term.subject="Political stability"

Summary: "This book addresses a prime challenge facing the international community: how to address governance gaps in fragile states. When governments fail to provide law and order and other basic public services, their citizens suffer, and threats to international security can emerge. Ordinary foreign aid programs are often insufficient remedies. A remarkable alternative therefore has arisen in which international and national actors share authority to carry out core sovereign tasks. This type of "sovereignty sharing" is controversial and challenging but is an important way in which the United Nations and other key global actors have sought to bolster governance in troubled polities. I examine sovereignty-sharing arrangements designed to repair ruptures in the rule of law-the heart of a well-governed state. I discuss both the conditions under which sovereignty may be justified and the conditions under which joint ventures are likely to be effective in meeting their aims. A central argument in the book is that these two questions are closely related, because the perceived legitimacy of a sovereignty-sharing venture hinges primarily on its performance. Sovereignty sharing carries important positive potential as a way to provide stopgap governance services and to help strengthen and reform ailing local institutions. It can pair international resources and expertise with local knowledge and ownership. Thriving partnerships can deliver better public services, earn popular legitimacy, and foster capacity building and domestic institutional reform. However, the dangers of sovereignty-sharing arrangements are equally apparent. This book illuminates the political factors that shape the creation, design, and implementation of sovereignty-sharing arrangements-and thus their performance and perceived legitimacy--above all on how the convergence or divergence of national and international interests shape these exceptional ventures. Sovereignty sharing is usually based on precarious political foundations, as the partners seldom share a common vision for governance. To accommodate differences, sovereignty-sharing arrangements are usually rooted in ambiguous agreements that contribute to confusion and discord during implementation. In particular, the partners' interests tend to diverge on matters of domestic institutional reform. As a result, while sovereignty-sharing schemes often have made important contributions through stopgap service provision, their record is much weaker on embedding reform. This book illustrates these arguments by examining sovereignty-sharing arrangements in three key domains: hybrid criminal tribunals, joint policing arrangements, and anti-corruption initiatives. Within each area, I touch on the universe of relevant cases and discuss the most important ventures in depth. These include cases from Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Lebanon, Timor-Leste, Guatemala, and Liberia. The diversity of these case studies helps to show the broad relevance of the book's arguments"

Summary: "In this book Erica De Bruin shows that how rulers design and organize their coercive institutions affects the survival of their regimes. Balancing the military with republican guards, secret police, and militia makes attempts to oust rulers more likely to fail. However, counterbalancing carries risks. When forces outside the regular military chain of command compete for arms and recruits, resentment among military officers can provoke coup attempts even as counterbalancing creates obstacles to a coup's execution."

Summary: "State fragility is a much-debated yet underinvestigated concept in the development and international security worlds. Based on years of research as part of the Country Indicators for Foreign Policy project at Carleton University, Exiting the Fragility Trap marks a major step toward remedying the lack of research into the so-called fragility trap. In examining the nature and dynamics of state transitions in fragile contexts, with a special emphasis on states that are trapped in fragility, David Carment and Yiagadeesen Samy ask three questions: Why do some states remain stuck in a fragility trap? What lessons can we learn from those states that have successfully transitioned from fragility to stability and resilience? And how can third-party interventions support fragile state transitions toward resilience? Carment and Samy consider fragility's evolution in three state types: countries that are trapped, countries that move in and out of fragility, and countries that have exited fragility. Large-sample empirical analysis and six comparative case studies-Pakistan and Yemen (trapped countries), Mali and Laos (in and out countries), and Bangladesh and Mozambique (exited countries)-drive their investigation, which breaks ground toward a new understanding of why some countries fail to see sustained progress over time"

Summary: Why do seemingly rational states become paranoid and delusional? The encrypted state engages in a close analysis of political disorder to better understand political stability. David Nugent focuses on a crisis of rule in twentieth-century Peru, when officials believed they had lost the ability to govern and communicated in secret code to protect themselves from imaginary subversives. The encrypted state employs the notion of sacropolitics - the politics of mass group sacrifice - to make sense of this plague of dark fantasies. Nugent explores the role of state structures and everyday cultural practices in generating state delusion. He also investigates the part affect and imagination play in producing government paranoia. This book sheds important new light on the forces that variously promote or undermine organized political subjection

Summary: "This study investigates power, belonging and exclusion in British society by analysing representations of the mosque, the University of Oxford, and the plantation in novels by Leila Aboulela, Robin Yassin-Kassab, Diran Adebayo, David Dabydeen, Andrea Levy, and Bernardine Evaristo. Lisa Ahrens combines Foucault's theory of heterotopia with elements of Wolfgang Iser's reader-response theory to work out Black British and British Muslim literature's potential for destabilising exclusionary boundaries. In this way, new perspectives open up on the intersections between space, power and literature, intertwining and enriching the discourses of Cultural and Literary Studies."

Summary: What impact does 40 years of war, violence, and military intervention have on a country and its people? Modern Afghanistan is a collection of the work of interdisciplinary scholars, aid workers, and citizens to assess the impact of this prolonged conflict on Afghanistan. Nearly all of the people in Afghan society have been affected by persistent violent conflict. The book focuses on social and political dynamics, issues of gender, and the shifting relationships between tribal, sectarian, and regional communities. Contributors consider topics ranging from masculinity among the Afghan Pashtun to services offered for the disabled, and from Taliban extremism to the role of TV in the Afghan culture wars. Prioritizing the perspective and experiences of the people of Afghanistan, new insights are shared into the lives of those who are hoping to build a secure future on the rubble of a violent past

Summary: During the Cold War, the superpowers shared a conception of strategic stability. It was for coexistence and a status quo frozen in place by the calculus of mutually assured destruction from nuclear weapons. In short, nuclear weapons promoted great-power peace. The United States made and continues to make its decisions about changes to force posture, risk of escalation, and prospects for arms control with strategic stability in mind. But today's international system is complicated by regional rivalries, rising states, more nuclear powers, asymmetric warfare, and non-state actors. The purpose of this book is to unpack and examine how different states view strategic stability, the use or non-use of nuclear weapons, and whether or not strategic stability is still a useful concept. The contributors to this book examine current and potential nuclear powers including the United States, Russia, China, India, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. This book makes an important contribution toward understanding how nuclear weapons will impact the international system in the twenty-first century

Summary: There are links between food security and political stability as was evident during the world food crisis of 2007-08. Food riots were witnessed in a number of countries contributing to political instability. There are a number of dimensions to the problem of food insecurity in Tajikistan. This book is an attempt to fill the academic void on Tajikistan, especially pertaining to its food security. This work traces the history of agriculture and food production in Tajikistan from the mid-19th century when it came under Russian rule. From its inception, Tajikistan has been facing the 'geographic handicap' as it is a mountainous country and only 7 percent of the total land is arable which limits its food production. This book is a detailed study of how Soviet economic geography introduced intensive cotton cultivation in Tajikistan at the expense of food crops. Soviet economic planners felt that a region with a hot climate and large water resources should not attempt to grow grains but cotton. In the contemporary context, this book focuses on how the state and international actors have responded to the food insecurity in Tajikistan. Most importantly, the book also analyses the relationship between food security and political stability in Tajikistan

Summary: Despite support from Western states and international organizations, many postcolonial African states are far from being stable. This book uses a multidisciplinary approach with a theoretical ground from which the author explores the notions of structures and agents, how they affect the instability of states, and how stability can be achieved