Routledge Studies in Global and Transnational Politics – serie

This book offers transdisciplinary scholarship which challenges the agendas of and markers around traditional social scientific fields. It builds on the belief that the study of major issues in the global cultural and political economies benefit from a perspective that rejects the limitations imposed by established boundaries, whether disciplinary, conceptual, symbolic or material. Established and early career academics explore and embrace contemporary political sociology following the ‘global’ and ‘cultural’ turns of recent decades. Categories such as state, civil society, family, migration, citizenship and identity are interrogated and sometimes found to be ill-suited to the task of analyzing global complexities. The limits of global theory, the challenges of global citizenship, and the relationship between globalisation and situated and mobile subjects and objects are all referenced in this book. The book will be of interest to scholars of International Relations, Political Science, Sociology, Political Sociology, Social Theory, Geography, Area studies and European studies.

In this new work, Axford seeks to contribute to the development of global theory, particularly where it engages with the contested idea of globality; a concept which musters as consciousness, condition, framework, even system. By examining emergent globalities through the lens of world-making communicative practices and forms, the author demonstrates their transformative social power and underlines the cultural dynamics of globalization. Taking a critical view of much of the current scholarship on emergent globalities, Axford steps outside the rationalist-territorialist conceptions of association and order and takes issue with those who advise there is a widespread 'myth' of media globalization. The book examines global communicative connectivity, using digital, or "new" media – especially the Internet - as the prime exemplar of global process. As well as the academic importance of such themes for theory-building, the strategic, "real-world" impacts of communicative connectivity are palpable. Thus, the welter of debate around the influence of the Internet on democracy, democratization, revolt and collective action generally, have real purchase when discussed in relation to the events of the uprisings in MENA, anti-capitalist protests in London and New York and the tribulations of the EU in recent months/years. Using such exemplars the book assesses claims for the existence and robustness of global society, the significance of cosmopolitan communication and the extent of global consciousness. This work will be of interest to students and scholars of globalization, international relations, and media and cultural studies.

This book offers transdisciplinary scholarship which challenges the agendas of and markers around traditional social scientific fields. It builds on the belief that the study of major issues in the global cultural and political economies benefit from a perspective that rejects the limitations imposed by established boundaries, whether disciplinary, conceptual, symbolic or material. Established and early career academics explore and embrace contemporary political sociology following the ‘global’ and ‘cultural’ turns of recent decades. Categories such as state, civil society, family, migration, citizenship and identity are interrogated and sometimes found to be ill-suited to the task of analyzing global complexities. The limits of global theory, the challenges of global citizenship, and the relationship between globalisation and situated and mobile subjects and objects are all referenced in this book. The book will be of interest to scholars of International Relations, Political Science, Sociology, Political Sociology, Social Theory, Geography, Area studies and European studies.

Diaspora politics is often expressed as an emancipating experience and can therefore give agency to migrants. Yet, rather than interpreting transnational political practices as globally liberal or cosmopolitan, Müller-Funk’s findings underline that diaspora politics is a highly diverse political field which can reinforce political fragmentation among migrant collectivities. This volume explores the controversial topic of diaspora politics: the political activities of migrants who aim to influence the domestic or foreign policy of their country of origin. The revolutions in 2010/11 represented a major political upheaval in the Middle East, which politicised Arabs across borders on a grand scale. Müller-Funk explores the links between recent political developments in Egypt between 2011 and 2013 and emigration. More specifically, she examines the question of how the revolution in and its aftermath influenced emigrants’ political perceptions and actions regarding their homeland. The book takes an interdisciplinary macro and micro approach by investigating policies which influence migrants’ political transnational behavior as well as by looking at individual activists’ perspectives. This volume will be of great interest to scholars of international relations, security studies, political theory, politics and middle east studies.

