The model of secularism as the overarching framework for managing the relationship between religion and politics has come under increasing scrutiny in recent International Relations (IR) scholarship, particularly in the wake of the so-called “postsecular turn”. Where once religion was thought to be an entity that was easily identifiable, definable and largely irrelevant to politics and public life, these assumptions are being increasingly brought into question. This special issue makes a specific contribution to this recent questioning of secularism within IR by noting and interrogating the multiple ways in which the boundaries between the religious and the political blur in contemporary politics. Our contributors explore the multifarious dimensions of this critical issue by asking whether the relationship between religion and politics has taken on significant new forms and dimensions in our contemporary globalised age or if we are simply beginning to recognise a pattern that has always been present. In this introduction we canvass some of the parameters of current debates on the religious and the political. We note that there are multiple and (at times) competing understandings of such key terms as religion, secularism, secularisation and the post-secular that shape and are shaped by ongoing discussions of the relationship between religion and public life. Our goal is not to close down these important points of difference through the imposition of singular understandings. We simply wish to highlight the points of contestation that continue to be significant for how we understand (or obscure) the boundaries between the religious and the political.

The activities of labouring classes show that establishing a system that puts their interests before corporate profits is possible.

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Dr. Benjamin Selwyn addresses the paradox of the world's abundance of wealth existing alongside the problem of mass-poverty. Through his talk, Dr. Selwyn provides a new way of thinking about economic development from a non-elitist, bottom-up perspective.

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2. This article examines the emergence of a new group of development experts who tackle development problems in "innovative" ways: professional designers and the organizations that fund them. What has become known as humanitarian design is an instantiation of the afterlives of development, which redefines the problem of development as eliciting the needs of poor clients and creating mechanisms so that they can provide feedback on proposed solutions. This reframing results in hybrid forms of development knowledge that combine business and entrepreneurial objectives with concerns about designers' moral responsibilities in the contemporary world. The use of humanitarian design in creating formal financial products and services for the poor is analyzed through the work of the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion. © 2014 by the American Anthropological Association.

This article examines the normative aspirations of the umma in international relations (IR). It is not the intention of this article to provide the blueprint of a ‘Muslim EU’, rather, in comparing the articulation of the European Union (EU) and the umma in IR, the article shows the way in which the EU represents a (limited) ‘European umma’, and charts the difficulties faced by both assemblies in being analysed in IR, by virtue of their shared transnational character. However, the Muslim umma assembly is shown to face more problems than its erstwhile EU counterpart due to the religious nature of the umma. The article charts the use of constructivism in IR to explain the creation of norms and identity in the international system, accounting for the EU's supranational presence in international politics. The application of constructivism to the umma, however, is shown to be more problematic due to the secular bias in IR and, perhaps more importantly, the Islamic resurgence being insufficiently concerned with the constitutive elements within it.

People manage heat flows in their homes through diverse skilful engagements, including interactions
with a wide range of materials that help to generate heat, move it around, or prevent its movement.
Using these strategies, we try to ensure that heat is where it is needed, when it is needed, and can also try
to minimise its wastage (heat-out-of place and heat-out-of-time). However, the practical knowledge or
know-how used in managing these thermal flows has received little attention to date, despite its relevance
to topical debates on energy consumption. This paper explores how experience-based know-how is used
in monitoring and managing heat flows in the home. I also consider three processes that stimulate the
development of new know-how: changes in the life-course, in material arrangements, and in shared
understandings. These themes are illustrated using quotes from various sources, such as web forums and
advice sites. Finally, I consider how these ideas relate to wider theories of experience and know-how, and
offer some reflections on what this approach might mean for research, policy and practice on sustainable
energy use.

Contrary to commonsense understandings of torture as a form of information-gathering, confessions elicited through the use of torture produce notoriously unreliable data, and most interrogation experts oppose it as a result. With a focus on the US carceral regime in the War on Terror, this article explores the social relations and structures of feelings that make torture and other seemingly ineffective and absurd carceral practices possible and desirable as technologies of security. While much of international relations scholarship has focused on the ways in which affective and material economies of Orientalism are central to representations of the ‘terrorist’ threat, this article connects the carceral violences in the racialized lawfare against Muslimified people and spaces to the capture and enslavement of Africans and the concomitant production of the figure of the Black body as the site of enslaveability and openness to gratuitous violence. The article further explores how these carceral security practices are not simply rooted in racial–sexual logics of Blackness, but themselves constitute key sites and technologies of gendered and sexualized race-making in this era of ‘post-racial triumph’ (HoSang and LaBennett, 2012: 5).

This paper presents an alternative reading of the evolution of the territorialization of state authority and security alliances in Africa’s Great Lakes Region from that provided by RADIL and FLINT (2013). Rather than a general transformation in the direction of more territorially centralized states, patterns of state authority have remained variegated in the post-Cold War era, with continuing fracturing in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is argued that RADIL and FLINT’s differing interpretation stems from an inappropriate application of social network analysis (SNA) to a context characterized by profound divergences between de facto and de jure phenomena and patchy data availability. These observations suggest scepticism regarding the extent to which SNA can help overcome the epistemological rifts that divide studies on the geography of politics.

Based on extensive field research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), this article elucidates the logics, processes and readings surrounding certain ‘extra-military’ practices enacted by the Congolese army, namely the processing of various types of disputes between civilians. Exceeding the boundaries of the domain of ‘public security’, such activities are commonly categorised as ‘corruption’. Yet such labelling, founded on a supposed clear-cut public–private divide, obscures the underlying processes and logics, in particular the fact that these practices are located on a blurred public–private spectrum and result from both civilian demand and military imposition. Furthermore, popular readings of military involvement in civilian disputes are highly ambiguous, simultaneously representing it as ‘abnormal’ and ‘harmful’, and normalising it as ‘making sense’ –reflecting the militarised institutional environment and the weakness of civilian authorities in the eastern DR Congo. Strengthening these authorities will be vital for reducing this practice, which has an enkindling effect on the dynamics of conflict and violence.

