The latest in IR - spring book round up
Welcome to our quarterly book round up. Each quarter we bring you updates on the latest International Studies releases by BISA members. To be included in the next update contact Marketing and Communications Director Chrissie Duxson: Chrissie.Duxson@bisa.ac.uk
US Foreign Policy - Fourth edition
Edited by Michael Cox and Doug Stokes
Michael Cox is Professor Emeritus of International Relations at the London School of Economics (LSE). He was one of the founding directors of LSE's foreign policy think tank LSE IDEAS, and he also holds a visiting professorship at the Catholic University of Milan. The author, editor and co-editor of over 30 books, his most recent include Agonies of Empire: American Power from Clinton to Biden (Bristol University Press, 2022); Afghanistan: Long War - Forgotten Peace (LSE Press, 2022); and Ukraine: Russia's War and the Future of the Global Order (LSE Press, 2023). Doug Stokes is a Professor in International Relations, Modul University, Vienna.
Blurb
This edition builds on the strengths of previous editions while reflecting on the significant changes in US foreign policy since 2018. It has been updated to cover the Biden presidency and the start of the second Trump administration, helping students to understand the dynamics of contemporary US foreign policy. All chapters have been completely revised, and ten new chapters cover climate change; internal divisions affecting America's global influence; the current state of US democracy and its implications for foreign policy; the dollar's role in sustaining US power; America's approach to military conflict; the US' relationship with Europe, India, Latin America and the Caribbean; and how America's soft power has evolved in recent years.
Find out more and purchase the book via the Oxford University Press website.
Nigeria’s Counter-Terrorism Strategy
Constructions of Threat, Response and Identity
Kodili Henry Chukwuma
Kodili Chukwuma is Assistant Professor in International Security in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University.
Blurb
This book critically engages with Nigeria's counter-terrorism strategy as a means of identity construction. Drawing on a wealth of archival materials, Kodili Chukwuma analyses how the federal government articulates and justifies its counter-terrorism policy against specific ‘terrorist’ groups such as Boko Haram in order to construct Nigeria's identity. He argues that the designation of particular terrorist threats as a new form of terrorism in Nigeria – and beyond – enables state counter-terrorism interventions. Revealing the complexities of Nigeria's counter-terrorist strategy, this book sheds new light on critical terrorism and critical security studies in a key postcolonial context.
Find out more and purchase the book via the Routledge website.
The Making of International Status
Marina Duque
Marina Duque is a Lecturer in International Politics at Newcastle University. Previously, she taught at University College London and Florida State University, held postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University and the Harvard Kennedy School, was the Managing Editor of Security Studies, and earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from The Ohio State University. Before entering academia, Duque worked as a career diplomat in Brazil when the country, like other emerging powers, strove to be recognized as an equal by the great powers. Drawing from this experience, her award-winning research explores international status by integrating interdisciplinary knowledge and using a multi-method approach.
Blurb
With great power rivalry on the rise again, many worry that struggles for status among states could lead to war. As a growing consensus indicates, status-dissatisfied states are more prone to conflict. Yet, a fundamental question remains: how do states achieve status? Scholars traditionally assume that status is a function of state attributes, especially material capabilities, but do not put this assumption to the test. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, this book develops a network theory of status. It argues that status depends on patterns of state relations, rather than on the properties of states. To understand how international hierarchies of status are made, the book traces their origins back to key transformations that magnified global inequality in the nineteenth century. As Europeans made a turn to imperialism, status distinctions legitimized inequality by drawing a boundary between “civilized” Europeans entitled to sovereignty on the one hand, and “uncivilized” non-Europeans unable to govern themselves on the other hand. Once established, status distinctions reinforced inequality via cumulative advantage mechanisms: the higher standing a state enjoys, the more it attracts additional recognition. It is no coincidence that, to this day, status evaluations rely on governance ideals associated with the West. Conducting a network analysis of diplomatic relations since the early nineteenth century, this study reveals relational patterns in status recognition that had not been examined empirically. By distinguishing status from the properties of states, the book aims to move status to its rightful place as a concept central to the study of international politics.
Find out more and purchase the book via the Oxford University Press website. Receive 30% discount using the code AUFLY30.
Humanitarianism in the Home
Hosting-at-home and the Politics of Hospitality
Gabrielle Daoust and Synne L Dyvik
Synne L Dyvik is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex, UK. Her research focuses on the gendered and racialised embodiment of humanitarianism, development, and conflict, with a focus on how people engage with and experience global politics. She has researched and published widely on the relationship between gender and counterinsurgency, as well as on militarism and embodiment. Gabrielle Daoust is Assistant Professor in the Department of Global and International Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada.
