While authoritarianism continues to gain ground globally, this book offers a global and nuanced perspective into how, when, and where autocratisation may be contested and sometimes reversed. Drawing on rich case studies from across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Southeastern Europe, the chapters in this book map the actors and institutions of resistance, ranging from political parties and bureaucrats to social movements and transnational alliances. Rather than offering a binary view of success or failure of opposition and resistance, this book adopts a dynamic, process-driven approach, considering the conditions under which resistance emerges, adapts, and persists even in shrinking civic and political spaces.

Whether through informal bureaucratic defiance, legal mobilisation, elite rivalries, transnational alliances, strategic litigation, or protest coalitions, these strategies reveal the agency of opposition actors navigating complex and often hostile terrains. These diverse experiences force us to rethink resistance as an ongoing, collective effort rather than a single moment of reversal.

This volume spans multiple disciplines, including political science, sociology, international relations, and legal studies, making it essential reading for students, scholars, and policymakers to understand how resistance emerges, evolves, and endures in the face of authoritarian resurgence.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

A comprehensive revision with the latest insights into counterintelligence practices.

Counterintelligence Theory and Practice, Third Edition, is the most comprehensive and authoritative overview of this area of intelligence studies. More than just an update, the third edition is a comprehensive reconsideration of counterintelligence in the face of twenty-first century challenges-with revisions for currency, expanded content, new case studies, and a new chapter on cybersecurity, this text provides readers with the latest insights into counterintelligence practices. From cyber-espionage threats to the intricacies of human intelligence gathering, Hank Prunckun covers not just the "how" but also the "why" behind counterintelligence operations and frames the subject in broader historical, social, and ethical contexts.

The third edition features:
? New Chapter 16 on counterintelligence in authoritarian regimes
? New Chapter 17 on cyber counterintelligence
? New and expanded case studies in nearly every chapter to reinforce the applied lessons
? Deep exploration of the ethical dimensions of counterintelligence, stressing the importance of principled decision-making in safeguarding national interests and corporate assets.
? Interactive exercises and scenarios, to engage readers and hone your analytical and critical thinking abilities through practical applications.
? A multidisciplinary perspective encompassing psychology, technology, international relations, and criminology, making this edition a comprehensive resource for understanding counterintelligence.
? Global examples that explore a wide array of recent and historical counterintelligence operations worldwide

From fundamentals to advanced tactics, this edition covers all counterintelligence aspects, catering to professionals, academics, and students alike.

Analyzing Hegel, Arendt and Amery's understanding of reconciliation and considering the role of victimhood in intergroup reconciliation, Nadler grapples with the threat of reignited conflict post resolution. He addresses social psychological research on promoting trusting relations between former adversaries and ameliorating conflict-related threats to their identities. Chapters consider how former enemies may cooperate to build trust, and the effects of truth commissions and public apologies on conciliatory tendencies. The book sheds light on real-world efforts to build trust and stable reconciled intergroup relations between former enemies. The book highlights remaining dilemmas in the study of post-conflict reconciliation.

This book is an essential resource for scholars and students of social psychology, political science, and sociology. It is also a beneficial read for professionals promoting ceasefires, and practitioners in governmental services and NGOs working towards an end to international and intra-societal unrest.

This book offers a compelling re-examination of Mao Zedong's political authority, giving readers a clear understanding and full picture of Mao, the politics of his era and the political life of the CCP.

The widespread view holds that Mao was an authoritarian leader, enjoying what was called absolute leadership authority. This book reveals that in fact from the late 1950s onwards, the CCP leadership was deeply fractured, during a period when China's internal political and economic dynamics and its external existential conditions were very complex. By analysing four major interconnected challenges to Mao's governing decisions and leadership imposed by senior military leaders from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, the book introduces the concept of a braking mechanism within the CCP during Mao's era, preventing the newly created PRC and its resource distribution rules and patterns from collapse.

Including in-depth textual analysis of documentary sources while contributing to the debate about Mao's authority and political power, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of modern Chinese history and political science.

What have been the fundamental shifts in Japanese society over the past decade? And what has remained the same? What will the country look like in five years from now?

Introducing you to all aspects of Japanese society, culture, politics, economy, geography and history, this book guides you through the country's enduring features, recent trends and the most interesting areas of analysis:

- Gender roles, gender fluidity and LBGTQ identities: including coverage of singledom and the changing nature of family life
- Changing demographics: considering the impact of increased immigration from China and Vietnam coupled with a falling birth rate and declining indigenous population
- The current state of Japanese politics: analysing the dominance of the LDP and the legacy of Shinzo Abe
- Reflections on contemporary Japanese culture: discussing the politics of education, the role of the media and the online sphere, new social movements, environmentalism
- Trends in Japan's external relations: looking at the LDP's increased defence spending, the continued rise of China and Russia's war in Ukraine.

