Christine Agius - Böcker

Since the end of the Cold War, and particularly in the post-9/11 international environment, neutrality has been conceptualised as a problematic subject. With the end of bipolarity, neutrality as a foreign and security policy lost much of its justification, and in the ongoing ‘War on Terror’, no state, according to the Bush Administration, can be neutral. However, much of this debate has gone unnoticed in IR literature. This book, newly available in paperback, examines the conceptualisation of neutrality from the Peloponnesian War to the present day, uncovering how neutrality has been a neglected and misunderstood subject in IR theory and politics. By rethinking neutrality through constructivism, this book argues that neutrality is intrinsically linked to identity. Using Sweden as a case study, it links identity, sovereignty, internationalism and solidarity to the debates about Swedish neutrality today and how neutrality has been central to Swedish identity and its world-view.

In what ways can we think through the complexities of identity? Identity is a contested concept, but it is more than a thing possessed by agents. Identity is contingent and dynamic, constituting and reconstituting subjects with political effects. In this edited book, identity is explored through a range of unique interdisciplinary case studies from around the world. Questions of citizenship, belonging, migration, conflict, security, peace and subjectivity are examined through social construction, post-colonialism, and gendered lenses from an interdisciplinary perspective. This combination showcases in particular the political implications of identity, how it is constituted, and the effects it produces. This edited collection will be of particular interest to students of international relations theory, migration studies, gender and sexuality, post-colonialism and policy-making at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

This book examines whether we are witnessing the resilience, persistence and adaptation of masculinist discourses and practices at both domestic and international levels in the contemporary global context.