This book analyses the entanglement between Washington and Hollywood to shed light on the violence inherent in the image as a semiotic-material agent in contemporary warfare. In the 21st century, the weaponized military drone, an image-centered machine, has spearheaded the geopolitical curatorship of the USA in the context of the war on terror. Drone violence shares the same characteristics as cinema: image and movement. However, a drone's image is not purely a reflection of the nature of war; it is more than representational, it is performative. Building upon the concept of annihilation-image, this book argues that the image wields a destructive agency as it transitions from reflection to diffraction. Rather than mirroring reality, the annihilation-image creates a brutal pattern of difference in the world. It is a destructive ontology in which seeing and annihilating are in a state of superposition. Therefore, everything that is framed is potentially dead. That is to say, by framing bodies and objects in the terrain, a state of superpositional violence is created in which one is alive, but virtually dead.

In War on Sacred Grounds, Ron E. Hassner investigates the causes and properties of struggles over sites that are both venerated and contested, and proposes ways for managing these disputes. Holy places can create the potential for clashes, not only between competing religious groups but also between religious groups and secular actors. Hassner illustrates this complex, violent dynamic through a series of case studies, including the conflict over Jerusalem and competing Hindu and Muslim claims over Ayodhya. He also analyses successful compromises that reduced conflict in Jerusalem in 1967 and in Mecca in 1979. In this updated edition of War on Sacred Grounds, Hassner reevaluates his findings and conclusions and surveys ongoing conflicts over holy sites.

This edited volume explores the new directions emerging in the field of war and culture through six essays that examine conflicts and their cultural legacy from the First World War to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

The first two essays focus on the French experience of the World Wars through, first, a study of trench poetry and then the sexual experiences of POWs in Germany. The next two essays focus on gendered and especially women's experiences of conflict through, first, a study of women's war labour in the British army and then analysis of women photojournalists' role in promoting the adoption of Vietnamese babies in the USA. This volume concludes with two essays focusing on twenty-first century conflict. The first explores representations of veterancy in contemporary Romanian fiction, and the second, the phenomenon of fanvids in relation to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

Originally published as a special issue of the Journal for War & Culture Studies, the book indicates new directions of travel for this sub-discipline and reflects the Journal's commitment over the past two decades to bring the Arts and Humanities and the Social Sciences into dialogue with each other.

Contributors adopt novel theoretical approaches and empirical methods to explore the effects and dynamics of security threats. They highlight the significant diversity in definitions of both gender and security, introducing refined ways of understanding the connection between the two, focusing on topics including war, violence, climate change, pandemics, and criminal networks, as well as feminist action. The Handbook identifies fruitful avenues for future research in the field, surveying gender-related security policy at the international, national and regional levels.

The Handbook on Gender and Security is an essential resource for students and scholars of International Relations, Security Studies, and Gender Politics. It is also a vital read for policy-makers seeking to understand the significant impact of gender on experiences of and vulnerabilities to security threats.

Revolutionary Warfare investigates how efforts to counter a revolution could also be revolutionary. The Algerian War fractured the French Empire, destroyed the legitimacy of colonial rule, and helped launch the Third Worldist movement for the liberation of the Global South. By tracing how French generals, officers, and civil officials sought to counter Algerian independence with their own project of radical social transformation, Terrence G. Peterson reveals that the conflict also helped to transform the nature of modern warfare.

The French war effort was never defined solely by repression. As Peterson details, it also sought to fashion new forms of surveillance and social control that could capture the loyalty of Algerians and transform Algerian society. Hygiene and medical aid efforts, youth sports and education programs, and psychological warfare campaigns all attempted to remake Algerian social structures and bind them more closely to the French state. In tracing the emergence of such programs, Peterson reframes the French war effort as a project of armed social reform that sought not to preserve colonial rule unchanged, but to revolutionize it in order to preserve it against the global challenges of decolonization.

Revolutionary Warfare demonstrates how French officers' efforts to transform warfare into an exercise in social engineering not only shaped how the Algerian War unfolded from its earliest months, but also helped to forge a paradigm of warfare that dominated strategic thinking during the Cold War and after: counterinsurgency.

Key Features:

• Coverage of all key elements of the policy cycle
• Critical reflections on the roles of policy analysts
• Insight into the complexity of policymaking in practice
• Up-to-date review of the literature on the policy process
• Fresh case studies on topics including migration, water management, social policies, and climate change.