With case studies, the latest data and lively debate, Contemporary Japan is essential reading if you are studying any aspect of Japanese sociology, politics, history, culture or language, or if you are simply interested in learning more about the country.

An interdisciplinary array of academics shed light on the rapidly evolving nature of East Asian politics and its uncertain future, reflecting on the region's impact on global events. They analyze how existing political divisions can be exacerbated or calmed by various actors, tariffs, military and civil unrest, and the knock-on effects of major international conflicts. Chapters cover the influence of China's history on contemporary policymaking, the effect of the US-China rivalry on international relations, and the importance of middle-power diplomacy. Contributors assess the changing nature of politics in this critical region and present indications of both emerging economic stresses and growth.

East Asian Politics in a Turbulent Era is an essential resource for scholars and students of Asian politics and policy, international relations and international politics, as well as those specializing in development and policy in East Asia and its interaction with worldwide powers.

Translated into English for the first time, My Animals and Flowers bring forth Theodor Lessing's visionary philosophy of need in an idiosyncratic series of musings on the natural world, which range from light-hearted to darkly shadowed. Full of imagination, wit, and insight into the nature and history of living species, they demonstrate Lessing's brilliant ability to combine biological observation with social, psychological, political, historical, educational, and above all, philosophical thoughts.

Grimly pessimistic about human society, Lessing found both a mirror and a refuge in the world of animals and flowers. In observing nature and attributing all type of human characteristics to animals and plants, he exposes the fusing of nature and culture, and - in dialogue with the natural world - confronts a whole cluster of political questions from the question of equality for women and marital fidelity to the pollution of cities and man's destruction of the environment. Much of this work, sketching out the implications of an atomic age for example, has proved uncannily prophetic.

To read this book is to enter into a curious and deeply sensitive world, in which to peer down at a colony of ants is to be reminded of 'giant nations, each in conflict with the others', and to catch a glimpse of bright poppies in a cornfield is to be submerged in a chain of thoughts from St Augustine to David Hume. Amongst the autobiographical reflections, Lessing weaves in critical observations of Western civilization, and critique of human culture as a destructive and disfiguring influence in the natural world. Ultimately, his philosophy of need shows how civilization comes at the expense of nature, ringing true with the climate of our times.

A compelling social and political balance-sheet of empire, revealing how former colonies worldwide are still shackled by the legacies of colonial oppression.

Why do some former colonies fail, staggering from crisis to crisis, while others recover? Why did so many succumb to dictatorship, corruption, civil war and instability after independence?

Amal Chatterjee argues that these 'failures' are underpinned by persistent, robust colonial structures which preserve and reproduce the oppressive, exploitative systems of the past. From land ownership to mining, transport networks to education provision, morality to law, many post-colonial institutions function almost exactly as they did under foreign rule, with power still concentrated in the hands of elites, and inequalities baked in. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary and historical material, including memoirs, economic data and administrative documents, Chatterjee explains how empire not only made its colonies into places of extraction and exploitation, but keeps them there today. Offering a truly global account--from the British Empire to the Belgian, from Mexico to Mozambique, from the Sahel to Sri Lanka--he shows how extractive capitalism and colonialism are intertwined, and how human rights and development are hostage to the imperatives of profit-making.

The world built by empire can still be challenged and changed--but to design a new, equitable future for all, we must first understand the legacies of the past.

There is no silver bullet for the climate crisis-but that hasn't stopped people searching. Seizing its chance, the nuclear power industry wants us to believe that theirs is the only technical fix for our deliverance. The public, politicians and the media have been easily swayed.

This should come as no surprise. After all, the pro-nuclear PR campaign is richly funded and has an army of lobbyists sowing myths while the industry reaps the rewards of taxpayer-funded subsidies.

No To Nuclear calls the industry's bluff. Blasting aside its claims to be safe and green, Linda Pentz Gunter makes the irresistible case that nuclear power is too slow, too expensive, too dangerous and too integrally connected to the nuclear weapons complex, to serve as a rational energy choice.

The book also delves into the lives of Indigenous peoples and communities of colour, who have been harmed the most by the nuclear sector, and questions whether the way we devalue nature and the environment is costing us the chance of a genuinely just energy transition.

