False Idols: How Diversion is Destroying Democracy

Kurt Warner

The ancient Roman poet and satirist Juvenal stated that people were distracted by “bread and circuses” rather than engaged in their civic duty. Juvenal argued these bread and circuses, or basic needs and entertainment, consumed the thoughts and lives of the average Roman no matter what was happening in the Republic around them. The powerful political forces in society used many different forms of distraction to enable them to do what they wanted unimpeded by the masses. 'False Idols: How Diversion Is Destroying Democracy' picks up where Juvenal left off. The book is a journey through contemporary America and it illustrates how the concept of “bread and circuses” is as powerful and as relevant now as it was in the days of ancient Rome. It examines the deliberate distractions that are created by the cultivation of false idols. The distractions include the adoration of celebrities and parasocial interactions, the economic culture and the implicit belief systems contained within it, sports and the adoration of athletes, the political system and structure, the art, music, and literature we spend our time listening to and watching, the internet and social media that occupies so much of our time, and the video games that occupy the minds and much of the lives of so many people. As long as everybody is chasing and distracted by these bread and circuses, they are willfully negligent to the goings-on in the very fabric of the social network that is of our society, government, and country. The more negligent they become, the more the democracy continues withering and dying. This book systemically deconstructs a modern society that seems designed to consistently pull us away from rather than draw us toward the creation of a better existence for all.

The United States-Japan-China Triangle in the Post-Cold War Early Decades: A Case Study of Applied Political Science

Power and Insecurity

Jalel Ben Haj Rehaiem

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 the preface by John Perry (Stanford University): “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.”

Living the Independence Dream: Ukraine and Ukrainians in Contemporary Socio-Political Context

Edited by Lada Kolomiyets, Dartmouth College/Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine

For many Ukrainians, 1991 was a crucial point when their long-held dream of independence came true. The image of the future life in independent Ukraine was then almost identical to folklore images of Ukraine as the land of milk and honey. "Living the Independence Dream" takes a multi-dimensional look at the period of regained independence as a time of advancement towards the realization of collective dreams shaping the post-Soviet nation, even through everyday disappointments, anxiety, and uncertainty. The collection features personal accounts of several generations of Ukrainians who found themselves displaced by political upheavals in foreign lands, as well as the voices of recently displaced people who left the Donbas or other regions of Ukraine following the outbreak of the Russian aggression. It revisits the legacy of Soviet dissidents and explores the ideologies of Ukrainian language revival and the ways that memory and language construct Ukrainian identity and generate vital energy amidst war. The collection "Living the Independence Dream" aims to analyze the agency of contemporary Ukrainian people and the role of media, literature, and digital folklore in creating new messages, meanings, and values formed during the Independence decades.

Topics and approaches to studying intelligence

Edited by Andrew Macpherson, University of New Hampshire and Glenn P. Hastedt, James Madison University

The goal of "Topics and approaches to studying intelligence" is to bring into sharper focus the evolving nature of intelligence studies, which is in the midst of a period of significant expansion that is taking place across a number of dimensions. Working on this foundation of past and contemporary analytic intelligence studies, the chapters in "Topics and approaches to studying intelligence" highlight areas of debate and disagreement, provide insight into new areas of study and broaden the methodological toolset used by researchers. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches investigate analysis, alliances, competitive/private sector intelligence, gendered practices of intelligence agencies, the nature of intelligence studies scholarship, accreditation, intelligence disclosure for diplomacy, and the sharing of nuclear-related intelligence.

Cuerpos de género y cuerpos politicos. Un estudio de españoles y de US latinos conversos al islam

Marta Boris Tarre, University of Idaho

"Cuerpos de género y cuerpos políticos" constituye uno de los pocos libros en lengua española sobre las conversiones al islam de los grupos en cuestión, pero más específicamente de como estos utilizan el género y la nación como vehículos identitarios, lo que será útil para investigadores en estudios religiosos y sociológicos. Este libro examina las convergencias que se producen entre conversión al islam y género, nación y ciudadanía por parte de dos grupos poblacionales occidentales –españoles y US latinos–. El estudio etnográfico de campo, los feminismos islámicos y el estudio de masculinidades van a constituir la base para explorar cómo la visión de género que estas mujeres y hombres conversos al islam sostienen representan nuevas formas identitarias de género que constituyen instrumentos políticos y que resisten los estereotipos que se atribuyen al sujeto musulmán. No obstante, estos también representan alternativas de género por incorporar un elemento religioso, lo cual les otorga agencia para vivir el islam en un territorio que vislumbra esta religión de forma hostil. Finalmente, "Cuerpos de género y cuerpos políticos" estudiará cómo los conversos redefinen la identidad de nación y de ciudadanía en función a su afiliación religiosa. El componente moral que su nueva religión aporta contribuye a una idea de nación y de ciudadanía que no puede entenderse sin visionar al ciudadano como un ser moral y religioso, lo que contrasta con la idea de ciudadanía occidental y con la identidad de nación del territorio donde residen en la que lo religioso es privatizada. Ello desemboca en un concepto de “españolidad” y de “latinidad” que incorpora el islam como base infalible de autoridad y que contrasta con una sociedad hegemónica que incorpora otros factores como la región, la cultura y la lengua como base a idea de nación y de cohesión nacional.

