This book offers a fresh perspective on the impact of the US intervention in Lebanon in 1982 and the decision-making drivers that led the Reagan Administration into the Lebanese Civil War. Based on newly released archival materials from high level Washington officials such as President Reagan, Secretary of State Shultz and Secretary of Defense Weinberger, it argues that the failure of the Reagan Administration to accurately understand the complex political landscape of the Lebanese Civil W...

Imagine a nation with the highest proportion of women legislators in the world. Imagine a country where a democratically elected president is committed to gender equality and poverty reduction, where urban and rural schools are being wired to the Internet, and where the government is committed to becoming a middle-income country by 2020. Imagine that this country is located in the heart of sub-Saharan Africa and that this progress comes in the wake of one of the 20th century's worst genoci...

This book frames the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh in the context of European and international security. It is the first book to focus on the politics of the conflict rather than the dispute itself. Since their emergence twenty years ago, this and other “frozen conflicts” of Eurasia have been affected by transformations in European security, and many ways absorbed into an ever fiercer geopolitical struggle for influence. The wars in Georgia and Ukraine brought greate...

This book offers an original and theoretically rich examination into the dynamics of alliances that great powers and weak states form to defeat threats, such as rebellion or insurgency, within the smaller state’s borders. The author examines contemporary examples of such “internal threat alliances,” including Russia’s collaboration with Syria’s Assad regime to defeat anti-government rebels and U.S. cooperation with Afghanistan’s ruling political elite to combat the Taliban. In each case, t...

Peace support operations are one of the most important tools in the foreign policy of Western democracies. This book is a study of Italian military operations in the last twenty years. Italy's operations are examined through an analysis of parliamentary debates and interviews with leading policy-makers.

This book sheds new light on the security challenges for failed states posed by violent non-state armed actors (VNSAs). By focusing on the Syrian Civil War, it explores the characteristics, ideologies and strategies of the Islamic State (ISIS) and the People’s Protection Units (YPG), as well as the regional and geopolitical impacts of these VNSAs. The contributors also cover topics such as the re-imagination of borders, the YPG’s demands for national sovereignty, and the involvement of reg...

This book presents an overview of psycho-social research on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, presents and analyzes people-to-people activities in the region, and offers new conceptualizations for Israeli-Palestinian co-creation of a grassroots peace and social justice processes.

This book analyzes the origins of conflicts and wars in the Persian Gulf, assesses the common factor(s) that have been their essential fuel, determines their fallout for the political, economic, and human development of the region, and provides insight into how they may be better contained.

This book offers a novel approach to understanding violence and violent conflict using complexity and network theories, borrowed from the natural sciences, together with social network analysis. Because violence is both a universal and central component of human communication and identity formation, it has a fundamental function in shaping social behavior. Using Manuel Castells’ work on the programming of social networks, this book explores the Lebanese Civil War and the ongoing war in Afg...

This edited volume examines the implications for international development actors of new kinds of terrorism taking place in civil conflicts. The threat from terrorism and violent extremism has never been greater – at least in the global South where the vast majority of violent extremist attacks take place. Some of the most violent extremist groups are also parties to civil conflicts in regions such as the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. But are these groups – especially the violent Isl...

This book examines the continuing US commitments to NATO in the post-Cold War era. The initial focus is on the recommitment decisions of the Clinton administration. It also extensively explores the US operations in Kosovo, Afghanistan and, in particular, Libya. The case study on Libya is especially important in exploring the Obama administration’s understanding of the purpose of NATO in the context of current economic pressures, domestic US debates about post-War on Terror interventions, a...

This edited volume helps bridge the elusive gap between theory and practice in dealing with the issue of "security" broadly conceived. A quarter of a century has passed since the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. Yet our notions of security remain mired in Cold War thinking whose realist ethos is predicated on holding the nation state's power, interests, and survival as the guiding unit of analysis in international relations. Security is ever changing. Confronting new dangers to the individual...