An original conceptual approach to the study of war, attempting to capture the entire phenomenon of military adaptation-whether strategic, institutional or in the field.

The unravelling of the post-Cold War order has intensified geopolitical tensions, driving a global increase in defence spending. Most military organisations are engaged in a process of drastic transformation, trying to scale their activities, learn from contemporary battlefields, and improve readiness. Yet armed forces engaged in such reforms must solve a major dilemma: how to adapt to an uncertain future without losing their current identity, coherence or operational effectiveness.

In this incisive and timely study, Olivier Schmitt explores how modern militaries adapt, or fail to adapt, to evolving threats, technologies and political constraints. Drawing on global case-studies--from the trenches of Ukraine to the halls of the People's Liberation Army leadership--he investigates how social expectations, political constraints and organisational cultures collide in the worldwide quest to reform the military.

Essential reading for defence professionals, policymakers and scholars of international security, Preparing for War equips readers with the tools to grasp not only the 'how' but the 'why' behind military transformation. In an era of rising defence budgets and shrinking certainties, this book delivers crucial insights into the future of war--and the institutions that must be ready for it.

This book takes the relationship between physics and sociology as its subject, focusing on the philosophical dispute between emergentism and reductionism. It argues that the mystery behind emergence disappears when we abandon the lawful understanding of causality in favor of a powers view.

Adopting a critical realist perspective, it offers a completely novel approach, arguing that the mystery associated with emergence is an artifact of the Humean covering law model of causality assumed by both sides of the reductionism and emergentist debate. In this debate, both reductionists and emergentists have focused on how a single whole or composite relates to its parts and have commonly operated with an understanding of causality in terms of lawful regularities among events. As a result, emergentists have been left with a dilemma: Either admit that laws governing higher-level behavior can be explained by lower-level laws, which is reductionism, or leave the existence of the higher-level laws a mystery.

The first book-length publication that addresses - and attempts to resolve - the debate over emergence and reductionism and that gives attention to emergence across the ontological levels from physics to social behavior, it will have a lively readership among critical realists. It will also be of interest to philosophers of mind, philosophers of science, social scientists, and theoretically oriented practitioners in chemistry, biology, and psychology.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

This book explains how the rise of temperance life assurance affected ideas surrounding the dangers of drinking and abstinence between 1840 and 1918.

James Kneale examines how temperance life insurance - initially a speculative business venture - evolved into a social experiment that played a crucial role in persuading ordinary people, doctors, and insurance firms that abstaining from alcohol was safer than drinking it. Drawing from archival materials, Kneale analyses contemporary stories from teetotallers and high-street temperance businesses, and investigates the broader impact on 'temperance towns' such as Manchester, Exeter, and the settlements of the Pendle area.

By charting the evolution of the first temperance life assurance firm the UK Temperance and General Provident Institution (UKT) from its difficult beginnings, to being the eighth largest British life assurance firm by the 1890s, the author demonstrates to readers how quickly social attitudes surrounding teetotalism changed, and why.

'A remarkable story' - Arun Kundnani, author of The Muslims are Coming!

In 2003, 23-year-old Uzair Paracha was arrested by the US government and branded a terrorist. A Pakistani man living in New York, he was accused of providing 'material support' to al-Qaeda - a vague, catch-all charge invented in the chaotic aftermath of 9/11. He was offered a plea deal but refused, knowing he was innocent.

What followed was a nightmare: years in solitary confinement, a trial built on fear instead of facts, and a justice system determined to make an example of someone who they thought looked the part. Uzair's case wasn't an anomaly: it was the blueprint.

The Man Who Refused to Plead Guilty is more than one man's story: it's a stark reflection of the path the US chose after 9/11. A path that reached for demonisation before understanding, punishment before truth. Uzair Paracha's experience lays bare the human cost of a vengeful nation, how a heart filled with principle can find some small semblance of justice.

A novel examination of interstate competition, considering how and why states employ proxies to perpetrate violence on their behalf.

Today's global security environment is characterised by great power contests. As we know from previous histories of strategic competition between states, such heightened rivalry routinely manifests in violence perpetrated by proxy forces-a dynamic intended either to avoid war, or to assist in its prosecution.

This book explores the use of proxies in arenas of international strategic competition characterised by force. It looks at why, where and when proxy warfare is waged, examining how states seek to employ proxies, to cajole them to act on their behalf, and then to ensure their compliance. Today, states wishing to avoid war, yet still to pursue competition, often turn to proxy warfare as an attractive low-cost option. This policy response is informed by history, from Europe's Napoleonic-era competition and the Great Game during the age of empire, to interwar competition in East Asia and, later in the twentieth century, the global Cold War.