This article examines the central role of the West German state in the transition from the golden to the global age of capitalism in the crisis decade of the 1970s. I argue that in order to keep the world economy open for its exports and shore up its competitive position, German crisis managers pursued a grand economic strategy that sought to defeat the interventionist and expansionary responses of the European left and to commit the United States to monetary discipline. The success of this strategy had contradictory consequences: It stabilized the social consensus inside Germany but undermined it in states whose economies did not stand to benefit from austerity measures. Germany's particularistic way of coping with the crisis thus contributed decisively, though not deliberately, to the “disembedding” of the liberal international economic order. This argument challenges existing explanations of neoliberalism as an Anglo-American imposition on a passive Western Europe and Japan or as an ideological conversion of policymakers. I conclude with an alternative interpretation that highlights the interplay of divergent and opposing strategies of crisis management as the principal driver of social and world order change in the 1970s and potentially today.

As análises dos sistemas-mundo e a teoria do desenvolvimento desigual e combinado representam duas das mais interessantes e inovadoras perspectivas teóricas para o estudo da economia política internacional baseadas no programa de pesquisa materialista histórico. Nos textos basilares de ambas as perspectivas, Trotsky e Wallerstein se defrontaram com o mesmo problema: como superar visões etapistas do desenvolvimento, derivadas do "marxismo vulgar", que previa a impossibilidade do surgimento de revoluções socialistas em países cujo nível de desenvolvimento fosse atrasado em relação aos Estados capitalistas centrais. Por caminhos diferentes, Trotsky e Wallerstein rompem com essa visão. Trotsky sugere o caráter desigual e combinado dos modos de produção em países atrasados; Wallerstein propõe uma perspectiva holística, em que os modos de produção aparecessem com referência à economia-mundo. Em ambos os casos, é possível identificar o problema subjacente causado pelo fato da multiplicidade política, pois o capitalismo efetivamente não se espalhou de modo igual por diferentes Estados. No presente artigo, argumenta-se que, apesar substanciais diferenças que apresentam entre si, as contribuições de Trotsky e Wallerstein podem ser vistas como complementares, ampliando o poder explicativo do materialismo histórico.

Going beyond a narrow account of the institutions and decision-making processes which formally govern the Clean Development Mechanism, this article explores the deeper politics and political economy of Argentina to show how relations of power within and beyond the state significantly configure the nature of carbon markets and their scope to enable broader transitions to lower carbon development pathways. This is done through thick description of relevant policy processes based on original fieldwork research and analysis of their implications for our understanding of the governance of carbon markets.

Calls for more broad-based, integrated, useful knowledge now abound in the world of global environmental change science. They evidence many scientists' desire to help humanity confront the momentous biophysical implications of its own actions. But they also reveal a limited conception of social science and virtually ignore the humanities. They thereby endorse a stunted conception of 'human dimensions' at a time when the challenges posed by global environmental change are increasing in magnitude, scale and scope. Here, we make the case for a richer conception predicated on broader intellectual engagement and identify some preconditions for its practical fulfilment. Interdisciplinary dialogue, we suggest, should engender plural representations of Earth's present and future that are reflective of divergent human values and aspirations. In turn, this might insure publics and decision-makers against overly narrow conceptions of what is possible and desirable as they consider the profound questions raised by global environmental change.

The world of climate politics is increasingly no longer confined to the activities of national governments and international negotiations. Critical to this transformation of the politics of climate change has been the emergence of new forms of transnational governance that cut across traditional state-based jurisdictions and operate across public and private divides. This book provides the first comprehensive, cutting-edge account of the world of transnational climate change governance. Co-authored by a team of the world's leading experts in the field and based on a survey of sixty case studies, the book traces the emergence, nature and consequences of this phenomenon, and assesses the implications for the field of global environmental politics. It will prove invaluable for researchers, graduate students and policy makers in climate change, political science, international relations, human geography, sociology and ecological economics.

Currently, there is no clearly delineated field that could be described as ‘the anthropology of morality’. There exists, however, an increasingly visible and vocal interest in issues of morality among anthropologists. Although there has been a lack of explicit study, it has become clear that anthropologists have, in fact, been concerned with issues of moralities all along. The purpose of this special issue is to bring this interest to ethnographic studies of childhood, and explore how and why children or young people act in a particular way and are making certain choices, how these are valued or contested by their families, peers, and communities. The papers in this special issue highlight the contestations that arise as multiple moralities collide, and the effects this may have for the persons involved. Collectively, the papers illustrate a notion of moralities as multiple, contested, and mobile, and the consequences this may have in a globalising world.

International relations teeters on the edge of an abyss of irrelevance. As an academic pursuit, it has become disparate and fragmented. Those of us in the discipline have ceased to pursue greater clarity in the way that we understand the world around us. Moreover, we have failed as agents of change; that is, as purveyors of opinion and proposals about a better and fairer world order. As such, we no longer serve our students and those practitioners who seek our advice, or, for those of us who take on policy jobs, to push out the envelope of what is considered acceptable. Global governance offers one potentially compelling way of “saving international relations”— though it is not without its problems. This article outlines how and why. The argument unfolds in three parts. The first outlines why and how IR teeters on the edge of an abyss. The second offers a proposal for moving beyond the fragmentation and atomization that afflicts international relations. We suggest that one way of encouraging reengagement is to return to debating grand questions that used to be the sustenance of IR. The third part argues that global governance—appropriately and specifically framed to make it fit for purpose—offers an opportunity to return to these questions and, in so doing, reinvigorate our fragmented and atomized field.

