This book investigates the politicisation and framing of immigration in the media and political arena in Central Europe, examining two countries - Czechia and Slovakia - in the period surrounding the “European migrant crisis”. Following years of immigration being practically invisible as an issue in the socio-political debates in most Central and Eastern European countries, it became a key concern because of the crisis. Analyzing news media items and plenary speeches, this book reveals how securitisation eclipses humanitarian considerations, dominating the discourse around immigration and that media and politicians are the two most important intermediaries from which citizens take cues on issues they rarely experience directly themselves. Finally, it also shows how the media and political arena portray immigration differently based on the origin, religious background, and legal status of immigrants. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of migration studies, global governance, international organisations, security studies, and media studies, as well as more broadly for public law, comparative politics and East/Central European politics.

"This book investigates the politicisation and framing of immigration in the media and political arena in Central Europe, examining two countries - Czechia and Slovakia - in the period surrounding the "European migrant crisis". Following years of immigration being practically invisible as an issue in the socio-political debates in most Central and Eastern European countries, it became a key concern because of the crisis. Analyzing news media items and plenary speeches, this book reveals how securitisation eclipses humanitarian considerations, dominating the discourse around immigration and that media and politicians are the two most important intermediaries from which citizens take cues on issues they rarely experience directly themselves. Finally, it also shows how the media and political arena portray immigration differently based on the origin, religious background, and legal status of immigrants. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of migration studies, global governance, international organisations, security studies, and media studies, as well as more broadly for public law, comparative politics and East/Central European politics"--

This book explores how 21st-century media-based discourses on migrants, refugees, and displaced people both reinforce and reconfigure existing negative stereotypes about these groups as 'other.' It is particularly pertinent considering the increasingly polarized world context and the evolving communication ecosystem with new media as privileged platforms for exclusionary narratives toward the 'outgroups' of migrants, refugees, and displaced people. The book's contributions encompass various methodologies and disciplines within communication studies, including qualitative analyses of media representations and quantitative research on public opinion. Unlike much of the existing English-language scholarship on these marginalized communities, this book de-centers North America and the UK to offer a global perspective focusing on regions such as continental and eastern Europe, the Middle East and Persian Gulf, India, China, Turkey, Russia, and Scandinavia. Rui Alexandre Novais is Professor and Researcher at the Centre for Philosophical and Humanistic Studies (CEFH) of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa (Portugal). Carlos Arcila Calderón is an Associate Professor and member of the Observatory of Audiovisual Contents (OCA) of the University of Salamanca (Spain).

EU Trade Agreements and European Integration studies 50 bilateral trade agreements negotiated by the European Commission from 1970–2008 and how they shaped European integration. The book argues that the Commission used these trade agreements, signed primarily with countries in Asia and Latin America, to advance European integration by ensuring that they became wider in scope and institutionally deeper by establishing ‘joint bodies’ – even in the face of resistance from member states in the Council of the European Union. Drawing upon principal–agent theory to explain Commission autonomy and Council control as well as extensive archival material and other sources across six in-depth case studies, it shows that the Commission primarily relied on asymmetric information to shape trade agreements in earlier negotiations. In later negotiations, the Commission harnessed its agenda-setting power to submit agreements that the Council could only accept or reject. Overall, the book argues that these 50 trade agreements significantly impacted European integration by increasing the Commission’s external action capability, transforming it into a truly global political actor – one trade agreement at a time. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of European Union Studies and EU policy making, practitioners involved in trade and external relations, and engaged citizens in Europe and abroad, particularly in India, which is prominently featured in the book.

This book examines EU and US bilateral trade and investment relations with China, their attempts to level the economic playing field and to narrow the ‘reciprocity gap’ in market openness. It explores the extent of EU and US policy change, the underlying factors accounting for this change and compares EU and US foreign economic policy answers to an adversary increasingly perceived as an unfair economic competitor and as a systemic rival. The book covers a broad range of policy areas from ‘trade wars’, trade defense instruments, their reform and use, investment screening, and export control to industrial policies. It makes eclectic use of different strands of International Relations, International Political Economy and Policy Analysis theorizing to account for the extent of, and differences in, the EU and US responses. The People’s Republic of China’s stellar economic and political rise combined with the resilience of its unfair trade practices, its reinforced authoritarian repression at home and its ever more assertive foreign (economic) policy has triggered a shift in perceptions of China, followed by equally profound policy change in the European Union and the US. This book expertly charts and explains this significant shift in stance. This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners in the fields of EU trade policymaking, US foreign/ foreign economic policy, EU-China-US economic relations, European political economy, and more broadly to European studies, Asian studies, International Relations, International Political Economy, and transatlantic relations.

This edited volume focuses on various forms of regionalism and neighborhoods in the Baltic-Black Sea area. In the light of current reshaping of borderlands and new geopolitical and military confrontations in Europe’s eastern margins, such as the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas, this book analyzes different types and modalities of regional integration and region-making from a comparative perspective. It conceptualizes cooperative and conflictual encounters as a series of networks and patchworks that differently link and relate major actors to each other and thus shape these interconnections as domains of inclusion and exclusion, bordering and debordering, securitization and desecuritization. This peculiar combination of geopolitics, ethnopolitics and biopolitics makes the Baltic-Black Sea trans-national region a source of inspiring policy practices, and, in the light of new security risks, a matter of increased concern all over Europe. The contributors from various disciplines cover topics such as cultural and civilizational spaces of belonging and identity politics, the rise of right-wing populism, region building under the condition of multiple security pressures, and the influence and regional strategies of different external powers, including the EU, Russia, and Turkey, on cross- and trans-regional relations in the area.

As a Slavic-speaking religious and ethnic “Other” living just a stone’s throw from the symbolic heart of the continent, the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina have long occupied a liminal space in the European imagination. To a significant degree, the wider representations and perceptions of this population can be traced to the reports of Central European—and especially Habsburg—diplomats, scholars, journalists, tourists, and other observers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This volume assembles contributions from historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and literary scholars to examine the political, social, and discursive dimensions of Bosnian Muslims’ encounters with the West since the nineteenth century.

A study of migration tides which explores political and economic factors that have influenced immigration in post-war Europe and the USA. It seeks to explain immigration in terms of the globalization of labour markets and the expansion of civil rights for marginal groups in liberal democracies.

Race Discrimination and Management of Ethnic Diversity and Migration at Work analyses nine countries’ perspectives on Diversity Management and their increasing awareness of diversity, equality, racism and discrimination within companies and organisations throughout Europe.