Pandemic and Narration: Covid-19 Narratives in Latin America

Edited by Andrea Espinoza Carvajal, University of Exeter and Luis A. Medina Cordova, University of Birmingham

'Pandemic and Narration: Covid-19 Narratives in Latin America' sheds light on how, as Covid-19 spread, infecting and killing millions across the world, life not only continued to be experienced but also continued to be narrated. By putting together this volume, we help understand what happened in the region from a perspective in which, unlike most of what we saw during the health emergency, numbers, statistics and percentages are not at the centre of the analysis. The essays gathered here foreground something else: the manifold ways Covid-19 was subjectively and collectively narrated in the news, government reports, political speeches, NGO communications, social media, literature, songs and many other media. From a wide range of disciplinary approaches, the contributors to this edition pay attention to how fictional and non-fictional stories, official discourses, as well as personal and political accounts, documented, represented and shaped the health crisis, laying bare how —in Latin American countries— the spread of the virus intersected with corruption, gender-based violence, inequality and exclusion, as with community, solidarity and hope. Readers will find that the focus on narrative provides an alternative source of knowledge on Latin America’s Covid-19 experience. Our perspective contrasts with the usual emphasis on death tolls, infection rates, weekly cases, vaccination counts, and the plethora of statistics that illustrated the gravity of the situation in the build-up to, during, and after the peak of the crisis. While extremely important to understand the situation, numbers do not tell the whole story. A comprehensive picture of the pandemic can only be achieved when the stories of the virus are accounted for. Health, after all, is no stranger to narrative. And neither is Latin America.

Mediated Ideologies: Nordic Views on the History of the Press and Media Cultures

Edited by Jukka Kortti, University of Helsinki, Finland and Heidi Kurvinen, University of Turku, Finland

Ideologies have not been a focus of interest in the field of humanities and social sciences in recent decades, but rethinking the power of ideologies in the media sphere has recently returned to the scholarly discussion. The compilation book “Mediated Ideologies: Nordic Views on the History of the Press and Media Cultures” participates in this by providing selected yet justified approaches to media history from the point of view of ideological uses of media in the Nordic region. In this book, the role of media – comprising both popular media and news journalism – as a forum for ideologies and their circulation will be analyzed by focusing on the Nordic region. The perceived similarities in the media systems of the Nordic countries constitute a perfect extent for a regional media history against not only a European but also a global backdrop. This does not mean that there have not been many national differences. The book does not provide a chronological narrative of Nordic media history. Still, the ideology of media is approached not only from the standpoints of different media forms – film, television, newspapers, magazines, and periodicals – but also from several historical periods from the mid-19th century to the late 20th century. The chapters show the multidimensional role that the media has in transmitting ideologies to their audiences and the public sphere. They also demonstrate that analyzing the role of different ideologies, such as modernization, nationalism, solidarity, feminism, and peace movement in media history provides wider perspectives in understanding past and present media landscapes and people’s mediated experiences that are fostered by them. “Mediated Ideologies: Nordic Views on the History of the Press and Media Cultures” can be used both as a reference book and as a classroom adaption in the field of media, communication, and history studies.

The Disease of Liberty

Thomas Jefferson, History, & Liberty: A Philosophical Analysis

M. Andrew Holowchak

Liberty for Jefferson was 'the' driving force of human history and a realizable state of the human organism and of a society of men. Study of history and anthropology showed that humans were moving from the barbaric independence suffered in primal hordes, which lived inefficiently on lands, to a more economical, human-friendly use of land in social settings, demanding laws for order. Those laws, historically, favored the powerful few to the detriment of the hoi polloi. As a pupil of the Enlightenment, Jefferson argued that all humans were by nature equal, and thus, deserving of as much civic liberty as a reason-oriented and sciences-loving society, a Jeffersonian republic, could guarantee them. This book, philosophical, explains how such a society was possible, given Jefferson’s conception of the nature of man, and how the realization of one such society could lead, through contagion, to a global community of such societies. There are a large number of books that cover Jefferson’s political ideology (e.g., Gordon Wood’s 'Empire of Liberty' and Adrienne Koch’s 'The Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson')—too many to limn—but none that gets at the philosophical implications of TJ’s views on liberty. This book, examining TJ as a natural scientist and philosophy, examines and situates him in the manner of other great political ideologists of his day—e.g., Hume and Kant.