The conclusion of the World Trade Organization’s (wto) ninth ministerial meeting – held in Bali 3–7 December 2013 – is at one and the same time momentous, marginal and business-as-usual. It is momentous because it marks the first multilateral agreement reached in the wto since the organisation began operations on 1 January 1995; it is marginal because the deal reached will have only a limited impact on the global trading system; and it is business as usual because the Bali package will be of disproportionally greater value to the industrial states than to their developing and least developed counterparts. We examine what happened in Bali, covering the principal issues at stake and the content of the outcome, what this means for the wto and for the Doha Development Agenda (dda), and why it all matters. We argue that, while the Bali ministerial is significant and the agreements reached important, the conclusion of the meeting and the package agreed represent only a limited movement forward in addressing the fundamental problems and inequities of the wto system.

The article analyses the involvement of pharmaceutical companies from emerging markets in global health governance. It finds that they play a central role as low-cost suppliers of medicines and vaccines and, increasingly, new technologies. In so doing, pharmaceutical companies from emerging markets have facilitated the implementation of a key goal of global health policy: widening access to pharmaceutical treatment and prevention. Yet, looking closer at the political economy underlying their involvement, the article exposes a tension between this policy goal and the political economy of pharmaceutical development and production. By declaring access to pharmaceuticals a goal of global health policy, governments and global health partnerships have made themselves dependent on pharmaceutical companies to supply them. Moreover, to provide pharmaceutical treatment and prevention at the global level, they depend on companies to supply medicines and vaccines at extremely low prices. Yet, the development and production of pharmaceuticals is organized around commercial incentives that are at odds with the prices required. The increasing involvement of low-cost suppliers from emerging markets mitigates this tension in the short run. In the long run, this tension endangers the sustainability of global access policies and may even undermine some of the successes already achieved.

This paper argues that the hierarchical market economy (HME) category does not provide an adequate starting point for addressing capitalist diversity in Latin America. Building from a critical perspective on the global commodity chain (GCC) and global production network (GPN) approaches, it instead considers the impact of firms’ transnational relations and the often neglected role of working-class struggles. It will argue that capitalist diversity can only be understood at the nexus of these ostensibly global and local phenomena; and by specifying the strategic decisions taken by firms in Argentina’s automobile industry, it will account for the failure of that sector. Finally, it examines the role of working-class struggles in the industry in Córdoba, Argentina, arguing that these were vital in shaping the specific and unstable form of capitalist diversity in Argentina, as well as potential alternatives to it.

This volume explores the postsecular as a momentous transformation of the international system which affects existing forms of political community, identity, and power. It encompasses a set of theoretical investigations of the postsecular, an analysis of four case studies (Europe, Russia, the United States, and Egypt), and an examination of the role and strategies of transnational actors in a postsecular world. Written by world-renowned and emerging leading scholars, these essays offer a lively engagement with the formidable challenges of the postsecular transformation of international politics.

The business strategy literature considers two types of corporate objectives or, as companies like to call them, 'missions', namely the shareholder and stakeholder approaches. According to the shareholder approach, companies exist to maximize the return for shareholders, and all other stakeholders (workers, managers, customers, suppliers, etc.) are instrumental in achieving this purpose. On the other hand, according to the stakeholder approach (in its more communitarian form), companies exist to benefit all stakeholders (including the shareholders, though, unlike for the shareholder approach, these are not given priority over other stakeholders). As one would expect, and as Naughton et al (1995) have pointed out, the notion of pursuing the common good in business is far more consistent with the stakeholder approach than with the shareholder approach. We argue that the case for the stakeholder approach, which – in its communitarian form – embodies the common good in a business context, is strengthened by recognising that we live in a postsecular predicament where many of the secular certainties of modernity are questioned in favour of approaches which draw on the resources of religious traditions. The growing body of literature on postsecularism discusses the normative implications for modern societies of living in an era where, contrary to the prediction of secularization, Jürgen Habermas argues that the moral intuitions of religions and spiritualties becomes important resources to cure the pathologies of modernization, including the crisis of an individualistic system of relations which prevents the construction of real and strong communities. Given the individualism and the secular frame which we argue to be inherent in the shareholder approach, in contrast with the genuine sense of community and openness to transcendence inherent in the stakeholder approach, our philosophical argument strengthens the case for the stakeholder approach as the preferable approach to corporate mission and identity in our contemporary, post-secular societies.

This paper challenges the traditional threefold classification of forced migration, and proposes a new concept: land-grab-induced displacement. The concept sheds light on issues that are shrouded by the conventional typology. Displacement, frequently treated as the ‘collateral damage’ of war and climate change, or an unfortunate sacrifice necessitated by ‘development’, may often be better understood as part of the political economy of land. The notion of land-grab-induced displacement encapsulates cases in which people are forcibly uprooted primarily so that others can control the land and its resources. The argument draws on three examples –from Colombia, Ethiopia and Southeast Asia post-tsunami- in order to highlight the limitations of the standard categorisation, and the need to better integrate land questions into our analytical frameworks of forced displacement.

We need a world trade organization. We just don't need the one that we have. By pitching unequally matched states together in chaotic bouts of negotiating the global trade governance of today offers - and has consistently offered - developed countries more of the economic opportunities they already have and developing countries very little of what they desperately need. This is an unsustainable state of affairs to which the blockages in the Doha round provide ample testimony.

So far only piecemeal solutions have been offered to refine this flawed system. Radical proposals that seek to fundamentally alter trade governance or reorient its purposes around more socially progressive and egalitarian goals are thin on the ground. Yet we eschew deeper reform at our peril. In What's Wrong with the World Trade Organization and How to Fix It Rorden Wilkinson argues that without global institutions fit for purpose, we cannot hope for the kind of fine global economic management that can put an end to major crises or promote development-for-all. Charting a different path he shows how the WTO can be transformed into an institution and a form of trade governance that fulfils its real potential and serves the needs of all.

