St Antony's Series

This book is a political ethnography of norm diffusion and storytelling through international institutions in China. It is driven by intellectual puzzles and realpolitik questions: are we converging or diverging on values? Do emerging powers reinforce or reshape the existing international order? Are international institutions socialising emerging powers or being used to promote alternative norms? This book addresses these questions through fieldwork research over three years at the United Nations Development Programme in China, the first international development agency to enter post-reform China in 1979. It provides a crucial case to study the everyday practices of norm diffusion in emerging powers, and highlights the central role of storytelling in translating and contesting normative scripts. The book selects norms in human rights, rule of law and development cooperation to analyse how translators and brokers innovatively use stories to advocate, and how these normative stories move back-and-forth between local-global spaces and orders.

"A fascinating ethnography that tells us much about international institutions and China's changing role in the world: of interest both to China specialists and theorists of international relations."

—Rana Mitter, Director of the University of Oxford China Centre, University of Oxford, UK

“Through pioneering ethnographic research, Xiaoyu Lu’s outstanding book makes a major contribution to our understanding of norm diffusion and the ways in which China is shaping, and is shaped by, international development norms. Lu’s richly textured analysis shows how ‘norm translators’ use case studies, personal stories, and other narratives to negotiate between global and local normative orders, and to facilitate the day-to-day processes of norm diffusion."

"An intricate account of the everyday politics in international development institution, that will enrich our understanding of emerging powers and their roles in global development.”

—Emma Mawdsley, Director of the Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies, University of Cambridge, UK

Trade unions in Europe face a range of cross-cutting challenges. This includes the near-universal contraction in union membership; the related decline of traditionally highly unionised blue-collar industries; and the rise of automation, microprocessing, and digitalisation, which can make it cheaper for employers to invest in machines than to pay humans to work. The breakdown of the standard contract of employment and increasing rates of precarious work have further transformed the world of work. Taken together, this makes any collectivist vision of society, and the notion of solidarity upon which trade unionism is built, difficult to sustain.

This interdisciplinary volume includes contributions that consider the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the EU level by researchers coming from a range of disciplines and backgrounds. The volume should especially appeal to researchers and practitioners working in the fields of political science, sociology, law, and business studies.

This edited book addresses the issues of gun trafficking and gun violence across different regions of the world, including the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe and Oceania. It seeks to identify global key trends on gun trafficking and related violence and discuss different enforcement measures. Each chapter is written by teams of distinguished academics and/or experienced practitioners to include practitioner insights and policy proposals on issues related to gun violence and gun trafficking. Chapters offer an overview of violence and recent gun control debates in the regions, enumerate challenges, provide lessons learnt, and recommend policy solutions. An overview of the global small arms trade is provided at the beginning alongside a comparative analysis of common challenges and significant differences across the regions. This book speaks to those in Criminology, International Relations, Public Policy, International Security, Public health and Law, and to civil society organizations, think tanks, research centers, policy analysts and policy makers involved in gun control debates. 

This book provides a new theory for how democracy can materialize in the Middle East, and the broader Muslim world. It shows that one pathway to democratization lays not in resolving important, but often irreconcilable, debates about the role of religion in politics. Rather, it requires that Islamists and their secular opponents focus on the concerns of pragmatic survival—that is, compromise through pacting, rather than battling through difficult philosophical issues about faith. This is the only book-length treatment of this topic, and one that aims to redefine the boundaries of an urgent problem that continues to haunt struggles for democracy in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

This book examines the evolution of the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) from its inception in 1998 to the present day. Using the theoretical framework of historical institutionalism, it examines both the successes and failures of the CSDP. Drawing on a series of interviews with officials and researchers from various EU institutions, NATO, and diplomatic missions of EU member states, it assesses what has instigated changes in the CSDP, and why some events have proven more determining and influential than others. The book reviews six crises that have shaped the CSDP, including the Yugoslav Wars, the Second Gulf War, the Libyan campaign, the Ukrainian crisis, the Syrian crisis, and Brexit, in order to understand how real-life events have influenced policy. In this context, the book defines the term ‘European Strategic Autonomy’ dynamically, as the residual effect of negotiation over time. It will appeal to government officials and policymakers, as well as students and scholars of European politics and international relations.

