John D Moore – författare

Petroleum and Politics in Iraq: The Struggle for the State investigates how oil wealth, elite power struggles and foreign intervention have shaped the fragile nature of the modern Iraqi state.Focusing on the period from Iraq's foundation through to the aftermath of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, this book analyses how rentierism, tactical political decision-making and coercion have interacted to erode, rather than reinforce, state cohesion. Drawing on rentier state theory, Joel Migdal's "e;politics of survival,"e; and Antonio Giustozzi's work on coercive institutions, it traces how successive Iraqi regimes - despite access to massive oil rents and international aid - failed to build lasting legitimacy or effective governance. Instead, the reliance on coercion became increasingly pronounced, leaving the state vulnerable to internal collapse and foreign influence. Through a careful examination of both pre- and post-2003 Iraq, the book argues that elite strategies and international actions have consistently undermined opportunities for meaningful state consolidation and raises critical questions about the future trajectory of Iraq's territorial and political integrity.Essential reading for scholars of Middle East politics, international relations and political economy, this book also offers valuable insights for policymakers, analysts and practitioners involved in post-conflict reconstruction, state-building and governance in resource-dependent and conflict-prone contexts.

Petroleum and Politics in Iraq: The Struggle for the State investigates how oil wealth, elite power struggles and foreign intervention have shaped the fragile nature of the modern Iraqi state.Focusing on the period from Iraq's foundation through to the aftermath of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, this book analyses how rentierism, tactical political decision-making and coercion have interacted to erode, rather than reinforce, state cohesion. Drawing on rentier state theory, Joel Migdal's "e;politics of survival,"e; and Antonio Giustozzi's work on coercive institutions, it traces how successive Iraqi regimes - despite access to massive oil rents and international aid - failed to build lasting legitimacy or effective governance. Instead, the reliance on coercion became increasingly pronounced, leaving the state vulnerable to internal collapse and foreign influence. Through a careful examination of both pre- and post-2003 Iraq, the book argues that elite strategies and international actions have consistently undermined opportunities for meaningful state consolidation and raises critical questions about the future trajectory of Iraq's territorial and political integrity.Essential reading for scholars of Middle East politics, international relations and political economy, this book also offers valuable insights for policymakers, analysts and practitioners involved in post-conflict reconstruction, state-building and governance in resource-dependent and conflict-prone contexts.

Petroleum and Politics in Iraq: The Struggle for the State investigates how oil wealth, elite power struggles and foreign intervention have shaped the fragile nature of the modern Iraqi state.Focusing on the period from Iraq’s foundation through to the aftermath of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, this book analyses how rentierism, tactical political decision-making and coercion have interacted to erode, rather than reinforce, state cohesion. Drawing on rentier state theory, Joel Migdal’s “politics of survival,” and Antonio Giustozzi’s work on coercive institutions, it traces how successive Iraqi regimes – despite access to massive oil rents and international aid – failed to build lasting legitimacy or effective governance. Instead, the reliance on coercion became increasingly pronounced, leaving the state vulnerable to internal collapse and foreign influence. Through a careful examination of both pre- and post-2003 Iraq, the book argues that elite strategies and international actions have consistently undermined opportunities for meaningful state consolidation and raises critical questions about the future trajectory of Iraq’s territorial and political integrity.Essential reading for scholars of Middle East politics, international relations and political economy, this book also offers valuable insights for policymakers, analysts and practitioners involved in post-conflict reconstruction, state-building and governance in resource-dependent and conflict-prone contexts.

Riemannian, symplectic and complex geometry are often studied by means ofsolutions to systems ofnonlinear differential equations, such as the equa­ tions of geodesics, minimal surfaces, pseudoholomorphic curves and Yang­ Mills connections. For studying such equations, a new unified technology has been developed, involving analysis on infinite-dimensional manifolds. A striking applications of the new technology is Donaldson''s theory of "anti-self-dual" connections on SU(2)-bundles over four-manifolds, which applies the Yang-Mills equations from mathematical physics to shed light on the relationship between the classification of topological and smooth four-manifolds. This reverses the expected direction of application from topology to differential equations to mathematical physics. Even though the Yang-Mills equations are only mildly nonlinear, a prodigious amount of nonlinear analysis is necessary to fully understand the properties of the space of solutions. . At our present state of knowledge, understanding smooth structures on topological four-manifolds seems to require nonlinear as opposed to linear PDE''s. It is therefore quite surprising that there is a set of PDE''s which are even less nonlinear than the Yang-Mills equation, but can yield many of the most important results from Donaldson''s theory. These are the Seiberg-Witte~ equations. These lecture notes stem from a graduate course given at the University of California in Santa Barbara during the spring quarter of 1995. The objective was to make the Seiberg-Witten approach to Donaldson theory accessible to second-year graduate students who had already taken basic courses in differential geometry and algebraic topology.

Riemannian, symplectic and complex geometry are often studied by means ofsolutions to systems ofnonlinear differential equations, such as the equa­ tions of geodesics, minimal surfaces, pseudoholomorphic curves and Yang­ Mills connections. For studying such equations, a new unified technology has been developed, involving analysis on infinite-dimensional manifolds. A striking applications of the new technology is Donaldson's theory of "anti-self-dual" connections on SU(2)-bundles over four-manifolds, which applies the Yang-Mills equations from mathematical physics to shed light on the relationship between the classification of topological and smooth four-manifolds. This reverses the expected direction of application from topology to differential equations to mathematical physics. Even though the Yang-Mills equations are only mildly nonlinear, a prodigious amount of nonlinear analysis is necessary to fully understand the properties of the space of solutions. . At our present state of knowledge, understanding smooth structures on topological four-manifolds seems to require nonlinear as opposed to linear PDE's. It is therefore quite surprising that there is a set of PDE's which are even less nonlinear than the Yang-Mills equation, but can yield many of the most important results from Donaldson's theory. These are the Seiberg-Witte~ equations. These lecture notes stem from a graduate course given at the University of California in Santa Barbara during the spring quarter of 1995. The objective was to make the Seiberg-Witten approach to Donaldson theory accessible to second-year graduate students who had already taken basic courses in differential geometry and algebraic topology.