Bandwagoning in International Relations: China, Russia, and Their Neighbors

Dylan Motin, Kangwon National University, Korea

Whether states balance against or bandwagon with threatening great powers remains an unsolved problem for international relations theory. One school argues that military power compels minor powers to accommodate threats, while another defends that it elicits balancing instead. With the emergence of potential hegemons in both Asia and Europe — namely China and Russia — understanding state alignment is more urgent than ever. This book shows that bandwagoning has been a rare choice in contemporary Asia and Europe. The only states that chose bandwagoning with China or Russia faced both conflicts with third rivals and low levels of U.S. assistance. Going further, I divide bandwagoning between full alignment, survival accommodation, and profit accommodation. Bandwagoners choose among these three options based on the severity of the threat posed by the potential hegemon, the intensity of third conflicts, and the level of U.S. assistance. I test this novel theory against three European (Armenia, Belarus, and Serbia) and four Asian (Cambodia, Myanmar, North Korea, and Pakistan) cases. This study is the first to provide an exhaustive and compelling explanation of bandwagoning fully compatible with neorealism and adds to the balancing-bandwagoning debate. Beyond scholarly implications, this research’s findings offer advice for policymakers concerned with the changing balance of power in Asia and Europe and how to counter China and Russia’s influence.

Being and Power. A Phenomenological Ontology of Forms of Life

Daniel Rueda Garrido

Why do we act as we do? Why do we assume that the way of being and behaving in our community is right, good, and common sense? Why do we fail to understand those who are, act, and feel differently? These are some of the questions that this book raises and attempts to answer. This ontology is rooted in the phenomenological tradition but with the innovation of taking the "form of life" as the central ontological unit. We are our form of life, but, as a transcendental-immanent reality, this is not directly equivalent to culture or society; it is rather the "political" realisation in the world of an image of the human being shared by a given community. This overcomes the traditional dualities of individual and society, consciousness and body, facticity and freedom, actuality and possibility. The subject is a subject because it identifies with that image, which is equivalent to the intersubjective consciousness of how one should act and be in the world. This gives rise to multiple forms of life. The latter implies a certain power to be who one wants to be. In this way, the book is an invitation to self-examination, for if our form of life is voluntary (i.e., capitalism), it shatters the illusion that one cannot live in any other way, and places us before the anguished but inevitable task of justifying its adoption or resorting to its abandonment. The book offers a dynamic analysis of human existence as the actualisation of a form of life that is, at the same time, the exercise of a certain power over those who seek to live otherwise, especially when that form is institutionalised by a government as the essence of the national or transnational community.

A Shot in the Dark: A History of the U.S. Army Asymmetric Warfare Group

Paul Jeffrey Cook, Temple University

This book presents the U.S. Army Asymmetric Warfare Group (AWG) as an example of successful change by the Army in wartime. It argues that creating the AWG required senior leaders to create a vision differing from the Army’s self-conceptualization, change bureaucratic processes to turn the vision into an actual unit, and then place the new unit in the hands of uniquely qualified leaders to build and sustain it. In doing this, it considers the forces influencing change within the Army and argues the two most significant are its self-conceptualization and institutional bureaucracy. The work explores three major subject areas that provide historical context. The first is the Army’s institutional history from the early 1950s through 2001. This period begins with the Army seeking to validate its place in America’s national security strategy and ends with the Army trying to chart a path into the post-Cold War future. The Army’s history is largely one of asymmetric warfare. The work thus examines several campaigns that offered lessons for subsequent wars. Some lessons the Army took to heart, others it ignored. As the AWG was a direct outgrowth of the failures and frustrations the Army experienced in Afghanistan and Iraq, the book examines these campaigns and identifies the specific problems that led senior Army leaders to create the AWG. Finally, the work chronicles the AWG’s creation in 2006, growth, and re-assignment from the Army staff to a fully-fledged organization subordinate to the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command in 2011 to its deactivation. This action resulted not from the unit’s failure to adapt to a post-insurgency Army focusing on modernization. Rather, it resulted from the Army failing to realize that while the AWG was a product of counterinsurgency, it provided the capability to support the Army during a period of great strategic and institutional uncertainty.

