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Books

Monographs (14) and Edited Volumes (13)

Monographs

14. The World as Abyss: The Caribbean and Critical Thought in the Anthropocene (co-authored with Jonathan Pugh) (University of Westminster Press, 2023). OPEN ACCESS

This book is about a distinctive ‘abyssal’ approach to the crisis of modernity. In this framing, influenced by contemporary critical Black studies, another understanding of the world of modernity is foregrounded – a world violently forged through the projects of Indigenous dispossession, chattel slavery and colonial world-making. Modern and colonial world-making violently forged the ‘human’ by dividing those with ontological security from those without, and by carving out the ‘world’ in a fixed grid of space and time, delineating a linear temporality of ‘progress’ and ‘development’. The distinctiveness of abyssal thought is that it inverts the stakes of critique and brings indeterminacy into the heart of ontological assumptions of a world of entities, essences, and universal determination. This is an approach that does not focus upon tropes of rescue and salvation but upon the generative power of negation. In doing so, it highlights how Caribbean experiences and writings have been drawn upon to provide an important and distinct perspective for critical thought.

“How is it that ontology has come to be seen as the antidote for modernity? While Foucault denigrated ontology as a mistaken and parochial exercise, contemporary social theory holds out the promise that new modes of planetary knowledge will save us from our own excesses. Drawing together long traditions in Caribbean scholarship with Afro-pessimist thought, Pugh and Chandler illustrate how the search for more emancipatory ontologies – relational ontologies, indigenous ontologies, non-human ontologies, etc. – not only misunderstands the problem of modernity but (more importantly) works to veil the negative force that marks both the limit and cause of all such knowledge practices: what they term the abyss. To engage in abyssal thought – as they lay out – is to inhabit a site of refusal: a determination not to be drawn into the lure of ontological ‘correction’ and to recognise that the practice of world making cannot not bear the imprint of colonial violence. Articulated in passionate declarative prose, these authors powerfully illuminate the trap of the emancipatory instinct and the promise of a deconstructive ethic.” — Mitch Rose, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, Aberystwyth University, UK

“A much-needed intellectual effort in the non-reductionist and non-essentialising style of Pugh and Chandler’s previous book. The World as Abyss gives Caribbean thought and culture the place they deserve within critical theory and materialist studies.” — Mónica Fernández Jiménez, Valladolid University, Spain

“For some time now scholars have questioned the overly general assumptions about the ‘anthropos’ of the Anthropocene, but much work needs to be done to flesh out what a decolonized Anthropocene might be. Pugh and Chandler’s The World as Abyss provides an original, intriguing and compelling counterpoint to bland Anthropocene humanism (and posthumanism). This timely work explores the poetics of the Caribbean and provides a way to think about the Anthropocene and the future beyond the managerialism of the present. This book is essential reading for those working in the environmental humanities or Anthropocene studies.” — Claire Colebrook, Professor, Penn State University, USA

“This book names an apocalypse that began long ago. Pugh and Chandler patiently follow the journey of thought as it travels from the Middle Passage to the Caribbean. This brings them face-to-face with the horror of anti-Black violence, not as just another resource to strip-mine, but as an unavoidable abyss that confines all thought. Its reminder: that we have still not yet begun to think a truly Black world.” — Andrew Culp, Professor, California Institute of the Arts, USA 

“With the force of a manifesto, the intensity of a polemic, and the nuance of a treatise, this book sets out to disavow the disavowal of Colonial violence in the making of the contemporary world and thought. Learning from Caribbean thinkers, writers, and poets, it sets to work unworking, desedimenting and deconstructing, the violent ontological foundations by which anti-Black worlds maintain and reproduce their innocence and ignorance. Replaying and reiterating, extending and multiplying, gestures of refusal – refusals of subjection, of History, of Geography, of meaning, of Being – there is the refusal of the World as it is and of the World as it could be. The World as Abyss artfully combines a critique of the historical forces which make and unmake the contemporary moment with the suspension of horizons, of ends, of grounds. What emerges in the wake is an intensification of the generative capacity of this refusal; voids, arrhythmia, counter-times, displacements, dislocations, the abyssal. First as threat and then as promise” — Paul Harrison, Associate Professor of Human Geography, Durham University, UK

13. Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds (co-authored with Jonathan Pugh) (University of Westminster Press 2021). OPEN ACCESS.