The present study provides an analysis of China’s foreign policy towards Central Asia to trace ‘culture of China’s foreign policy’. The culture of China’s foreign policy approach deals with China as an identity and process rather than being static or within boundaries. The present research highlights China’s multilateral and cooperative policies in Central Asia and with Russia as an outcome of evolutionary process of construction of China’s identity. The complex process of building relations with Central Asian region although within a short period of time (in post-Soviet context) are analysed to make a case for China’s innovative (partially) political processes of dealing with frontier security and embracing multilateralism. This is explained by studying the evolution of China’s identity and interests and the role of significant events that affect its perceptions of self and that are a prescription for its policy orientations as observed in case of foreign policy towards Central Asia. The theoretical foundation of Peter Katzenstein thesis is helpful premises upon which an argument in favour of the discourse of identity and security is developed to see how culture of national security of China and ‘complementarity’ of Central Asian states is at work in security cooperation seen among these states. By problematizing the notion of ‘national interest’, the present study argues that interests of the states can be contextualized in a broader environment referred as civilization to trace the relationship between interests and identities of China as at play in Central Asian region. By placing the political state of ‘China’ in the broader context of civilization and as evolving, helps understand how Chinese political spectrum seeks to construct and maintain a great power identity while locating ‘self’ against ‘others’. It further argues that the cooperative and multilateral policies of China in form of Shanghai Cooperation Organization can be understood best by studying how the configurations of identity of China has guided the policy formation process; that constructs and reconstructs interstate normative structure in form of SCO.

Modes of dialectical reasoning were introduced into International Relations (IR) from the 1980s onwards in the context of the post-positivist debate as an alternative intellectual resource drawn from the philosophy of the social sciences. To the extent that the deployment of dialectics for IR drew upon Marx and the wider Hegelian Marxist tradition, it was challenged philosophically and substantively on two fronts. Philosophically, the problem emerged how to disassociate dialectics from the ‘systemic’ Hegelian legacy, which expressed itself in the naturalism and monism of dialectical materialism, and how to overcome a reading of capital as a self-unfolding conceptual category, expressed in systematic dialectics, which de-historicised and de-subjectified capitalism as a social relation. Substantively, the problem remained how to anchor a Historical Sociology of international relations in a historicist philosophy of praxis to avoid the temptation of a relapse into structuralist modes of explanation. By addressing this double challenge, this paper identifies a central lacuna within the Marxist IR tradition—the gap between general Marxist theories of IR and the analysis of foreign policy-making. This gap persists in equal measure in the bifurcation between the fields of general IR theory and actor-specific foreign policy analysis (FPA). For general IR theories—Marxist and non-Marxist—tend to deploy structuralist versions of theory, which relegate the problem of foreign policy-making to lesser, possibly non-theorisable, forms of inquiry. FPA is thereby demoted and subsumed under wider structural imperatives capable of cross-case generalisation. The paper moves from a critical exposition of the wider debate in IR and FPA of attempts to close this gap, via a critique of dialectical materialism and systematic dialectics, to a re-statement of the dialectic of the concrete. It concludes with a reconsideration of how dialectical thinking may bridge this gap by incorporating foreign policy as the crucial site for the active drawing together and re-articulation of multiple influences from the domestic and the foreign into a Historical Sociology of international relations.

This article explores the emergence of 'diaspora orphans' over the course of Zimbabwe's crisis. The debates over this phenomenon reflect a range of real emotional and practical problems encountered by children and youth with parents abroad. But they also highlight the ambiguity of moral judgments of emigration and émigrés, and the crisis of expectation that assumptions of diaspora wealth have fostered within families and among those remaining behind. The negative stereotyping of 'diaspora orphans' reflects the moral discourse circulating within families, schools and society more broadly, which is revealing for the light it sheds on unfolding debates over changing parenting, gender, and extended family obligations as these have been challenged by crisis and mass exodus. The article furthers understanding of transnational parenting, particularly the perspectives of those who fulfil substitute parental caring roles for children left behind, and of the moral dimensions of debates over the role of money and material goods in intimate relationships of care for children. It adds a new strand to debates over African youths by focusing not on the problems created through entrap-ment by poverty, but on the emotional consequences of parents' spatial mobility in middle class families where material resources may be ample. The article is based on interviews with adults looking after children and youths left behind (maids, siblings, grandparents and single parents), and the reflections of teachers and 'diaspora orphans' themselves.

The period leading up to and following the global financial crisis has been characterized by rising global financial diversity and multipolarity, a process underscored by the growth of so-called sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). To date there has not been any systematic examination of the interactions between this rising global financial diversity and national economic institutional diversity. Here I apply an institutional “comparative capitalisms” perspective to the analysis of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) SWF investment in German industry since the onset of the global financial crisis. The evidence demonstrates that a growing number of German industrial firms—particularly the major automotive firms at the heart of German industry—have recruited long-term GCC SWF investment as an adaptive response to the stresses of financial restructuring, most importantly the appearance of hostile takeovers as a feature of the German corporate governance landscape. These patterns lend partial support to “varieties of capitalism” (VOC) arguments that institutional complementarity and comparative institutional advantage are likely to produce path dependent trajectories of national institutional evolution. They also lend partial support to critiques of VOC, emphasizing, on the one hand, the importance of the Polanyian “double movement” of market expansion and containment and, on the other, the transnational foundations of national institutional diversity. I conclude that to fully explain these patterns, both VOC theories of institutional complementarity and comparative advantage, and Polanyian theories of the double movement, must be grounded in a “generalized Darwinian” analysis of population-level selection dynamics.

This paper presents the financialization of poverty as a conceptual addition to the literature on microfinance. It argues that for microfinance to be seen as a solution to poverty alleviation, poverty has been made into a financial problem. This is exemplified by the World Bank's global poverty line and leads to the constitution of poor people as financial subjects. In addition, thinking of poverty in financial terms enables Northern publics' engagement with poverty. Recent initiatives like Live Below the Line and Kiva.org are presented as examples of how poverty is made manageable for Northern supporters of microfinance. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This article examines the emergence of a new group of development experts who tackle development problems in "innovative" ways: professional designers and the organizations that fund them. What has become known as humanitarian design is an instantiation of the afterlives of development, which redefines the problem of development as eliciting the needs of poor clients and creating mechanisms so that they can provide feedback on proposed solutions. This reframing results in hybrid forms of development knowledge that combine business and entrepreneurial objectives with concerns about designers' moral responsibilities in the contemporary world. The use of humanitarian design in creating formal financial products and services for the poor is analyzed through the work of the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion. © 2014 by the American Anthropological Association.

