There is no silver bullet for the climate crisis-but that hasn't stopped people searching. Seizing its chance, the nuclear power industry wants us to believe that theirs is the only technical fix for our deliverance. The public, politicians and the media have been easily swayed.

This should come as no surprise. After all, the pro-nuclear PR campaign is richly funded and has an army of lobbyists sowing myths while the industry reaps the rewards of taxpayer-funded subsidies.

No To Nuclear calls the industry's bluff. Blasting aside its claims to be safe and green, Linda Pentz Gunter makes the irresistible case that nuclear power is too slow, too expensive, too dangerous and too integrally connected to the nuclear weapons complex, to serve as a rational energy choice.

The book also delves into the lives of Indigenous peoples and communities of colour, who have been harmed the most by the nuclear sector, and questions whether the way we devalue nature and the environment is costing us the chance of a genuinely just energy transition.

An original conceptual approach to the study of war, attempting to capture the entire phenomenon of military adaptation-whether strategic, institutional or in the field.

The unravelling of the post-Cold War order has intensified geopolitical tensions, driving a global increase in defence spending. Most military organisations are engaged in a process of drastic transformation, trying to scale their activities, learn from contemporary battlefields, and improve readiness. Yet armed forces engaged in such reforms must solve a major dilemma: how to adapt to an uncertain future without losing their current identity, coherence or operational effectiveness.

In this incisive and timely study, Olivier Schmitt explores how modern militaries adapt, or fail to adapt, to evolving threats, technologies and political constraints. Drawing on global case-studies--from the trenches of Ukraine to the halls of the People's Liberation Army leadership--he investigates how social expectations, political constraints and organisational cultures collide in the worldwide quest to reform the military.

Essential reading for defence professionals, policymakers and scholars of international security, Preparing for War equips readers with the tools to grasp not only the 'how' but the 'why' behind military transformation. In an era of rising defence budgets and shrinking certainties, this book delivers crucial insights into the future of war--and the institutions that must be ready for it.

What have been the fundamental shifts in Japanese society over the past decade? And what has remained the same? What will the country look like in five years from now?

Introducing you to all aspects of Japanese society, culture, politics, economy, geography and history, this book guides you through the country's enduring features, recent trends and the most interesting areas of analysis:

- Gender roles, gender fluidity and LBGTQ identities: including coverage of singledom and the changing nature of family life
- Changing demographics: considering the impact of increased immigration from China and Vietnam coupled with a falling birth rate and declining indigenous population
- The current state of Japanese politics: analysing the dominance of the LDP and the legacy of Shinzo Abe
- Reflections on contemporary Japanese culture: discussing the politics of education, the role of the media and the online sphere, new social movements, environmentalism
- Trends in Japan's external relations: looking at the LDP's increased defence spending, the continued rise of China and Russia's war in Ukraine.

With case studies, the latest data and lively debate, Contemporary Japan is essential reading if you are studying any aspect of Japanese sociology, politics, history, culture or language, or if you are simply interested in learning more about the country.

This book offers a compelling re-examination of Mao Zedong's political authority, giving readers a clear understanding and full picture of Mao, the politics of his era and the political life of the CCP.

The widespread view holds that Mao was an authoritarian leader, enjoying what was called absolute leadership authority. This book reveals that in fact from the late 1950s onwards, the CCP leadership was deeply fractured, during a period when China's internal political and economic dynamics and its external existential conditions were very complex. By analysing four major interconnected challenges to Mao's governing decisions and leadership imposed by senior military leaders from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, the book introduces the concept of a braking mechanism within the CCP during Mao's era, preventing the newly created PRC and its resource distribution rules and patterns from collapse.

Including in-depth textual analysis of documentary sources while contributing to the debate about Mao's authority and political power, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of modern Chinese history and political science.

This book brings together leading African scholars to consider China's impact on Africa's political, economic, cultural, environmental, and social spaces.

