Peter Newell,  Global Green Politics  (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

In light of growing urgency in tackling the global environmental crisis, there is a need for new visions and strategies to ensure a more sustainable and just world. This book provides a comprehensive overview of Green perspectives on a range of global issues, including security, the economy, the state, global governance, development and the environment. Drawing on academic literature on Green political theory, combined with insights from real-world practice and the author's own extensive personal experience, it provides a timely and accessible account of why we need to embrace Green politics in order to tackle the multiple crises facing the world today.

Stefan Elbe,  Pandemics, Pills, and Politics: Governing Global Health Security  (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018)

A pill can strengthen national security? The suggestion may seem odd, but many states around the world believe precisely that. Confronted with pandemics, bioterrorism, and emerging infectious diseases, governments are transforming their security policies to include the proactive development, acquisition, stockpiling, and mass distribution of new pharmaceutical defenses. What happens—politically, economically, and socially—when governments try to protect their populations with pharmaceuticals? How do competing interests among states, pharmaceutical companies, regulators, and scientists play out in the quest to develop new medical countermeasures? And do citizens around the world ultimately stand to gain or lose from this pharmaceuticalization of security policy?

Stefan Elbe explores these complex questions in Pandemics, Pills, and Politics, the first in-depth study of the world’s most prominent medical countermeasure, Tamiflu. Taken by millions of people around the planet in the fight against pandemic flu, Tamiflu has provoked suspicions about undue commercial influence in government decision-making about stockpiles. It even found itself at the center of a prolonged political battle over who should have access to the data about the safety and effectiveness of medicines.

Pandemics, Pills, and Politics shows that the story of Tamiflu harbors deeper lessons about the vexing political, economic, legal, social, and regulatory tensions that emerge as twenty-first-century security policy takes a pharmaceutical turn. At the heart of this issue, Elbe argues, lies something deeper: the rise of a new molecular vision of life that is reshaping the world we live in.

Synne L. Dyvik,  Gendering Counterinsurgency: Performativity, Embodiment and Experience in the Afghan ’Theatre of War’  (Routledge, 2017)

The book examines the US led war in Afghanistan from 2001 onwards, including the invasion, the population-centric counterinsurgency operations and the efforts to train a new Afghan military charged with securing the country when the US and NATO withdrew their combat forces in 2014. Through an analysis of key counterinsurgency texts and military memoirs, the book explores how gender and counterinsurgency are co-constitutive in numerous ways. It discusses the multiple military masculinities that counterinsurgency relies on, the discourse of ‘cultural sensitivity’, and the deployment of Female Engagement Teams (FETs). Gendering Counterinsurgency demonstrates how population-centric counterinsurgency doctrine and practice can be captured within a gendered dynamic of ‘killing and caring’ – reliant on physical violence, albeit mediated through ‘armed social work’. This simultaneously contradictory and complementary dynamic cannot be understood without recognising how the legitimation and the practice of this war relied on multiple gendered embodied performances of masculinities and femininities. Developing the concept of ‘embodied performativity’ this book shows how the clues to understanding counterinsurgency, as well as gendering war more broadly are found in war’s everyday gendered manifestations.

Synne L. Dyvik, Jan Selby, Rorden Wilkinson (eds.),  What's the Point of International Relations?  (Routledge, 2017)

What’s the Point of International Relations casts a critical eye on what it is that we think we are doing when we study and teach international relations (IR). It brings together many of IR’s leading thinkers to challenge conventional understandings of the discipline’s origins, history, and composition. It sees IR as a discipline that has much to learn from others, which has not yet lived up to its ambitions or potential, and where much work remains to be done. At the same time, it finds much that is worth celebrating in the discipline’s growing pluralism and views IR as a deeply political, critical, and normative pursuit. 

The volume is divided into five parts:
• What is the point of IR?
• The origins of a discipline
• Policing the boundaries
• Engaging the world
• Imagining the future

Although each chapter alludes to and/or discusses central aspects of all of these components, each part is designed to capture the central thrust of the concerns of the contributors. Moving beyond western debate, orthodox perspectives, and uncritical histories this volume is essential reading for all scholars and advanced level students concerned with the history, development, and future of international relations.

Kamran Matin, Alexander Anievas, Eds,  Historical Sociology and World History - Uneven and Combined Development over the Longue Durée  (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016)

This volume is the first to provide a sustained reflection on the idea of uneven and combined development as the intellectual basis for a non-Eurocentric social theory of ‘the international’. It does so through a series of empirically rich and theoretically informed analyses of socio-historical change, political transformation, and intersocietal conflict over the longue durée. The volume thereby aims to demonstrate the unique potentials of uneven and combined development in overcoming IR and historical sociology’s shared inability to theorize the interactive and multilinear character of development. 