Blurb
Who is a humanitarian, and where does humanitarianism take place? Focusing on humanitarian responses within the Global South and North, Humanitarianism in the Home critically examines hosting-at-home – that is, people providing shelter in their own home to displaced people – as a widespread yet underexamined and underappreciated response to large-scale displacement.
This book situates hosting-at-home practices and initiatives within a current expansion of private expressions of humanitarian action across a range of global contexts. It situates the home as a key site of humanitarian hospitality and considers the implications of hosting-at-home for humanitarian politics writ large and its relationship to wider dynamics and structures of international relations and global politics. Drawing on feminist and decolonial literature, it grounds this analysis in a theorisation of the interconnections between humanitarianism, home, and hospitality, informing a critical understanding of hosting-at-home as a simultaneously everyday and global practice, in its spatial, temporal, and relational dimensions. Overall, the book sees hosting-at-home as neither a straightforward alternative to the dominant international humanitarian system and attendant structures of power, nor a simple continuation of this. Instead, given the multiplicity of its various expressions, hosting-at-home occupies an ambivalent position within tensions between care and control, and co-optation and solidarity.
Find out more and purchase the book via the Routledge website.
Islamophobia and Translations of Securitization in the UK, France, and Italy
Ugo Gaudino
Ugo Gaudino is a Lecturer in the Department of Criminology and Social Sciences at Kingston University. He has taught at the University College London and at the London School of Economics. He is co-author of Methodologies in Critical Terrorism Studies. Gaps and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2024). He has been published on topics including Critical Security and Terrorism Studies, European Politics, and Islamophobia in Europe.
Blurb
Islamophobia and Translations of Securitization in the UK, France, and Italy develops an alternative framework for studying Islamophobia and the securitization of Muslims. Gaudino integrates cross-disciplinary resources to investigate how and why European Muslims are often portrayed as a security threat by both right and left-wing political parties, exploring research on Islamophobia in the West, critical studies on security and terrorism, and scholarship on the normalization of far-right racism across the political spectrum.
Using the United Kingdom, France, and Italy as case studies, Gaudino takes a close look at the gradual evolution of discourse surrounding Islam within three major parties: Labour in Britain, the Socialist Party in France, and the Democratic Party in Italy. In analyzing official documents and speeches released by British, French, and Italian policymakers, he finds that Islamophobia varies by national context and political ideology, particularly in cases related to immigration, counterterrorism, and citizenship policies. The framework therefore challenges the prevailing scholarly narrative regarding the convergence of political parties to the 'centre' in the post-1989 democratic West, showing that in the case of Islam, both the mainstream Right and Left have, in fact, moved further to the right.
Find out more and purchase the book via the Oxford University Press website.
The Politics of Preventing Violent Extremism
Liberal Democracy, Civil Society, and Countering Radicalization
Charlotte Heath-Kelly and Sadi Shanaah
Charlotte Heath-Kelly is a Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. Sadi Shanaah is a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick.
Blurb
The Politics of Preventing Violent Extremism explores how counter-radicalization policies have come to dominate European counterterrorism and security. Using interviews with practitioners across seven European nations, it documents how national security policies have been repurposed to identify individuals deemed ‘vulnerable’ to extremism and radicalization, and to provide targeted preventative interventions from welfare state agencies. Crucially, however, the methods (and limits) of preventing violent extremism (PVE) policies vary between nations. The Politics of Preventing Violent Extremism explores how political culture, the welfare state, and the conception of civil society in each nation shapes the type of counter-radicalization employed. While some European states have designed extensive pre-crime surveillance networks to identify those ‘radicalizing’ others, other states in Europe are bound by constitutional commitments to liberty of thought and speech which restrain them from using any type of pre-crime intervention. Accordingly, while PVE policies have been heralded as a novel solution to the problem of radicalization, they remain rooted in, and limited by, the political and social traditions of European democracies.
Find out more and read the book, which is open access, on the Oxford Academic website.
Critical Perspectives on NATO
Feminist Insights
Edited by Sorana-Cristina Jude and Katharine A M Wright
Sorana-Cristina Jude is a Lecturer in Defence Studies at King’s College London and the Joint Services Command and Staff College of the Defence Academy of the UK.
Katharine A M Wright is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at Newcastle University, UK and a Fulbright Scholar and Research Fellow on the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Blurb
This innovative volume applies cutting-edge critical theories—including feminist, queer and human security perspectives—to analyse NATO's evolving role as a security and defence institution.
Moving beyond traditional problem-solving approaches, it features diverse international contributors and employs a comprehensive methodological toolkit from discourse analysis to creative research methods. It also reveals how social, political and geopolitical forces shape NATO whilst examining its transformative impact on global affairs.