China's power and influence on the African continent have increased exponentially in recent decades, providing a range of political and economic goods and services. African governments have opened their markets to Chinese goods and services and, in turn, allowed China easy access to their raw materials. This book asks whether the relationship is mutually beneficial or asymmetrical, with China at risk of becoming a new imperialist. Drawing together African scholars from at home and abroad, the book examines a range of Beijing-led activities and projects, and considers their impact on states and societies on the continent, and on their growth and development. Overall, the book presents a nuanced African perspective on the immediate and long-term implications of the Sino-African relationship.

Providing an important critical evaluation of China's programs and projects in Africa, this book will be an important resource for researchers of Africa-China relations and of global international relations more broadly.

Analyzing Hegel, Arendt and Amery's understanding of reconciliation and considering the role of victimhood in intergroup reconciliation, Nadler grapples with the threat of reignited conflict post resolution. He addresses social psychological research on promoting trusting relations between former adversaries and ameliorating conflict-related threats to their identities. Chapters consider how former enemies may cooperate to build trust, and the effects of truth commissions and public apologies on conciliatory tendencies. The book sheds light on real-world efforts to build trust and stable reconciled intergroup relations between former enemies. The book highlights remaining dilemmas in the study of post-conflict reconciliation.

This book is an essential resource for scholars and students of social psychology, political science, and sociology. It is also a beneficial read for professionals promoting ceasefires, and practitioners in governmental services and NGOs working towards an end to international and intra-societal unrest.

Examines how cyber espionage became an instrument of statecraft, shaped by the entanglements between states, hackers and tech companies that drive global instability.

Even the most elite hackers use common technologies to steal state secrets, which help intelligence agencies to catch them. Are these hackers simply reckless, or do their operations reveal something deeper about their nation-state patrons?

Over a globally interconnected Internet, nations must constantly toe the delicate line of maintaining stability--developing shared tech protocols that they themselves must also break, in order to spy. This is the paradox at the heart of cyber espionage: states need to cooperate if they are to compete. As the US and China vie for strategic advantage through a new form of statecraft in cyber space, an intensifying cat-and-mouse game makes cyber security more difficult, more expensive and more unpredictable for us all.

Full Stack Spies examines the dynamic, interdependent relationships that hackers, cyber defenders, tech giants and nation states forge, leverage and exploit to amass cyber power against a wide range of targets in geopolitics, global trade and finance, the armed forces, and critical infrastructure. But this jostling for cyber dominance makes spying online harder--and, more crucially, undermines long-term trust in cyber space, destabilising the foundations of digital societies.

'A remarkable story' - Arun Kundnani, author of The Muslims are Coming!

In 2003, 23-year-old Uzair Paracha was arrested by the US government and branded a terrorist. A Pakistani man living in New York, he was accused of providing 'material support' to al-Qaeda - a vague, catch-all charge invented in the chaotic aftermath of 9/11. He was offered a plea deal but refused, knowing he was innocent.

What followed was a nightmare: years in solitary confinement, a trial built on fear instead of facts, and a justice system determined to make an example of someone who they thought looked the part. Uzair's case wasn't an anomaly: it was the blueprint.

The Man Who Refused to Plead Guilty is more than one man's story: it's a stark reflection of the path the US chose after 9/11. A path that reached for demonisation before understanding, punishment before truth. Uzair Paracha's experience lays bare the human cost of a vengeful nation, how a heart filled with principle can find some small semblance of justice.

Drawing on insights from political science, international relations, history and philosophy, Esteve puts forward an innovative historical perspective on the environmental practices and discourses of the military. Chapters explore how, over the last decades, the civilian and military heads of defense organizations have been issuing a series of statements calling for armed forces to take greater account of environmental issues. He discusses this in light of the repeated denunciations of the ecological footprint of military activities and the environmental consequences of armed conflicts, revealing how the environment and climate change have been problematized within the defence sector.

This book is an essential resource for students and scholars of international relations, security studies, environmental studies and political science. It is also an important read for journalists, activists and policymakers interested in the environmental cost of war and the militarization of the environment.