Providing an insight into the complexity of policymaking in today's world, this engaging textbook is an invaluable resource for undergraduate and master's students of public policy, policy analysis and public administration.

The War on Rescue documents how governments block assistance to people in times of crisis. Focusing on the European Migration Crisis of 2015-2022 to address the reasons why governments do this, William Plowright discusses the strategies employed that prevent suffering people from receiving help.

The European Migration Crisis motivated people around the world to offer assistance to needy refugees and migrants across Europe, the Mediterranean, and North Africa. Both large and small organizations rushed to bring food, medical care, and rescue to those stranded at sea. However, many European governments sought to prevent humanitarian assistance and deny safe haven to the desperate. Boats filled with those rescued were blocked from harbors, activists were arrested, and staff were threatened; some faced violence. The War on Rescue adds to social science understanding of and explanations for humanitarian assistance and the reasons why governments obstruct rescue efforts.

Adopting an international comparative perspective, authors examine common and differing features of various states to show how these features pertain to local autonomy, as well as what impacts derive from local government configurations. Chapters cover 57 countries situated on six continents over a span of 31 years, including almost all member states of the European Union, Council of Europe and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The authors define local autonomy as a multifaceted concept which can be measured through legal, functional, financial, organizational, administrative and central-or-regional-access dimensions. With fresh empirical data and findings on local autonomy, they capture its evolving nature.

Dynamics and Issues of Local Autonomy is an essential read for scholars of public administration, regulation and governance, public policy and political science. Providing a better understanding of the factors that influence local autonomy and its implications for governance and service delivery, this book is a vital resource for practitioners and policymakers alike.

The Humanities and Public Administration presents a comprehensive analysis of how fields such as historiography, philosophy, religious studies, and the fine arts can shed light on under-explored aspects of administrative phenomena. Reflecting critically and systematically on the applications of these subject areas, chapters present exciting new approaches to understanding international public administration and public policy. Authors also emphasise the wider benefits of connecting the humanities as a whole to the study of social sciences.

This pioneering book is a vital read for academics and students in public administration and management, public governance, and public policy. It provides an illuminating insight into the interdisciplinary nature of both public administration and the humanities for all those interested in these fields.

Suffering Victory recounts the commitment of Soviet liberal intellectuals to democratic transition during the effervescent period of perestroika and in the first years of post-Soviet Russia to the rise of Boris Yeltsin and the dissolution of the USSR. Guillaume Sauve argues that late Soviet liberalism was mainly nourished by the legacy of humanistic socialism, combining Enlightenment ideals and Romantic aspirations, and concludes that the distinguishing feature is its assumed moralism.

After encouraging the concentration of power in the hands of the Russian president and an enlightened elite, liberal intellectuals undermined their own democratic project and were pushed aside from decision-making, while being rejected by most of the population for having supported a course of reforms that did not fulfill its promises. As Suffering Victory shows, the success of Russia's liberal intellectuals against the Communist Party came at the price of a decline deeper and more lasting than in most post-communist countries. Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the fate of late Soviet liberals sheds crucial light on the prospects of liberal reforms in Russia today.

Scholars and practitioners usually regard the nuclear non-proliferation regime as composed of two categories of countries - those with and those without nuclear weapons. The latter are regarded as the core designers of that regime, while the former have their prominence in shaping non-proliferation institutions eclipsed or ignored. This book proposes to go beyond that duality by focusing on a usually neglected group of states: latent nuclear countries. Those are the countries that possess advanced nuclear capabilities but no weapons.

This book shows that latent nuclear countries not only participate actively in non-proliferation institutions but also promote the creation of new frameworks highlighting concerns and perspectives different from their nuclear-weapon and nuclear-free counterparts. The author makes this argument through an intricate combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, with an in-depth analysis of Brazil and Germany as sources for case studies. He makes the case to understand the nuclear non-proliferation regime as an inclusive and refined approach that takes into consideration countries' nuclear capabilities, identities, role conceptions, and domestic structures.

This commemorative 30th-anniversary volume of Research in Political Sociology delves into the ramifications of warfare and conflict on migration, sustainable development, and security. What threat is posed by warfare and conflict to environmental integrity, security, and the prospects of a sustainable future?