This edited volume introduces readers to the relationship between higher education and transnational politics. It shows how higher education is a significant arena for regional and international transformation as well as domestic political struggle replete with unequal power relations.This volume shows: The causes and impacts of recent transformations in higher education within a transnational context;Emerging similarities in objectives, institutional set-ups, and approaches taking place within higher education institutions across different world regions; The asymmetrical relations between various kinds of institutional, commercial and state actors across borders;The extent to which historical and colonial legacies are important in the transformation of higher education;The potential effects these developments have on the current structure of international political order.Drawing on case studies from across the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe, the contributors develop diverse perspectives explaining the impact of transnational politics on higher education—and higher education on transitional politics—across time and locality. This book is among the first multi-disciplinary effort to wrestle with the question of how we can understand the political role of higher education, and the political force universities exert in the realm of international relations.

This book seeks to develop our understanding of the contemporary geopolitical reconfigurations of two regions of the world system with high cultural affinity and traditional close relations: Latin America and Europe. Relations between Latin America and Europe have been interpreted generally in the social sciences as synonyms of interstate relations. However, although States remain the most important actor in the geopolitical scene, they have been deeply reconfigured in recent decades, impacted by transnational dynamics, politics and spaces. This book highlights interregional relations and transnational dynamics between Latin America and Europe from a critical geopolitics perspective, promoting a new look for interregional relations which encompasses international cooperation and development, global policies, borders, inequalities and social movements. It brings attention to the relevance of interregionalism in the current geopolitical reconfiguration of the world system, but also argues for systematic inclusion of relevant new social actors and imaginaries in this traditional sphere of states. These social actors, particularly social movements and practices of contestation, are developing not only "international" bonds but a new "transnational" field, where networks defy traditional territorial orders.This volume seeks to generate a new discussion among scholars of geopolitics, international relations, social theory and social movement studies by encouraging a development of an interregional and transnational perspective of the two regions.

Living the Global City (1996) was a landmark text in the field of Global Studies, offering an analysis of globalization and global/local processes by focussing on specific issues and themes which include community, culture, milieu, socioscapes and sociospheres, microglobalization, poverty, ethnic identity and carnival. In this new collection Eade and Rumford draw together scholars whose work has engaged with the original volume over the last 15 years and the result is a unique and thematically coherent collection of essays which both complements the original book and challenges some of its core assumptions. Re-Living the Global City both pays homage to a key text and pushes its agenda into important new areas. After reflecting upon how debates in the field have developed since the original publication, the contributors seek to drive the debate forward through discussion of contemporary themes and issues such as borders and bordering, social movements, community and global connectivity. They consider the ways in which the city produces different experiences of globalization for different people and examine the various accounts of the ways in which new forms of sociality are definitive of contemporary globalization and cosmopolitanism. Drawing together scholars from a range of disciplines including international relations, politics, sociology, urban studies and anthropology, this work will be of great interest to all students and scholars of global studies and globalization.

This volume seeks to propose a reinvention of freedom under contemporary conditions of globalization, cross-border mobility, and neo-liberal dominance. There are currently two predominant myths circulating about freedom. The first is that in a global age growing numbers of citizens are less concerned with freedom than they are with security. Secondly, there is the presumption that freedom only refers to market freedom and consumerism, implying that the ideas of choice and consumption are interchangeable with ideas of freedom. Stevenson argues that while these arguments are significant, they are deeply misleading. More ‘authentic’ ideas of freedom such as self-realisation, participating in politics and seeking a meaningful life of self-reflection have not been entirely displaced but have instead become reinvented in our global times. The cries of freedom can still be heard in a multitude of places from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Movement and from the protests against European austerity to the current popularity of human rights. Stevenson also argues that the idea of freedom has become increasingly mobile in our interconnected and transnational society. The spaces and places of civil society are more complex in this global age, pushing ideas of freedom far beyond the usual arena of national politics. This volume brings together a diverse range of cultural interpretations in respect of freedom related to the idea of the commons, cosmopolitanism, contemporary documentary cinema and the history of jazz music. Exploring the ways in which notions of freedom are being re-made within the context of the present, and looking more precisely at the current threats to freedom, it will be of interest to students and scholars of globalization, human rights and cultural sociology.