‘Ambitious, sophisticated, timely and downright inspirational.’ – Philip Hayward, University of Technology Sydney, Okinawan Journal of Island Studies

‘A must read … a new analytical agenda for the Anthropocene, coherently drawing out the power of thinking with islands.’ – Elena Burgos Martinez, Leiden University

‘This is an essential book. [The] analytics they propose … offer both a critical agenda for island studies and compass points through which to navigate the haunting past, troubling present, and precarious future.’ – Craig Santos Perez, University of Hawai’i, Manoa

‘All academic books should be like this: hard to put down. Informative, careful, sometimes devasting, yet absolutely necessary – if you read one book about the Anthropocene let it be this. You will never think of islands in the same way again.’ – Kimberley Peters, University of Oldenburg

‘ … a unique journey into the Anthropocene. Critical, generous and compelling’. — Nigel Clark, Lancaster University

The island has become a key figure of the Anthropocene – an epoch in which human entanglements with nature come increasingly to the fore. For a long time, islands were romanticised or marginalised, seen as lacking modernity’s capacities for progress, vulnerable to the effects of catastrophic climate change and the afterlives of empire and coloniality. Today, however, the island is increasingly important for both policy-oriented and critical imaginaries that seek, more positively, to draw upon the island’s liminal and disruptive capacities, especially the relational entanglements and sensitivities its peoples and modes of life are said to exhibit.

Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds explores the significant and widespread shift to working with islands for the generation of new or alternative approaches to knowledge, critique and policy practices. It explains how contemporary Anthropocene thinking takes a particular interest in islands as ‘entangled worlds’, which break down the human/nature divide of modernity and enable the generation of new or alternative approaches to ways of being (ontology) and knowing (epistemology). The book draws out core analytics which have risen to prominence (Resilience, Patchworks, Correlation and Storiation) as contemporary policy makers, scholars, critical theorists, artists, poets and activists work with islands to move beyond the constraints of modern approaches. In doing so, it argues that engaging with islands has become increasingly important for the generation of some of the core frameworks of contemporary thinking and concludes with a new critical agenda for the Anthropocene.

12. Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene (co-authored with Julian Reid) (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019)

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Representations of indigenous peoples, while never static, have always served the interests of settler-colonialism. Historically, the dominant framing marginalised indigeneous practices as legacies of the distant past. Today indigenous approaches are demanded in order for settler-colonialism itself to have a future. Becoming indigenous, we are told, is a necessity if humanity is to survive and cope with the catastrophic changes wrought by modernist excess in the Anthropocene. Becoming Indigenous provides an agenda-setting critique, analysing how and why indigeneity has been reduced to instrumental imaginaries of perseverance and resilience. Indigenous ‘alternatives’ are today central to a range of governing discourses, which promise empowerment but are highly disciplinary. Critical theorists often endorse these framings, happy to instrumentalise indigenous peoples as caretakers of the environment or as teaching the moderns about their ‘more-than-human’ responsibilities. Chandler and Reid argue that these discourses have little to do with indigenous struggles or with challenging settler-colonial power. In fact, instrumentalising indigeneity in these ways merely reinforces neoliberal hegemony, marginalising critical alternatives for both indigenous and non-indigenous peoples alike.

11. Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: An Introduction to Mapping, Sensing and Hacking (single authored) (Routledge, 2018)

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The Anthropocene captures more than a debate over how to address the problems of climate change and global warming. Increasingly, it is seen to signify the end of the modern condition itself and potentially to open up a new era of political possibilities. This is the first book to look at the new forms of governance emerging in the epoch of the Anthropocene. Forms of rule, which seek to govern without the handrails of modernist assumptions of ‘command and control’ from the top-down; taking on board new ontopolitical understandings of the need to govern on the grounds of non-linearity, complexity and entanglement. The book is divided into three parts, each focusing on a distinct mode or understanding of governance: Mapping, Sensing and Hacking. Mapping looks at attempts to govern through designing adaptive interventions into processes of interaction. Sensing considers ways of developing greater real time sensitivity to changes in relations, often deploying new technologies of Big Data and the Internet of Things. Hacking analyses the development of ways of ‘becoming with’, working to recomposition and reassemble relations in new and creative forms. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of international politics, international security and international relations theory and those interested in critical theory and the way this is impacted by contemporary developments.