Echoing the sentiments expressed in pivotal UN resolutions and positions which emphasize the inherently destructive nature of warfare on sustainable development, the chapters focus on the importance of adhering to international legal frameworks for safeguarding the environment during armed conflicts. Recognizing the pervasive ramifications of warfare across diverse socio-cultural contexts, this volume convenes scholarly insights from three continents - Europe, the Americas, and Asia - to elucidate the far-reaching implications of conflict on environmental sustainability and harmonious cohabitation among nations. Beyond this, contributors underscore the indispensable role of women in environmental management and development and emphasize their full participation in developmental efforts even amidst wartime conditions as crucial for fostering international peace and security.

Through a shared emphasis on the transformative power of education, this volume collectively underscores the urgent need to address the severe and enduring consequences of warfare on global ecosystems and collective well-being.

The Mongol Archive in Late Medieval France is the first comprehensive study of contact between France and the Mongols in the late Middle Ages. As these realms expanded across Eurasia-the French through crusade and settlement, the Mongols through conquest-their encounters altered each other's understanding of the world and their place in it.

The Mongol influence on French culture is visible in what Mark Cruse calls the Mongol archive-a wide range of materials including chronicles, crusade treatises, encyclopedias, manuscript illuminations, maps, romances, and travel accounts-revealing how the French court made sense of a people previously unknown to the European intellectual tradition. Cruse mines this archive of Franco-Mongol contact to reassess France's place in the continental history of medieval Eurasia.

By comparing the French and Mongol courts, Cruse shows how their similarities allowed meaningful communication between them and highlights the surprising connections-diplomatic, intellectual, and genealogical-across vast distances. The library of King Charles V (r. 1364-1380), one of the largest in medieval Europe, is a monument to the richness of these encounters, which anticipate the global interconnectedness of the modern world. Ultimately, the innovative approach in The Mongol Archive in Late Medieval France toward French conceptions of and relations with the Mongols demonstrates how a global perspective transforms our understanding of the medieval world.

This work offers a groundbreaking exploration of the urgent need for creativity and innovation in contemporary military thought.

In an era characterised by the ceaseless flux of global dynamics, traditional paradigms of warfare have become increasingly obsolete. The pursuit of victory no longer lies in the fixation upon past conflicts but rather in the discerning assessment of and adaptation to the challenges that will shape the conflicts of tomorrow. This innovative work dissects the barriers that have thus far hindered the realisation of this potential. Furthermore, it challenges the status quo and advances a series of recommendations poised to steer international militaries towards success in the theatre of contemporary conflicts. Drawing from their extensive involvement with defence forces worldwide, the authors introduce concepts such as military design thinking as catalytic instruments of change. Through introspective reflections and real-world case studies, they present implications for mitigating cognitive biases, heralding a transformative epoch in military operations. It is this very transformation that furnishes militaries with the capacity to surge ahead of their adversaries, a capability proving to be indispensable in modern warfare.

Offering a well-illuminated path for military entities to adapt and flourish within an ever-evolving global landscape, this book will be of much interest to students of military studies, security studies, and international relations, as well as military professionals and leaders in the field.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This unique volume brings together academics of Russian journalism and media with journalists and editors who reported or continue to report on the country, to explore and reflect on the changing landscape for journalists in Russia or covering Russia, and the increasing control exerted by the government on independent journalists.

Combining rigorous academic research with reflective practitioner essays, the volume investigates the future of reporting in Russia and the implications for the future of the country. It offers an understanding of the experience of independent journalists and media outlets in Russia, as well as other individuals who experience censorship (academics, activists), and examines how the current situation in Russia and people's experiences of censorship can inform both our theoretical understandings of censorship and information control, in the context of the twenty-first-century digital technologies and the policymaking both inside and outside of Russia.

Offering important insight into what is happening within Russia's borders, this volume will appeal to researchers and students of journalism, political science, international relations, propaganda and censorship, mass media, as well as journalists and policymakers.

Chapter 4 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-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

When Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, causing more than 1,800 deaths and more than $100 billion in damages, it was deemed a "once-in-a-lifetime storm." After the hurricane, over 1.5 million volunteers came to New Orleans through various nonprofit organizations, and around 500 new charities were established to aid the city's recovery. We Came to Rebuild New Orleans documents this significant movement through interviews with the activists who spearheaded the city's recovery.