Over the last decade, anti-government demonstrations worldwide have brought together individuals and groups that were often assumed unlikely to unite for a common cause due to differences in ideological tendencies. They have particularly highlighted the role of youth, women, social media, and football clubs in establishing unusual alliances between far left and far right groups and/or secular and religious segments of the society. In this wide-ranging volume, the contributors question to what extent political ideologies have lost their explanatory power in contemporary politics and society. This book aims to contribute to the ongoing debates about the relationship between ideology and public protests by introducing the global context that allows the comparison of societies in different parts of the world in order to reveal the general patterns underlying the global era. Tackling a highly topical issue, this book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of international relations, social movements and globalization.

This book seeks to provide a critical introduction to the under-theorized concept of Glocalization. While the term has been slowly diffused into social-scientific vocabulary, to date, there is no book in circulation that specifically discusses this concept. Historically theorists have intertwined the concepts of the ‘global’ and the ‘glocal’ or have subsumed the ‘glocal’ under other concepts – such as cosmopolitanization. Moreover, theorists have failed to give ‘local’ due attention in their theorizing. The book argues that the terms ‘global’, the ‘local’ and the ‘glocal’ are in need of unambiguous and theoretically and methodologically sound definitions. This is a prerequisite for their effective operationalization and application into social research. Glocalization is structured in two parts:Part I introduces the term, seeking to provide a history and critical assessment of theorists' past use of glocalization and offering an alternative perspective and a clear, effective and applicable definition of the term, explaining the limitations of the term globalization and the value of defining glocalization. Part II then moves on to illustrate how the concept of glocalization can be used to broaden our understanding and analysis of a wide range of issues in world politics including the 21st century culture of consumption, transnationalism & cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and religious traditions. Utilizing a wide range of historical, ethnographic and real-life examples from various domains this work will be essential reading for students and scholars of Globalization and will be of great interest to those in the field of Global, Transnational and Cosmopolitan Studies.

This book seeks to provide a critical introduction to the under-theorized concept of Glocalization. While the term has been slowly diffused into social-scientific vocabulary, to date, there is no book in circulation that specifically discusses this concept. Historically theorists have intertwined the concepts of the ‘global’ and the ‘glocal’ or have subsumed the ‘glocal’ under other concepts – such as cosmopolitanization. Moreover, theorists have failed to give ‘local’ due attention in their theorizing. The book argues that the terms ‘global’, the ‘local’ and the ‘glocal’ are in need of unambiguous and theoretically and methodologically sound definitions. This is a prerequisite for their effective operationalization and application into social research. Glocalization is structured in two parts:Part I introduces the term, seeking to provide a history and critical assessment of theorists' past use of glocalization and offering an alternative perspective and a clear, effective and applicable definition of the term, explaining the limitations of the term globalization and the value of defining glocalization. Part II then moves on to illustrate how the concept of glocalization can be used to broaden our understanding and analysis of a wide range of issues in world politics including the 21st century culture of consumption, transnationalism & cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and religious traditions. Utilizing a wide range of historical, ethnographic and real-life examples from various domains this work will be essential reading for students and scholars of Globalization and will be of great interest to those in the field of Global, Transnational and Cosmopolitan Studies.

In this new work, Axford seeks to contribute to the development of global theory, particularly where it engages with the contested idea of globality; a concept which musters as consciousness, condition, framework, even system. By examining emergent globalities through the lens of world-making communicative practices and forms, the author demonstrates their transformative social power and underlines the cultural dynamics of globalization. Taking a critical view of much of the current scholarship on emergent globalities, Axford steps outside the rationalist-territorialist conceptions of association and order and takes issue with those who advise there is a widespread 'myth' of media globalization. The book examines global communicative connectivity, using digital, or "new" media – especially the Internet - as the prime exemplar of global process. As well as the academic importance of such themes for theory-building, the strategic, "real-world" impacts of communicative connectivity are palpable. Thus, the welter of debate around the influence of the Internet on democracy, democratization, revolt and collective action generally, have real purchase when discussed in relation to the events of the uprisings in MENA, anti-capitalist protests in London and New York and the tribulations of the EU in recent months/years. Using such exemplars the book assesses claims for the existence and robustness of global society, the significance of cosmopolitan communication and the extent of global consciousness. This work will be of interest to students and scholars of globalization, international relations, and media and cultural studies.