This article argues for the primacy of class relations and struggles as determinants of developmental processes and outcomes, emphasizing the evolving, dialectical nature of these relations. It does so by providing a case study of export horticulture in North-east Brazil. It documents how the region's rural trade union has been able, through mobilizing its membership base, to achieve significant improvements in their livelihoods, pay and conditions. It also shows how the region's employers have responded to these gains by restructuring the labour force in order to attempt to fragment and weaken it. The article pays particular attention to the gender dynamics of class relations.

In recent years a large body of work has emerged that uses a positivist epistemology and quantitative methods to assess the likely conflict impacts of global climate change. This article advances a critique of this positivist climate conflict research programme, identifying within it three serial shortcomings. It contends, first, that the correlations identified by this research are specious, since they always rest upon coding and causal assumptions which range from the arbitrary to the untenable. It argues, second, that even if the correlations identified within this research were significant and meaningful, they would still not constitute a sound basis for making predictions about the conflict impacts of climate change. And it submits, third, that this research programme reflects and reproduces an ensemble of Northern stereotypes, ideologies and policy agendas. A departure from positivist method is required, the article contends, if we are to get close to thinking through the wide-ranging political and conflict implications of the human transformation of the global climate.

This article develops a new framework for understanding environment-conflict relations, on both theoretical grounds and through a qualitative historical analysis of the links between water and conflict in the states of Sudan and South Sudan. Theoretically, the article critiques the dominant emphases on ‘scarcity’, ‘state failure’ and ‘under-development’ within discussions of environmental security, and proposes an alternative model of environment-conflict relations centring on resource abundance and globally-embedded processes of state-building and development. Empirically, it examines three claimed (or possible) linkages between water and conflict in the Sudans: over trans-boundary waters of the Nile; over the links between internal resource scarcities and civil conflict; and over the internal conflict impacts of water abundance and development. We find that there exists only limited evidence in support of the first two of these linkages, but plentiful evidence that water abundance, and state-directed processes of economic development and internal colonisation relating to water, have had violent consequences. We conclude that analysts and policymakers should pay more attention to the impacts of resource abundance, militarised state power and global political economic forces in their assessments of the potential conflict impacts of environmental and especially climate change.

This special issue of Geopolitics presents a series of critical interventions on the links between global anthropogenic climate change, conflict and security. In this introduction, we situate the special issue by providing an assessment of the state of debate on climate security, and then by summarising the eight articles that follow. We observe, to start with, that contemporary climate security discourse is dominated by a problematic ensemble of policy-led framings and assumptions. And we submit that the contributions to this issue help rethink this dominant discourse in two distinct ways, offering both a series of powerful critiques, plus new interpretations of climate-conflict linkages which extend beyond Malthusian orthodoxy.

This article introduces Adriana Cavarero's concept of “horrorism” into International Relations (IR) discussions of the relationship between war and citizenship. Horrorism refers to a violent violation of vulnerable humans who are defined by their simultaneous openness to the other's care and harm. With its motif of physical and ontological denigration, horrorism offends the human condition by making its victims gaze upon and/or experience repugnant violence and bodily disfiguration precisely when the vulnerable are most in need of care. The article argues that horrorism complicates disciplinary understandings of contemporary violence which tend to see terrorism, but not horrorism, in war and which generally neglect to theorize how violence—and particularly horrorism—is embedded in, and exchanged, through state/citizen relationships. To elaborate these arguments, the article analyses three pieces of war art: Jeremy Deller's “Baghdad, 5 March 2007,” Donald Gray's mural, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” and a still image from Cynthia Weber's film, “Guadalupe Denogean: ‘I am an American.’” By taking the War on Terrorism as their subject, these pieces demonstrate how war makes visible the terror and horror in state/citizen relationships. The article concludes by reconsidering how encountering signs of horrorism might broaden our frames of war and further our empathic vision toward the precarious victims of horrorism or, alternatively, might confirm the patriotic allegiances of imperial citizens in ways that further bind their citizenship to state political and economic violence and narrow the scope for genuine empathy.

What is queer? Why are queer international theories relevant to international relations? What might queer investigations of international relations look like?

Pharmaceuticals are now critical to the security of populations. Antivirals, antibiotics, next-generation vaccines, and antitoxins are just some of the new ‘medical countermeasures’ that governments are stockpiling in order to defend their populations against the threat of pandemics and bioterrorism. How has security policy come to be so deeply imbricated with pharmaceutical logics and solutions? This article captures, maps, and analyses the ‘pharmaceuticalisation’ of security. Through an in-depth analysis of the prominent antiviral medication Tamiflu, it shows that this pharmaceutical turn in security policy is intimately bound up with the rise of a molecular vision of life promulgated by the biomedical sciences. Caught in the crosshairs of powerful commercial, political, and regulatory pressures, governments are embracing a molecular biomedicine promising to secure populations pharmaceutically in the twenty-first century. If that is true, then the established disciplinary view of health as a predominantly secondary matter of ‘low’ international politics is mistaken. On the contrary, the social forces of health and biomedicine are powerful enough to influence the core practices of international politics – even those of security. For a discipline long accustomed to studying macro-level processes and systemic structures, it is in the end also our knowledge of the minute morass of molecules that shapes international relations.

Global governance remains notoriously slippery. While the term arose to describe change in the late twentieth century, its association with that specific moment has frozen it in time and deprived it of analytical utility. It has become an alternative moniker for international organizations, a descriptor for an increasingly crowded world stage, a call to arms, an attempt to control the pernicious aspects of globalization, and a synonym for world government. This article aims not to advance a theory of global governance but to highlight where core questions encourage us to go. A more rigorous conception should help us understand the nature of the contemporary phenomenon as well as look “backwards” and “forwards.” Such an investigation should provide historical insights as well as prescriptive elements to understand the kind of world order that we ought to be seeking and encourage us to investigate how that global governance could be realized.