This book explains how the rise of temperance life assurance affected ideas surrounding the dangers of drinking and abstinence between 1840 and 1918.

James Kneale examines how temperance life insurance - initially a speculative business venture - evolved into a social experiment that played a crucial role in persuading ordinary people, doctors, and insurance firms that abstaining from alcohol was safer than drinking it. Drawing from archival materials, Kneale analyses contemporary stories from teetotallers and high-street temperance businesses, and investigates the broader impact on 'temperance towns' such as Manchester, Exeter, and the settlements of the Pendle area.

By charting the evolution of the first temperance life assurance firm the UK Temperance and General Provident Institution (UKT) from its difficult beginnings, to being the eighth largest British life assurance firm by the 1890s, the author demonstrates to readers how quickly social attitudes surrounding teetotalism changed, and why.

A novel examination of interstate competition, considering how and why states employ proxies to perpetrate violence on their behalf.

Today's global security environment is characterised by great power contests. As we know from previous histories of strategic competition between states, such heightened rivalry routinely manifests in violence perpetrated by proxy forces-a dynamic intended either to avoid war, or to assist in its prosecution.

This book explores the use of proxies in arenas of international strategic competition characterised by force. It looks at why, where and when proxy warfare is waged, examining how states seek to employ proxies, to cajole them to act on their behalf, and then to ensure their compliance. Today, states wishing to avoid war, yet still to pursue competition, often turn to proxy warfare as an attractive low-cost option. This policy response is informed by history, from Europe's Napoleonic-era competition and the Great Game during the age of empire, to interwar competition in East Asia and, later in the twentieth century, the global Cold War.

Proxy warfare is not the preserve of major powers, but a tool of statecraft available to all. Andrew Maher illuminates current trends, deriving a strategic logic to the proxy wars that will continue to influence today's geopolitical competitions-and tomorrow's.

This collective work offers a critical analysis of contemporary humanitarian action, through the prism of Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders (MSF).

Initially created to provide healthcare to the most vulnerable populations in crisis-stricken countries, MSF has grown from just a few dozen members in 1971 to a movement of over 67,000 people with an annual budget of over 2 billion euros. But in today's rapidly evolving global landscape, many of the founding principles and myths surrounding its creation are questioned or undermined. The post-COVID era has been marked by a reinforcement or acceleration of pre-existing trends that continue to challenge the work of humanitarian organisations: restrictive, or indeed hostile, state policies; the presence of non-state actors in counter-terrorism contexts; questionable adherence to international humanitarian law. MSF must also address several key issues, such as combating discrimination, defining its position with regard to protest movements in countries of intervention, confronting challenges related to climate change and global health security, and safeguarding patients' personal data.

Drawing on the viewpoints of practitioners, analysts, and academics, this book will be an essential read for anyone engaged in or curious about humanitarian action.

This book investigates and compares two contemporary Israeli peace movements through the angle of collective emotions, and specifically of hope.

Drawing on empirical qualitative research combining interviews with Jewish and Arab-Palestinian activists and ethnographic work, the work provides unique documentation of the birth and development of Standing Together (a mixed-gender peace movement) and Women Wage Peace (a women's peace movement). It explores the meaning of hope for Israeli peace activists, and shows the concrete efforts that both movements undertake to trigger hope, as part of an intersectional peace politics and of a non-partisan women's peace politics, respectively. The book also engages with the post-October 2023 developments in the Middle East, showing how both peace movements, now followed by others in the Israeli peace camp, continue to invest in their politics of hope amid devastation, fatigue and fear. Offering a gendered typology of hope-related emotion work useful beyond the cases at hand, the book proposes that collective hope-based action, combined with other emotions, might be powerful in all contexts of despair and protracted conflicts.

This book will be of interest to students of peace and conflict studies, social and peace movements, gender studies, non-violent resistance, international relations and Israel-Palestine/Middle East.

This book presents the transformative framework of integral peace leadership, a holistic approach to challenging violence and aggression while building positive, just, and equitable systems and structures, and showcases stories of community peace leaders working to build sustainable, peaceful change around the world.

