This book advances the peace discourse as defined in UN guidelines, while also working towards the implementation of the science of peace in various educational contexts in Africa, particularly at universities. The contributions gathered here are intended to highlight the role of university peace studies programs, particularly their relevance for peace education, peace research and peace work.

The book is dedicated to students and teachers of Peace Studies and Development Studies at universities as well as civil society experts. They bear a great responsibility with regard to shaping the "Culture of Peace" called for by the UN, based on the foundation of peace education and peace work and in the context of an adequate peace policy. The book seeks to strengthen African pillars of lasting peace through Peace Studies. Analyzing the latest topics in Africa of universal importance, it offers a valuable reference guide for researchers and professionals grappling with the realities of nonviolence and other essential topics in Peace Studies.

Understanding Human Security and Climate Change critically analyses the climate challenges faced across North America, Africa and Asia, and their respective efforts to produce workable solutions. The threats to communities, the economy, healthcare, politics and personhood are compared, as well as the major policies and laws that have been introduced to tackle them. Each chapter contains insightful expert interviews, which contribute towards a better understanding of climate change and its consequences for humanity.

This informative book is a vital resource for students and scholars of climate change, environmental policy and international relations. It is also of interest to legal practitioners, environmental policymakers and other professionals working in the environmental and human rights fields.

Bringing together a diverse collection of experts, Tobias T. Gibson and Kurt W. Jefferson analyse international security and technology through three conceptual frameworks: approaches, assessments, and frontiers. The book examines the real-life impacts of new technologies on national security, warfare, military doctrine, and geopolitical security alliances across various environmental and human security contexts. Exploring intelligence, information control strategies, cybersecurity, child labour trafficking and chemical and biological weapons, it builds a deeper understanding of the applied aspects of security and technology. The book concludes with a discussion of how science fiction and the silver screen, the future of space in international security, the ethics of autonomous weapons, and American presidential war powers are all affected by the boundaries of technological advancements in the context of international security.

This book is vital for students and scholars of security, international relations, AI and technology, politics and public policy, and regulation and governance. Its practical applications are also beneficial to international security lawyers and policy advisors.

This book argues for the reconstitution of the cultural in African cultural industries and societies. It posits that African cultural industries face a deep-seated problem of the crisis of normativity that is largely rooted in the coloniality of modern cultural policy and an unconscious, but pervasive anti-Black racism culture in the continent itself. The book places hope for re-animating African agency and national cultural identities in the decolonization of cultural policy and cultural industries as consciousness industries. Only through relevant cultural policy, a higher-order cross-institutional moral and ethical value system for reconstituting the cultural in post-colonies, can Africa build truly democratic, progressive, cosmopolitan, decolonized, and self-respecting citizens and societies. Using decolonial cultural policy studies, the book develops a decolonial cultural critique that locates African culture industries within the racialized power dynamics of capitalist modernity. It explores the decolonization praxis of cultural industries and acknowledges the complexity of cultural decolonization iniatives in a continent that is so diverse, interconnected, globalized, and facing newer modes of colonialism that are aggressive and covert.

How can we understand social democracy today? This ambitious book offers a global perspective on the nature of capitalism; its past and future possibilities of survival; the differentiation between neoliberal, authoritarian and social democratic systems, exemplified by the United States, China, and the EU; and the conflict relationships between them.

Reflecting on urgent global risks, such as climate change, pandemics and nuclear confrontation - Mouzelis & Sotiropoulos explore why these risks can only be dealt with by the cooperation of these three major players in the global arena. They explore how the model of social democracy, which in the previous century tamed unfettered capitalism in some national contexts, can help contain the excesses of global capitalism now. In clear, compelling and coherent terms, the authors demonstrate how unchecked antagonism among these three major players has the potential to spill-over into inertia or reluctance to manage these urgent risks, to the detriment of humanity as a whole.

The cognitive potency of the human mind can be fully appreciated only if it is conceived of as a linguistic mind. This is the starting point of Nikola Kompa's investigation into the relationship between language and cognition.