Feminist scholarship has shown how gender is integral to understanding war, and that the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was partly legitimated through a reference to Afghan women’s ‘liberation’. Recognizing this, the article analyses how gender is crucial also to understanding the practice of ‘population-centric’ counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Because this type of warfare aims at ‘winning hearts and minds’, it is in engaging the population that a notable gendered addition to the US military strategy surfaces, Female Engagement Teams (FETs). Citing ‘cultural sensitivity’ as a key justification, the US deploys all-female teams to engage with and access a previously untapped source of intelligence and information, namely Afghan women. Beyond this being seen as necessary to complete the task of population-centric counterinsurgency, it is also hailed as a progressive step that contributes to Afghan women’s broader empowerment. Subjecting population-centric counterinsurgency to feminist analysis, this article finds that in constructing women both as ‘practitioners’ and ‘targets’, this type of warfare constitutes another chapter in the various ways that their bodies have been relied upon for its ‘success’.

This article discusses the divergent developmental outcomes among postwar South Korea, Taiwan, and South Vietnam. While U.S. aid has correctly been identified as a key factor in the rapid postwar development of South Korea and Taiwan, the failure of aid to establish strong institutions in South Vietnam calls for a closer analysis of how different historical and geopolitical factors explain the greater political stability and institutional capacity of South Korea and Taiwan. In particular, the legacies of Japanese colonialism are seen as having played a key role in establishing the strong developmental states of South Korea and Taiwan, while the postcolonial South Vietnamese state was more fragile. As such, there was greater political resistance to land reform in the latter, and large amounts of U.S. economic and military aid were unable to quell domestic insurgency and establish the basis for economic development.

This paper explores the political economy of energy transition in South Africa. An economic model based around a powerful ‘minerals-energy complex’ that has previously been able to provide domestic and foreign capital with cheap and plentiful coal-generated electricity is no longer economically or environmentally sustainable. The paper analyses the struggle over competing energy visions, infrastructures and political agendas in order to generate insights into the governance and financing of clean energy transitions in South Africa. It provides both a rich empirical account of key policy developments aimed at enabling such a transition and provides reflections on how best to theorise the contested politics of energy transitions.

The Chinese Communist Party’s response to the wave of factory strikes in the early summer of 2010 has raised important questions about the role that labour plays in the transformation of world orders. In contrast to previous policies of repression towards labour unrest, these recent disputes centring round wages and working conditions have been met with a more permissive response on the part of the state, as the CCP ostensibly seeks to facilitate a transition away from a model of political economy based on ‘low-road’ labour relations and export dependence.

Labour and Development in East Asia shows that such inter-linkages between labour, geopolitical transformations, and states’ developmental strategies have been much more central to East Asia’s development than has commonly been recognised. By adopting an explanatory framework of the labour-geopolitics-development nexus, the book theorises and provides an historical analysis of the formation and transformation of the East Asian regional political economy from the end of the Second World War to the present, with particular reference to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China.

In 2011, the Department for International Development, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, and the Ministry of Defence launched the Building Stability Overseas Strategy (BSOS). This document sought to integrate cross-government activity as it related to conflict and security so as to ‘take fast, appropriate and effective action to prevent a crisis or stop it escalating and spreading’. At the heart of the strategy was the recognition that addressing instability and conflict overseas was morally right and in the UK's national interests. This confluence of foreign policy realism and ethical outlook most clearly found harmony in the acknowledgement that it was cheaper for the international community to avoid conflict than it was to try to manage it. Through an examination of three historical case studies (Uganda 1964–1972, Rhodesia–Zimbabwe 1979–1981, and Sierra Leone 2000–2007), this article seeks to demonstrate just how difficult this seemingly sensible strategic outlook is. In particular, the article shows there are historical parallels in British postcolonial history that very closely resemble contemporary policy choices; that these can be used to define what is different about past and present practice; and, which in turn, can be used to – at least tentatively – mark out the potential strengths and weaknesses in BSOS.

British attitudes towards military intervention following the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have undergone what appears to be considerable change. Parliament has voted against the use of Britain's armed forces in Syria and the public are unenthused by overseas engagement. Conscious of the costs and the challenges posed by the use of British military power the government has been busy revamping the way it approaches crises overseas. The result is a set of policies that apparently heralds a new direction in foreign policy. This new direction is encapsulated in the Building Stability Overseas Strategy (BSOS) and the more recent International Defence Engagement Strategy (IDES). Both BSOS and IDES set out the basis for avoiding major deployments to overseas conflict and instead refocuses effort on defence diplomacy, working with and through overseas governments and partners, early warning, pre-conflict prevention and post-conflict reconstruction. Developing a number of themes that reach from across the Cold War to more contemporary discussions of British strategy, the goal of this special edition is to take into account a number of perspectives that place BSOS and IDES in their historical and strategic context. These papers suggest that using defence diplomacy is and will remain an extremely imprecise lever that needs to be carefully managed if it is to remain a democratically accountable tool of foreign policy.

This article contributes to literature on the sociology of sleep by exploring the sleeping practices and subjective sleep experiences of two social groups: shift workers and students. It draws on data, collected in the UK from 25 semi-structured interviews, to discuss the complex ways in which working patterns and social activities impact upon experiences and expectations of sleep in our wired awake world. The data show that, typically, sleep is valued and considered to be important for health, general wellbeing, appearance and physical and cognitive functioning. However, sleep time is often cut back on in favour of work demands and social activities. While shift workers described their efforts to fit in an adequate amount of sleep per 24-hour period, for students, the adoption of a flexible sleep routine was thought to be favourable for maintaining a work–social life balance. Collectively, respondents reported using a wide range of strategies, techniques, technologies and practices to encourage, overcome or delay sleep(iness) and boost, promote or enhance wakefulness/alertness at socially desirable times. The analysis demonstrates how social context impacts not only on how we come to think about sleep and understand it, but also how we manage or self-regulate our sleeping patterns.