10. Peacebuilding: The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1997-2017 (single authored) (Palgrave, 2017)

This book is the first to chart the rise and fall of peacebuilding. Charting its beginnings, as an ad-hoc extension of peacekeeping responsibilities, and formalisation, as a UN-supported international project of building liberal states. Twenty years later, the grounding policy assumptions of peacebuilding – that democracy, the rule of law and free markets were a universal solution to conflict-prone states and societies – have been revealed as naïve at best, and at worst, hubristic and Eurocentric. Here, Chandler traces the disillusionment with international peacebuilding, and the discursive shifts in the self-understanding of the peacebuilding project in policy and academic debate. He charts the transformation from peacebuilding as an international project based on universalist assumptions, to the understanding of peace as a necessarily indigenous process based on plural and non-linear understandings of difference. Is the end of peacebuilding necessarily a cause for celebration? Does this shift result in a realist resignation to the world as it appears? Is it necessary to “marry idealism with realism” – as E.H. Carr once argued – if we wish to keep open the possibilities for social change? This book seeks to answer these questions, making an invaluable reference both for students and practitioners of peacebuilding and for those interested in the broader shifts in the social and political grounding of policy-making today.

9. The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability (co-authored with Julian Reid) (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016)

Political practices, agencies and institutions around the world promote the need for humans, individually and collectively, to develop capacities of resilience. We must accept and adapt to the ‘realities’ of an endemic condition of global insecurity and to the practice of so-called sustainable development. But in spite of claims that resilience make us more adept and capable, does the discourse of resilience undermine our ability to make our own decisions as to how we wish to live? This book draws out the theoretical assumptions behind the drive for resilience and its implications for issues of political subjectivity. It establishes a critical framework from which discourses of resilience can be understood and challenged in the fields of governance, security, development, and in political theory itself. Each part of the book includes a chapter by David Chandler and another by Julian Reid that build a passionate and provocative dialogue, individually distinct and offering contrasting perspectives on core issues. It concludes with an insightful interview with Gideon Baker. In place of resilience, the book argues that we need to revalorize an idea of the human subject as capable of acting on and transforming the world, rather than being cast in a permanent condition of enslavement to it.

8. Resilience: The Governance of Complexity (single authored) (Routledge, 2014)

Resilience has become a central concept in government policy understandings over the last decade. In our complex, global and interconnected world, resilience appears to be the policy ‘buzzword’ of choice, alleged to be the solution to a wide and ever-growing range of policy issues. This book analyses the key aspects of resilience-thinking and highlights how resilience impacts upon traditional conceptions of governance. This concise and accessible book investigates how resilience-thinking adds new insights into how politics (both domestically and internationally) is understood to work and how problems are perceived and addressed; from educational training in schools to global ethics and from responses to shock events and natural disasters to long-term international policies to promote peace and development. This book also raises searching questions about how resilience-thinking influences the types of knowledge and understanding we value and challenges traditional conceptions of social and political processes. It sets forward a new and clear conceptualisation of resilience, of use to students, academics and policy-makers, emphasising the links between the rise of resilience and awareness of the complex nature of problems and policy-making.

