During the post-cold war world, the world's only superpower has encountered an unprecedented challenge: a non-state enemy that is challenging its hegemony and is using violence as a strategic means. Given the international nature of this phenomenon, a structured explanation such as this is given added necessity and urgency. Cornelia Beyer provides a structured explanation for terrorism and its links with the 'Global War on Terror' as it relates to the latter's broader context, causes and implications. She offers a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of international terrorism and proposes effective policies to counter it. She also remedies the current undertheorized nature of the subject area, and in doing so opens up new modes of thinking about and struggling against global terrorism.

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

With Theory of International Politics Kenneth Waltz established Neo-realism as a major school of thought in IR, which still remains a dominant approach within the discipline in the Anglo-American world and beyond. Man, the State and War - his first contribution to the debate in IR and the predecessor to Theory of International Politics - received praise for its presentation of a discussion on the causes of international warfare as well as the possibilities of its prevention on three different levels of analysis: the individual, the state and the international system. This book reflects on the arguments presented in Man, the State and War from a contemporary perspective. Do Waltz's ideas still hold firm ground in the discipline? The book alerts to the perceived necessity of combining conceptions of governance and authority with considerations on the reduction of inequality at the individual, state and international level. Inequality in particular has received increased attention as a cause for violence at all three levels since Waltz published Man, the State and War. The book also addresses Waltz's rejection of supranationalism as the remedy for war - a view that has been challenged since he wrote the book. One theme stands out: from today's perspective, the establishment and maintenance of 'good global governance' can be considered the most important aspect for the prevention of war.

This seminal work is the first fully to engage human security with power in the international system. It presents global governance not as impartial institutionalism, but as the calculated mismanagement of life, directing biopolitical neoliberal ideology through global networks, undermining the human security of millions. The book responds to recent critiques of the human security concept as incoherent by identifying and prioritizing transnational human populations facing life-ending contingencies en mass. Furthermore, it proposes a realignment of World Bank practices towards mobilizing indigenous provision of water and sanitation in areas with the highest rates of avoidable child mortality. Roberts demonstrates that mainstream IR's nihilistic domination of security thinking is directly responsible for blocking the realization of greater human security for countless people worldwide, whilst its assumptions and attendant policies perpetuate the dystopia its proponents claim is inevitable. Yet this book presents a viable means of achieving a form of human security so far denied to the most vulnerable people in the world.

This book examines the limits to cosmopolitan liberal peacebuilding caused by its preoccupation with the values and assumptions of neoliberal global governance. The peace people experience is determined by the processes privileged in peacebuilding. This book is about four things that shape the processes involved. First, it is a critique of orthodox postconflict peacebuilding. It takes the position that the present approach, although seemingly hegemonic, is routinely ignored or manipulated by elites and society and converted into a miasma that to some degree wastes the energies and opportunities involved. Second, it is about alternatives which invoke the kind of peace people might seek in postconflict places if they had more control over the process of peacebuilding, a notion referred to here as ‘popular peace’. It is thus not the kind of critical work that some describe as ‘reflexive anti-liberalism’. Rather, it seeks alternatives that are grounded in the lives of people in postconflict spaces and which also reflect some of the essential values of Liberalism. Third, it is about the role of both informal and formal actors, institutions and practices in the creation of such a peace. For instance, it is concerned with the legitimacy of informal practices that lie beyond Liberal tolerance and which are vital in the pursuit of everyday peace. Fourth, it is about a ‘transversal’ (rather than vertical or hierarchical) relationship of global and local governance in securing a peace that reflects the needs and values of both. In short, this work is a response to the substantial inconsistencies that appear between peacebuilding rhetoric and everyday outcomes in postconflict places. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, post-conflict statebuilding, conflict studies, global governance and International Relations in general.

Military, economic, and environmental violence in the era of globalization cause immense suffering and may ultimately threaten the existence of life as we know it, but author Pilisuk explains that the future can change if we understand and act upon the roots of violence. A professor emeritus of psychology and human and community development, Pilisuk explains how most violence is the product of a human-built social order in which some people and institutions control most of the resources, make the decisions that necessitate violence, and operate with minimal accountability. The common root of war, poverty, environmental destruction, and other forms of violence is spotlighted. Such violence, says Pilisuk, is a natural consequence of a system inordinately influenced by a relatively small, interconnected group of corporate, military, and government leaders with the power to instill fear, to increase their excessive fortunes, and to restrict information, particularly about their own clandestine dealings. This text includes scholarship hailing from across disciplines, combined with information from investigative journalism, and insights from nonprofit watchdog groups, all shedding light on centralized power and its effects. Pilisuk presents material including the range of tactics used to manipulate and destroy adversaries, the human capacity to kill as a challenge, and how media is used by powerful groups to manipulate fear and maintain their power. Here, readers find solid social science to support what whistleblowers and social critics are observing about a system that needs change.

This book examines the foundations of China’s grand strategy as it is critical to any assessment of current and future Chinese regional and global strategic behavior, especially Beijing’s policies toward the USA. This eclectic study aims to analyze the current Chinese and American flexible grand strategies, based on present complexity and disorder. It identifies the major building blocks of both strategies, their major material, and ideational drivers and assesses how they might evolve in the future. Additionally, the author looks at China’s relations with important international players such as Russia, ASEAN, UN, EU, and BRICS.

This is a provocative collection exploring the different types of violence and how they relate to one another, examined through the integration of several disciplines, including forensic psychotherapy, psychiatry, sociology, psychosocial studies and political science. By examining the 'violent states' of mind behind specific forms of violence and the social and societal contexts in which an individual act of human violence takes place, the contributors reveal the dynamic forces and reasoning behind specific forms of violence including structural violence, and conceptualise the societal structures themselves as 'violent states'. Other research often stops short at examining the causes and risk factors for violence, without considering the opposite states that may not only mitigate, but allow for a different unfolding of individual and societal evolution. As a potential antidote to violence, the authors prescribe an understanding of these 'creative states' with their psychological origins, and their importance in human behaviour and meaning-seeking. Making a call to move beyond merely mitigating violence to the opposite direction of fostering creative potential, this book is foundational in its capacity to cultivate social consciousness and effect positive change in areas of governance, policy-making, and collective responsibility. Volume 1: Structural Violence and Creative Structures covers structural and symbolic violence, with violent states and State violence, and with creative responses and creative states at the local and global levels.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This is the first extensive analysis of large-scale violence and the methods of its restraint in the early modern world. Using examples from Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe, it questions the established narrative that violence was only curbed through the rise of western-style nation states and civil societies. Global history allows us to reframe and challenge traditional models for the history of violence and to rethink categories and units of analysis through comparisons. By decentring Europe and exploring alternative patterns of violence, the contributors to this volume articulate the significance of violence in narratives of state- and empire-building, as well as in their failure and decline, while also providing new means of tracing the transition from the early modern to modernity.

This new edition of Manfred Steger's award-winning book explores the three principal ideologies of our time: the neoliberal "market globalism," the "justice globalism" of the global justice movement, and the "jihadist globalism" of radical Islamists. Steger, one of the world's leading scholars on these subjects, explores globalization's central questions: What, exactly, are the core claims of these conflicting globalisms? What are the most likely future trajectories of this great ideological struggle of the twenty-first century? Written with impressive historical and theoretical breadth, this groundbreaking work is essential reading for all those concerned with the key questions that our shrinking world must face.