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What is the role of currency statecraft in world politics? When a national money gains international appeal, the power resources of the issuing country are augmented. Currency statecraft is about what the country chooses to do – or not do – with its currency power. This book begins with the premise that every international money goes through a life cycle, from youth to maturity to (eventually) decline. At each stage, the supplier has three choices: to be pro-active in favor of international use, to resist internationalization, or to remain neutral. The central argument of the book is that beyond purely material factors, currency statecraft is motivated by cognitive considerations having to do with a society’s underlying sense of identity. In particular, policy is shaped by the extent of a state’s geopolitical ambition: how driven it is to build or sustain a prominent place in the community of nations. Extensive study of experience in the modern era demonstrates the key role played by the presence or absence of geopolitical ambition in the rise of international currencies like the West German Deutsche mark or Japanese yen, the long-standing dominance of the US dollar, and the decline of the British pound. The book concludes with a look at the growing rivalry between America’s greenback and the emergent renminbi of China – the central drama on the world currency stage today. Analysis suggests that a new era of open and costly monetary hostilities may be approaching.

This book offers a wealth of new knowledge about the origins of suicide terrorism and strategies to stop it. It presents the results of examinations of every suicide terrorist attack worldwide from 1980 to 2009, and how the insights that have been gleaned from that data fundamentally challenge how we understand the root causes of terrorist campaigns today—and reveal why the War on Terror has been ultimately counterproductive. Through a close analysis of suicide campaigns by Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Israel, Chechnya, and Sri Lanka, the chapters provide powerful new evidence that, contrary to popular and dangerously mistaken belief, only a tiny minority of these attacks are motivated solely by religion. Instead, the root cause is foreign military occupation, which triggers secular and religious people alike to carry out suicide attacks.

Does the emergence of democracy in the developing world promote economic globalization? Which societal actors favour and which actors oppose economic globalization and thus trade reforms in developing countries? How do electoral rules influence governments in developing country democracies to be responsive to societal demands for trade reforms? Democracy and Trade Policy in Developing Countries addresses these questions that lie at the forefront of understanding the link between democracy and economic globalization. This book first develops a comprehensive theoretical framework that explores how, why and when labor market conditions affects the balance of political power between labor and capital in newly democratized regimes across the developing world. It then explains how changes in the balance of political power between labor and capital affect political competition between parties, international trade policies, and eventually the prospects for democratic consolidation in new democracies. The book further extends this theoretical framework to understand how certain electoral rules in consolidated developing country democracies affects domestic political contestation over economic globalization. The key insight from extended theoretical analysis is the prediction that developing countries with “weak” political parties are more receptive to economic globalization while countries with “strong” political parties are more susceptible to anti-globalization pressure stemming from protectionist industries. The theoretical claims are evaluated by analyzing the relevant data and conducting a detailed case-study examination of trade politics in three “BRICS” countries: Brazil, India and South Africa. The book’s main claims and results have implications for understanding the prospects of international economic co-operation.

The term “civilization” comes with considerable baggage, dichotomizing people, cultures, and histories as “civilized”—or not. While the idea of civilization has been deployed throughout history to justify all manner of interventions and sociopolitical engineering, few scholars have stopped to consider what the concept actually means. Here, the author examines how the idea of civilization has informed our thinking about international relations over the course of ten centuries. From the Crusades to the colonial era to the global war on terror, this book exposes “civilization” as a stage-managed account of history that legitimizes imperialism, uniformity, and conformity to Western standards, culminating in a liberal-democratic global order. Along the way, the author explores the variety of confrontations and conquests—as well as those peoples and places excluded or swept aside—undertaken in the name of civilization. Concluding that the “West and the rest” have more commonalities than differences, the book ultimately points the way toward an authentic intercivilizational dialogue that emphasizes cooperation over clashes.

