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 neglected and misunderstood subject in IR theory and politics. By rethinking neutrality through constructivism, this book argues that neutrality is intrinsically linked to identity. Using Sweden as a case study, it links identity, sovereignty, internationalism and solidarity to the debates about Swedish neutrality today and how neutrality has been central to Swedish identity and its world-view.

This book offers a timely and concise academic and historical background to the concept and practice of neutrality, a relatively new phenomenon in foreign and security policy. It approaches two key questions: under what circumstances can permanent neutrality be applied, and what are the main ingredients of success and the causes of failure in applying permanent neutrality? By evaluating, comparing, and contrasting the two successful European case studies of Austria and Switzerland and the two challenging Asian case studies of Afghanistan and Laos, the author creates a new framework of analysis to explore the feasibility of reframing, adopting, and applying a policy of neutrality and jump start debates on the feasibility of the idea of “new neutrality”. He opens the debate by asking whether, as neutrality successfully functioned as a conflict resolution tool during the Cold War, a reframed and adopted version of neutrality could also serve the needs of the twenty-first-century world order. This is an insightful book for all scholars, students, and policymakers workingin international relations, security studies, the history of neutrality, and Afghanistan studies.

Intervention and State-Building in the Pacific explores state-building intervention in weak, war-torn, or failing states through a critical examination of a new model that 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--seems to offer a legitimate way to engage in state-building intervention. Drawing on a group of distinguished Pacific specialists, this book mounts a critique of these claims, showing how international legitimacy does not automatically translate into political legitimacy among those in the affected societies and how the attempt to legitimize the intervention internationally may actually work against such legitimacy in the recipient state.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 287-314) index.

Across and beyond Europe, history is being rewritten in the wake of the Cold War's dissolution. An example of this process is the re-evaluation of the part played by resistance movements during World War II in country after country. This book deals with the role of myth and memory in the formation of collective identities with a particular emphasis on national identities. Myth and memory should not be seen as clearly demarcated from history. They are history in ceaseless transformation and reconstruction, the image of the past is continuously reconsidered and reconstituted in the light of an everchanging present. History is an interpretation of the past; not the past as it really was. The key question of this book concerns the role myth and memory play in the construction of communities, and what the distinction between collective myth and memory signifies. The discussion of this question is undertaken in theoretically oriented chapters as well as 15 case studies of national patterns from Scandinavia in the north to Italy and Israel in the south, and from the USA in the west to Russia in the east, as well as local community constructions in working-class districts in Glasgow and Roubaix and the national politics of architecture in Berlin and Rome. This book appears within the framework of a research project on the cultural construction of community in modernisation processes in comparison. This project is a joint enterprise of the European University Institute in Florence and the Humboldt University in Berlin sponsored by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Fund.

Since the end of the Cold War, and particularly in the post-9/11 international environment, neutrality has been conceptualized 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 conceptualization of neutrality from the Peloponnesian War to the present day, uncovering how neutrality has been a neglected and misunderstood subject in IR theory and politics. By rethinking neutrality through constructivism, this book argues that neutrality is intrinsically linked to identity. Using Sweden as a case study, it links identity, sovereignty, internationalism, and solidarity to the debates about Swedish neutrality today and how neutrality has been central to Swedish identity and its world-view.

Reviews are an important aspect of scholarly discussion because they help filter out which works are relevant in the yearly flood of publications and are thus influential in determining how a work is received. The IBR, published again since 1971 as an interdisciplinary, international bibliography of reviews, it is a unique source of bibliographical information. The database contains entries on over 1.2 million book reviews of literature dealing primarily with the humanities and social sciences published in 6,820, mainly European scholarly journals. Reviews of more than 560,000 scholarly works are listed. The database increases every year by 60,000 entries. Every entry contains the following information: On the work reviewed: author, title On the review: reviewer, periodical (year, edition, page, ISSN), language, subject area (in German, English, Italian) Publisher, address of journal