This volume seeks to uncover and discuss the links between genocide, geopolitics and transnational networks. By studying the destruction of the Union Patrotica (UP) in Colombia - a process usually regarded as one of the extreme by-products of the Colombian armed conflict- through the lens of genocide studies, Gomez-Suarez challenges mainstream international relations, genocide and Colombian armed conflict studies. Moving beyond the analysis of the Colombian case, the book offers a broader interdisciplinary theoretical framework that also attends to transnational relations of perpetrators and resisters and the political economy of affective-dispositions for mapping genocidal conjuncture. Methodologically, the text aims to present a re-interpretation of what constitutes genocide beyond its legal definition and turn towards its political and ethical dimensions to create a conceptual framework in which genocide appears to turn ever more into a decentralized network of various actors that contributed to a genocidal mentality, which, ultimately, enable the destruction of the civil society networks. This work will be an important contribution to both the debates on genocide and international relations and the study of global connectivities.

There is a sprawling scholarship on violence, crime, and corrupt state rule; yet few have interpreted these challenges as transformative at the global scale and as a potential source of alternative, non-state, legitimacy. This volume challenges "Westphalian conservativism" in a provocative yet plausible manner, shedding light at the ubiquity and diversity of unfolding non-state agendas and at their effect on the imagined state community.Focusing on civil war parties, warlords, commercial providers of security, multinational companies and criminal organizations, the book directs attention to theoretical questions and policy challenges arising from non-state armed expansion. To accomplish this, the contributors present a range of case studies and comparisons within three thematic sections: the first takes stock of how, when, and in what measure state and state-system legitimacy are challenged by non-state violent or criminal activity; the second addresses the nature, effectiveness, and side-effects of different state-mandated reaction to non-state activities; and third focuses on the recombination of state and non-state actors contributing to processes of socio-political transformation.This volume provides a current analysis of different armed and violent actors encroaching on the state's monopoly of violence. It seeks to spark debate about global political change and will be of interest to students and scholars of global governance, global security, and international relations.

Global Perspectives on Nationalism takes an interdisciplinary approach informed by recent theorisations of nationalism to examine perennial questions on the topic.The idea of nationalism centres on questions of ethnicity, culture, religion, language, and access to resources. What determines consciousness of nationalism? How is nationalism manifested, shaped, or countered through literary and cultural productions? The contributors highlight topical areas in studies of nationalism including ecology, natural resources, sustainability, globalisation, the Anthropocene, postcolonialism, indigeneity, folklore, popular culture, and queer theory. They develop innovative perspectives on nationalism through in-depth analyses of the theoretical, political, literary, linguistic, cultural, and ecological dimensions of nationalism in Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, China, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Lebanon, Nepal, Nigeria, Poland, Scotland, Turkey, the United States, and elsewhere. This volume underscores the importance of generative dialogue between disciplines in assessing the implications of nationalism for everyday life through five thematic sections: (I) Ethnicity, Ideology, and Narration; (II) Religion, Identity, and Heritage; (III) Linguistics, Tradition, and Modernism; (IV) Music, Lyricism, and Poetics; and (V) Ecology, Environment, and Non-Human Lives.This book will be of particular value to students and researchers in philosophy, literary studies, and political theory with interests spanning ecology, ethnicity, folklore, gender, heritage, identity, linguistics, nationalism, nationhood, religion, and sexuality.