7. Freedom vs Necessity in International Relations: Human-Centred Approaches to  Security and Development (single authored) (Zed Books, 2013)

Human-centred understandings of the world have become increasingly dominant over the last two decades. Indeed, it is rare to read any analysis addressing the problems of insecurity, conflict or development which does not start from the need to empower or capacity-build local agency. In this path-breaking book, Chandler undertakes a radical challenge to such human-centred understandings and suggests that, in articulating problems as a result of human behaviour or decision-making, the problems of the world have become reinterpreted as problems of the human subject itself. Within this framework, the solutions are not seen to lie with structures of economic and social relations, but with the social and cognitive shaping of those who are often seen to be the most marginal and powerless. This shift – from the material problems of the external world to the subjective problems of human thought and action – has gone hand-in-hand with the shift from state-based to society-based understandings of the world. In a provocative analysis, Chandler highlights how human-centred approaches have shrunk rather than enlarged our world and have limited our understanding of transformative possibilities.

6. International Statebuilding: The Rise of Post-Liberal Governance (single authored) (Routledge, 2010)

This concise and accessible new text offers original and insightful analysis of the policy paradigm informing international statebuilding interventions. The book covers the theoretical frameworks and practices of international statebuilding, the debates they have triggered, and the way that international statebuilding has developed in the post-Cold War era. Spanning a broad remit of policy practices from post-conflict peacebuilding to sustainable development and EU enlargement, Chandler draws out how these policies have been cohered around the problematization of autonomy or self-government. Rather than promoting democracy on the basis of the universal capacity of people for self-rule, international statebuilding assumes that people lack capacity to make their own judgements safely and therefore that democracy requires external intervention and the building of civil society and state institutional capacity. Chandler argues that this policy framework inverses traditional liberal–democratic understandings of autonomy and freedom – privileging governance over government – and that the dominance of this policy perspective is a cause of concern for those who live in states involved in statebuilding as much as for those who are subject to these new regulatory frameworks. Encouraging readers to reflect upon the changing understanding of both state–society relations and of the international sphere itself, this work will be of great interest to all scholars of international relations, international security and development.

5. Hollow Hegemony: Rethinking Global Politics, Power and Resistance (single authored) (Pluto Press, 2009)

David Chandler explores the concept of ‘global ideology’ and how it impacts on conflict, security and development policy-making, explaining why ‘the global’ is such a damaging construction and exposing the political vacuum at the heart of common perceptions of global politics. He argues that the pre-eminence of the global, whether in terms of global governance, global security or global resistance, is predicated on a lack rather than a presence. It is the lack of clear sites and articulations of power, the lack of clear security threats and the lack of clear political programmes or movements of resistance that drives the concept of international relations in global terms. This wide-ranging analysis is a perfect antidote for students frustrated with the abundant but vague literature on globalisation.

4. Empire in Denial: The Politics of Statebuilding (single authored) (Pluto Press, 2006)

David Chandler argues that state-building, as it is currently conceived, does not work. In the 1990s, interventionist policies challenged the rights of individual states to self-governance. Today, non-Western states are more likely to be feted by international institutions offering programmes of poverty-reduction, democratisation and good governance. States without the right of self-government will always lack legitimate authority. The international policy agenda focuses on bureaucratic mechanisms, which can only instutiutionalise divisions between the West and the non-West and are unable to overcome the social and political divisions of post-conflict states. Highlighting the dangers of current policy — including the redefinition of sovereignty, and the subsquent erosion of ties linking power and accountability — David Chandler offers a critical look at state-building that will be of interest to all students of international affairs. Praise for From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: ‘A fine book.’ Edward S. Herman. ‘Anyone concerned with world events should read this book.’ Global Dialogue

3. Constructing Global Civil Society: Morality and Power in International Relations (single authored) (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004 and 2006)

Global civil society is a crucial concept in International Relations today, used as both a description of new mechanisms of non-state actor and NGO engagement in international policy-making and as a normative political project of international change. David Chandler critically investigates the claims made by the advocates of global civil society, analyzing the limits of the concept as a way of describing actual policy processes and the political dynamics behind the search for an international source of collective ethical values and social change.