Cynthia Weber,  Queer International Relations  (Oxford University Press, January 2016)

Asked about queer work in international relations, most IR scholars would almost certainly answer that queer studies is a non-issue for the subdiscipline -- a topic beyond the scope and understanding of international politics. Yet queer work tackles problems that IR scholars themselves believe are central to their discipline: questions about political economies, the geopolitics of war and terror, and the national manifestations of sexual, racial, and gendered hierarchies, not to mention their implications for empire, globalization, neoliberalism, sovereignty, and terrorism. And since the introduction of queer work in the 1980s, IR scholars have used queer concepts like "performativity" or "crossing" in relation to important issues like sovereignty and security without acknowledging either their queer sources or their queer function.

This agenda-setting book asks how "sexuality" and "queer" are constituted as domains of international political practice and mobilized so that they bear on questions of state and nation formation, war and peace, and international political economy. How are sovereignty and sexuality entangled in contemporary international politics? What understandings of sovereignty and sexuality inform contemporary theories and foreign policies on development, immigration, terrorism, human rights, and regional integration? How specifically is "the homosexual" figured in these theories and policies to support or contest traditional understandings of sovereignty? Queer International Relations puts international relations scholarship and transnational/global queer studies scholarship in conversation to address these questions and their implications for contemporary international politics.

David Karp  Responsibility for Human Rights: Transnational Corporations in Imperfect States  (September 2015)

Responsibility for Human Rights provides an original theoretical analysis of which global actors are responsible for human rights, and why. It does this through an evaluation of the different reasons according to which such responsibilities might be assigned: legalism, universalism, capacity and publicness. The book marshals various arguments that speak in favour of and against assigning 'responsibility for human rights' to any state or non-state actor. At the same time, it remains grounded in an incisive interpretation of the world we actually live in today, including: the relationship between sovereignty and human rights, recent events in 'business and human rights' practice, and key empirical examples of human rights violations by companies. David Karp argues that relevantly public actors have specific human rights responsibility. However, states can be less public, and non-state actors can be more public, than might seem apparent at first glance.

Jan Selby, Clemens Hoffmann (eds)  Rethinking Climate Change, Conflict and Security  (Taylor & Francis, 2014)

Is global climate change likely to become a significant source of violent conflict, and should it therefore be seen as a national security challenge? Most Northern governments, militaries, think tanks and NGOs believe so, as do many academic researchers, on the grounds that increased temperatures, changing precipitation patterns and rising sea levels will worsen existing social stresses, especially within poor societies and marginal communities across Africa and Asia.

This book argues otherwise. The first collection of its kind, it brings together leading scholars of Anthropology, Geography, Development Studies and International Relations to provide a series of critical analyses of mainstream thinking on the climate-security nexus. It shows how policy discourse on climate conflict consistently misrepresents the causes of violence, especially by obscuring its core political dimensions. It demonstrates that quantitative research provides a flawed basis for understanding climate-conflict linkages. It argues that climate security discourse is in hoc with a range of questionable military, authoritarian and developmental agendas. And it reveals that the greening of global capitalism is already having violent consequences across the global South. Climate change, the book argues, does indeed have serious conflict and security implications – but these are quite different from how they are usually imagined.

Kurt Mills, David Jason Karp (eds)  Human Rights Protection in Global Politics: Responsibilities of States and Non-State Actors   (Palgrave, January 2015)

Human Rights Protection in Global Politics analyzes the contemporary human rights responsibilities of state, non-state and international actors. It includes an interdisciplinary set of perspectives based in international relations, politics, law and philosophy. The book seeks to understand — but also to critique and to move beyond — the contributions of, firstly, the 'respect-protect-fulfil' tripartite division of human rights responsibility, and secondly, the more recent 'Responsibility to Protect' policy framework. It rejects approaches that treat duties to respect, not to harm, or not to violate human rights as entirely constitutive of the responsibilities that global actors have. The book's contributors engage in dialogue with each other, and sometimes even disagree. However, they are unified in their attempt to paint a more complex picture than is currently available about the nature of human rights protection and various global actors' responsibility for it

Kevin Gray, Labour and Development in East Asia: Social Forces and Passive Revolution  (Routledge, October 2014)

The Chinese Communist Party’s response to the wave of factory strikes in the early summer of 2010 has raised important questions about the role that labour plays in the transformation of world orders. In contrast to previous policies of repression towards labour unrest, these recent disputes centring round wages and working conditions have been met with a more permissive response on the part of the state, as the CCP ostensibly seeks to facilitate a transition away from a model of political economy based on ‘low-road’ labour relations and export dependence.

