The latest in IR - winter 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 Communications Manager, Chrissie Duxson: Chrissie.Duxson@bisa.ac.uk

Queering Women, Peace and Security

Expanding Feminist Approaches to Gender in Peacebuilding

Jamie J Hagen

Jamie J Hagen is a Lecturer in Global Politics at the University of Manchester and a researcher applying a feminist and anti-racist approach to bridging gaps between academic, policy, and activism. Formerly Hagen was a Lecturer in International Relations at Queen's University Belfast where she co-founded the Centre for Gender in Politics. Working at the intersection of gender, security studies, and queer theory, Hagen is an expert on ways international bodies consider LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) populations in peacebuilding, with a special focus on how Women, Peace and Security initiatives can better include LGBTQ voices and experiences, especially lesbian, bisexual, and transgender women. She is co-editor of Queer Conflict Research: New Approaches to the Study of Political Violence. She is also the BISA EDI Officer.

Blurb

In 2000, the United Nations Security Council passed resolution 1325, which addressed, for the first time, the experience of women and girls during conflict and the need to consider gender in peacebuilding. From this landmark resolution, a groundbreaking Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has evolved, guided by ten total Security Council resolutions. But to this point, the WPS framework and related scholarship has yet to meaningfully include queer and trans women in their programmatic work and conflict interventions.

Queering Women, Peace and Security fills this gap by applying queer theory to feminist efforts to ensure a gender perspective is promoted by the WPS agenda. Engaging with WPS documentation, examples of implementation, and interviews with practitioners, Jamie J. Hagen examines how the needs of LGBTQ people in conflict and peacebuilding are considered within the current architecture and practices. In particular, she identifies the interchangeable use of the words "gender" and "women," which betrays a larger analytical failure to think outside a binary categorization of gender. Informed by this analysis and interviews with leaders from Northern Ireland and Colombia, Hagen outlines steps those implementing the WPS agenda can take to work in collaboration with queer and trans communities in their gender, peace, and security work.

Find out more and purchase the book via the Oxford University Press website.

Vernacular Security Studies

Concepts, Cases, and Critiques

Edited by Lee Jarvis, Michael Lister, Akinyemi Oyawale

Lee Jarvis is Professor of Security and Society at Adelaide University, Australia. He holds honorary professorships at the University of East Anglia, UK, and Loughborough University, UK. Michael Lister is Professor of Politics at Oxford Brookes University, UK. His research focuses on the intersections between citizenship and terrorism/counterterrorism. Akinyemi Oyawale is a multi-award winning scholar and Assistant Professor in International Relations in the Politics and International Studies Department (PAIS) at the University of Warwick, UK.

Blurb

This book covers new conceptual, methodological, and empirical issues that will progress debate on Vernacular Security Studies (VSS) and the value of studying ordinary articulations of (in)security. Bringing together established and emerging scholars, it offers a timely and much needed engagement with this explicitly critical – and increasingly prominent – framework in security research. Demonstrating its value in different geographical, thematic, and historical contexts these experts consider the impact of VSS on a range of topical issues including multi-species relations, decolonial/ postcolonial approaches to security, migration, borders, and cities. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and students engaging with ‘bottom-up’ approaches in critical security studies or critical International Relations.

Find out more and purchase the book via the Routledge website.

Gender Equality, Matrimony, and Secularism in Egypt and Iran

A Comparative Exploration of Early Twentieth-Century Family Law

Samantha Louden-Cooke

Samantha Louden-Cooke is Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Politics at the University of Gloucestershire. Her research explores identity, gender equality, secularism and resistance in the Middle East and North Africa region.

Blurb

This book delves into the intricacies of family law in Egypt and Iran in the early twentieth century, highlighting the impact of secular models on individual rights. By understanding the effect of external power structures on the religious/secular identity of the state during this era, readers will gain an understanding of how modes of implementation and colonial engagements shaped family law. Whilst the book explores the impact of the secular nature of the state on gender quality in family law in the from 1900 to 1940, the contemporary vignettes which open the book, provide context regarding the impact of power structures, such as the state, on individual agency. The use of contemporary issues to introduce an historically focused book provides a unique way to encourage reflections upon state trajectories, the importance of external influences, and the modes of resistance which have transcended the last century.

This book argues that, within the context of early twentieth century Egypt and Iran, secularism contributed towards government and civilian responses to (non) secular changes in law and society, whilst simultaneously reinforcing already existing power structures as the frameworks within which parts of society will continue to function. While family law remains firmly within a religio-legal jurisdiction, secularism did have an impact on through linguistic and cultural engagements.Bringing together intersecting factors such as gender equality, family law, colonialism, secularism and religion, it provides insights into the close-knit relationship of the public and private spheres. Moreover, it contributes empirically by focusing exclusively on two states which have, as far as the literature indicates, never been solely compared.

Find out more and purchase the book via the Springer website.

Military Victory Beyond the Battlefield

Outside Wartime

Mirko Palestrino

Mirko Palestrino is Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. His research sits within the fields of Critical War Studies and International Political Sociology and focuses on the sociologies and politics of time and temporality, experiences and narratives of war, theories and practices of military victory, and the embodied politics of military training and deployment. His work has been published in leading International Relations journals. He is the co-convenor of the transnational research network Doing International Political Sociology.

Blurb

Military Victory Beyond the Battlefield rethinks hegemonic understandings of military victory as the outcome of war by focusing on the relationship between victory and time. While International Relations and War Studies increasingly recognise that the boundaries between war and peace are blurry, military victory is still conceptualised as an event that brings war to cessation and restores peace.

