This book examines the origins of the US Navy's 2007 Maritime Strategy, the formation of the US government's "Pivot to Asia" strategy, and the most recent revisions to this strategy that focus more specifically on China. Besides examining the details of this strategy formulation, the book explores the internal and external repercussions on the US Navy of the Pivot to Asia. It discusses the "Fat Leonard" scandal, which involved bribery and corruption in contracts for the maintenance of the US fleets in the region, and considers the sharp decrease in training and readiness of the Pacific fleet to support the pivot, which in turn led to serious maritime collisions. It also assesses the impact of the pivot on other countries in the region, engaging in the debate as to whether the pivot was necessary in order to convince the countries of the region that the United States had not lost its staying power, or whether the pivot managed to make tensions in the Asia-Pacific worse even while allowing the strategic situation in the Middle East and Europe to worsen as a result of neglect.

This book investigates the hegemony of the USA by examining the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations' responses to major global crises. Combining a Gramscian framework with the main features of complexity theory it provides a comprehensive account of the systemic crisis of the hegemonic order of the United States in security, environmental, and economic issue-areas. By examining key case studies, the author reveals that the hegemonic responses of the US were confronted by overt challenges, including emerging state and non-state actors, globally complex transnational flows, and a combative domestic political climate which undermined the United States' role in multilateral institutions no longer fit for purpose. This book will be of interest to general readers as well as scholars and students of US foreign policy, global politics, and Gramscian theory.

Intergovernmental Relations in the UK provides a timely and up-to-date analysis of a turbulent decade in British politics and presents a fascinating case study of intergovernmental relations and territorial power in a devolved unitary state.

As over time a widening range of powers has been transferred from the Westminster Parliament to the devolved legislatures in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, intergovernmental relations have become increasingly important to deal with the corresponding overlaps of legislative and fiscal authority. However, leaving the European Union has exposed the weakness of the intergovernmental architecture and challenged the functionality of the UK's multilevel polity. Until now, the question of how powerful the devolved administrations really are has not been satisfactorily answered. The author uses insights from comparative studies of federations to develop a systematic account of shared rule and intergovernmental relations. This book examines how informal institutions and practices can provide political influence beyond formal structures, with reference to an extensive range of institutions, practices, policies and political decisions. Unlike other studies focused predominantly on the state of the Union, this volume points to the interplay between conflict and cooperation, and demonstrates that the proclaimed 'break-up of the Union' is accompanied by efforts to integrate the different jurisdictions.

This book will be of interest to scholars and postgraduate students of comparative politics, political systems, multilevel governance, regional and federal studies, British politics and public administration. It will also appeal to politicians, government advisers, civil servants and other practitioners who seek a better, more nuanced understanding of the UK's multilevel constitution and politics, and the nature of intergovernmental relations in the UK.

While there has been sustained interest in Gandhi's methods and continued academic inquiry, Gandhi's Global Legacy: Moral Methods and Modern Challenges is unique in bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars who analyze Gandhi's tactics, moral methods, and philosophical principles, not just in the fields of social and political activism, but in the areas of philosophy, religion, literature, economics, health, international relations, and interpersonal communication. Bringing this wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, the contributors provide fresh perspectives on Gandhi's thought and practice as well as critical analyses of his work and its contemporary relevance.
Edited by Veena R. Howard, this book reveals the need for reconstructing Gandhi's ideas and moral methods in today's context through a broad spectrum of crucial issues, including pacifism, health, communal living, gender dynamics, the role of anger, and peacebuilding. Gandhi's methods have been refined and reimagined to fit different situations, but there remains a need to consider his concept of Sarvodaya (uplift of all), the importance of economic, gender, and racial equity, as well as the value of dialogue and dissenting voices in building a just society. The book points to new directions for the study of Gandhi in the globalized world.

A fresh perspective on statecraft in the cyber domain

The idea of "cyber war" has played a dominant role in both academic and popular discourse concerning the nature of statecraft in the cyber domain. However, this lens of war and its expectations for death and destruction may distort rather than help clarify the nature of cyber competition and conflict. Are cyber activities actually more like an intelligence contest, where both states and nonstate actors grapple for information advantage below the threshold of war?

