Browse

Bargaining for Women’s Rights: Activism in an Aspiring Muslim Democracy asks why a Muslim-majority democracy, the Republic of Niger, adopted some gender equality reforms and rejected others. It argues that Niger’s seemingly inconsistent policies on gender equality can be explained by the mobilization of women and conservative and the political context. Governments are more likely to adopt gender equality reforms when women mobilize for them. Women’s activists are not the only ones who care about the regulation of gender relations. Conservative activists may mobilize as well. In democratic contexts where public opinion polling is limited, women’s and conservative activists must use other tactics to convince government officials that their demands represent the will of the electorate. The activists who succeed use locally salient symbols and public rituals to draw the line between policies that are thinkable and unthinkable. Thus, Islam does not have a uniformly negative effect on women’s rights policy adoption, contrary to the conventional wisdom. Further, government concerns about international funding and reputation, even for countries as poor as Niger, are mediated by the demands and power of domestic groups.

In contemporary politics, nature is generally assumed to be a commitment of the political left and restrictionism a commitment of the right. The reality, however, is significantly more complicated: in the United States, environmentalists have argued for immigration restrictions since the movement first began in the last 1800s; many of the so-called fathers of American environmentalism were immigration restrictionists; and the argument continues to attract vocal adherents among mainstream and radical greens.This book seeks to explain these seemingly paradoxical commitments by grounding them in contemporary debates over the relationship between sovereignty and nature. It observes that – amid the ruptures of neoliberal globalization – restrictionist and their opponents seek to reconfigure the relationship between sovereignty and nature toward what they believe to be a sustainable end. Through this analysis, it makes the case that nature is increasingly being deployed as a form of "walling"-enabling restrictionists to subtly reinforce territorial boundaries and identities without having to revert to racial and cultural logics that are unpalatable to the political left. This phenomenon has major implications on the prospect for justice an inclusion in the 21^st century; well-intentioned environmentalist efforts to “green sovereignty” are actually serving to reinforce exclusionary forms of political community.It argues that attention to the realities of transnational migration could provide an alternative perspective upon which to construct a very different brand of socio-ecological activism – one that might be our only chance of effectively confronting the powerful forces and structures producing ecological devastation and social injustice.

This book investigates the world of logistics, tracing its movement over the last 60 years from the battlefield to the boardroom, and back again. With a focus on chokepoints - national borders, zones of piracy, blockades, and cities – this book tracks contemporary efforts to keep stuff circulating and the new spaces of security and forms of violence they produce. This is the first book to analyse both the military and civilian world of logistics, refusing the usual segregation of these interlinked fields. Rough Trade considers contemporary logistics in the context of its long history and is centrally concerned with the role of war in trade. This is the first book to investigate the revolution in logistics outside the applied field of business management. This book draws on 7 years of fieldwork in many sites around the world while also offering a rich theoretical engagement with debates in political economy, science and technology studies, geography, security studies, and queer theory.

Few studies reflect the critical need to study gangs across time and space. Most investigations focus on a single gang or gangs in a single community, and present the gang in a “snapshot” manner, reflecting the nature of the gang at a specific point in time. More importantly, few collections offer comparative studies of gangs across cultures. This volume uniquely offers a thematic approach to engage in concrete comparisons, both contextually and transnationally, of gangs In Brazil, China, El Salvador, France, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, the Russian Federation, Sierra Leone, South Africa, the USA. Each chapter is based on direct primary empirical research, and the collection is framed by a critical Introduction by the editors and an Afterword by renowned US gang researcher Sudhir Venkatesh. The volume is likely to reach a wide-ranging audience across disciplines, including: anthropology, criminology, development studies, geography, history, international studies, law, political science, sociology, and urban studies. It could serves as a foundational text for advanced undergraduate level courses on conflict and violence, urban security studies, or informal politics, for example, as well as a useful resource at the MA level..

This book is an analysis of the complex but hierarchical global nuclear order produced, maintained, and obscured by the workings of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime. Using an analysis heavily influenced by postcolonial International Relations theory, the book examines the interstate inequalities that sustain this order, the mechanisms that produce a (mimetic) desire for nuclear weapons, the neoliberal interests that drive the production of nuclear power, and the communities and bodies made vulnerable by nuclear pursuits. Making a case for nuclear abolition, the book suggests that the path to nuclear zero is more effectively traversed through the political economy of injustice rather than the prism of “security”. This book is unique in bringing a Postcolonial approach to the study of the global nuclear order. The book is aimed primarily at scholars and students of International Relations (IR). In terms of its academic genealogy, it is situated within two areas in IR – Postcolonial International Relations and Critical Security Studies.

In July 1999, Canadian authorities intercepted four boats off the coast of British Columbia carrying nearly six hundred Chinese citizens who were being smuggled into Canada. Government officials held the migrants on a Canadian naval base, which it designated a port of entry. As one official later recounted during research for this book, the Chinese migrants entered a legal limbo, treated as though they were walking through a long tunnel of bureaucracy to reach Canadian soil. The “long tunnel thesis” is the basis of this investigation into the power of states to change the relationship between geography and law as they negotiate border crossings. The book draws from many sources to argue that refugee-receiving states capitalize on crises generated by high-profile human smuggling events to implement restrictive measures designed to regulate migration. Whether states view themselves as powerful actors who can successfully exclude outsiders or as vulnerable actors in need of stronger policies to repel potential threats, they end up subverting access to human rights, altering laws, and extending power beyond their own borders. Using examples from Canada, Australia, and the United States, this text demonstrates the centrality of space and place in efforts to control the fate of unwanted migrants.

Since the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001, finance and security have become joined in new ways to produce particular targets of state surveillance. This book describes how previously unscrutinized practices such as donations and remittances, especially across national borders, have been affected by security measures that include datamining, asset freezing, and transnational regulation. These “precrime” measures focus on transactions that are perfectly legal but are thought to hold a specific potential to support terrorism. The pursuit of suspect monies is not simply an issue of financial regulation, it shows, but a broad political, social, and even cultural phenomenon with profound effects on everyday life. The book offers a range of examples that illustrate the types of security interventions employed today, including the extralegal targeting and breaking up of the al-Barakaat financial network that was accompanied by raids in the United States, asset freezes in Sweden, and the incarceration of a money remitter at Guantánamo Bay. The text develops the paradigm of “speculative security” as a way to understand the new fusing of finance and security, denoting the speculative nature of both the means and the ends of the war on terrorist financing.