Underpinned by philosophical ideas from Plato to Ockham, and from Locke to Vygotsky, Kompa uses theories within the philosophy of language, mind, and cognitive science and draws on neuro-psychology and psycholinguistic studies to explore core ideas about language and cognition. How did language transform our ancestors into creatures of considerable cognitive and social accomplishment? How does language augment cognition? Is language only a means of communicating our ideas or is a means of thinking itself? Her study has repercussions for a broad range of questions, from how humans differ from other animals and what a cognitive architecture looks like if it approximates the achievements of the human mind, to questions of education and cross-cultural communication.

Theorizing and forming hypotheses about how language and cognition might have coevolved, how the availability of (symbolic) labels enhance various cognitive functions, what the cognitive function of inner speech might be and how inner speech and thought relate to each other, Kompa addresses the perennial philosophical question of what the benefits of having a language might be, and brings into sharper relief the intimate connection between linguistic and other cognitive functions. Informed by recent discussions on language evolution, labels, and inner speech, this timely contribution helps us understand more about how language changes the way we think.

Civil-military relations in the Global South are both important and understudied. In practice, this leads to international programmes repeatedly, erroneously assuming that the only way to restore stability, development and peace in post-conflict and post-crisis societies is to focus on state-building without taking into account the respective political culture in place. The results in the Global South, and particularly in Africa, have been weak and fragile at best.

In this open access book, through rich new case studies of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Cameroon, and Rwanda, Olaf Bachmann takes an important step in de-Westernizing civil-military relations theory. Focussing on one of the key pillars of the state-the army-and starting from the historically established axiom that there cannot be a state without an army and there cannot be an army without a state, Bachmann demonstrates how and why most African militaries never developed into professional armies. Instead, they have generally remained quasi-armies in the context of the quasi-states that established themselves after independence. Analyzing these events in the context of a wide array of Asian and African sources, Bachmann exposes the Anglo-Eurocentrism at the heart of Samuel Huntington's hugely influential theory of the soldier and the state, and in so doing, he provides a powerful, more globally relevant re-examination of state-formation processes as they relate to the control of violence.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

The Translocal Island of Okinawa reveals the underrepresented memories, visions and actions that are involved in the making of Okinawan resistance against its subordinated status under the US-Japan security system beyond the narrowly defined political, cultural and geographical borders of locality. As Okinawa's base politics is a problem deeply rooted in the context of East Asia, so is the history of the people's protest movement. The issue examined in this book is the arbitrary distinction of scale between 'local', which tends to be employed for a particular territory demarcated by a cohesive culture, and 'regional', a larger area that consists of myriad localities.

Locality, Shinnosuke Takahashi here argues, is neither self-evident, fixed nor homogenous but is established through historical processes that involve interaction, conflict and negotiation of individuals and communities across territorial and cultural boundaries. This book reveals the novel concept of Okinawa as a translocal island which offers a way to understand locality in the context of Okinawan activism as a product of multiple cultural and human flows, as opposed to the conventional way of framing the local community as fixed, internally cohesive and rigidly bordered. It makes an exciting contribution to the field of modern Japanese and East Asian studies by stimulating discussions on the richness and scale of local civic activism that is increasingly becoming a key political feature of the East Asian region.

Krzysztof Poslajko offers a novel version of an anti-realist view about beliefs, rejecting the extreme proposal of eliminativism that beliefs do not exist. He shows us we should rather say that beliefs exist, but they are not real.

Poslajko demonstrates how we might make sense of this idea by providing a unified account of the debates in philosophical psychology. The antirealist view interprets beliefs as being causally irrelevant, that they do not constitute a natural kind, and that their content cannot be naturalized. Exploring the status of folk psychology, Poslajko raises key questions in the analytic metaphysics of mind: Are beliefs real? Do people really possess mental states which are causally efficacious bearers of propositional content?

