Naman Karl-Thomas Habtom – författare

Redefining neutrality as a dynamic and strategic posture in global politics, this open access interdisciplinary volume moves beyond Cold War legacies and Eurocentric legal frameworks to explore neutrality through philosophy, law, economics, and international relations. Contributions include the examination of ancient texts including Kautilya’s Arthashastra, the resilience of neutrality law in cyber warfare, and the strategic agency of small states in nuclear diplomacy and multipolar conflict. With diverse global case studies from Europe, Asia, and the Americas, this innovative volume decentralizes traditional narratives and highlights neutrality’s relevance in today’s fragmented world order. Whether as a tool of sovereignty, a buffer against great power rivalry, or a platform for global peacebuilding, neutrality emerges as a vital concept for scholars, diplomats, and policymakers seeking to understand how states navigate autonomy, responsibility, and global governance in the 21st century.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Kyoto University.

This open access book repositions neutrality as a globally embedded political practice, legal instrument and identity-forming strategy across a wide array of historical and geopolitical contexts. Focusing explicitly on the experiences of individual neutral and non-aligned states, it offers in-depth discussions about the conceptual challenges faced in the past by actors who tried to chart a viable third-party course towards belligerent environments, and offers a fresh, global and cross-disciplinary look into the practice of neutrality.Interrogating the legal and political agency of states under occupation, such as Hawai’i and China, it revisits the role of neutrality in the Pacific War, the First World War and Cold War diplomacy. Investigating examples such as the tensions between ideology and pragmatism in Indonesian and Irish foreign policies, and the empirical shifts in public perception toward neutrality in places like Switzerland and Luxembourg, it offers case studies from around the globe.By tracing how states from diverse historical trajectories used neutrality to navigate imperial pressures, shifting alliances, and great power politics, the volume highlights both the adaptability and vulnerability of neutrality as a global concept. Collectively, the chapters argue that neutrality has been—and remains—an active expression of agency within an unequal international order, and that its global history must be reclaimed to better understand the possibilities of non-alignment in the present.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Kyoto University, Japan