Despite widespread acknowledgment of the crucial role of nonprofit organizations in New Orleans's recovery, scholarly examinations of these recovery workers' experiences remain scarce. We Came to Rebuild New Orleans fills this gap, drawing on a vast corpus of interviews with more than fifty leaders and staff involved in Katrina recovery across various areas, including housing, criminal justice reform, legal aid, and wetlands restoration. The interviews seek to understand what motivates individuals to devote significant portions of their lives to recovery, and to assess whether nonprofit volunteer labor was an effective recovery strategy.

Analysis of the testimonies of participants reveals that most of the disaster recovery corps, even those in their early twenties, had histories of activism or civic engagement before committing to New Orleans recovery work. While significant, their recovery work in New Orleans tended to represent a single chapter in a broader life story of service and civic engagement. Despite the good intentions of the volunteers, their testimonies also highlight the limitations of relying on volunteer nonprofit organizations for disaster recovery.

We Came to Rebuild New Orleans thus offers an extraordinary new look at long-term disaster recovery efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Sharing the personal stories of nonprofit workers from many walks of life, the book emphasizes their persistent spirit of activism and civic engagement, while also reflecting critically on the effectiveness of volunteer--based disaster recovery initiatives.

This book posits the possibility of a reasons-based account of the European integration process.

The book pursues the force of public reason in getting to agreement beyond the nation state and spells out the fundamentals of the European integration process, theorizing the mechanisms that brought the European Union (EU) into existence. The book combines insights from social and political theory, law, and political science in setting out a novel theory of European integration and reconstructing the normative foundation of the EU. It goes on to establish the problem of arbitrary rule (dominance) created by political differentiation, examines the place of democracy in the multilevel constellation that makes up the EU, and proposes a set of democratic reforms.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of EU studies, European integration, democracy, and international political theory/philosophy.

This book explains why China chooses to coerce Asia-Pacific regional states, despite the risk of such actions creating a backlash and complicating its strategic calculus.

China's coercion of neighboring states, often a variation of heavy informal economic sanctions combined with diplomatic pressure and gray-zone coercive measures, has been increasingly observable in the past decade. It has become an important tool in China's foreign policy toolbox and is frequently used by Beijing to shape the security-political environment of the Asia-Pacific. The book begins with an appreciation of China's complicated geopolitical exposition and an understanding that such coercion creates backlash, since the target state will likely be alienated and pushed into closer security cooperation with the United States, China's main geopolitical rival. Through two in-depth case studies of Chinese coercion, targeting the Philippines and South Korea, respectively, the book demonstrates that, first, the reason China coerces is that the secondary state engages in actions that fundamentally threaten China's security interests, and, second, it will coerce these states only if other policy options geared to change the secondary state's course of action have not worked. Employing balance-of-power theory, and particularly wedge strategies, the book solves a pertinent research question and improves our knowledge of contemporary security politics in the Asia-Pacific.

This book will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners of Asia-Pacific security, Chinese foreign policy, and international relations.

To solve its multiple challenges post-2024, America must act with intelligence and wisdom, which can only come from an active and well-informed citizenry. The issues that confront us post-2024 are profound: climate change, inequality, artificial intelligence, an unstable geopolitical global order, existential threats from unfriendly nations, just to name a few. A democracy needs an educated society, which requires not just information, but knowledge and understanding.

As the dust settles from the 2024 presidential election, we are faced with several philosophical issues. How we act post-2024 will affect our America and our children's America. Our future depends on the proactive action that we take now, which is influenced by how much we understand today's issues. This is a book about today's America.

Russia Reverts to Muscovy explores the implications of removing the notion of "Russia" from political and scholarly discourse.

The book posits the following questions: Should the state ruled from Moscow be termed "Russia"? Might not "Muscovy" be more appropriate? It reflects on how academia has conceptualized developments among the Eastern Slavs over the centuries from the early days of Muscovy up until the present-day Russian Federation with the result that by consistently viewing events through a Moscow lens the West has been instrumental in supporting Muscovite claims to hegemony and thus in allowing Moscow to play an outsized role not only in the region but also in global geopolitics. This book highlights the more recent developments of the Muscovite state, and the increasingly hollow nature of the claims of the Russian Federation to represent all of Russia.

Exploring how the Eastern Slav world could be conceptualized differently and how this world might develop in reality, this book will be of interest to researchers in International Relations, Ethnic Studies, Political Science, and Central Asian, Russian and Soviet Politics.

