In this first comprehensive analysis of state organized crime from the perspective of international law, Decoeur discusses how international law can and should be used to tackle state organized crime and argues for the development of international legal mechanisms specifically designed to address this issue.

This book explores Sino-Indian tensions from the angle of state-building, showing how they stem from their competition for the Himalayan people's allegiance.

This book investigates the political legacy of colonialism in contemporary African institutions. Using the case study of electoral and justice institutions in post-colonial Zimbabwe, the book explores how those in post-colonial states relate to and with institutions initially designed to oppress them and remain structurally and systematically colonial. The book argues that the colonial era colonised the land, knowledge, and minds of Africans, resulting in injustice and epistemicides. The book demonstrates how the critical institutions of elections and justice have been rendered anti-black and toxic. The book calls for Africa to invest in epistemic independence, unencumbered by Western political modernity, and then deploy that independence to build reconstituted institutions, structures, and systems that serve the interests of Africans. This book will be an important read for African policymakers and researchers working on African politics, governance, and international relations.

Challenging the traditional notion that state officials act autonomously in formulating and implementing international policy, the contributors to this volume argue that the influence of organized business groups has been consistently underestimated in recent decades. Each uses a "business conflict" model of state-society relations as a new paradig

By drawing on her extensive fieldwork in India and on the adjacent theoretical literature, Barbara Harriss-White describes the working of the Indian economy through its most important social structures of accumulation. Successive chapters explore a range of topics including labour, capital, the state, gender, religious plurality, caste and space. Despite the complexity of the subject, the book is vivid and compelling. The author's intimate knowledge of the country enables the reader to experience the Indian local scene and to engage with the precariousness of daily life. Her conclusion challenges the prevailing notion that liberalisation releases the economy from political interference and leads to a postscript on the economic base for fascism in India. This is an intelligent book, first published in 2002, by a distinguished scholar, for students of economics, as well as for those studying the region.

Organised civil society in Greece is generally regarded as weak with rankings for associational density, volunteerism and levels of social capital traditionally among the lowest in Europe. Austerity and the Third Sector in Greece explores the context behind the statistics and general perceptions of a society of takers, not givers. Stereotypes of a country living beyond its means have been exacerbated by the Eurozone crisis but, since 2008, there has in fact been a great proliferation of organised civil society initiatives in the country. Has the financial crisis seen a belated awakening of Greek civil society? Offering a broad overview of contemporary civil society in Greece this book explores how various characteristics of the country's socio-political context have affected the development of the third sector and examines the effect of the economic crisis on it. Expert contributors combine macro-level analyses with local case studies to form a fascinating new study on the influences of national and regional context on civil society development. Their findings provide not only for a better understanding of similar movements, but also contribute to wider academic debates on societal responses to economic crises.

This book offers a bold, ground-breaking epistemological critique of the dominant discourses on African conflicts. Based on a painstaking study of the ways in which the Sierra Leone civil war has been interpreted, it considers how Africa is constructed as a site of knowledge and the implications that this has for the continent and its people.

Stemming from an international and multidisciplinary network of leading specialists, this best-selling text is fully updated with new chapter additions. With the first edition prepared at the end of the last century and the second edition adding inter-regional relations, this new edition focuses on competing models of regional cooperation within a multipolar world and the role of European Union. This new edition offers: - A comparative analysis of regional cooperation and of both US-centred and EU-centred interregionalism. - A fresh exploration of key issues of regionalism versus globalization and the potential for world economic and political governance through regional cooperation, notably in hard times. - A vigorous response to conventional wisdom on the controversial EU international identity - An appendix on regional and interregional organizations. - A key resource for postgraduate or undergraduate study and research of international relations, European integration studies, comparative politics and international political economy. Taking into account both the expanded European Union and regional cooperation in every continent, this multidisciplinary volume comprises contributions from established scholars in the field: A. Gamble, P. Padoan, G. Joffé, G. Therborn, Th. Meyer, R. Higgott, B. Hettne / F. Ponjaert, F. Soederbaum, Ch. Deblock, K. Eliassen / A. Arnottir, S. Keukeleire / I. Petrova, S. Santander and M. Telò (editor).

'Resilience' has become one of the first fully fledged academic and political buzzwords of the 21st century. Within this context, Geoffrey DeVerteuil proposes a more critically engaged and conceptually robust version, applying it to the conspicuous but now residual clusters of inner-city voluntary sector organisations deemed ‘service hubs’. The process of resilience is compared across ten service hubs in three complex but different global inner-city regions – London, Los Angeles and Sydney – in response to the threat of gentrification-induced displacement. DeVerteuil shows that resilience can be about holding on to previous gains but also about holding out for transformation. The book is the first to move beyond theoretical works on ‘resilience’ and offers a combined conceptual and empirical approach that will interest urban geographers, social planners and researchers in the voluntary sector.

This volume identifies the economic and social factors underlying the perpetuation of civil wars, exploring as well the economic incentives and disencentives available to international actors seeking to restore peace to war-torn societies. The authors consider the economic rationality of conflict for beligerents, the economic strategies that elites use to sustain their positions, and in what situations elites find war to be more profitable than peace.