Essential reading for scholars and practitioners of international relations, security studies and critical theory, this collection offers fresh insights into one of the world's most influential political-military alliances through an inclusive, multi-perspective lens.
Find out more and purchase the book via the Bristol University Press website.
Occupying the Everyday
Militarisation and Gendered Politics of Living in Kashmir
Niharika Pandit
Niharika Pandit is Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London. She co-runs Insurgent Knowledges, an anticolonial feminist political education collective and co-convenes BISA's Colonial, Postcolonial, Decolonial working group.
Blurb
Occupying the Everyday is a feminist exploration of the everyday politics of living through militarised control in Kashmir. On 5 August 2019, when the Indian government de-operationalised Jammu and Kashmir's nominal autonomy, integrationist and heterosexist discourses including 'Kashmir is finally integrated and will see development' and 'Indian men can now marry fair-skinned Kashmiri women' gained fuel. Assembling a rigorous post-2019 archive by combining ethnographic investigations and interdisciplinary gender studies, Pandit examines these narratives alongside everyday practices of violence, control, silencing and surveillance to offer a grounded theorisation of militarisation by contemporary nation-states in these times of global imperialism.
Through intersectional explorations of space, home, time, and storytelling, Pandit presents an epistemic and political account of how militarised control violently structures the everyday lives of Kashmiris through spatial, embodied, affective, temporal, and discursive capture. Yet, the resolute desire of a people to not be consumed by the overwhelming expanse of power makes the everyday a fertile ground for liberatory politics.
Find out more and purchase the book via the Oxford University Press website.
Deweaponizing Interdependence
Bringing the Idea of International Clearing Union into the Twenty-First Century
Anthology Editors: Jamie Morgan and Heikki Patomaki
Heikki Patomäki is Professor of World Politics at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Previously he has also worked as a Professor of World Politics and Economy at the Nottingham Trent University, UK, and RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.
Jamie Morgan is Professor of Economics at Leeds Beckett University. He co-edits the Real-World Economics Review with Edward Fullbrook. He has published widely in the fields of economics, political economy, philosophy, sociology and international politics.
Blurb
The scope and future of globalisation have been questioned for many years now. One obvious reason for this has been the rise in trade tensions, exemplified by the high-profile conflict between China and the United States. Trade conflicts of this kind ultimately stem from a basic contradiction: while global trade surpluses and deficits balance out, surplus countries typically accumulate savings, whereas deficit countries tend to accumulate debt. A fallacy of composition – the mistaken belief that what one actor can achieve at a given moment can be achieved by all actors at once – lies behind this state of affairs. It is not possible for every country to run a trade surplus simultaneously. Yet, attempts to do so are encouraged by the current international trade and monetary system.
For deficit countries, a possible individual response is to resort to unilateral measures, as the Trump II administration has done. However, this can trigger a spiral of retaliation, as it did in the 1930s and, to some extent, does now, thereby exacerbating the situation. Worse still, in the 2020s, we are witnessing the weaponisation of interdependence, the securitisation of commodity chains, and growing divisions between differently aligned blocs of states. Not only is this combination highly volatile, but it also impedes cooperative action at a time when the world confronts numerous existential challenges. It is, however, possible to establish behaviour-shaping rules and principles and create more suitable common institutions. An International Clearing Union (ICU) is a potentially constructive way forward.
Find out more and purchase the book via the Bloomsbury website.
Pleasure and Depletion in Contemporary Militarism
Julia Welland
Julia Welland is Associate Professor of War Studies at University of Warwick, UK.
Blurb
This book asks why US service members, veterans and military families continue to affectively invest in militarism – both as a structure of global politics and in their everyday lives – when they have experienced first-hand, its physical and emotional costs?
Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with military communities and ethnographic insights from a range of military sites, the book examines how those service members, veterans and military families who have been physically and emotionally depleted through their intimate relations to US militarism are the same individuals who have simultaneously experienced its concomitant pleasures, joys, and have built lives and worlds through their attachment to it.
Ultimately, the book argues these dual and contradictory experiences are central to militarism’s endurance in global politics; both through individuals continued affective investment in a militarised pathway and through the incremental and incomplete ways that militarism is reproduced in their everyday lives.
Find out more and purchase the book via the Edinburgh University Press website.
If you're a BISA member and you'd like your book included in next quarter's round up, email Marketing and Communications Director Chrissie Duxson: Chrissie.Duxson@bisa.ac.uk. Please include the title, blurb and a link to where the book can be purchased. If you are able, you can also include details of any discount available, but of course this is not required. The book should have been published a maximum of six months prior to your email.
Top photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash