Contrary to charges of religious “dogma,” Christian actors in international politics often wrestle with the lack of a clear path in determining what to do and how to act, especially in situations of violence and when encountering otherness. Lynch argues that it is crucial to recognise the ethical precarity of decision-making and acting. This book contextualizes and examines ethical struggles and justifications that key figures and movements gave during the early modern period of missionary...

This groundbreaking edited collection brings together diverse global perspectives to examine struggles against liberalisms through decolonial, postcolonial, Indigenous, feminist, queer, and intersectional lenses.Prioritising grassroots experiences and subaltern voices, contributors from around the world explore three critical dimensions: resistance to liberal violence, the agency of those engaged in struggle and the complex challenges of transcending colonial legacies. Through rich...

Interpreting International Politics addresses each of the major, "traditional" subfields in International Relations: International Law and Organization, International Security, and International Political Economy. But how are interpretivist methods and concerns brought to bear on these topics? In this slim volume Cecelia Lynch focuses on the philosophy of science and conceptual issues that make work in international relations distinctly interpretive. This work both legitimizes and...

Constructivism's basic premise - that individuals and groups are shaped by their world but can also change it - may seem intuitively true. Yet this process-oriented approach can be more difficult to apply than structural or rational choice frameworks. Based on their own experiences and exemplars from the IR literature, well-known authors Audie Klotz and Cecelia Lynch lay out concepts and tools for anyone seeking to apply the constructivist approach in research. Written in jargon-free prose...

In this innovative volume, experts from international relations, anthropology, sociology, global public health, postcolonial African literature, and gender studies, take up Ngūgī wa Thiong’o’s challenge to see how Africa gives to the west instead of the reverse. Humanitarian assumptions are challenged by unpacking critical legacies from colonial and missionary genealogies to today’s global networks of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Who Gives to Whom: Reframing Africa in the Huma...

This book gives a clear and readable overview of the philosophical work of Jürgen Habermas, the most influential German philosopher alive today, who has commented widely on subjects such as Marxism, the importance and effectiveness of communication, the reunification of Germany, and the European Union. Gordon Finlayson provides readers with a clear and readable overview of Habermas's forbiddingly complex philosophy using concrete examples and accessible language. He then goes on to analyse...

What do we mean by development? How can citizens, governments and the international community foster development? The process by which nations escape poverty and achieve economic and social progress has been the subject of extensive examination for hundreds of years.The notion of development itself has evolved from an original preoccupation with incomes and economic growth to a much broader understanding of development. In this Very Short Introduction Ian Goldin considers the cont...

Jurgen Habermas is one of the most influential thinkers of our time. This detailed, article length guide examines his theory of deliberative democracy and covers many of the central concepts such as communicative reason, communicative power, and the ideal speech community.

Two years ago George Lakoff published the bestselling Don't Think of an Elephant! Its account of the conservative monopoly on effective framing touched off a national discussion about political language. It also gave rise to a chorus of pleas for more:* What is the progressive vision of America;* Why progressive values are America's values;* How frames are necessary to serve the truth;* Why sloganeering alone doesn't work;* How progressives trap ...

Since the 1980s, globalization and neoliberalism have brought about a comprehensive restructuring of everyone’s lives. People are being ‘disciplined’ by neoliberal economic agendas, ‘transformed’ by communication and information technology changes, global commodity chains and networks, and in the Global South in particular, destroyed livelihoods, debilitating impoverishment, disease pandemics, among other disastrous disruptions, are also globalization’s legacy.This collection of ge...

Contemporary theory is replete with metaphors of travel—displacement, diaspora, borders, exile, migration, nomadism, homelessness, and tourism to name a few. In Questions of Travel, Caren Kaplan explores the various metaphoric uses of travel and displacement in literary and feminist theory, traces the political implications of this “traveling theory,” and shows how various discourses of displacement link, rather than separate, modernism and postmodernism.Addressing a wide r...

Jonathon Moses makes moral, political and economic arguments in favor of the free mobility of human beings across national borders. Pointing to the importance of immigration to the sucess of many nations, he shows that Europe itself now faces a falling population, and has over the past fifty years actively encouraged huge immigration from other countries. There is near consensus across the political spectrum that the free movement of goods and free movement of capital are good for economie...