A twentieth-century innovation, foreign aid has become a familiar and even expected element in international relations. But scholars and government officials continue to debate why countries provide it: some claim that it is primarily a tool of diplomacy, some argue that it is largely intended to support development in poor countries, and still others point out its myriad newer uses. This book puts this dispute to rest by providing a comprehensive answer to the question of why governments give foreign aid. The author argues that because of domestic politics in aid-giving countries, it has always been—and will continue to be—used to achieve a mixture of different goals. Drawing on both comparative politics and international relations, and on her experience as a former public official, she provides five in-depth case studies—the United States, Japan, France, Germany, and Denmark—that demonstrate how domestic politics and international pressures combine to shape how and why donor governments give aid. In doing so, the author explores the impact on foreign aid of political institutions, interest groups, and the ways governments organize their giving.

Border fixity—the proscription of foreign conquest and the annexation of homeland territory—has, since World War II, become a powerful norm in world politics. This development has been said to increase stability and peace in international relations. Yet, in a world in which it is unacceptable to challenge international borders by force, sociopolitically weak states remain a significant source of widespread conflict, war, and instability. This book argues that the process of state building has long been influenced by external territorial pressures and competition, with the absence of border fixity contributing to the evolution of strong states, and its presence to the survival of weak ones. What results from this norm, it argues, are conditions that make internal conflict and the spillover of interstate war more likely. Using a comparison of historical and contemporary case studies, the book sheds light on the relationship between state weakness and conflict. This book’s argument that under some circumstances an international norm which was established to preserve the peace may actually create conditions that are ripe for war is sure to generate debate and shed light on the dynamics of continuing conflict in the twenty-first century.

This book explores the complex and creative role of emotion in global politics. From casual observers to trained experts, people care about challenges such as terrorism, violent conflict, and humanitarian crises; these are not just technical problems demanding solutions but also matters possessing emotional urgency and appeal. Political problems acquire emotional significance when they involve human suffering, political controversy, and other qualities of pressing moral concern. But, as this book shows, emotional intensity is also shaped by lived experience of events, communicative practices, and social interactions. The book studies emotional dimensions of global politics by investigating they way everyday social interactions intensify, harmonize, and blend the emotional responses of participants. It begins with on-the-ground events such as protests, speeches, and commemoration rituals and then traces the emotions they evoke among co-participants— both elites and ordinary people, near and far. Revisiting well-studied civil conflicts from the 1990s, as well as the War on Terror from the 2000s, the book uncovers emotional effects missed by research trained on identities, institutions, or interests. Drawing widely from current research in neuroscience, microsociology, and cultural theory, the book reconceptualizes the social genesis of emotion and their distinctive impact on global politics.

American women attain more professional success than most of their counterparts around the world, but they lag surprisingly far behind in the national political arena. Women held only 15 per cent of U.S. congressional seats in 2006, a proportion that ranks America behind eighty-two other countries in terms of females elected to legislative office. This book is an exploration of this deficiency and reveals why the United States differs from comparable democracies that routinely elect far more women to their national governing bodies and chief executive positions. Explaining that equal rights alone do not ensure equal access to political office, the author shows that electoral gender parity also requires public policies which represent maternal traits. Most other democracies, she demonstrates, view women as more suited to govern because their governments have taken on maternal roles through social welfare provisions, gender quotas, or the continuance of symbolic hereditary monarchies. The United States has not adopted such policies, and until it does, the author warns, American women run for office with a troubling disadvantage.

It is widely expected that the growth and power of trade-dependent and multinational firms would make protectionism politically untenable. This book argues that governments can use trade barriers to advance the competitive interests of large businesses whose operations span borders. Regulatory barriers to trade act as entry barriers for smaller foreign competitors, raising prices and profits for large multinationals. As a result, governments that have more at stake in the profits of multinational firms are more likely to embrace stricter regulatory standards. The book offers statistical evidence from disputed measures at the WTO, as well as contentious fights over safety and health in the food, chemical, and even children’s toy manufacturing to show that large firms, and their host governments, not only embrace but demand stricter regulation, all at the expense of smaller foreign firms.