Global Perspectives on Nationalism takes an interdisciplinary approach informed by recent theorisations of nationalism to examine perennial questions on the topic.The idea of nationalism centres on questions of ethnicity, culture, religion, language, and access to resources. What determines consciousness of nationalism? How is nationalism manifested, shaped, or countered through literary and cultural productions? The contributors highlight topical areas in studies of nationalism including ecology, natural resources, sustainability, globalisation, the Anthropocene, postcolonialism, indigeneity, folklore, popular culture, and queer theory. They develop innovative perspectives on nationalism through in-depth analyses of the theoretical, political, literary, linguistic, cultural, and ecological dimensions of nationalism in Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, China, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Lebanon, Nepal, Nigeria, Poland, Scotland, Turkey, the United States, and elsewhere. This volume underscores the importance of generative dialogue between disciplines in assessing the implications of nationalism for everyday life through five thematic sections: (I) Ethnicity, Ideology, and Narration; (II) Religion, Identity, and Heritage; (III) Linguistics, Tradition, and Modernism; (IV) Music, Lyricism, and Poetics; and (V) Ecology, Environment, and Non-Human Lives.This book will be of particular value to students and researchers in philosophy, literary studies, and political theory with interests spanning ecology, ethnicity, folklore, gender, heritage, identity, linguistics, nationalism, nationhood, religion, and sexuality.

The Rise and Decline of Modern Democracy assesses the rise of, subsequent political challenges to, and decline of, contemporary liberal democratic processes, in particular since the ‘third wave’ of democratization from the 1990s.Democracy is in global decline. Fewer countries are democratic and fewer people, globally, live in substantive democracies. Autocracy is now the dominant political form and the future looks, at best, challenging for the retention of such democracies that remain. As they did a century ago, nationalism and populism have again reared their ugly heads, and more people are claiming that democracy no longer addresses their most compelling needs or interests. This book examines what democracy is and the circumstances that allowed – even encouraged – it to arise. Democracy has been a product of a need to find a political model that mediates between competing interests, building on conducive conditions. However, there have since been fundamental changes to those conditions, imbalances within democratic countries and between countries, that have diminished the strength of the democratic proposition. The question now arises as to whether democracy can continue as a matter of political will. Challengers to democracy, from the radical Right in developed countries to populist autocracy and state-centred authoritarianism in developing countries, have increasingly shown this may not be the case. Democracy may survive, as this book concludes, but is likely to do so only with more substantial and conscious commitment to the democratic project, with recognition of the need to replenish the fertility of the political soil in which democracy grows.This wide-ranging and empirically and theoretically rich book will be of interest to students, scholars and researchers of political science, international relations, history and democracy.

The Rise and Decline of Modern Democracy assesses the rise of, subsequent political challenges to, and decline of, contemporary liberal democratic processes, in particular since the ‘third wave’ of democratization from the 1990s.Democracy is in global decline. Fewer countries are democratic and fewer people, globally, live in substantive democracies. Autocracy is now the dominant political form and the future looks, at best, challenging for the retention of such democracies that remain. As they did a century ago, nationalism and populism have again reared their ugly heads, and more people are claiming that democracy no longer addresses their most compelling needs or interests. This book examines what democracy is and the circumstances that allowed – even encouraged – it to arise. Democracy has been a product of a need to find a political model that mediates between competing interests, building on conducive conditions. However, there have since been fundamental changes to those conditions, imbalances within democratic countries and between countries, that have diminished the strength of the democratic proposition. The question now arises as to whether democracy can continue as a matter of political will. Challengers to democracy, from the radical Right in developed countries to populist autocracy and state-centred authoritarianism in developing countries, have increasingly shown this may not be the case. Democracy may survive, as this book concludes, but is likely to do so only with more substantial and conscious commitment to the democratic project, with recognition of the need to replenish the fertility of the political soil in which democracy grows.This wide-ranging and empirically and theoretically rich book will be of interest to students, scholars and researchers of political science, international relations, history and democracy.