Labour and Development in East Asia shows that such inter-linkages between labour, geopolitical transformations, and states’ developmental strategies have been much more central to East Asia’s development than has commonly been recognised. By adopting an explanatory framework of the labour-geopolitics-development nexus, the book theorises and provides an historical analysis of the formation and transformation of the East Asian regional political economy from the end of the Second World War to the present, with particular reference to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China.

This book will be required reading for students and scholars of international relations, development studies and comparative politics.

Fabio Petito  Towards a Postsecular International Politics: New Forms of Community, Identity, and Power   (Palgrave, August 2014)

This volume explores the postsecular as a momentous transformation of the international system which affects existing forms of political community, identity, and power. It encompasses a set of theoretical investigations of the postsecular, an analysis of four case studies (Europe, Russia, the United States, and Egypt), and an examination of the role and strategies of transnational actors in a postsecular world. Written by world-renowned and emerging leading scholars, these essays offer a lively engagement with the formidable challenges of the postsecular transformation of international politics.

Kamran Matin,  Recasting Iranian Modernity: International Relations and Social Change  (Routledge, 2013)

Critically deploying the idea of uneven and combined development this book provides a novel non-Eurocentric account of Iran’s experience of modernity and revolution. Recasting Iranian Modernity presents the argument that Eurocentrism can be decisively overcome through a social theory that has international relations at its ontological core. This will enable a conception of history in which there is an intrinsic international dimension to social change that prevents historical repetition.

Kevin Gray (with Craig N. Murphy),  Rising Powers and the Future of Global Governance  (Routledge, September 2013)

This volume contributes to the growing debate surrounding the impact that the rising powers may or may not be having on contemporary global political and economic governance. Through studies of Brazil, India, China, and other important developing countries within their respective regions such as Turkey and South Africa, we raise the question of the extent to which the challenge posed by the rising powers to global governance is likely to lead to an increase in democracy and social justice for the majority of the world’s peoples. By addressing such questions, the volume explicitly seeks to raise the broader normative question of the implications of this emergent redistribution of economic and political power for the sustainability and legitimacy of the emerging 21st century system of global political and economic governance. Questions of democracy, legitimacy, and social justice are largely ignored or under-emphasised in many existing studies, and the aim of this collection of papers is to show that serious consideration of such questions provides important insights into the sustainability of the emerging global political economy and new forms of global governance.

Beate Jahn  Liberal Internationalism: Theory, History, Practice   (Palgrave, 2013) 

This book presents a radical intervention into the contemporary literature on liberalism, addressing the core problems surrounding liberal internationalism. Explaining the disjuncture between liberal theory and practice, it offers a firmer grasp on the historical role of liberalism in world politics.

Despite the hegemonic position of liberalism after the end of the Cold War, liberal foreign policies like democracy promotion, humanitarian intervention and neoliberal economic policies widely failed to achieve their aims. This study provides a conception of liberalism that accounts for the successes as well as failures of these policies. It shows that the attempt to realize liberal principles in practice simultaneously generates nonliberal forces. This dynamic explains the tragic fate of liberalism in history: the moments of its greatest triumph give rise to its most serious crises. It suggests, therefore, that the main challenge for liberal foreign policies does not lie in confronting external threats but in designing policies that avoid internal fragmentation.

Beate Jahn provides a focused debate and criticism of liberalism which has hitherto been avoided, locating the core principles of liberalism and applying them to politics, economics, and ethics. This book will be an essential source to all scholars of international relations theory and liberal foreign policy.

Samuel Knafo, The Making of Modern Finance - Liberal Governance and the Gold Standard  (Routledge, May 2013)

The Making of Modern Finance is a path-breaking study of the construction of liberal financial governance and demonstrates how complex forms of control by the state profoundly transformed the nature of modern finance. Challenging dominant theoretical conceptions of liberal financial governance in international political economy, this book argues that liberal economic governance is too often perceived as a passive form of governance. It situates the gold standard in relation to practices of monetary governance which preceded it, tracing the evolution of monetary governance from the late middle Ages to show how the 19th century gold standard transformed the way states relate to finance. More specifically, Knafo demonstrates that the institutions of the gold standard helped to put in place instruments of modern monetary policy that are usually associated with central banking and argues that the gold standard was a prelude to Keynesian policies rather than its antithesis. The author reveals that these state interventions played a vital role in the rise of modern financial techniques which emerged in the late 18th and 19th century and served as the foundation for contemporary financial systems.

