This study focuses on the relationship between the government and central banks in Britain and France. It begins by addressing the question of how and to what extent governments have influenced the policy-making process and asks what freedom central banks have had. It then explores the relationship between the British government and the Bank of England since 1694, and between the French government and the Bank of France since 1800. The study finds that the relationships have varied greatly over time and has become increasingly complex.

The concepts of agency and structure are of increasing and defining importance to international relations and politics as fields of enquiry and knowledge. This is the first book to explore the two concepts in depth in that context.
The agent-structure problem refers to questions concerning the interrelationship of agency and structure, and to the ways in which explanations of social phenomena integrate and account for them. This is an important contribution to the study of international relations and politics.

The author argues for a revised conception of international relations that acknowledges the irreconcilability of realist and idealist theories, and concerns itself instead with important substantive issues.

Henrik Larsen presents discourse analysis as an alternative approach to foreign policy analysis. Through an extensive empirical study of British and French policies towards Europe in the 1980s, he demonstrates the importance of political discourse in shaping foreign policy.
The author discusses key theoretical problems within traditional belief system approaches and proposes an alternative one: political discourse analysis. The theory is illustrated through detailed analyses of British and French discourses on Europe, nation/state security and the nature of international relations.

This book is a major contribution to the debate about philosophy and method in history and international relations. The author analyses IR scholarship from classical realism to quantitative and postmodern work.

This book tackles the issues involved and explores strategies to deal with many of the problems of establishing equivalence. Each contribution focuses on a theoretically relevant theme, such as: tolerance; political values; religious orientations; gender roles; voluntary associations; party organizations and party positions; democratic regimes, and the mass media. Each chapter covers different topics, methods, data and countries, making use of research to show the problems of finding similar or identical indicators in realistic research settings.

This text explores the controversial concept that has evolved from diplomatic peacekeeping and military peace-enforcement. Jarat Chopra, the architect of Peace-Maintenance, outlines the limitations of traditional peacekeeping principles reliant on the increasingly questionable consent of belligerents. He traces the evolution of the political, administrative, legal and judicial ingredients of international authority and draws on his extensive experience of peace operations with the United Nations. He uses many examples to illustrate the context and evolution of Peace-Maintenance, including...

Globalisation is widely understood as a set of processes driven by technological, economic and cultural change. Few have successfully defined the changing character and role of politics in global change. Political institutions such as the nation-state have been seen as undermined by globalisation, or needing to respond to it. This book clarifies the tensions which global change has provoked in our understanding of politics. Politics and Globalisation suggests that globalisation is a process which is politically contested and even politically constituted. The volume presents five key...

The information flow about crises and conflicts is highly selective, the media only focus on a few major conflicts at a time. Many conflicts are neglected, others soon forgotten after the fighting ends. This book fills the gaps and offers a systematic overview of all crises and conflicts in and among states since 1945 and traces the global trends of conflict development.
Based on the broad empirical basis of the Conflict Simulation Model KOSIMO, Pfetsch and Rohloff use an integrated approach to cover many forms and types of political conflicts, both peaceful and violent.

This work critically explores contemporary liberal international relations theory. In the fifty years since the declaration of human rights, the language of international relations has come to incorporate the language of justice and injustice. The book argues that if justice is to become the governing principle of international politics, then liberals must recognize that their political preferences cannot be the preconditions of global ethics. The hierarchy of international political ethics must be constructed afresh so that the first principles of justice are accessible to all agents as...