This book offers an ontological study of Islamism and its transformation with a specific focus on Türkiye, Bangladesh, and Senegal.The dominant reading of the transformation of Islamism from a discernibly Islamist, then anti-systemic discourse to a more systemic one has been through the arguments of post-Islamism, which claim the failure and end of Islamism. However, this assumes that Islamists are still Islamists, which is an oxymoron. This book suggests that this scholarship fails to recognise the political, ontological nature of Islamism. It argues that under-theorisation of the political, accompanied by Eurocentrism and positivism, hinders a proper understanding of Islamism by engendering methodological nationalism and state-centrism and obstructing Islamists as political actors by denying them political agency to undertake transformation. This shows the need for an ontological analysis to surmount the mentioned problems and comprehend Islamists as political actors by disarticulating any necessary relationship between the political and any fixed entity, such as the state, a specific rhetoric or form. The book, as an exercise in political theory, offers such an analysis, articulated through the tools provided by post-foundationalist political theory, particularly the works of Martin Heidegger, Antonio Gramsci, Hannah Arendt, and Salman Sayyid, who mobilises Carl Schmitt and post-Marxist discourse theory to read Islamism.This book will appeal to scholars and students of Politics, International Relations, Area Studies, and Sociology, especially those specialising in Islam and Islamism.

Over the last decade, anti-government demonstrations worldwide have brought together individuals and groups that were often assumed unlikely to unite for a common cause due to differences in ideological tendencies. They have particularly highlighted the role of youth, women, social media, and football clubs in establishing unusual alliances between far left and far right groups and/or secular and religious segments of the society. In this wide-ranging volume, the contributors question to what extent political ideologies have lost their explanatory power in contemporary politics and society. This book aims to contribute to the ongoing debates about the relationship between ideology and public protests by introducing the global context that allows the comparison of societies in different parts of the world in order to reveal the general patterns underlying the global era. Tackling a highly topical issue, this book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of international relations, social movements and globalization.

Diaspora politics is often expressed as an emancipating experience and can therefore give agency to migrants. Yet, rather than interpreting transnational political practices as globally liberal or cosmopolitan, Müller-Funk’s findings underline that diaspora politics is a highly diverse political field which can reinforce political fragmentation among migrant collectivities. This volume explores the controversial topic of diaspora politics: the political activities of migrants who aim to influence the domestic or foreign policy of their country of origin. The revolutions in 2010/11 represented a major political upheaval in the Middle East, which politicised Arabs across borders on a grand scale. Müller-Funk explores the links between recent political developments in Egypt between 2011 and 2013 and emigration. More specifically, she examines the question of how the revolution in and its aftermath influenced emigrants’ political perceptions and actions regarding their homeland. The book takes an interdisciplinary macro and micro approach by investigating policies which influence migrants’ political transnational behavior as well as by looking at individual activists’ perspectives. This volume will be of great interest to scholars of international relations, security studies, political theory, politics and middle east studies.

This book seeks to develop our understanding of the contemporary geopolitical reconfigurations of two regions of the world system with high cultural affinity and traditional close relations: Latin America and Europe. Relations between Latin America and Europe have been interpreted generally in the social sciences as synonyms of interstate relations. However, although States remain the most important actor in the geopolitical scene, they have been deeply reconfigured in recent decades, impacted by transnational dynamics, politics and spaces. This book highlights interregional relations and transnational dynamics between Latin America and Europe from a critical geopolitics perspective, promoting a new look for interregional relations which encompasses international cooperation and development, global policies, borders, inequalities and social movements. It brings attention to the relevance of interregionalism in the current geopolitical reconfiguration of the world system, but also argues for systematic inclusion of relevant new social actors and imaginaries in this traditional sphere of states. These social actors, particularly social movements and practices of contestation, are developing not only "international" bonds but a new "transnational" field, where networks defy traditional territorial orders.This volume seeks to generate a new discussion among scholars of geopolitics, international relations, social theory and social movement studies by encouraging a development of an interregional and transnational perspective of the two regions.

