This edited volume examines the crucial, yet overlooked, role narratives play in the rapidly changing relationship between Europe and China.Its contributors analyse the role of narratives in different societies and arenas ranging from economic and foreign policy to history and social media. Emphasizing the social dimension of narrative, the volume challenges traditional state-centric and strategic approaches in international politics. It also engages with the ubiquity of stories ab...

This book examines the involvement of the European Union (EU) and China in Central Asia and critically assesses the implications this has for the region as a whole.The volume adopts a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach, combining insights from International Relations, EU Studies, International Economics, International Law, Sinology, and History. It concentrates on three thematic levels: (1) historical and contextual, (2) geopolitical and geo-economic, and (3) socio-cultural ...

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.Drawing on decolonial perspectives on peace, statehood and development, this illuminating book examines post-liberal statebuilding in Central Asia. It argues that, despite its emancipatory appearance, post-liberal statebuilding is best understood as a set of social ordering mechanisms that lead to new forms of exclusion, marginalization and violence.Using ethnographic fieldwork in Southern Kyrgyzstan, the volume ...

China has become the powerhouse of the world economy, its incredible boom overseen by the elite members of the secretive and all-powerful communist party. But since the election of Xi Jinping as General Secretary, life at the top in China has changed. Under the guise of a corruption crackdown, which has seen his rivals imprisoned, Xi Jinping has been quietly building one of the most powerful leaderships modern China has ever seen. In CEO China, the noted China expert Kerry Brown reveals th...

Language and Globalization explores the effects of language in the processes of globalization. Norman Fairclough adopts the approach of combining critical discourse analysis with cultural political economy to develop a new theory of the relationship between discourse and other dimensions of globalization. Using examples from a variety of countries such as the USA, Britain, Romania, Hungary and Thailand, Language and Globalization shows how the analysis of texts can be coh...

An invigorating book about the debates raging within China. We all know about the fast pace of change in this country. This book brings us the ideas being fought over in the country itself – from democracy to the idea of a ‘peaceful rise’. It challenges all of our assumptions about China.We know everything and nothing about China. We know that China is changing so fast that the maps in Shanghai need to be rewritten every two weeks. We know that China has brought 300 million people ...

Winner, The Lionel Gelber Prize Silver Medal, Arthur Ross Book Award For decades, China's rise to power was characterized by its reassurance that this rise would be peaceful. Then, as Susan L. Shirk, shows in this sobering, clear-eyed account of China today, something changed. For three decades after Mao's death in 1976, China's leaders adopted a restrained approach to foreign policy. They determined that any threat to their power, and that of the Chinese Communist Party, ...

This Open Access book investigates the methodological and ethical dilemmas involved when working with digital technologies and large-scale datasets in relation to ethnographic studies of digital migration practices and trajectories. Digital technologies reshape not only every phase of the migration process itself (by providing new ways to access, to share and preserve relevant information) but also the activities of other actors, from solidarity networks to border control agencies. In doin...

'Kerry Brown's Xi is the perfect primer for understanding Xi Jinping's status as China's greatest ruler since Mao and as this century's least assailable statesman' John Keay, author of China: A History'A valuable primer for anyone looking to get up to speed on Xi Jinping's rise to global power' Jeff Wasserstrom, Guardian'Offers a nuanced and thorough explanation of Xi's ...

Digital, Political, Radical is a siren call to the field of media and communications and the study of social and political movements. We must put the politics of transformation at the very heart of our analyses to meet the global challenges of gross inequality and ever-more impoverished democracies.Fenton makes an impassioned plea for re-invigorating critical research on digital media such that it can be explanatory, practical and normative. She dares us to be politically ...

Since the founding of the Communist Party in China just over a century ago, there is much the country has achieved. But who does the heavy lifting in China? And who walks away with the spoils? Cadre Country places the spotlight on the nation's 40 million cadres the managers and government officials employed by the ruling Communist Party to protect its great enterprise. This group has captured the culture and wealth of China, excluding the voices of the common citizens of this powe...

Using the borderscapes concept, this book offers an approach to border studies that expresses the multilevel complexity of borders, from the geopolitical to social practice and cultural production at and across the border. Accordingly, it encourages a productive understanding of the processual, de-territorialized and dispersed nature of borders and their ensuring regimes in the era of globalization and transnational flows as well as showcasing border research as an interdisciplinary field ...