The Lord of the Rings trilogy sheds light on issues of real-world international relations

This book uses several fantasy movies or movie series and television series to explain political and international relations (IR) concepts and theories. It begins with an overview of the importance of fantasy in literature, film and television, and its increasing impact on the field of International Relations. It then presents the political, IR, and social issues in each franchise, and in five chapters uses these tales’ key story arcs or plot points to illustrate major political and IR themes. The volume pays particular attention to such fantasy franchises as Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, the Harry Potter films, recent fairytale and children’s stories, and female-led fantasy projects.

This comprehensive guide captures important trends in international relations (IR) pedagogy, paying particular attention to innovations in active learning and student engagement for the contemporary International Relations IR classroom.

Feminist International Relations scholarship in the United States recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. Over those years, feminist researchers have made substantial progress concerning the question of how gender matters in global politics, global economics, and global culture. The progress has been noted both in the academic field of international relations and, increasingly, in the policy world. Celebrating these achievements, this book constructs conversations about the history, present state of, and future of feminist International Relations as a field across subfields of IR, continents, and generations of scholars. Providing an overview and assessment of what it means to "gender" IR in the 21st century, the volume has a unique format: it features a series of intellectual conversations, presenting cutting-edge research in the field, with provocative comments from senior scholars. It examines issues including global governance, the United Nations, war, peace, security, science, beauty, and human rights and addresses key questions including: What does viewing the diverse problems of global politics through gendered lenses look like in the 21st Century? How do feminisms accommodate differences in culture, race, and religion? How do feminist theoretical and policy analyses fit together? These conversations about feminist IR are accessible to non-specialist audiences and will be of interest to students and scholars of Gender Studies, Feminist Politics and International Relations.

This exciting new textbook challenges the implicit notions inherent in most existing International Relations (IR) scholarship and instead presents the subject as seen from different vantage points in the global South. Divided into four sections, (1) the IR discipline, (2) key concepts and categories, (3) global issues and (4) IR futures, it examines the ways in which world politics have been addressed by traditional core approaches and explores the limitations of these treatments for understanding both Southern and Northern experiences of the "international." The book encourages readers to consider how key ideas have been developed in the discipline, and through systematic interventions by contributors from around the globe, aims at both transforming and enriching the dominant terms of scholarly debate. This empowering, critical and reflexive tool for thinking about the diversity of experiences of international relations and for placing them front and center in the classroom will help professors and students in both the global North and the global South envision the world differently. In addition to general, introductory IR courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels it will appeal to courses on sociology and historiography of knowledge, globalization, neoliberalism, security, the state, imperialism and international political economy.

In nine essays originating from the running Miami International Relations Group seminar, the editors and contributors introduce constructivism as an alternative to studying IR from a historical and systems' analytical framework. They advance constructivism in the context of the perennial agent-structure debate; discuss international relations under social construction (as in national identity, feminist struggle, and global Internet governance), and reconstructing the discipline. Paper edition (unseen), $22.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Martin Wight's tradition of the three R (realism - rationalism - revolutionism) is one of the central aspects that help to understand the approach of the English School of International Relations. And Hedley Bull is one of the central figures who picked up and continued Wight's ideas. While in the beginning of his academic work Bull was supporting rationalism combined with realist ideas he later turned to a more revolutionist-inspired (but still rationalist) approach focusing on individual and human rights. He therefore put individual interests rather than interests of states in the center of his attention. This paper analysis the different aspects of these two approaches to international society (pluralism and solidarism) and also the question why Bull changed from a realist-inspired pluralist to a revolutionist-inspired solidarist.

Benedikt Franke assesses the peace and security architecture that is taking shape under the nominal leadership of the African Union, analysing the emerging structures and trends and also rethinking prevailing notions and theoretical assumptions about interstate security relations.