By arguing for the antirealist view and revising our common-sense view about the nature of mind, he makes a compelling case for adopting a pragmatic metaphilosophy when we deal with questions about belief.

Informed by senior policymakers with extensive expertise in defense policy, this book provides a comprehensive regional and functional perspective on US policy toward the People's Republic of China.

Confronting China addresses the central security questions of our generation: How best can the United States deter Chinese aggression and win the peace? China's pursuit of global hegemony reflects a patient yet determined effort to reshape the international order in its favor. Deterring Chinese aggression and winning the peace necessitates an integrated approach that draws upon all instruments of US national power.

Drawing on the insightful analysis of eleven senior national security practitioners, chapters discuss the China challenge from multiple perspectives. Contributors examine the different dimensions of China's growing power and assess how well they advance the Chinese Communist Party's political ambitions and what must be done to counter them. Drawing upon each writer's particular areas of expertise, chapter authors provide concrete, strategy-based, and resource-informed policy recommendations.

Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy provides crucial insights for assessing the post-neoliberal era in this cutting-edge volume of anti-capitalist scholarship. It maps the critical new assemblages emerging out of decades of neoliberalism to diagnose contemporary and future discontent.

Working alongside other forms of inquiry into the post-neoliberal era, the volume proposes a novel combination of ethics and Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy to understand the post-neoliberal era. Contributors argue that current critiques of neoliberalism ignore the determining role of colonialism and the accelerated threat of climate breakdown. They highlight the precariousness of our planetary existence and propose new forms of inquiry into Deleuzo-Guattarian becoming. Deleuze, Guattari and the Schizoanalysis of Post-Neoliberalism considers new modes of capitalism, societies built on exhaustion, digital power, education, agroforestry, as well as literary texts that characterise the post-neoliberal era. Alongside these critical positions, the volume uses an ethical framework to challenge dialectical divisions in neoliberal critique. In the process, the essays remap the antagonisms, discontents and tensions of current post-neoliberal becoming.

The end of the Qajar era in Iran, despite the accepted narrative of decline, was in fact an occasion of modern and forward-thinking nationalism. Iran developed an imperial nationalism, which was informed by its experiences under British and Russian hegemony and the absorption of Western modern ideas and practices, and which now looked towards a future as a sovereign and independent state within the foundational framework of its previous Empire. Emboldened by post-WWI notions of self-determination and the development of international institutions devoted to peace, Iran spearheaded its new-found diplomacy by sending a delegation to the peace talks in Paris in 1919.

This book shows how Iran's immediate post-war diplomacy came about, the conduct of Iran's delegation to Paris, frustrations with the Anglo-Persian Agreement, and ultimately how Iran's progress became the victim of British imperialism. Throwing a spotlight on an under-researched period of Iranian history, it will be of interest to readers of Iranian history, and those interested in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.

Our contemporary mode of life is characterised by what Serene Richards in Biopolitics as a System of Thought calls: Smart Being. Smart Being believes in the solutions of techno-capital where living is always at stake and directed to survival. Armed with this concept, this book examines how we arrived at this mode of being and asks how it could be that, while the material conditions of our lives have increasingly worsened, our capacities for effective political action, understood as the capacity for transforming our existing social relations, appear to be diminishing.

Drawing from jurists and philosophers such as Pierre Legendre, Yan Thomas, Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Richards argues that biopolitics intervenes at the most minute level of our everyday lives. She argues that there are conceptual truths presupposed in the mode of biopolitics' functioning, for instance that life can be assigned a value for the purpose of intervention, abandonment, or death, which have implications for our politics. In exciting engagements with political movements such as the post-May 1968 Mouvement des travailleurs Arabes (MTA), Richards shows how demands to transform our system of social relations are undermined by institutional models that proffer to offer rights protection while simultaneously annihilating the living altogether. Through a reappraisal of law, governance and capital, Richards seeks to reconceptualise our collectivity of thought, arguing for a politics of destitution that could form the basis of a communism to come.