Integral Peace Leadership explores the four interconnected dimensions essential to peace leadership: Innerwork, the personal peace practices for growth and development; Knowledge, the interactive skills and engagement strategies; Community, the collaborative action and collective impact; and Environment, the navigation and transformation of systemic structures. Sixteen compelling narratives from peace leaders across Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Jammu and Kashmir, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Switzerland, and the United States show how this framework catalyzes meaningful change in diverse contexts. These authentic stories demonstrate how integral peace leadership moves from theory to practice, creating sustainable transformation in communities facing complex challenges.

Providing an accessible roadmap for those committed to creating a more just and peaceful world, this book is the ideal resource for both scholars seeking theoretical foundations and practitioners looking to implement peacebuilding strategies.

European NATO members face the dual challenge of Russia's military threat and the United States' expectations about significantly greater 'burden sharing', or even 'burden shifting', for Europe's defence. Their commitment at The Hague Summit in June 2025 to invest 5% of GDP in defence expenditure annually by 2035 acknowledged the need to develop a more sovereign European defence capability and reduce critical dependencies.

This IISS Strategic Dossier assesses the progress that has been made in building up NATO European defence capability. It analyses the critical 'hardware gaps' of most European NATO allies relating to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets, long-range strike systems and integrated air and missile defence.

The dossier examines European gaps in the software essential for modern military operations. Although the significant dependence on US providers of hyperscale cloud-computing capacity is unlikely to change soon, efforts by European armed forces to address their 'software gaps' have led to European companies developing significant expertise in edge cloud computing for advanced defence projects.

The volume discusses how European countries are looking to speed up procurement, including through legislative changes. Importantly, the trend towards prioritising equipment purchases from domestic or European suppliers continues. The dossier also assesses the prospects for European allies achieving NATO's new investment pledge.

This IISS Strategic Dossier was produced in the context of the IISS Prague Defence Summit (PDS) 2025, which has been supported by the government of the Czech Republic.

Foreign Intervention and Radicalization in Somalia: How and When Does Conflict Evolve into Violence (2001 -2009) analyzes political violence within a broader political context in which the mobilization of social movements takes place. The central focus of this book is to explain the social mechanisms through which the radicalization processes unfolded on the part of al-Shabaab between 2001 and 2009 in Somalia. H. Ibrahim Alegoez traces the intricate interactions of social mechanisms that gave rise to the steady escalation of more militant forms of conflict from a relational, dynamic, and process-oriented perspective.
The book offers an alternative approach to the existing models linking violence to ideological preferences, cultural templates, or ethnic and state-centric pathologies. Alegoez argues that historical and contentious political interactions play a crucial role in explaining violence. The author demonstrates how the interests of local, regional, and international actors have overlapped within the Global War on Terror framework. The book finds that radicalization dynamics have undergone two consecutive episodes of contentious social interactions that, at the onset, were related to the formation of the Mogadishu-based warlord alliance and escalated following the Ethiopian military intervention in Somalia. It prompted a power vacuum which allowed al-Shabaab to expand its tactical repertoire of action and modify its target preferences into a relatively institutionalized, aggressive, and clandestine character.

This book examines the nexus of environmental change and defence in the Arctic as a national and global security issue.

In an era dominated by a new range of threats and priorities, Gisele Arruda discusses the militarization process in the High North and explores how climate change is impacting the maritime, infrastructure and defence systems dynamics. Contextualizing the Arctic region as part of a global security geo-space, the book has a particular emphasis on the security and geopolitical implications to societies, the northern territories, coastal communities and maritime routes of Arctic states. It analyses recent NATO initiatives to build-up strategies in defence and the implementation of technology and innovation to advance regional and international cooperation. The final chapters present trends around environmental multilateralism and consolidate the analysis of all risk-factors related to the climate geopolitics. They also include a focused discussion on the development of new nuclear systems in the region and preparedness in case of a nuclear emergency.

This book will be of great interest to students, academics and researchers studying international relations, climate change, security and strategic studies, political geography and environmental studies more broadly.