Thomas Jefferson and Maria Cosway: A Gordian Love Affair

Complete Correspondence with Critical Commentary

M. Andrew Holowchak

This is the only book to offer the complete correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Maria Cosway, a talented artist for whom Jefferson fell while in France. There is agreement in the secondary literature that Jefferson’s affection for Hemings was reciprocated. This book shows that that cannot be believed. Holowchak also shows that Cosway, through letters late in life, much longs for Jefferson’s company, suggestive of regret for not having earlier in life reciprocated Jefferson’s feelings—hence, the importance of a book with the complete correspondence. Holowchak also offers in the introduction a short psychobiography of Cosway that shows the significance of key early-life events—e.g., her childhood in a tavern, her removal to a convent, her introduction to art, and two singular dreams. Cosway would ever be tugged antipodally by the lure of earthy living as well as the asceticism of Catholic piety.

Lessons from Regional Responses to Security, Health and Environmental Challenges in Latin America

Edited by Ivo Ganchev, Founder of the Centre for Regional Integration, UK

What is the role of regional organizations in maintaining security across different parts of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)? How did COVID-19 impact states in the region and what types of collective action have helped respond to public health emergencies? In what way is LAC environmental policy formulated and what broader lessons can be drawn for the Global South? This edited volume addresses these questions, revealing the reasons behind the successes and failures of LAC regional responses to collective challenges as well as their limitations and potential for future improvement. It contains 11 chapters, authored by 16 authoritative academics who employ methodologically-diverse perspectives. Each chapter provides insights that would be of interest to scholars, students and policy-makers working on the regional governance of LAC and the Global South. The contributions are thematically organised in three parts and produced with pragmatic considerations in mind, discussing existing and potential real solutions to pressing issues.

Tomar la palabra. Islamofobia y participación política después del 15-M

Johanna M. Lems, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

'Tomar la palabra' es un análisis basado en la búsqueda de justicia social por medio de la participación sociopolítica, que aborda con cuidado muchos de los temas que determinan y contribuyen a reproducir las situaciones de subalternidad y subordinación a las que se ven sometidas las personas musulmanas en España. Desde un posicionamiento novedoso sobre el islam en el contexto español, al abordar su estudio desde la existencia de musulmanidades diversas, contribuye al avance de los estudios sobre la realidad social y política de las poblaciones musulmanas en nuestro país. El principal objetivo de la autora ha sido identificar los procesos mediante los que las personas musulmanas – o aquellas leídas como tales– tratan de ganar voz y reclamar los derechos que les son negados sistemáticamente. Todo ello con el fin de contribuir a una comprensión más crítica y menos estigmatizadora sobre el islam y las personas musulmanas que viven en España. Se trata de un trabajo interdisciplinario que parte de una investigación etnográfica llevada a cabo entre 2017 y 2020 en distintas partes del territorio estatal. Puede resultar de gran interés como monografía para profesores y estudiantes de cursos de grado y posgrado en disciplinas como sociología, antropología, ciencias políticas, ciencias de las religiones. Igualmente, será de utilidad como obra de consulta en estudios de subalternidad, feministas y de migraciones o para trabajadores sociales, líderes y comunidades religiosas, instituciones gubernamentales y aquellas personas u organizaciones centradas en los derechos humanos, el diálogo interreligioso o las que, en general, quieren estar informadas sobre el escenario político contemporáneo español.

The Singularity of State Repression

Alexei Anisin, Anglo-American University

What sets a single bout of state repression apart from a longer trajectory of political violence? Why does state repression of protesters sometimes result in discrete events of violence while, in other cases, it spurs larger cascades of political violence such as politicide, genocide, or civil war? This book introduces a new framework for state repression and its relationship to different forms of civil resistance. It argues that state repression in the modern era of history is an empirical phenomenon that has been marked by singularity. Through taking the law of coercive responsiveness as a starting point, this book reveals that when political status quos are challenged by civilians, states do respond in law-like ways, but the impact that state repression has on social change is more heterogeneous than previously considered. State repression has brought about indeterminate effects and outcomes across space and time. Through analyzing event-based data featuring 24 variables on a cross-national sample of 171 different protest massacres that arose from 1819-2022, this book provides among the more wide-reaching comparative inquiries into repression and dissent to date. It draws on comparative sequential analysis to identify three different processes in which the sample of cases is matched alongside causal mechanisms and sequence types. The mixed methodological approach drawn in this book features quantitative analysis, process tracing, and qualitative case studies. Readers are taken on a journey through tumultuous periods of political violence that range from 19th-century massacres in the U.S. to 1928 Colombia and 1970s Apartheid, 1990s China, the Arab Spring, and contemporary Syria and Myanmar, among a diverse range of other cases. Along with identifying new quantitative insights into civil resistance strategies and various geographic and temporal dynamics associated with repression, the analyses presented in this book offer timely insight into policies that can aid the prevention of human rights violations.