How do people seek security in relation to their sense of 'who they are'? How can one make sense of insecurity at the intersection of competing identity claims? Based on the voices of Mayan women, Stern critically re-considers the connections between security, subjectivity and identity. By engaging in a careful reading of how Mayan women 'speak' security in relation to the different contexts that inform their lives, she explores the multiplicity of both identity and security, and questions the main story of security imbedded in the modern 'paradox of sovereignty.' Her provocative analysis...

In the wake of 9/11, the Asian crisis and the 2004 tsunami, traditional analytical frameworks are increasingly unable to explain how individuals and communities are rendered insecure, or advance individual, global or environmental security. In the Asia-Pacific, the accepted wisdom of realism has meant that analyses rarely move beyond the statist, militarist and exclusionary assumptions that underpin traditional realpolitik. This innovative new book challenges these limitations and addresses the missing problems, people and vulnerabilities of the Asia-Pacific region. It also turns a critical...

Developed through a series of encounters with a Bosnian Serb soldier, The ethics of researching war is a meditation on the possibilities and limitations of responding to the extreme violence of the Bosnian war. The book explores the ethics of confronting the war criminal and investigates the possibility of responsibility not just to victims of war and war crimes, but also to the perpetrators of violence. As such, The ethics of researching war is a consideration of the human encounter, exploring the political and scholarly strategies through which the 'human' is often dismissed as 'inhuman'....

State-building intervention in weak, war-torn or failing states has become a priority for the international community. However, the question of how to legitimately engage in the shaping of national governance remains, at the very least, a vexed one.
This book explores this key issue through a critical examination of a new model of state-building intervention which has recently emerged in relation to the Pacific 'arc of crisis'. Initiated by the Australian Government in 2003, this 'cooperative intervention' doctrine, built on declared principles of partnership and respect for sovereignty,...

This book, newly available in paperback, argues for greater openness in the ways we approach human rights and international rights promotion, and in so doing brings some new understanding to old debates. Starting with the realities of abuse rather than the liberal architecture of rights, it casts human rights as a language for probing the political dimensions of suffering. Seen in this context, the predominant Western models of rights generate a substantial but also problematic and not always emancipatory array of practices. These models are far from answering the questions about the nature...

Based on geo -- and biopolitical analyses, this book reconsiders how security policies and practices legitimate state and non-state violence in the Colombian conflict. Using the case study of the official Democratic Security Policy (DSP), Echavarria examines how security discourses write the political identities of state, self and others. She claims that the DSP delimits politics, the political, and the imaginaries of peace and war through conditioning the possibilities for identity formation. "In/security in Colombia" offers an innovative application of a large theoretical framework on the...

Since the end of the Cold War, and particularly in the post-9/11 international environment, neutrality has been conceptualised as a problematic subject. With the end of bipolarity, neutrality as a foreign and security policy lost much of its justification, and in the ongoing 'War on Terror', no state, according to the Bush Administration, can be neutral. However, much of this debate has gone unnoticed in IR literature. This book, newly available in paperback, examines the conceptualisation of neutrality from the Peloponnesian War to the present day, uncovering how neutrality has been a...

In 2005, twelve political cartoons of the Islamic prophet Mohammed sparked international waves of protest and violence. What troubled many people about these provocative images was the anti-Islamic sentiment they purportedly exposed. Satire and polysemous symbolism have long made political cartoons safe havens for extreme opinion and unfounded accusation. It would be easy to dismiss the Danish cartoon controversy as a gross overreaction to a few offensive images until one considers that many Jews in Nazi Germany or Tutsis in Rwanda dismissed the seriousness of political cartoons that...

This book is a timely analysis of the securitisation of Islam in the US and an original contribution to securitisation theory by introducing the notion of 'indirect securitising speech acts' and the role of emotions and affect in securitisation studies. It is an innovative approach to Islamophobia, everyday racism and security. -- .

Analysing primary textual, audio and video data, this book argues that Islamist organisations in Germany and the UK perform collective emotions in and through narrative when turning to political violence. The book offers a provocative account departing from conventional interpretations of radicalisation and reminds us of the power of emotions. -- .