In 2007, Martin Luther Agwai was deployed to Darfur as Force Commander of UNAMID, which, as the first African Union-UN hybrid mission, was to become the largest peacekeeping operation in the world. Four years earlier, Darfur had imploded, descending into violent conflicts. The international community - in the form of both activists and state actors - felt it could not remain uninvolved lest a genocide on the scale of Rwanda occurred. Despite such lofty intentions, UNAMID proved to be high on promise but low on commitment and delivery. Ultimately, it failed to address the conflicts taking place, much less build a sustainable peace.

Agwai provides unique insight into what went wrong in Darfur, and the myriad challenges facing international peacekeeping operations more generally. Crucially, he highlights the lack of multi-level cooperation between the people of Darfur and the intervening parties, and how the absence of a bottom-up approach to peacebuilding works against peace being both achieved and maintained.

Comparative in approach and organised around key themes, such as the media, political participation and elections, European Politics guides you through the political institutions, processes and issues that matter in Europe today. In this fifth edition, Tim Bale and new co-author Jens Meijen build on this well-established text to include extensive coverage of recent events and current political trends in Europe's fast-changing landscape.

With debating boxes, country profiles, up-to-date scholarship, data and examples, this textbook is the perfect companion for anyone who wants to develop their understanding of Europe's politics. It is suitable for use on Comparative European Politics and European Union Politics courses, as well as courses on Comparative Politics more broadly.

This new edition offers:
- More Central and Eastern European examples and case studies
- Updated coverage of recent events including the climate emergency, the cost of living crisis and rampant inflation, the ongoing fallout from Brexit, and Europe's response to the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia's war in Ukraine.
- Full analysis of the most pressing issues in Europe today, including sustainability, digitalization, disinformation, populism and citizen participation.

Accompanying resources for supporting teaching and learning can be found at www.bloomsburyonlineresources.com/european-politics-5e

This is the must-have introduction to the European Union. A primer on the EU's history, institutions, and politics, this brief and engaging textbook reviews the challenges and opportunities faced by the EU, from the democratic deficit and the potential of future enlargement to the spread of nationalism, the threats posed by a belligerent Russia, and the international shockwaves caused by the second Trump administration. In a rapidly changing world, understanding the personality and prospects of the European Union is now more important than ever before, and this popular text - in a fully revised new edition - provides a succinct and enlightening account of the EU's domestic and global impact.

The ideal guide for all undergraduate and postgraduate courses in political science, global affairs and European studies, it is also a valuable starting point for anyone seeking to learn about the EU.

New to this Edition:
- Chapter previews offer summaries designed to make content clearer and easier to approach
- Boxes from earlier editions have been re-organized thematically to ask critical questions about the EU, to give examples of the EU at work, and to make comparisons.
- A Glossary has been added to the end of the book that brings together key terms.
- Maps have been carefully and thoroughly revised to provide important visual references.
- Content has been updated to include coverage of the 2024 European Parliament elections and changes in the leadership of the major EU institutions.
- A thorough update has been made of changes in the global order, including the impact of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the evolving state of EU-China relations, and the effects on transatlantic trade and security of changes in US policy.

In this prescient Research Agenda leading experts explore emerging and future research in EU politics. Leading experts in the field analyse current trends in the EU, including digitalization and a change of paradigm in external foreign policies.

The book is framed within the context of the Green transition from an exponential growth based on fossil fuels to sustainable development using renewable energies, and how this shift has influenced key political shifts across Europe. Chapters explore a range of issues, including relationships with Russia, the EU's enlargement process, the shifting relationship of the institutional triangle and the growing securitization of migration and borders. The contributing authors also assess adjacent policies of the EU created through spillover effects, the EU's cyber policies as well as both the European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR) and the EUs Cohesion Policy.

In light of more than a decade of crises in the EU, this Research Agenda is a timely and vital resource for students and scholars of EU politics, international relations, security studies and political economy, and also an informative read for policymakers in these areas.