In Deter, Disrupt, or Deceive, Robert Chesney and Max Smeets argue that reframing cyber competition as an intelligence contest will improve our ability to analyze and strategize about cyber events and policy. The contributors to this volume debate the logics and implications of this reframing. They examine this intelligence concept across several areas of cyber security policy and in different national contexts. Taken as a whole, the chapters give rise to a unique dialogue, illustrating areas of agreement and disagreement among leading experts and placing all of it in conversation with the larger fields of international relations and intelligence studies.

Deter, Disrupt, or Deceive is a must read because it offers a new way for scholars, practitioners, and students to understand statecraft in the cyber domain.

Details the textual and performative history of the South Asian festival of Indra and its role in the development of classical Hinduism.

The Festival of Indra details the textual and performative history of an important South Asian festival and its role in the development of classical Hinduism. Drawing on various genres of Sanskrit textual sources-especially the epic Mahabharata-the book highlights the innovative ways that this annual public festival has supported the stable royal power responsible for the sponsorship of these texts. More than just a textual project, however, the book devotes significant ethnographic attention to the only contemporary performance of this festival that adheres to the classical Sanskrit record: the Indrajatra of Kathmandu, Nepal. Here, Indra's tall pole remains the festival's focal point, though its addition of the royal blessing by Kumari, the "living goddess" of Nepal, and the regular presence of the fierce god Bhairav show several significant ways that ritual agents have re-constructed this festival over the past two thousand years.

This book explores the role of listening in community engagement and peacebuilding efforts, bridging academic research in communication and practical applications for individual and social change.

For all their differences, community engagement and peacebuilding efforts share much in common: the need to establish and agree on achievable and measurable goals, the importance of trust, and the need for conflict management, to name but a few. This book presents listening - considered as a multi-disciplinary concept related to but distinct from civility, civic participation, and other social processes - as a primary mechanism for accomplishing these tasks. Individual chapters explore these themes in an array of international contexts, examining topics such as conflict resolution, restorative justice, environmental justice, migrants and refugees, and trauma-informed peacebuilding. The book includes contemporary literature reviews and theoretical insights covering the role of listening as related to individual, social, and governmental efforts to better engage communities and build, maintain, or establish peace in an increasingly divided world.

This collection provides invaluable insight to researchers, students, educators, and practitioners in intercultural and international communication, conflict management, peacebuilding, community engagement, and international studies.

Chapter 10 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND) 4.0 license.

This edited volume explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming international conflict in cyberspace.

Over the past three decades, cyberspace developed into a crucial frontier and issue of international conflict. However, scholarly work on the relationship between AI and conflict in cyberspace has been produced along somewhat rigid disciplinary boundaries and an even more rigid sociotechnical divide - wherein technical and social scholarship are seldomly brought into a conversation. This is the first volume to address these themes through a comprehensive and cross-disciplinary approach. With the intent of exploring the question 'what is at stake with the use of automation in international conflict in cyberspace through AI?', the chapters in the volume focus on three broad themes, namely: (1) technical and operational, (2) strategic and geopolitical and (3) normative and legal. These also constitute the three parts in which the chapters of this volume are organised, although these thematic sections should not be considered as an analytical or a disciplinary demarcation.

This book will be of much interest to students of cyber-conflict, AI, security studies and International Relations.

The Open Access version of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

A penetrating analysis of weaponized information-one of the most pressing dangers to open societies

Now more than ever, communities across the world are integrated into a complex, global information ecosystem that shapes the nature of social, political, and economic life. The ripple effects of actors trying to manipulate or disrupt this information ecosystem are far more severe than the primary effects that are merely being felt in the information space. In fact, the weaponization of narratives has already shown its potential to transform the character of conflict in the twenty-first century.

Subversion examines how malicious state and nonstate actors take advantage of the information space to sow political chaos. Andreas Krieg reveals how the coordinated use of weaponized narratives can achieve strategic-level effects through a six-stage process. Preying on vulnerable states and communities to find the fault lines within societies, these campaigns begin in the information space with an ultimate goal of producing tangible results (such as changes to policy or voting behavior, or spurring political violence). Krieg closely examines recent subversion campaigns by two states in particular, focusing on Russia's interference in Western public discourse and the United Arab Emirates's demonization of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.