Kevin Gray (with Barry Gills),  People Power in an Era of Global crisis: Rebellion, Resistance and Liberation  (Routledge, December 2012)

In the light of the recent democratic movements in the Middle East, this volume poses the question of the extent to which ‘people’s power’ has been able to play an active role resisting neoliberalism and deepen substantive democracy and social justice. Through a series of case studies of the regions and individual countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe, the contributions in the volume provide a new set of original and in-depth critical assessments of the nature of the longer-term impact of the democratic transitions commencing in the 1980s and continuing until the present, and questioning their impact and potential influence on human dignity, freedom, justice, and self-determination, and thus opening new avenues of enquiry into the future of democracy.

Peter Newell,  Globalization and the Environment: Capitalism, Ecology and Power  (Polity Books, August 2012)

Globalization and the Environment critically explores the actors, politics and processes that govern the relationship between globalization and the environment. Taking key aspects of globalization in turn; trade, production and finance, the book highlights the relations of power at work that determine whether globalization is managed in a sustainable way and on whose behalf.

Contents
1. Globalization and the Environment: Capitalism, Ecology & Power 2. The Political Ecology of Globalization 3. Power(in) Globalization: The Political Economy of Global Environmental Governance 4: Whose Rules Rule? Global Trade and the Environment 5. Racing to the Top, Bottom or the Middle? Global Production and the Environment 6. Gambling on Green? Global Finance and the Environment 7. Conclusions: Ecologising Globalization/ Globalising Ecology

Ben Selwyn,  Workers, State and Development in Brazil: Powers of labour, chains of value  (Manchester University Press, January 2012)

How do changing class relations contribute to processes of capitalist development?

Within development studies the importance of class relations is usually relegated to lesser status than the roles of states and markets in generating and allocating resources. This book argues that the changing class relations are central to different patterns of capitalist development and that processes and outcomes of class struggle co-determine the form that development takes.

Workers, state and development in Brazil illuminates these claims through a detailed empirical investigation of class dynamics and capitalist development in North East Brazil’s São Francisco valley. It details how workers in the valley’s export grape sector have won significant concessions from employers, contributing to a progressive pattern of regional capitalist development.

Anna Stavrianakis, Jan Selby  Militarism and International Relations: Political economy, security, theory  (Routledge, August 2012)

This book examines contemporary militarism in international politics, employing a variety of different theoretical viewpoints and international case studies. Militarism - understood as the social and international relations of the preparation for, and conduct of, organized political violence - is an abiding and defining characteristic of world politics. Yet despite the on going social, political and economic reach of military institutions, practices and values, the concept and subject of militarism has not received significant attention within recent debates in International Relations. This book intends to fill the gap in the current body of literature. It has two key overarching aims: to make the case for a renewed research agenda for IR centred on the concept of militarism; and to provide a series of empirically focused and theoretically informed case studies of contemporary militarism in practice.

Cynthia Weber, I am an American (Intellect Books, 2011). 

In ‘I am an American’ Weber set out on a journey across post-9/11 America in search of a deeper understanding of what it means to be an American today. This captivating memoir gives a voice to ordinary citizens for whom the terrorist attacks of 2001 live on in collective memory. Heartrending first-person testimonials reveal how the ongoing fear of terrorists and immigrants has betrayed America’s core values of fairness and equality. These portraits, with fifty full colour images, also provide a sharp contrast to the idealized vision of Americanness frequently spun by media and politicians.

“An unsentimental journey through America. Whatever kind of American you are, or however well you think you know Americans, this book is an eye-opener. I couldn't put it down.”—Joanna Bourke, Birkbeck College, author of Fear: A Cultural History

Andreas Antoniades  Producing Globalisation: Politics of Discourse and Institutions in Greece and Ireland  (Manchester University Press, 2010)

This book asks several key questions about globalisation: how can globalisation be studied in a way that transcends the divide between material and ideational accounts? How has globalisation resonated and dominated in different national contexts? What role have national political economies and domestic institutions played in those processes? Producing Globalisation sheds new light on these important issues by scrutinising the nexus between globalisation and national institutional settings.

Anna StavrianakisTaking Aim at the Arms Trade  (Zed Books, June 2010)

This book takes a critical look at the ways in which non-governmental organisations (NGOs) portray the arms trade as a problem of international politics and the strategies they use to effect change. The book analyses the tensions inherent in NGOs' engagement with the arms trade and argues for a re-examination of dominant assumptions about NGOs as global civil society actors.

Stefan Elbe,Security and Global Health  (Polity Press, March 2010)

In this book Stefan Elbe shows that in the new millennium international politics is characterized by its need to urgently confront what is now an epidemic of epidemics. Over the past decade a whole host of diverse global health issues have raised the highest levels of political concern, provoking governments and international institutions to tackle such health threats through the prism of security. It is this transformation of security, Elbe argues in an innovative and engaging re-conceptualization of the health-security nexus, that marks nothing short of the medicalization of security.