribution to research of this kind. The work provides a panoramic view of how journalists and travel writers from the late …
How Democracy Survives explores how liberal democracy can better adapt to the planetary challenges of our time by evolving beyond the Westphalian paradigm of the nation state. The authors bring perspectives from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America, their chapters engaging with the concept of transnational democracy by tracing its development in the past, assessing its perform…
This volume examines the ethical issues that arise as a result of national security intelligence collection and analysis. Powerful new technologies enable the collection, communication, and analysis of national security data on an unprecedented scale. Data collection now plays a central role in intelligence practice, yet this development raises a host of ethical and national security problems, …