Governments in Europe and around the world amassed vast pharmaceutical stockpiles in anticipation of a potentially catastrophic influenza pandemic. Yet the comparatively ‘mild’ course of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic provoked considerable public controversy around those stockpiles, leading to questions about their cost–benefit profile and the commercial interests allegedly shaping their creation, as well as around their scientific evidence base. So, how did governments come to view pharmaceutical stockpiling as such an indispensable element of pandemic preparedness planning? What are the underlying security rationalities that rapidly rendered antivirals such a desirable option for government planners? Drawing upon an in-depth reading of Foucault’s notion of a ‘crisis of circulation’, this article argues that the rise of pharmaceutical stockpiling across Europe is integral to a governmental rationality of political rule that continuously seeks to anticipate myriad circulatory threats to the welfare of populations – including to their overall levels of health. Novel antiviral medications such as Tamiflu are such an attractive policy option because they could enable governments to rapidly modulate dangerous levels of (viral) circulation during a pandemic, albeit without disrupting all the other circulatory systems crucial for maintaining population welfare. Antiviral stockpiles, in other words, promise nothing less than a pharmaceutical securing of circulation itself.

Allied Fighting Effectiveness in North Africa and Italy, 1942-1945 offers a collection of scholarly papers focusing on heretofore understudied aspects of the Second World War. Encompassing the major campaigns of North Africa, Sicily and Italy from operation TORCH to the end of the war in Europe, this volume explores the intriguing dichotomy of the nature of battle in the Mediterranean theatre, whilst helping to emphasise its significance to the study of Second Word War military history. The chapters, written by a number of international scholars, offer a discussion of a range of subjects, including: logistics, the air-land battle, coalition operations, doctrine and training, command, control and communications, and airborne and special forces.
Contributors are Matthew C. Ford, Simon Godfrey, John Greenacre, Andrew L. Hargreaves, James Hudson, Alan Jeffreys, Kevin Jones, Paul Lemaire, Ross Mahoney, Christopher Mann, Cesar Campiani Maximiano, Patrick J. Rose, and Grant T. Weller.

More than six decades after its occurrence, China’s ‘peasant revolution’ of 1949 remains an enigma. According to classical Marxism, peasants are passive ‘objects of history’ who must be transformed into industrial workers before they can become agents of revolutionary change. This line of argument is reinforced by much extant Sinology and historical sociology, both of which have treated Maoism either as a disguised continuation of peasant exploitation, or as a failed emulation of Stalinism. Contra these interpretations, this thesis argues that China’s peasant revolution was a real historical phenomenon which involved a previously unthinkable form of peasant political agency. To substantiate this argument, the thesis deploys Leon Trotsky's theory of Uneven and Combined Development (U&CD) which posits social development as a non-linear process constituted via multi-societal interaction. This reveals that the origins and specificities of the Chinese Revolution can best be understood with reference to a 'combined development' emerging from China's long-run and short-run interactions with variegated social forms.

The first chapter of the thesis shows how China’s ‘peasant revolution’ remains an insurmountable paradox for the relevant literature, expressed in a shared problem of
anachronism. Chapter 2 introduces Uneven and Combined Development as a theory of inter-societal causation that might overcome the problem by virtue of its non-linear
conception of social development. Chapter 3 demonstrates how this inter-societal perspective is central to understanding the longue dureé ‘peculiarities’ of China’s development: the interaction of nomadic and sedentary societies made the Chinese peasants directly subject to a centralizing empire, configuring their political agency quite differently (and with quite different potentials) from that of their European feudal counterparts. Chapter 4 analyzes the specific intersection of the Chinese social formation with the universalizing dynamics of Western capitalism, an intersection which generated the context of China’s modern combined development. Chapter 5 then provides a conjunctural analysis of how the revolutionary agency of the peasant came to the fore in China’s revolution in terms of a pattern of combined development that substituted the peasantry for the weak bourgeoisie and nascent proletariat as the leading agency of a socialist modernization that fused anti-imperialist struggle and campaigns for rural restoration and national liberation into a single process aimed at overcoming China’s backwardness. Finally, Chapter 6 shows how this argument resolves the Sinological debate on whether modern Chinese history is ‘China-made’ or ‘West-made’; for it reveals how the interaction of China’s premodern social forms with Western modernity co-determined the peculiarites of China’s modern transformation. It also provides a critique of extant Marxist historical sociology, arguing that it is built upon a mode-of-production analysis that tends towards falsely unilinear, ‘internalist’ explanations.

The three-decades old call for an inter-disciplinary rapprochement between IR Theory and Historical Sociology, starting in the context of the post-positivist debate in the 1980s, has generated a proliferating repertory of contending paradigms within the field of IR, including Neo-Weberian, Post-Structuralist, and Constructivist approaches. Within the Marxist literature, this project comprises an equally rich and diverse set of theoretical traditions, including World-Systems Theory, Neo-Gramscian IR/IPE, the Amsterdam School, Political Marxism, Neo-Leninism, and Postcolonial Theory. More recently, a “third wave” of approaches has been announced from within the field of IR, suggesting to move the dialogue from inter-disciplinarity towards an integrated super-discipline of International Historical Sociology (IHS). This proposition has been most persistently advanced by advocates of the theory of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD), claiming to constitute a universal, unitary and sociological theory of IR. This article charts the intellectual trajectory of this ongoing IR/HS dialogue. It moves from a critique of Neo-Weberianism to a critique of UCD against the background of the original promise of the turn in IR to Historical Sociology: the supersession of the prevailing rationalism, structuralism, and positivism in extant mainstream IR approaches through the mobilization of alternative and non-positivistic traditions in the social sciences. This critique will be performed by setting UCD in dialogue with Political Marxism. By anchoring both approaches at opposite ends on the spectrum of Marxist conceptions of social science – respectively the scientistic and the historicist - the argument is that UCD reneges on the promise of Historical Sociology for IR by re-aligning, first by default and now by design, with the meta-theoretical premises of Neo-Realism. This is most visibly expressed in the articulation of a deductive-nomological covering law, leading towards acute conceptual and ontological anachronisms, premised on the radical de-historicisation of the fields of ontology, conceptuality and disciplinarity. This includes the semantic neutering and hyper-abstract re-articulation of the very category, which in IR’s self-perception lends legitimacy to its claim of disciplinary distinctiveness: the international. The article concludes by suggesting that an understanding of Marxism as a historicist social science subverts all calls for the construction of grand theories and, a fortiori, a unitary super-discipline of IHS, premised on a set of universal, space-time indifferent, and abstract categories that hold across the spectrum of world history. In contrast, recovering the historicist credentials of Marxism demands a constant temporalisation and specification of the fields of ontology, agency, conceptuality and disciplinarity. The objective is to lay the foundations for a historicist social science of geopolitics.