Living On centers around the unprecedented mobilization of mental health professionals in the wake of a massive earthquake that struck western Turkey in 1999-a disaster that left more than 20,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands of residents displaced. Working amid unimaginable destruction and suffering, volunteer psychiatrists and psychologists would quickly improvise a makeshift response, offering thousands of survivors access to psychiatric care for the first time. Never before had there been such a collective expression of concern for people's psychological well-being.

Christopher Dole explores how this psychiatric response fashioned individual and collective lives far into the disaster's future. Based on research spanning two decades, from the earthquake to its twentieth anniversary, he considers how this convergence of geological activity and psychiatric expertise introduced novel psychiatric and psychological discourses into everyday lives of survivors, as it also animated new visions of self, society, and technopolitical promise. Living On not only offers insight into Turkey's transformations over the opening decades of the twenty-first century, but it also sheds light on a more general arrangement of disaster, governance, and medical expertise-one that increasingly characterizes our era of planetary ecological crisis.

The Spirit of Socialism is a cultural history of the Soviet collapse. It examines the millions of Soviet people who, during the cascading crises of the collapse and the post-Soviet transition, embarked on a spirited and highly visible search for new meaning. Amid profound disorientation, these seekers found direction in their horoscopes, or behind gurus in saffron robes or apocalyptic preachers, or by turning from the most basic premises of official science and history to orient themselves anew. The beliefs they seized on and, even more, the questions that guided their search reveal the essence of late-Soviet culture and its legacy in post-Soviet Russia.

To skeptical outsiders, the seekers appeared eccentric, deviant, and above all un-Soviet. Yet they came to their ideas by Soviet sources and Soviet premises. As Joseph Kellner demonstrates, their motley beliefs reflect modern values that formed the spiritual core of Soviet ideology, among them a high regard for science, an informed and generous internationalism, and a confidence in humanity to chart its own course. Soviet ideology failed, however, to unite these values in an overarching vision that could withstand historical change.

And so, as The Spirit of Socialism shows, the seekers asked questions raised but not resolved by the Russian Revolution and subsequent Soviet order-questions of epistemic authority, of cultural identity, and of history's ultimate meaning. Although the Soviet collapse was not the end of history, it was a rupture of epochal significance, whose fissures extend into our own uncertain era.

The Province of All Mankind is the story of a powerful idea about the cosmos. Born in the science-fiction literature of the nineteenth century and maturing in the Age of Apollo, this idea held that outer space should be preserved as a "sanctuary" from human strife, free from weapons, warfare, and political rivalry. If humanity could somehow leave violence behind as it moved into space, perhaps peace would finally reign.

Bucking a half-century of "space race" scholarship, Stephen Buono argues that despite waging a totalizing Cold War, the United States achieved stunning diplomatic successes that heralded the cosmos as a realm of peace and cooperation. The early story of space politics is not primarily one of militarization, but rather of political prescience and restraint. The Province of All Mankind demonstrates that space became a unique domain of American foreign relations and international law, and provides lessons for the Second Cold War unfolding over the horizon.

This book focuses on the more than 8,000 local elections administrators in counties, municipalities, and townships who largely manage the key administrative processes of elections, work with campaigns and candidates, design voting materials and choose voting equipment, staff early, and Election Day polling locations, and communicate with and educate voters. They are the frontline of democracy, and this is the first book that explores who becomes an election administrator; their opinions about election reform and election integrity; how LEOs responded to the unique challenges of the 2020 election which included misinformation and even death threats; and how to move forward to ensure a sustainable, diverse, and sustainable community.

Bringing together a cross-disciplinary team of experts, the Handbook examines the causes, dynamics and effects of trust and distrust in public governance. Authors illustrate the complex interplay between (dis)trust, vulnerability, transparency, power, regulation and control in an era characterised by fluid and inclusive forms of government that require collaboration and a functional balance between trust and distrust to operate. They cover key topics including among others, participation, networks, contracting, technology, crisis governance, and trust reparation. Ultimately, the Handbook explores how to expand the boundaries of future research, and demonstrates that fostering reciprocal relations of functional trust is a fundamental principle of effective governance.

The Handbook on Trust in Public Governance is an essential read for students and scholars of public administration and management, political science, policy studies, and public governance. It is also a key resource for policy-makers and government officials seeking to craft strategies that enhance governance legitimacy and resilience.