Proxy warfare is not the preserve of major powers, but a tool of statecraft available to all. Andrew Maher illuminates current trends, deriving a strategic logic to the proxy wars that will continue to influence today's geopolitical competitions-and tomorrow's.

Drawing on insights from political science, international relations, history and philosophy, Esteve puts forward an innovative historical perspective on the environmental practices and discourses of the military. Chapters explore how, over the last decades, the civilian and military heads of defense organizations have been issuing a series of statements calling for armed forces to take greater account of environmental issues. He discusses this in light of the repeated denunciations of the ecological footprint of military activities and the environmental consequences of armed conflicts, revealing how the environment and climate change have been problematized within the defence sector.

This book is an essential resource for students and scholars of international relations, security studies, environmental studies and political science. It is also an important read for journalists, activists and policymakers interested in the environmental cost of war and the militarization of the environment.

This collective work offers a critical analysis of contemporary humanitarian action, through the prism of Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders (MSF).

Initially created to provide healthcare to the most vulnerable populations in crisis-stricken countries, MSF has grown from just a few dozen members in 1971 to a movement of over 67,000 people with an annual budget of over 2 billion euros. But in today's rapidly evolving global landscape, many of the founding principles and myths surrounding its creation are questioned or undermined. The post-COVID era has been marked by a reinforcement or acceleration of pre-existing trends that continue to challenge the work of humanitarian organisations: restrictive, or indeed hostile, state policies; the presence of non-state actors in counter-terrorism contexts; questionable adherence to international humanitarian law. MSF must also address several key issues, such as combating discrimination, defining its position with regard to protest movements in countries of intervention, confronting challenges related to climate change and global health security, and safeguarding patients' personal data.

Drawing on the viewpoints of practitioners, analysts, and academics, this book will be an essential read for anyone engaged in or curious about humanitarian action.

This book presents the transformative framework of integral peace leadership, a holistic approach to challenging violence and aggression while building positive, just, and equitable systems and structures, and showcases stories of community peace leaders working to build sustainable, peaceful change around the world.

Integral Peace Leadership explores the four interconnected dimensions essential to peace leadership: Innerwork, the personal peace practices for growth and development; Knowledge, the interactive skills and engagement strategies; Community, the collaborative action and collective impact; and Environment, the navigation and transformation of systemic structures. Sixteen compelling narratives from peace leaders across Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Jammu and Kashmir, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Switzerland, and the United States show how this framework catalyzes meaningful change in diverse contexts. These authentic stories demonstrate how integral peace leadership moves from theory to practice, creating sustainable transformation in communities facing complex challenges.

Providing an accessible roadmap for those committed to creating a more just and peaceful world, this book is the ideal resource for both scholars seeking theoretical foundations and practitioners looking to implement peacebuilding strategies.

European NATO members face the dual challenge of Russia's military threat and the United States' expectations about significantly greater 'burden sharing', or even 'burden shifting', for Europe's defence. Their commitment at The Hague Summit in June 2025 to invest 5% of GDP in defence expenditure annually by 2035 acknowledged the need to develop a more sovereign European defence capability and reduce critical dependencies.

This IISS Strategic Dossier assesses the progress that has been made in building up NATO European defence capability. It analyses the critical 'hardware gaps' of most European NATO allies relating to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets, long-range strike systems and integrated air and missile defence.

The dossier examines European gaps in the software essential for modern military operations. Although the significant dependence on US providers of hyperscale cloud-computing capacity is unlikely to change soon, efforts by European armed forces to address their 'software gaps' have led to European companies developing significant expertise in edge cloud computing for advanced defence projects.

The volume discusses how European countries are looking to speed up procurement, including through legislative changes. Importantly, the trend towards prioritising equipment purchases from domestic or European suppliers continues. The dossier also assesses the prospects for European allies achieving NATO's new investment pledge.

This IISS Strategic Dossier was produced in the context of the IISS Prague Defence Summit (PDS) 2025, which has been supported by the government of the Czech Republic.

This book investigates and compares two contemporary Israeli peace movements through the angle of collective emotions, and specifically of hope.

Drawing on empirical qualitative research combining interviews with Jewish and Arab-Palestinian activists and ethnographic work, the work provides unique documentation of the birth and development of Standing Together (a mixed-gender peace movement) and Women Wage Peace (a women's peace movement). It explores the meaning of hope for Israeli peace activists, and shows the concrete efforts that both movements undertake to trigger hope, as part of an intersectional peace politics and of a non-partisan women's peace politics, respectively. The book also engages with the post-October 2023 developments in the Middle East, showing how both peace movements, now followed by others in the Israeli peace camp, continue to invest in their politics of hope amid devastation, fatigue and fear. Offering a gendered typology of hope-related emotion work useful beyond the cases at hand, the book proposes that collective hope-based action, combined with other emotions, might be powerful in all contexts of despair and protracted conflicts.

