Power and Politics in Africa: A Boundary Generator

Takuo Iwata, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan

Africa’s potential and challenges in the 21st century make it a focal point for global attention. The continent’s political landscape is now more diverse, with a mix of democracy, authoritarianism, peace, and conflict. Understanding the dynamics of African politics is crucial. This comprehensive book delves into African Politics and International Relations, exploring power through the lenses of politics, geography, sociology, and anthropology. It is based on the author’s three decades of fieldwork and research across Africa, Asia, and the West. Ideal for academic scholars, students, diplomats, government officials, journalists, and NGO staff seeking to deepen their understanding of African politics and international relations.

Facebook Friendship Groups as a Space for Peace: A Case Study of Relations between Libyan and American Citizens

Lisa Gibson, Washington and Jefferson College

"Facebook Friendship Groups as a Space for Peace" provides new ways of thinking about the concept of friendship in international relations by drawing upon Aristotle’s ancient insights on sociability and reconceptualizing them for modern international relations. This book explores how citizens can be engaged in public diplomacy through everyday interactions in Facebook friendship groups which allows them to promote understanding and reframe identity narratives. This book provides rich-in-demand empirical insights from citizens in the global south about the ways that social media friendship groups can be used to facilitate positive relations between citizens from countries that have a history of conflict. It also provides important insights for state leaders on the kinds of citizen initiatives that are seen as most useful in promoting positive images among foreign peoples. However, it challenges much of the notion that citizen initiatives will improve foreign public views of a state’s foreign policy, especially when those foreign policy priorities negatively affect citizens directly, like former President Donald Trump’s travel ban. Negative foreign policy initiatives cause distrust and once that is broken, it is difficult to rebuild absent changing the foreign policy. This book shows that conflict is deeply contextual, and as such public diplomacy initiatives must also be designed in such a way to address the unique challenges that exist between countries. Social media friendship groups can be a place to start to promote understanding, dispel stereotypes and reframe enemy narratives, which are essential to long-term positive relations.

Peace Studies and the Color Line

Africana Contributions

Carlos Cordero-Pedrosa and I Jin Jang

The book aims to continue and expand the conversations emerging from the margins of peace studies about race and racism, and their implications for the field. Especially drawing from the often-overlooked African diasporic critical and philosophical tradition —with an emphasis on Africana phenomenology and existentialism— the book addresses questions that are central in Africana thought yet remain under-explored in peace studies. This enables to rethink peace studies’ assumptions, conceptual frameworks, and epistemic and normative elements. Inter- or transdisciplinary dialogue requires a profound re-evaluation of what constitutes the exclusions in both knowledge and politics. This, in turn, necessitates a critical examination of the structures and organization of knowledge, a deeper understanding of the field’s identity, its foundational narratives and presuppositions, a reassessment of the relations with other disciplines and areas of knowledge, and the histories, the subjects and the forms of agency that it privileges. Taking race and racism seriously through African diasporic thought entails, among others, reconsidering the ties of peace studies with international relations and liberal political theory, bringing to the forefront the question of freedom, examining the relationship between the ethical and the political, and complicating the distinction between violence and nonviolence.

The Red Warrior: U.S. Perceptions of Stalin’s Strategic Role in the Allied Journey to Victory in The Second World War

Reagan Fancher, Texas Woman’s University

Through U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program, American leaders sought to keep Joseph Stalin’s Red Army in the field and fighting Adolf Hitler’s forces in the Second World War from 1941 forward. Delivered by the Anglo-American Arctic naval convoys, overland through the Iranian deserts and mountains, and through the skies from Alaska to Siberia, this much-needed material aid helped Stalin’s Red Army to continue fighting and thereby prevented a separate peace with Hitler’s Germany and a mechanized repeat of the First World War’s Brest-Litovsk fiasco. Yet Roosevelt and other U.S. officials, due to their severe underestimation of Stalin’s character and his rigid and fanatical devotion to exporting Communism at gunpoint, gambled incorrectly that they could win the Soviet premier’s heart and mind through several excessive wartime aid gestures, including the furnishing of atomic bomb materials to the Soviet regime. By 1945, American leaders had succeeded in their strategic goal of keeping Stalin and his Red Army in the war and hastening victory but failed in their efforts to purchase the Soviet premier’s goodwill and commitment to postwar peace, heralding the global Cold War, and setting the stage for later U.S. martial aid programs to those resisting aggression abroad. In addition to its primary focus on the American leadership’s perceptions of Stalin’s strategic importance to the Allied war effort in the Second World War, this work also includes a detailed assessment of Roosevelt’s Soviet Lend-Lease program alongside U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s later support for the Afghan Islamic guerrillas resisting Soviet occupation during the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s and a comparison of both martial aid programs with Washington’s recent revival of Lend-Lease aid for the Ukrainian war effort. It offers today’s American leaders and policymakers a chance to consult the lessons of history and apply them in the present.

The Dark Side of Speech

A Disenchanted Report on the Decade that Preceded the Invasion of Ukraine

Carlo Penco, University of Genoa, Italy

What is disinformation, and why does it matter? How can we understand and detect different kinds of disinformation? The book's four parts provide the reader with answers and a deeper understanding of various concepts and events: (1) On notions of post-truth and fake news, with examples from the last decade. (2) On the notion of conspiracy theory and the influence of “narratives” that obfuscate the truth of the matter. (3) On the role of algorithms in propaganda and their impact on freedom of expression. (4) On “emergency tools” for detecting disinformation at an individual level, understanding the most hidden mechanisms of the dark side of the speech. From John Perry’s Preface: “What to do with this book? Read it from start to finish; it is fascinating. Alternatively, pick out a topic, study the index and learn all about it. I think the book would make a great text for an undergraduate course --- a semester or even a year. But by picking one topic or another, historical or philosophical or a combination, one could put together a great lecture or a seminar. If you find your kids seduced by bullshit from the internet, set them down and explain where it really came from. And for that matter, use the book to help determine whether your own beliefs are information or disinformation.”