The purpose of this book is to describe effective means of constitution making in societies that are not only divided, but divided in such a manner that disparate groups have entirely different conceptions of what the state should look like, with each group seeking to project its own vision onto the constitution. Using the example of Iraq, the book indicates that the solution in such unusual, but not unprecedented, circumstances is to embrace capaciousness in the founding document, and to support continuing efforts at reconciliation among disparate groups such that after ratification, they can develop suitable, consensual constructions of the capacious framework text so as to render the constitution a workable and functioning foundational document. An idealized process wherein all relevant political interests come together into a broader constitutional bargaining session and all matters of deep contention are consensually settled in some semi-permanent fashion is realistic in some, indeed perhaps most, settings. However, it is not a particularly useful model for a society like that of Iraq suffering from deep identitarian divisions with political grievances that span a period of decades, if not centuries. Greater time to negotiate, and broader experience in the practices and policies of governing, are necessary before something approaching a lasting functional order can exist. To achieve a successful form of constitution making in such a society, it becomes necessary to look beyond the original bargain, to the subsequent construction of flexible, incomplete framework constitutional text in a consensual fashion over a period of time.

Samuel Huntington labeled democratization “an important—perhaps the most important—global political development of the late twentieth century” and scholars have extensively studied the relationship between democratic transitions and membership in international organizations. However, the mechanisms underpinning this association remain unclear. Paul Poast and Johannes Urpelainen clarify these mechanisms by arguing that leaders in new democracies use, and often must create, international organizations to provide the public goods and technical expertise necessary to consolidate democratic rule. Poast and Urpelainen bring to bear a host of evidence showing that new democracies form international organizations and how these organizations support these states along the difficult path to consolidating their democratic institutions. From the application of rigorous statistical techniques to the exploration of the Baltic state’s accession to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Poast and Urpelainen provide a compelling account for how transitional states can use international institutions to organize democracy.

How states cooperate in the absence of a sovereign power is a perennial question in international relations. This book argues that global governance is more than just the cooperation of states under anarchy: it is the formation and maintenance of collective intentions, or joint commitments among states to address problems together. The key mechanism through which these intentions are sustained is face-to-face diplomacy, which keeps states' obligations to one another salient and helps them solve problems on a day-to-day basis. The book argues that the origins of this practice lie in the Concert of Europe, an informal agreement among five European states in the wake of the Napoleonic wars to reduce the possibility of recurrence, which first institutionalized the practice of jointly managing the balance of power. Through the Concert's many successes, the book shows that the words and actions of state leaders in public forums contributed to collective self-restraint and a commitment to problem solving—and at a time when communication was considerably more difficult than it is today. Despite the Concert's eventual breakdown, the practice it introduced—of face-to-face diplomacy as a mode of joint problem solving—survived, and is the basis of global governance today.

If wars are costly and risky to both sides, why do they occur? Just as people buy expensive things precisely because they are more expensive, because they offer the possibility of improved social status or prestige, so too do countries, this book argues. It shows how many seemingly wasteful government expenditures that appear to contradict the laws of demand actually follow the pattern for what are known as Veblen goods, or positional goods for which demand increases alongside price, even when cheaper substitutes are readily available. From flashy space programs to costly weapons systems a country does not need and cannot maintain to foreign aid programs that offer little benefit to recipients, these conspicuous and strategically timed expenditures are intended to instill awe in the observer through their wasteful might. And underestimating the important social role of excess has serious policy implications. Increasing the cost of war, for example, may not always be an effective tool for preventing it, the book claims, nor does decreasing the cost of weapons and other technologies of war necessarily increase the potential for conflict, as shown by the case of a cheap fighter plane whose price tag drove consumers away. In today's changing world, where there are high levels of uncertainty about the distribution of power, this book also offers a valuable way to predict which countries are most likely to be concerned about their position and therefore adopt costly, excessive policies.