2. From Kosovo to Kabul (and Beyond): Human Rights and International Intervention (single authored) (Pluto Press, 2002 and 2006)

This new and updated edition of David Chandler’s acclaimed book takes a critical look at the way in which human rights issues have been brought to the fore in international affairs. The UN and Nato’s new policy of interventionism–as shown in Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor–has been hailed as part of a new ‘ethical’ approach to foreign policy. David Chandler offers a rigorous critique of this apparently benign shift in international relations to reveal the worrying political implications of a new human rights discourse. He asks why the West can now prioritise the rights of individuals over the traditional rights of state sovereignty, and why this shift has happened so quickly. Charting the development of a human rights-based foreign policy, he considers the theoretical problems of defining human rights and sets this within the changing framework of international law. Meticulous and compelling, From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond offers a disturbing insight into the political implications of a human rights-led foreign policy, and the covert agenda that it conceals.

1. Bosnia: Faking Democracy after Dayton (single authored) (Pluto Press, 1999 and 2000)

‘Chandler’s book deserves urgent and serious attention by all those who care about the future of Bosnia, Balkan stability, and above all, democracy – before the corrosive effect of justifiable cynicism takes hold.’ Susan L. Woodward, Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution. ‘A devastating analysis.’ Simon Jenkins, The Times. ‘A welcome contribution to the debate over Western intervention in Bosnia… For a detailed discussion oft he Dayton Peace Accord, there is no better book on the market.’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies. The Dayton Accords brought the Bosnian war to an end in November 1995, establishing a detailed framework for the reconstitution of the Bosnian state and its consolidation through a process of democratisation. In Bosnia David Chandler makes the first in-depth critical analysis of the policies and impact of post-Dayton democratisation. Drawing on interviews with key officials within the OSCE in Bosnia and extensive original research exploring the impact of policies designed to further political pluralism, develop multi-ethnic administrations, protect human rights and support civil society, Chandler reveals that the process has done virtually nothing to develop democracy in this troubled country. Political autonomy and accountability are now further away than at any time since the outbreak of the Bosnian war. The Afterword to this new edition updates Bosnian developments and adds an analysis of the structures and problems of the international protectorate in Kosovo.

Edited volumes

13. International Relations in the Anthropocene: New Agendas, New Agencies and New Approaches (co-edited with Franziska Müller and Delf Rothe (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming April 2021)

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This textbook introduces advanced students of International Relations (and beyond) to the ways in which the advent of, and reflections on, the Anthropocene impact on the study of global politics and the disciplinary foundations of IR. The book contains 24 chapters, authored by senior academics as well as early career scholars, and is divided into four parts, detailing, respectively, why the Anthropocene is of importance to IR, challenges to traditional approaches to security, the question of governance and agency in the Anthropocene, and new methods and approaches, going beyond the human/nature divide.

Reviews

“This is a ground-breaking book on the wider intimations of the Anthropocene for thinking International Relations differently. Written in an accessible style, it covers an impressive array of theoretical and substantive topics, including planetary thinking, Posthumanism, environmental security, Decolonial and Queerfeminist thought, governance and new epistemologies. A superb collection of original essays, International Relations in the Anthropocene is likely to serve as a standard reference on the theme of the Anthropocene in the field of International Relations.” Mustapha Kamal Pasha, Chair in International Politics, Aberystwyth University, UK

“This textbook provides a sophisticated yet highly accessible overview of the myriad facets of what is described as the Anthropocene condition. By shifting our analytical gaze towards a planetary approach rooted in transdisciplinary knowledges and methodologies, it challenges the ways in which world affairs have customarily been conceived, analyzed and taught. International Relations in the Anthropocene offers a priceless resource for those who seek a comprehensive ‘one-stop’ source of concepts, themes and approaches for understanding and addressing our current existential crisis.” Arlene B. Tickner, Professor of International Relations, Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá, Colombia

“This trailblazing textbook – the first ever to anchor the study of IR in the politics of the Anthropocene – is set to transform the way students think and learn. Teachers like myself have long needed such a book to explain the intensifying turbulence of life on our planet.” Peter Dauvergne, Professor of International Relations, University of British Columbia, Canada

“International Relations in the Anthropocene represents an important step for IR and its ability to engage with and respond to the planetary real. This book introduces new ideas of agency, updates traditional understandings of institutions and global governance, and expands our vocabulary for teaching and researching in global politics. It introduces methods that take us beyond the usual approaches with chapters on the city, map-making, collaging, weather, cinema and space. A must for the twenty-first century classroom.” Stefanie Fishel, Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia

12. Resilience in the Anthropocene: Governance and Politics at the End of the World (co-edited with Kevin Grove and Stephanie Wakefield) (Routledge, 2020)

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This book offers the first critical, multi-disciplinary study of how the concepts of resilience and the Anthropocene have combined to shape contemporary thought and governmental practice. Faced with the climate catastrophe of the Anthropocene, theorists and policymakers are increasingly turning to ‘sustainable’, ‘creative’ and ‘bottom-up’ imaginaries of governance. The book brings together cutting-edge insights from leading geographers, international relations scholars and philosophers to explore how the concepts of resilience and the Anthropocene challenge and transform prevailing understandings of Earth, space, time and knowledge, and how these transformations reshape governance, ethics and critique today. This book examines how the Anthropocene calls into question established categories through which modern societies have tended to make sense of the world and engage in critical reflection and analysis. It also considers how resilience approaches attempt to re-stabilize these categories – and the ethical and political effects that result from these resilience-based efforts. Offering innovative insights into the problem of how environmental change is known and governed in the Anthropocene, this book will be of interest to students in fields such as geography, international relations, anthropology, science and technology studies, sociology, and the environmental humanities.

11. Digital Objects, Digital Subjects: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Capitalism, Labour and Politics in the Age of Big Data (co-edited with Christian Fuchs) (University of Westminster Press, 2019)

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This volume explores activism, research and critique in the age of digital subjects and objects and Big Data capitalism after a digital turn said to have radically transformed our political futures. Optimists assert that the ‘digital’ promises: new forms of community and ways of knowing and sensing, innovation, participatory culture, networked activism, and distributed democracy. Pessimists argue that digital technologies have extended domination via new forms of control, networked authoritarianism and exploitation, dehumanization and the surveillance society. Leading international scholars present varied interdisciplinary assessments of such claims – in theory and via dialogue – and of the digital’s impact on society and the potentials, pitfalls, limits and ideologies, of digital activism. They reflect on whether computational social science, digital humanities and ubiquitous datafication lead to digital positivism that threatens critical research or lead to new horizons in theory and society.

10. Mapping and Politics in the Digital Age (co-edited with Pol Bargués-Pedreny and Elena Simon) (Routledge, 2018)

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Throughout history, maps have been a powerful tool in the constitutive imaginary of governments seeking to define or contest the limits of their political reach. Today, new digital technologies have become central to mapping as a way of formulating alternative political visions. Mapping can also help marginalised communities to construct speculative designs using participatory practices. Mapping and Politics in the Digital Age explores how the development of new digital technologies and mapping practices are transforming global politics, power, and cooperation. The book brings together authors from across political and social theory, geography, media studies and anthropology to explore mapping and politics across three sections. Contestations introduces the reader to contemporary developments within mapping and explores the politics of mapping as a form of knowledge and contestation. Governance analyses mapping as a set of institutional practices, providing key methodological frames for understanding global governance in the realms of urban politics, refugee control, health crises and humanitarian interventions and new techniques of biometric regulation and autonomic computation. Imaginaries provides examples of future-oriented analytical frameworks, highlighting the transformation of mapping in an age of digital technologies of control and regulation. In a world conceived as without borders and fixed relations, new forms of mapping stress the need to rethink assumptions of power and knowledge. This book provides a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of the role ofmapping in contemporary global governance, and will be of interest to students and researchers working within politics, geography, sociology, media, and digital culture and technology.