This volume seeks to uncover and discuss the links between genocide, geopolitics and transnational networks. By studying the destruction of the Union Patrotica (UP) in Colombia - a process usually regarded as one of the extreme by-products of the Colombian armed conflict- through the lens of genocide studies, Gomez-Suarez challenges mainstream international relations, genocide and Colombian armed conflict studies. Moving beyond the analysis of the Colombian case, the book offers a broader interdisciplinary theoretical framework that also attends to transnational relations of perpetrators and resisters and the political economy of affective-dispositions for mapping genocidal conjuncture. Methodologically, the text aims to present a re-interpretation of what constitutes genocide beyond its legal definition and turn towards its political and ethical dimensions to create a conceptual framework in which genocide appears to turn ever more into a decentralized network of various actors that contributed to a genocidal mentality, which, ultimately, enable the destruction of the civil society networks. This work will be an important contribution to both the debates on genocide and international relations and the study of global connectivities.

This volume seeks to propose a reinvention of freedom under contemporary conditions of globalization, cross-border mobility, and neo-liberal dominance. There are currently two predominant myths circulating about freedom. The first is that in a global age growing numbers of citizens are less concerned with freedom than they are with security. Secondly, there is the presumption that freedom only refers to market freedom and consumerism, implying that the ideas of choice and consumption are interchangeable with ideas of freedom. Stevenson argues that while these arguments are significant, they are deeply misleading. More ‘authentic’ ideas of freedom such as self-realisation, participating in politics and seeking a meaningful life of self-reflection have not been entirely displaced but have instead become reinvented in our global times. The cries of freedom can still be heard in a multitude of places from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Movement and from the protests against European austerity to the current popularity of human rights. Stevenson also argues that the idea of freedom has become increasingly mobile in our interconnected and transnational society. The spaces and places of civil society are more complex in this global age, pushing ideas of freedom far beyond the usual arena of national politics. This volume brings together a diverse range of cultural interpretations in respect of freedom related to the idea of the commons, cosmopolitanism, contemporary documentary cinema and the history of jazz music. Exploring the ways in which notions of freedom are being re-made within the context of the present, and looking more precisely at the current threats to freedom, it will be of interest to students and scholars of globalization, human rights and cultural sociology.

There is a sprawling scholarship on violence, crime, and corrupt state rule; yet few have interpreted these challenges as transformative at the global scale and as a potential source of alternative, non-state, legitimacy. This volume challenges "Westphalian conservativism" in a provocative yet plausible manner, shedding light at the ubiquity and diversity of unfolding non-state agendas and at their effect on the imagined state community.Focusing on civil war parties, warlords, commercial providers of security, multinational companies and criminal organizations, the book directs attention to theoretical questions and policy challenges arising from non-state armed expansion. To accomplish this, the contributors present a range of case studies and comparisons within three thematic sections: the first takes stock of how, when, and in what measure state and state-system legitimacy are challenged by non-state violent or criminal activity; the second addresses the nature, effectiveness, and side-effects of different state-mandated reaction to non-state activities; and third focuses on the recombination of state and non-state actors contributing to processes of socio-political transformation.This volume provides a current analysis of different armed and violent actors encroaching on the state's monopoly of violence. It seeks to spark debate about global political change and will be of interest to students and scholars of global governance, global security, and international relations.

This edited volume introduces readers to the relationship between higher education and transnational politics. It shows how higher education is a significant arena for regional and international transformation as well as domestic political struggle replete with unequal power relations.This volume shows: The causes and impacts of recent transformations in higher education within a transnational context;Emerging similarities in objectives, institutional set-ups, and approaches taking place within higher education institutions across different world regions; The asymmetrical relations between various kinds of institutional, commercial and state actors across borders;The extent to which historical and colonial legacies are important in the transformation of higher education;The potential effects these developments have on the current structure of international political order.Drawing on case studies from across the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe, the contributors develop diverse perspectives explaining the impact of transnational politics on higher education—and higher education on transitional politics—across time and locality. This book is among the first multi-disciplinary effort to wrestle with the question of how we can understand the political role of higher education, and the political force universities exert in the realm of international relations.