This book will be of interest to students of peace and conflict studies, social and peace movements, gender studies, non-violent resistance, international relations and Israel-Palestine/Middle East.

Examines how cyber espionage became an instrument of statecraft, shaped by the entanglements between states, hackers and tech companies that drive global instability.

Even the most elite hackers use common technologies to steal state secrets, which help intelligence agencies to catch them. Are these hackers simply reckless, or do their operations reveal something deeper about their nation-state patrons?

Over a globally interconnected Internet, nations must constantly toe the delicate line of maintaining stability--developing shared tech protocols that they themselves must also break, in order to spy. This is the paradox at the heart of cyber espionage: states need to cooperate if they are to compete. As the US and China vie for strategic advantage through a new form of statecraft in cyber space, an intensifying cat-and-mouse game makes cyber security more difficult, more expensive and more unpredictable for us all.

Full Stack Spies examines the dynamic, interdependent relationships that hackers, cyber defenders, tech giants and nation states forge, leverage and exploit to amass cyber power against a wide range of targets in geopolitics, global trade and finance, the armed forces, and critical infrastructure. But this jostling for cyber dominance makes spying online harder--and, more crucially, undermines long-term trust in cyber space, destabilising the foundations of digital societies.

This book examines the nexus of environmental change and defence in the Arctic as a national and global security issue.

In an era dominated by a new range of threats and priorities, Gisele Arruda discusses the militarization process in the High North and explores how climate change is impacting the maritime, infrastructure and defence systems dynamics. Contextualizing the Arctic region as part of a global security geo-space, the book has a particular emphasis on the security and geopolitical implications to societies, the northern territories, coastal communities and maritime routes of Arctic states. It analyses recent NATO initiatives to build-up strategies in defence and the implementation of technology and innovation to advance regional and international cooperation. The final chapters present trends around environmental multilateralism and consolidate the analysis of all risk-factors related to the climate geopolitics. They also include a focused discussion on the development of new nuclear systems in the region and preparedness in case of a nuclear emergency.

This book will be of great interest to students, academics and researchers studying international relations, climate change, security and strategic studies, political geography and environmental studies more broadly.

Foreign Intervention and Radicalization in Somalia: How and When Does Conflict Evolve into Violence (2001 -2009) analyzes political violence within a broader political context in which the mobilization of social movements takes place. The central focus of this book is to explain the social mechanisms through which the radicalization processes unfolded on the part of al-Shabaab between 2001 and 2009 in Somalia. H. Ibrahim Alegoez traces the intricate interactions of social mechanisms that gave rise to the steady escalation of more militant forms of conflict from a relational, dynamic, and process-oriented perspective.
The book offers an alternative approach to the existing models linking violence to ideological preferences, cultural templates, or ethnic and state-centric pathologies. Alegoez argues that historical and contentious political interactions play a crucial role in explaining violence. The author demonstrates how the interests of local, regional, and international actors have overlapped within the Global War on Terror framework. The book finds that radicalization dynamics have undergone two consecutive episodes of contentious social interactions that, at the onset, were related to the formation of the Mogadishu-based warlord alliance and escalated following the Ethiopian military intervention in Somalia. It prompted a power vacuum which allowed al-Shabaab to expand its tactical repertoire of action and modify its target preferences into a relatively institutionalized, aggressive, and clandestine character.

In 2007, Martin Luther Agwai was deployed to Darfur as Force Commander of UNAMID, which, as the first African Union-UN hybrid mission, was to become the largest peacekeeping operation in the world. Four years earlier, Darfur had imploded, descending into violent conflicts. The international community - in the form of both activists and state actors - felt it could not remain uninvolved lest a genocide on the scale of Rwanda occurred. Despite such lofty intentions, UNAMID proved to be high on promise but low on commitment and delivery. Ultimately, it failed to address the conflicts taking place, much less build a sustainable peace.

Agwai provides unique insight into what went wrong in Darfur, and the myriad challenges facing international peacekeeping operations more generally. Crucially, he highlights the lack of multi-level cooperation between the people of Darfur and the intervening parties, and how the absence of a bottom-up approach to peacebuilding works against peace being both achieved and maintained.