9. The Routledge Handbook of International Resilience (co-edited with Jon Coaffee) (Routledge, 2016 and 2020)

Resilience is increasingly discussed as a key concept across many fields of international policymaking from sustainable development and climate change, insecurity, conflict and terrorism to urban and rural planning, international aid provision and the prevention of and responses to natural and man-made disasters. Edited by leading academic authorities from a number of disciplines, this is the first handbook to deal with resilience as a new conceptual approach to understanding and addressing a range of interdependent global challenges. The Handbook is divided into nine sections: Introduction: contested paradigms of resilience; the challenges of resilience; governing uncertainty; resilience and neoliberalism; environmental concerns and climate change adaptation; urban planning; disaster risk reduction and response; international security and insecurity; the policy and practices of international development. Highlighting how resilience-thinking is increasingly transforming international policy-making and government and institutional practices, this book will be an indispensable source of information for students, academics and the wider public interested in resilience, international relations and international security.

8. The Routledge Handbook of International Statebuilding (co-edited with Timothy Sisk) (Routledge, 2013)

This new Handbook offers a combination of theoretical, thematic and empirical analyses of the statebuilding regime, written by leading international scholars. Over the past decade, international statebuilding has become one of the most important and least understood areas of international policy-making. Today, there are around one billion people living in some 50-60 conflict-affected, ‘fragile’ states, vulnerable to political violence and civil war. The international community grapples with the core challenges and dilemmas of using outside force, aid, and persuasion to build states in the wake of conflict and to prevent such countries from lapsing into devastating violence. The Routledge Handbook of International Statebuilding is a comprehensive resource for this emerging area in International Relations. The volume is designed to guide the reader through the background and development of international statebuilding as a policy area, as well as exploring in depth significant issues such as security, development, democracy and human rights. Divided into three main parts, this Handbook provides a single-source overview of the key topics in international statebuilding. Part One: Concepts and Approaches. Part Two: Security, Development and Democracy. Part Three: Policy Implementation. This Handbook will be essential reading for students of statebuilding, humanitarian intervention, peacebuilding, development, war and conflict studies and IR/Security Studies in general.

7. A Liberal Peace?: The Problems and Practices of Peacebuilding (co-edited with Susanna Campbell and Meera Sabaratnam) (Zed Books, 2011)

Moving beyond the binary argument between those who buy into the aims of creating liberal democratic states grounded in free markets and rule of law, and those who critique and oppose them, this timely and much-needed critical volume takes a fresh look at the liberal peace debate. In doing so, it examines the validity of this critique in contemporary peacebuilding and statebuilding practice through a multitude of case studies – from Afghanistan to Somalia, Sri Lanka to Kosovo. Going further, it investigates the underlying theoretical assumptions of liberal peacebuilding and statebuilding, as well as providing new theoretical propositions for understanding current interventions. Written by some of the most prominent scholars in the field, alongside several new scholars making cutting edge contributions, this is an essential contribution to a rapidly growing interdisciplinary area of study.

6. Critical Perspectives on Human Security: Rethinking Emancipation and Power in International Relations (co-edited with Nik Hynek) (Routledge, 2010 and 2012)

This new book presents critical approaches towards Human Security, which has become one of the key areas for policy and academic debate within Security Studies and IR. The Human Security paradigm has had considerable significance for academics, policy-makers and practitioners. Under the rubric of Human Security, security policy practices seem to have transformed their goals and approaches, re-prioritising economic and social welfare issues that were marginal to the state-based geo-political rivalries of the Cold War era. Human Security has reflected and reinforced the reconceptualisation of international security, both broadening and deepening it, and, in so doing, it has helped extend and shape the space within which security concerns inform international policy practices. However, in its wider use, Human Security has become an amorphous and unclear political concept, seen by some as progressive and radical and by others as tainted by association with the imposition of neo-liberal practices and values on non-Western spaces or as legitimizing attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan. This book is concerned with critical perspectives towards Human Security, highlighting some of the tensions which can emerge between critical perspectives which discursively radicalise Human Security within frameworks of emancipatory possibility and those which attempt to deconstruct Human Security within the framework of an externally imposed attempt to regulate and order the globe on behalf of hegemonic power. The chapters gathered in this edited collection represent a range of critical approaches which bring together alternative understandings of human security. This book will be of great interest to students of human security studies and critical security studies, war and conflict studies and international relations.