This thesis challenges the Eurocentric division of international history into distinct 'Western' and 'Eastern' strands by demonstrating the intensive historical interactivity between the Ottoman Empire and Europe. Addressing Weberian, Marxian and postcolonial inspired historiography, it seeks to overcome a series of interconnected binaries- East versus West, tradition versus modernity and inside versus outside- that characterise the one-sidedness of these approaches. This thesis argues that Uneven and Combined Development (U&CD) is a theoretical framework primed to overcoming precisely such partialities, and can therefore make an original contribution to Ottoman historiography.
More specifically the thesis tackles problems in Ottoman historiography across three key junctures. Through a treatment of the origins of the Empire, I demonstrate that the Ottoman tributary state was a product of international determinations- a form of combined development. Analysing the Ottoman apogee of the sixteenth century, I argue that Ottoman geopolitical pressure on Europe created sociological conditions for that emergence of capitalism. Finally, I show that Ottoman decline was inextricable from the uneven and combined development of capitalism over the course of the long nineteenth century. These historical analyses offer distinct contributions to historical sociological debates around the 'tributary mode of production', the 'Rise of the West' and 'modernisation' respectively.
Theoretically, I show that any historical study from a singular spatial vantage point will always tend to be partial. Instead, multiple vantage points derived from multiple spatio-temporal origins better capture the complexity of concrete historical processes. In presenting this argument, this thesis offers a theoretical reconstruction of U&CD as the articulation of spatio-temporal multiplicity in mode of production analysis, which overcomes the fissure between international relations and historical sociology. It thus extends the theory of U&CD onto the terrain of 'big questions' surrounding pre-capitalist social relations and capitalist modernity.

The central paradox of the contemporary world is the simultaneous presence of wealth on an unprecedented scale, and mass poverty. Liberal theory explains the relationship between capitalism and poverty as one based around the dichotomy of inclusion (into capitalism) vs exclusion (from capitalism). Within this discourse, the global capitalist system is portrayed as a sphere of economic dynamism and as a source of developmental opportunities for less developed countries and their populations. Development policy should, therefore, seek to integrate the poor into the global capitalist system. The Global Development Crisis challenges this way of thinking. Through an interrogation of some of the most important political economists of the last two centuries--D. Friedrich List, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Schumpeter, Alexander Gerschenkron, Karl Polanyi and Amarta Sen--Selwyn argues that class relations are the central cause of poverty and inequality, within and between countries. In contrast to much development thinking, which portrays 'the poor' as reliant upon benign assistance, this book advocates the concept of labour-centred development. Here 'the poor' are the global labouring classes, and their own collective actions and struggles constitute the basis of an alternative form of non-elitist, bottom-up human development.

Responsibility for Human Rights provides an original theoretical analysis of which global actors are responsible for human rights, and why. It does this through an evaluation of the different reasons according to which such responsibilities might be assigned: legalism, universalism, capacity and publicness. The book marshals various arguments that speak in favour of and against assigning 'responsibility for human rights' to any state or non-state actor. At the same time, it remains grounded in an incisive interpretation of the world we actually live in today, including: the relationship between sovereignty and human rights, recent events in 'business and human rights' practice, and key empirical examples of human rights violations by companies. David Karp argues that relevantly public actors have specific human rights responsibility. However, states can be less public, and non-state actors can be more public, than might seem apparent at first glance.

This article argues that Prevent, Britain’s counter-radicalisation policy, has been an important and under-analysed site for contemporary renegotiations of threat; first, in that it seeks to act on threats existing within a radically unknowable future, and second, in terms of how it identifies those subjects seen to represent this future threat. In its ambition to tame this radical contingency, Prevent represents an extension of governmentality that acts at the level of potential, before the threat being targeted has come to exist. It does so by mediating these unknowable futures through ascriptions of identification, values and the danger it sees posed by disassociations from “Britishness” and then intervenes in the present, both pre-emptively through community cohesion and at a precautionary level through the Channel programme. What is at stake is the (re)generation and the policing of the boundaries of secured life, and ultimately, it will be argued, the possibilities of contemporary politics.

This article argues that the lead role of West Germany in the transition from fixed to floating exchange rates sits uneasily with accounts that conceptualise the breakdown of Bretton Woods in terms of hegemonic power politics, the influence of global economic interests or a neoliberal paradigm shift. Short of a convincing explanation, the German currency float seems to be a prime example of states surrendering to financial markets. The article offers an alternative interpretation that focuses on the nexus between state agency and capital accumulation. German authorities were indeed confronted with a destabilising influx of dollars that undermined their available policy options. But as they realised that these inflationary flows emanated from the same export-oriented forces in whose interest they had sought to hold on to an undervalued currency, they chose floating in order to regain command over liquidity and create an anti-inflationary programme that was at the heart of Germany's subsequent ability to better manage the 1970s crisis than its partners. Attention to the particular circumstances and consequences of these ‘structured choices’, I conclude, may offer a more compelling account of financial globalisation as a state-led project than those which generalise from the US context.