This book explores the possible (actual, potential and imagined) future security threats migration from Nigeria could pose to Europe, the United States of America, Canada and to some extent Australia. The negative consequences of terrorism, resource curse, extreme poverty, bad governance and illiteracy are highly likely to compound the already existing migration (both legal and illegal migration) from Nigeria to Europe. Given the current nationalist and populist tendencies in the United States of America and many parts of Europe, which have amplified the securitization of migration, the authors argue that the continuous high influx of legal and illegal migrants from Africa is a potential global security case.

This book observes that a key determinant of Europe’s welfare over the coming decades will be how the region manages crises, both financial and societal. It examines how key institutional developments, such as Economic and Monetary Union, reflected differentiated integration (DI) in the EU, but argues that modern-day risks are highly interconnected, and their management therefore has to be inclusive. In that connection it looks in particular at the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB), whose mandate to protect financial stability also gives it relevance with regard to other crises. The book considers that the strengthening of this institution, and bringing it to the fore, would help EU member states, as well as countries around the EU including applicant nations, to manage financial and societal risks, including COVID-19 and the transition to a green economy, thus safeguarding the economies of Europe. It builds on a model of the EU allowing for DI in some activities, while ensuring sound governance arrangements between those inside and those outside that activity, and embodying inclusivity in the fundamentals of the EU, including in the management of risk. 

This book explores the form, dynamics, and main reasons for media capture and conspiracy between editors and executive politicians in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) since 2000. Situated in the literatures on Europeanization, democratization, party studies, and media studies, the book aims to connect these fields by showing that internal party dynamics play an important role in motivating executive politicians to hijack or collaborate with media. Against this backdrop, the book tells the story of Croatian journalism in the context of media-mafia conglomerates, political corruption, and media hijacking, and examines how "traditional" democratic drivers that the literature frequently cites, such as Europeanization and party competition, failed to prevent systematic transgressions by politicians. Methodologically, the book takes a two-pronged approach. First, nearly 50 interviews were conducted with Croatian investigative journalists, from which the narratives about the relationships between government politicians and editors over 15 years were reconstructed. In a second step, a sample of 40,000 media articles was subjected to a computational sentiment analysis, covering the same 15-year period and showing high levels of cooperation between corrupt politicians and corrupt media outlets.

This book contributes to the fields of memory and human rights. It offers a novel and interdisciplinary theory on social indifference, and in particular on the indifference of people to human rights violations committed against certain sectors of society in turbulent times. These theoretical frameworks are explored empirically with respect to the Chilean case. Through a blend of mixed methods, the book explains the causes, characteristics and social consequences of the current indifference of Chileans with respect to the human rights violations committed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-90). The different findings are an invitation to rethink new challenges of transitional justice processes in fragmented societies and to strengthen public policies on human rights.

This book looks at the cultural, political and economic conditions of British Euroscepticism. Focusing on eight British dystopian novels, published in the years before the decisive In/Out-Referendum, and taking into account cultural, political and economic contexts, Lisa Bischoff shows how the novels’ stance towards the integration project range from slight criticism to outright hostility. The wide availability of the novels, and the prominence of both its authors and readers, among which are political figures David Cameron, Nigel Farage and Daniel Hannan, amplify the power of literary Euroscepticism. Drawing on cultural studies, literature and social science, British Novels and the European Union reveals the many facets of British Euroscepticism.

Fuel trafficking has consolidated in recent years as a paramount illegal enterprise and a priority for Mexico´s diverse criminal actors. This black market has been growing at an overwhelming pace in Mexico since 2011: it is estimated that between 2013–2018, more than 100 million barrels containing different fuels were stolen from the country´s refineries, terminals and pipelines. This academic book focuses on finding explanations as to how this came to be. By examining the Mexican fuel black market, one of the largest and most sophisticated criminal enterprises of its kind worldwide, this timely investigation shines a light on this recently relevant criminal market, which has been detected across the world, including in North and South America, the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. This book will prove of relevance for readers interested in energy and security, illicit markets, criminality, modern-day Mexico and the challenges posed by the country´s security crisis. At a wider level, this work contributes with insights on the diversification and sophistication of criminality and black markets in Mexico, Latin America and the world.