Subversion will provide scholars and policymakers with a comprehensive understanding of one of the most urgent threats in international politics along with recommendations on how vulnerable communities can become more resilient.

This book explores the relationships between empire, natural history, and gender in the production of geographical knowledge and its translation between colonial Burma and Britain. Focusing on the work of the plant collector, botanical illustrator, and naturalist, Charlotte Wheeler-Cuffe, this book illustrates how natural history was practised and produced by a woman working in the tropics from 1897 to 1921.

Drawing on the extensive and under-studied archive of private and official correspondence, diaries, sketchbooks, photographs, paintings, and plant lists of Wheeler-Cuffe, this book advances our conceptual understanding of the 'invisible' historical geographies underpinning scientific knowledge production, by focusing on the role of a female actor in the complex gendered setting of colonial Burma. Using a bio-geographical approach, this analysis reconceptualises female agency beyond authorship and publication, and stresses how Wheeler-Cuffe represents an instantiation of the occluded contribution of women to the historiography of natural history. This book highlights Wheeler-Cuffe's production of scientific knowledge about Burma in the context of her relationship, as a white Western woman, with local, indigenous actors and details her practice of fieldwork and its embodied geographies in different parts of Burma, while she maintained the domestic superstructure of a colonial wife.

This book will be of interest to advance-level students and researchers in historical and cultural geography; the history of science; feminist geography; women and natural history; colonial Burma and imperialism; and botanical art and illustration.

This book focuses on education and power in Southeast Asia and analyzes the ways in which education has been instrumentalized by state, non-state, and private actors across this diverse region.

The book looks at how countries in Southeast Asia respond to the endogenous and exogenous influences in shaping their education systems. Chapters observe and study the interplay between education and power in Southeast Asia, which offers varying political, social, cultural, religious, and economic diversities. The political systems in Southeast Asia range from near consolidated democracy in Indonesia to illiberal democracy in Singapore and Thailand to the communist regime in Laos to absolute monarchy in Brunei. Structured in three parts, (i) centralization and decentralization, (ii) privatization and marketization, and (iii) equity and justice, these themes are discussed in single-country and/or multi-country studies in the Southeast Asian region.

Bringing together scholars from and focused on Southeast Asia, this book fills a gap in the literature on education in Southeast Asia.

This book provides a critical account of federal asymmetry in India - its origins, context, forms and functioning - by taking into account the institutional effectiveness of asymmetric institutions in the regions for identity fulfillment, development and governance. It argues that while some asymmetry, de jure/ or de facto, is part of all federations for meeting some special circumstances, in India, which has followed a different path of federation building, asymmetric institutional solutions especially in the border areas have played a crucially important role in accommodating ethno-cultural diversity, ensuring law and order, a level of development and governance in a process that has turned the 'rebels into stakeholders'. India's federal asymmetric designs and their working has been a key to holding the peripheries within the Union of India. The book utilizes both archival research and empirical survey data, as well as elite interviews.

This book presents a new, contemporary introduction to medieval philosophy as it was practiced in all its variety in Western Europe and the Near East. It assumes only a minimal familiarity with philosophy, the sort that an undergraduate introduction to philosophy might provide, and it is arranged topically around questions and themes that will appeal to a contemporary audience.

In addition to some of the perennial questions posed by philosophers, such as "Can we know anything, and if so, what?", "What is the fundamental nature of reality?", and "What does human flourishing consist in?", this volume looks at what medieval thinkers had to say, for instance, about our obligations towards animals and the environment, freedom of speech, and how best to organize ourselves politically. The book examines certain aspects of the thought of several well-known medieval figures, but it also introduces students to many important, yet underappreciated figures and traditions. It includes guidance for how to read medieval texts, provokes reflection through a series of study questions at the end of each chapter, and gives pointers for where interested readers can continue their exploration of medieval philosophy and medieval thought more generally.