5. Statebuilding and Intervention: Policies, Practices and Paradigms (editor) (Routledge Studies in Intervention and Statebuilding, 2009)

This edited book sets out and engages with some of the key policies, practices and paradigms of external intervention in the case of state support and reconstruction. Many assumptions about statebuilding have been reconsidered in the wake of Iraq, and ongoing problems in other states such as Afghanistan, Bosnia and Kosovo. Rather than being a regional survey or a policy-orientated ‘lessons learned’ book, this collection explores the broader framing of policy goals, statebuilding practices and the consensus on the need for Western states and international institutions to be engaged in this policy area. The volume is divided into three parts: the first engages with some of the key policy frameworks and conceptual issues raised by recent statebuilding interventions; the second considers core statebuilding practices; and the third reconsiders statebuilding paradigms more broadly. The essays open up debate and critical discussion in the field at a time when many advocates of extending statebuilding intervention suggest that the complex nature of the problems of non-Western states and societies mean that it will inevitably be contradictory and limited in its results.

4. Rethinking Ethical Foreign Policy: Pitfalls, Paradoxes and Possibilities (co-edited with Volker Heins) (Routledge, 2007)

This new volume moves beyond the limits of current debate to show how today’s foreign policy is increasingly about values rather than interests and why ethics are now playing a central role. Rather than counterposing interests and ethics, trying to find ‘hidden agendas’ or emphasizing the double-standards at play in ethical foreign policy, this book brings together leading international theorists, and a variety of stimulating approaches, to develop a critical understanding of the rise of ethical foreign policy, and to analyze the limits of ethical policy-making on its own terms. They deal with the limits of ‘ethical foreign policy’ both in the light of the internal dynamic of these policies themselves, and with regard to the often unintended consequences of policies designed to better the world. This book also shows how the transformation of both the domestic and the international spheres of politics means that ethics has become a rallying point for non-state actors and experts who gather around values and norms in order to force institutions to justify their behavior. This process results from different structural changes and the transformation of the international system, the individualization of Western societies and the growing importance of expertise in the justification of decisions in risk adverse societies. It leads to a transformation of norms and to a redefinition of a global ethical framework that needs to be clarified. This book will be of great interest to all students and researchers of foreign policy formation, politics and international relations.

3. Peace without Politics? Ten Years of State-Building in Bosnia (editor) (Routledge, 2006 and 2007)

Ten years on from the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement in November 1995, the legacy of the Bosnian war still shapes every aspect of the political, social and economic environment of the tiny state. This state of affairs is highlighted by the fact that Bosnia is still under international control, with the Office of the International High Representative regularly using its powers to dismiss elected presidents, prime-ministers and MPs and to impose legislation over the resistance of elected legislatures at national, regional and local level. What has changed in the ten years since Dayton? Is international regulation helping to establish a sustainable peace in Bosnia? What lessons can be learned for nation-building in Bosnia? This volume was previously published as a special issue of the leading journal International Peacekeeping.

2. Global Civil Society: Contested Futures (co-edited with Gideon Baker) (Routledge, 2005 and 2006)

For many commentators, global civil society is revolutionising our approach to global politics, as new non-state-based and border-free expressions of political community challenge territorial sovereignty as the exclusive basis for political community and identity. This challenge ‘from below’ to the nation-state system is increasingly seen as promising nothing less than a reconstruction, or a re-imagination, of world politics itself. Whether in terms of the democratisation of the institutions of global governance, the spread of human rights across the world, or the emergence of a global citizenry in a worldwide public sphere, global civil society is understood by many to provide the agency necessary for these hoped-for transformations. Global Civil Society asks whether this idea is such a qualitatively new phenomenon after all; whether the transformation of the nation-state system is actually within its reach; and what some of the drawbacks might be.

1. Rethinking Human Rights: Critical Approaches to International Politics (editor) (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002)

Rethinking Human Rights brings together a team of authors-from fields as diverse as political theory, peace studies, international law, and media studies-concerned with a new international agenda of human rights promotion. The collection presents an original and tightly argued critique of current trends and deals with a range of questions concerning the implication of human rights approaches for humanitarian aid, state sovereignty, international law, democracy, and political autonomy.

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