This book challenges the conventional story of sovereignty told in the field of International Relations. The conventional story holds that sovereignty has “traditionally” entailed unfettered rights to autonomous self-government and freedom from external intervention. Only in recent years, the tale goes, have these indefeasible rights been challenged by ideas that sovereigns should be accountable for the protection of their populations from mass atrocities. Present day concepts such as the “responsibility to protect” are thus framed as radical departures from the centuries-old meaning of sovereignty. This conventional story is wrong. The book offers a new story of sovereignty. It argues that sovereignty has been understood to entail varied and evolving responsibilities for the protection of populations since it first emerged in early modern Europe, and that sovereigns have been held to be accountable to God, to “the people,” and to the international society of states for carrying out these responsibilities. It demonstrates that the supposed “traditional,” non-interventionist meaning of sovereignty was only firmly established by states for the first time in the twentieth century, and then only for a few decades before again being challenged by claims that sovereigns are responsible and accountable for the protection of their populations. The book traces the relationship between sovereignty and responsibility, from the early modern period through to today, and tells a new history that has profound implications for present day debates.

Among the more frequent and most devastating of conflicts, civil wars—from Yugoslavia to Congo—frequently reignite and even spill over into the international sphere. Given the inherent fragility of civil war peace agreements, innovative approaches must be taken to ensure the successful resolution of these conflicts. This book provides both analytical frameworks and a series of critical case studies demonstrating the effectiveness of a range of strategies for keeping the peace. The book contends that lasting peace relies on aligning the self-interest of individuals and communities with the society-wide goal of ending war—if citizens and groups have a stake in peace, they will seek to maintain and defend it. The book's chapters explore two complementary approaches toward achieving this goal: restructuring domestic institutions and soft intervention. Some chapters examine the first tactic, which involves reforming governments that failed to prevent war, while others discuss the second, an umbrella term for a number of non-military strategies for outside actors to assist in keeping the peace.

There is considerable speculation that the twenty-first century will witness a systemic leadership transition in which the United States, the incumbent system leader, is passed by China. The probability and timing of such a momentous event remains unclear. So, too, are the causal processes which might bring it about. Despite the occurrence of previous systemic transitions, commentators tend to treat the possible ascendance of China to predominance as a novelty. A different approach relies heavily on international relations theory and applies a forward reasoning approach to constructing a range of possible future transition scenarios. As the future unfolds, we watch for reality-scenario correspondence which also helps to identify the mix of conflict inducing and constraining drivers at work

The state of Israel is often spoken of as a haven for the Jewish people, a place rooted in the story of a nation dispersed, wandering the earth in search of their homeland. Born in adversity but purportedly nurtured by liberal ideals, Israel has never known peace, experiencing instead a state of constant war that has divided its population along the stark and seemingly unbreachable lines of dissent around the relationship between unrestricted citizenship and Jewish identity. By focusing on the perceptions and histories of Israel’s most marginalized stakeholders — Palestinian Israelis, Arab Jews, and non-Israeli Jews — this book cuts to the heart of the Israeli-Arab conflict, demonstrating how these voices provide urgently needed resources for conflict analysis and peacebuilding. Navigating a complex set of arguments about ethnicity, boundaries, and peace, and offering a different approach to the renegotiation and reimagination of national identity and citizenship, it pushes the conversation beyond the bounds of the single narrative and toward a new and dynamic concept of justice — one that offers the prospect of building a lasting peace.

Dilemmas from climate change to financial meltdowns make it clear that global interconnectedness is the norm in the twenty-first century. As a result, global governance organizations (GGOs)—from the World Trade Organization to the Forest Stewardship Council—have taken on prominent roles in the management of international affairs. These GGOs create and promulgate rules to address a host of pressing problems. But as this book reveals, they struggle to meet two challenges: building authority despite limited ability to impose sanctions and maintaining legitimacy while satisfying the demands of key constituencies whose support is essential to a global rulemaking regime. Through an empirical study of twenty-five GGOs, this book provides a picture of the compromises within and the competition among these influential institutions by focusing attention on their organizational design. Analyzing four aspects of GGO organization in depth—representation and administration, the rulemaking process, adherence and enforcement, and interest group participation—the book describes variation systemically, identifies patterns, and offers explanations that link GGO design to the fundamental challenge of accountability in global governance.