Instead, this book argues that victory is a temporal, sense-making device. It shows that victory is produced just as much outside the battlefield as on it, during both wartime and peacetime. Palestrino demonstrates that the end of war has little to do with warfighting. Wars are made to end through a series of victory practices that seek to clearly mark a conflict's temporal boundaries to convince key audiences of its definitive outcome.

Analysing exhibitions of military tattoos, war memorials, commemoration rituals, doctrine manuals, history textbooks and videogames, this book shows that, as soon as we stop looking for victory in the usual places, a plurality of wartimes comes to the surface and the assumption that victory ends war is cast into doubt. It also shows that attending to these victory practices and their politics is important because they can appear to be peaceful yet conceal overlooked forms of violence.

Find out more and purchase the book via the Oxford University Press website. The book is also on Oxford Scholarship Online and can be accessed by subscribers.

United States and Chinese foreign assistance and diplomacy

Aid for dominance

Salvador Santino Regilme and Obert Hodzi

Salvador Santino Regilmeis an Associate Professor of International Relations at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Obert Hodzi is an Associate Professor in Politics at the University of Liverpool, UK.

Blurb

United States and Chinese foreign assistance and diplomacy addresses the analytic weaknesses of mainstream analysis of foreign aid, which often focuses on its material dimensions. The book underscores the constitutive relationship between foreign aid as a material resource and the diplomatic discourses and practices that constitute complex bilateral relations between donor and recipient states. Written by two leading scholars of contemporary United States and Chinese foreign policies in the Global South, Aid for Dominance offers a pioneering, theoretically conscious, and empirically rich account of the two great powers' grand strategies in the global development sector. By deploying a multidisciplinary and comparative analysis, this book draws from a wide range of evidentiary materials from primary sources, including data from fieldwork interviews, government documents, local and international newspapers, speeches by high-ranking government officials and diplomats, and secondary data from scholarly publications and policy papers.

Find out more and purchase the book via the Manchester University Press website.

The Way Out

Justice in the Queer Search for Refuge

Rebecca Buxton and Samuel Ritholtz

Samuel Ritholtz is Research Fellow in Politics at All Souls College, University of Oxford. Rebecca Buxton is Lecturer in Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Bristol.

Blurb

The global refugee regime has shifted under our feet. Over the last forty years, international asylum practices have expanded to include the queer and trans displaced. At least thirty-seven countries now recognize LGBTIQ refugees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, with some states providing specialized support. Yet amid this expansion, backlash has intensified against refugee protection as well as the hard-earned rights of LGBTIQ people. In this disquieting context, the protection of LGBTIQ refugees remains partial and exclusionary.
 
The Way Out examines the complexities of queer and trans displacement around the world. Centering personal narratives of LGBTIQ refugees, the book exposes the shortcomings of an international protection regime that is unable to address the harms that drive displacement. Rebecca Buxton and Samuel Ritholtz's analysis of the stakes of queer and trans inclusion in accounts of displacement justice offers a vibrant example of theory brought to life.

Find out more and purchase the book via the University of California Press website.

Rethinking Remote Warfare

AI, Drones, and Future War

Edited by James Patton Rogers and James Wesley Hutto

James Patton Rogers is Executive Director of the Brooks Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University. James Wesley Hutto is Associate Professor of Military Strategy and Security Studies at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies (SAASS).

Blurb

The first book to analyze the legacies of Remote Warfare, this study is unique in its focus on the myriad ways in which Western-pioneered strategies of war are impacting our modern world. With a focus on drones, AI, and next-generation weapons technologies, this edited collection brings together an innovative interdisciplinary group of expert policymakers, academics, humanitarians, industry leaders, and those from military institutions to discuss some of the most influential and important topics under debate in security studies, international politics, law, and international relations today. From the Global War on Terror to the Russia-Ukraine War, this book explains how the high-tech wars of the 2020s emerged and explores what the future of warfare is likely to be.

Find out more and purchase the book via the Springer website.

Making and Unmaking Global Citizenship

Lived Experiences of Precarious Migration

Vicki Squire

Vicki Squire is Professor of International Politics in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick.

Blurb

How do lived experiences of precarious migration generate claims to rights, belonging and accountability? To what extent does global citizenship in the making provide an analytical framework that helps to make sense of such claims? And in what ways do claims in situations of precarity trouble conventional ideas of citizenship and ‘the international’?

This book draws on research conducted over two decades with people experiencing the violence of contemporary governing practices first-hand. Based on case studies including the Mediterranean, the Mexico-US border region, sub-Saharan Africa and the UK, it charts a multiplicity of ways through which claims are enacted in situations of precarity. The book highlights the potential and the limits of global citizenship in the making.

Vicki Squire concludes that theories of coloniality, racial capitalism and abolition provide critical insights for a migrant-oriented perspective on the politics of precarious migration.

Find out more and purchase the book via the Edinburgh University Press website.

Killing in the Name of the State:

State-Sponsored Assassination in International Politics

Edited by Luca Trenta and Kiril Avramov

Luca Trenta is associate professor of international relations at Swansea University. Kiril Avramov is assistant professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies and a fellow with the Intelligence Studies Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

Blurb

How do governments approach, understand, and even justify assassination? What methods have been used historically, and how do they differ from current practice? What are the consequences of assassination for international politics, diplomacy, and international law? These are the fundamental questions animating this ground-breaking exploration of the adoption and deployment of assassination as an instrument of statecraft.

Find out more and purchase the book via the Lynne Rienner website. There is 50% discount for a limited time.

If you're a BISA member and you'd like your book included in next quarter's round up, email Communications Manager, 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