Key Features

• Covers the contributions of women to medieval philosophy, providing students with a fuller understanding of who did philosophy during the Middle Ages
• Includes a focus on certain topics that are usually ignored, such as animal rights, love, and political philosophy, providing students with a fuller range of interests that medieval philosophers had
• Gives space to non-Aristotelian forms of medieval thought
• Includes useful features for student readers like study questions and suggestions for further reading in each chapter

Science and technology have long been considered key for development, problem solving and education in low-income countries, and Sweden has been at the forefront of efforts in this area, as one of the first countries to formalize research aid.

This book analyses how the Swedish Agency for Research Cooperation with Developing Countries (Sarec) and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) have worked to promote science in low-income countries. In doing so, the book tackles challenging questions around whose knowledges and capacities count, who sets the research agenda, how knowledge resources are distributed, and how complex donor-recipient relationships serve both to address and inflate these issues. Through a discursive analysis of policy material and interviews with former directors at Sarec and Sida as well as other key persons, the book traces how perceptions of the relationship between research and development have shifted over the last five decades.

Pointing to why long-term collaboration is necessary in order to contribute significantly to capacity building, as well as highlighting more general tensions relating to the production of knowledge, Sweden's Research Aid Policy: The Role of Science in Development will be a valuable resource for advanced students and researchers of foreign aid, development cooperation and the history of science and technology.

Using Israel as a case study, this book examines teachers' approaches to Controversial Political Issues (CPI) in the classroom. The book focuses on the democratic responsibilities that teachers face in an era where social media use is ubiquitous, and polarization and fake news are increasingly common. Presenting original research on the topic and developing a pedagogical framework for dealing with controversial issues in a sensitive and effective manner, this accessible volume highlights social-emotional learning approaches and considers a broad definition of CPI to include issues of racism, religion, political differences, multiculturalism, and Jewish-Arab relations. Using the results of an in-depth research project foregrounding personal experience, the book explores situational accounts of teachers from a diverse range of subject disciplines and different minority-majority group settings to present comparative evidence from European contexts.

Offering concrete suggestions for ways of dealing with controversial political issues and volatile remarks that are grounded in research, this timely book will be highly relevant for researchers, students, and educators in the fields of social studies, democratic and peace education, citizenship education, race and education, and educational politics.

Reframes the discussion of deliberative democracy in a unique fashion, approaching the debate as a historical conversation.

This book changes the narrative regarding democratic deliberation. It does so by bringing to bear insights into the nature of morality and discourse associated with one of the twentieth century's foremost philosophers of history, Hans-Georg Gadamer. Tradition and the Deliberative Turn thus reframes the discussion about deliberative democracy with a robust historical sensibility, which has largely been missing from this conversation. Gadamer's "rehabilitation" of tradition shows how the concrete ethical life does not merely occlude but also facilitates moral understanding, providing a particular vantage point from which we perceive the world. What other scholars have overlooked is that such a perspective is therefore always limited. Drawing on Gadamer's practical philosophy, an underappreciated element in his corpus, Ryan R. Holston argues for the need to cultivate these historically-rooted and local relationships and the shared meanings to which they give life.

This book demonstrates that the disciplinary boundaries present within international relations approaches to security studies are redundant when examining social media, and inter- and multi-disciplinary analysis is key. A key result of the analysis undertaken is that when examining the social media sphere security scholars need to "expect the unexpected". This is because social media enables users to subvert, contest and create security narratives with symbols and idioms of their choice which can take into account "traditional" security themes, but also unexpected and under explored themes such as narratives from the local context of the users' towns and cities, and the symbolism of football clubs. The book also explores the complex topography of social media when considering constructions of security. The highly dynamic topography of social media is neither elite dominated and hierarchical as the Copenhagen School conceptualises security speak. However, neither is it completely flat and egalitarian as suggested by the vernacular security studies' non-elite approach. Rather, social media's topography is shifting and dynamic, with individuals gaining influence in security debates in unpredictable ways. In examining social media this book engages with the emancipatory burden of critical security studies. This book argues that it remains unfulfilled on social media and rather presents a "thin" notion of discursive emancipation where social media does provide the ability for previously excluded voices to participate in security debates, even if this does not result in their direct emancipation from power hierarchies and structures offline.