Power and Politics in Africa: A Boundary Generator

Takuo Iwata, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan

Africa attracts the world with its potential and challenges in the 21st century. The political situation became more diverse on the African continent than in the 20th century between democracy and authoritarianism and between peace and tragic conflict. Understanding African politics’ engine, logic, and mechanism becomes more meaningful and required. This is a comprehensive book on African Politics and International Relations that focuses on the concept of power by covering politics, geography, sociology, and anthropology perspectives. This book is built through the author’s three decades of fieldwork, document work, and conference presentations in African, Asian, and Western countries. This book is expected to be read by professional academic scholars, graduate and undergraduate students in classrooms, diplomats, government officers, journalists, and NGO staff who want to deepen their understanding of politics and international relations in/with Africa.

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 publics 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, Universitat Jaume I, Spain; UNESCO Chair of Philosophy for Peace and I Jin Jang, Universitat Jaume I; Spain; UNESCO Chair of Philosophy for Peace

Race is an important element of the modern understanding of the human being which emerged during colonialism in order to mark the distinction between the human and the subhuman. Histories and processes of racialization have not only been histories of direct and structural violence, but they were coterminous with the formation of modern human and social sciences, forms of governance, the emergence of international law, notions of citizenship, the formation of modern states, the elaboration of liberal political theories. Likewise, race is a significant aspect of migration, international and humanitarian aid, the notion of development, or current urban and environmental conflicts. The anthropological and racial dimensions of these issues have been omitted in peace studies. This work explores the silence on questions of race in peace studies, the under-theorization of racism and colonialism, and the scarce engagement with the different fields and traditions that put race, racism and colonialism at the center of their inquiry. The book starts with the question of how peace studies can address issues of race and racism when the discipline has not only ignored them as an object of study but also when the field has not properly addressed the intricacy of race, racism colonialism with knowledge production. To that effect, it follows two interwoven paths: First, it addresses the reasons behind these absences and what the silence says about the field. Bringing the silences to the forefront would enable us to situate and rethink how peace research conceives itself, its own foundational narrative, its disciplinary boundaries, and its relationship with other fields of knowledge. Second and relatedly, the approach of the book is not only critical but also expansive and reconstructive. It engages in conversations with neglected fields such as black and Africana philosophy, anticolonial and decolonial thought, and feminist approaches to race and racism.

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? With an analysis of relevant events of the period 2012-2022, the book attempts to answer these questions. The book is organized into four parts. (1) The first part presents the notions of post-truth and fake news using some of the most recent critical studies, analyzing some typical examples and the environment in which some of them originated. (2) The second part introduces the notion of conspiracy theory and describes the emergence of the idea of white supremacy and its ramifications, together with the narratives developed during the COVID restrictions. (3) The third part describes the emergence of the algorithms behind social networks and their role in propaganda, making examples of US and European elections and the Brexit referendum. An analysis of 'Cambridge Analytica' shows the tip of an iceberg of disinformation that is spreading around the world. Some remarks by comedians and philosophers help to give a new view on the concept of freedom of speech, with particular attention to the more and more difficult freedom of the press. (4) The fourth part gives some “emergency tools” for detecting disinformation at an individual level, understanding the most hidden mechanisms of disinformation, and the biases that almost unavoidably enter our minds. These tools come from the results both of traditional theories and the most recent social philosophy of language, not despising references to statistics. This is a fundamental book for having a general survey of this period of political turmoil, consulting a wide list of references and official documents, and having a grasp of the means of intellectual self-defense. This book is non-standard: it relies on the most sophisticated theories of language and yet it gives everything in simple and colloquial language. Differently from sophisticated analyses of linguistic phenomena, it gives the feeling of participating in a tour around what happened in the last decade, with a disenchanted eye that uses some results of the critical literature, without compelling one to become a theoretician in the field of philosophy or critical analysis. The hidden focus of the book is freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and what they mean today in an era of more sophisticated and widespread disinformation permitted by the algorithms governing social networks...