Andrew Shanks brings together a grand narrative of theology and continental philosophy to argue that the 'solidarity of the shaken' is the kingdom of God in secular dress.

Shanks engages with the philosophy of Jan Patocka; specifically, his Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, which culminate in the concept of the 'solidarity of the shaken'. Such solidarity is quite simply that which empowers the most radically thoughtful openness to others, embattled against even the most repressive closure; a solidarity without any other essential qualification.

Split into three distinct parts, Shanks begins by discussing Patocka's philosophico-centric grand narrative, and drawing wider reference to the pre-philosophic origins of Abrahamic religious tradition. This is followed by an exploration of mystical theology, Christian and Islamic; of its decay into 'mysticism', and its influence on Christian and Jewish gnostic traditions. The final third presents a discussion on ethical phenomenology. Analysing the proponents of a 'pathos of shakenness' such as Kierkegaard, Levinas, Logstrup, he juxtaposes 19th-century thinkers such as Arendt and Hegel with Heidegger and Strauss as he moves through the century, and eventually to the rise of secular public conscience movement.

In 1924, the crown prince and future emperor of Ethiopia, Ras Taefaeri, on a visit to Jerusalem, called on forty Armenian orphans who had survived the genocide of 1915-1916 to form his empire's royal brass band. The conductor, who was also Armenian, composed the first official anthem of the Ethiopian state.


Drawing on this highly symbolic event, and following the history of the small Armenian community in Ethiopia, in this book Boris Adjemian shows how it operated on the margins of political society, hiding in its interstices, preferring intimacy and discreet loyalty to the glitter of open politics. The astonishing role of the Armenians in their host country was embodied in the friendship that the kings and queens of Ethiopia extended to them, a theme that is echoed in the life stories collected from their descendants.


Bringing to light the political and cultural importance of a community that has long been ignored and has almost vanished, this study draws on the collective memory of Armenian immigration and the centuries-long history of proximity between the Armenian and Ethiopian Churches. The author argues for a sedentary approach to the diaspora, for a socio-history of this collective rootedness, which dates back to the 19th century and builds on historical representations of otherness from the early modern period up to the colonial era. Highlighting stateless immigrants halfway between the national and the foreign, this history reveals the agency of stateless immigrants and their descendants, their ability to play with identities and undermine assigned belongings.


The Brass Band of the King is an original exploration of the social making of nationhood and foreignness in Africa and elsewhere.

Eugen Fink's deep engagement with the phenomenon of play saw him transcend his two towering mentors, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, to become a crucial figure in early 20th-century phenomenology. The Phenomenology of Play draws on Fink's concept of play to build a picture of his philosophy, from its foundations to its applications.

The book's three sections focus on the building blocks of Fink's phenomenology of play, how his work maps onto the broader history of philosophy, and finally how his writing can be applied to contexts from education and care to politics and religion. This rich account of Fink's contribution to theories of play demonstrates its immense value and fundamental importance to human existence. Relating Fink's work to that of his contemporaries and predecessors like Husserl, Heidegger, Schiller, Gadamer, Nietzsche and Sartre shows the range and importance of his ideas to modern European thought. The Phenomenology of Play also features newly translated material including notes from conversations between Fink and Heidegger, and Fink's own essay 'Mask and Cothurnus' on ancient theatre - which shed new light on his philosophical enquiries.

Frank Fischer advances deliberative policy argumentation and the logic of practical reason, exploring how this can be used as a framework for interpreting the interaction of normative and empirical arguments in policy politics. He applies this approach to a diverse range of topics, including technocracy, policy expertise, deliberative democratic politics, interpretive policy analysis, post-truth, climate and Covid denialism, participatory governance, local and tacit knowledge, and the role of emotion in policy controversies. The book concludes with a look to transformative policy learning and the future of the field.

Connecting social and political theory with empirical research, this book is essential for students and scholars of public policy, politics, governance, public administration, and regulatory policy. Its practical, real-world applications will also be of value to policymakers worldwide.