An enlightening look at contemporary border tensions—from the Gaza Strip to the space race—by one of the world's leading experts in geopolitics.Border expert Klaus Dodds journeys into the geopolitical clashes of tomorrow in an eye-opening tour of border walls both literal and figurative. In the Himalayas, the Mediterranean, and elsewhere, the tension inherent to trying to divide the world into separate parcels has not gone away. And with climate change shifting our ...

Taken for granted as the natural order of things, peace at sea is in fact an immense and recent achievement—but also an enormous strategic challenge if it is to be maintained in the future. In Maritime Strategy and Global Order, an international roster of top scholars offers historical perspectives and contemporary analysis to explore the role of naval power and maritime trade in creating the international system.The book begins in the early days of the industrial revoluti...

Geopolitics is a way of looking at the world: one that considers the links between political power, geography, and cultural diversity. In certain places such as Iraq or Lebanon, moving a few feet either side of a territorial boundary can be a matter of life or death, dramatically highlighting the connections between place and politics. Even far away from these 'danger zones' - in Europe or the US for example - geopolitics remains an important part of everyday life. For a country's location an...

Conversations defining the Arctic region often provoke debate and controversy -- for scientists, this lies in the imprecise and imaginary line known as the Arctic Circle; for countries like Canada, Russia, the United States, and Denmark, such discussions are based in competition for land and resources; for indigenous communities, those discussions are also rooted in issues of rights. These shifting lines are only made murkier by the threat of global climate change. In the Arctic Ocean, the...

The Antarctic is one the most hostile natural environments in the world. It is an extraordinary physical space, which changes significantly in shape and size with the passing of the seasons. Politically, it is unique as it contains one of the few areas of continental space not claimed by any nation-state. Scientifically, the continental ice sheet has provided us with vital evidence about the Earth's past climate. In this Very Short Introduction, Klaus Dodds provides a modern accou...

Geopolitics is a slippery term. From great power politics and speculation about resource scrambles, to everyday encounters and objects such as smart phones, it affects citizens, corporations, international bodies, social movements, and governments. Geopolitics is far more than simply the impact of geographical features such as rivers, mountains, and climate on political developments. Geography matters but not necessarily in the way that pundits and presidents assume. In this Very Short...

Global James Bond: (Re) Imagining and Transplanting a Popular Culture Icon focuses on the ambivalent yet fascinating interplay between the global and the local in the longest running film franchise in history. It explores how James Bond established itself as a global standard for action-spy film making and even as a minor global cinema (i.e. imagining), and hot the franchise subsequently inspired a series of genre bending, blending, and breaking in local visual and some literary c...

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring The Arctic is demanding global attention. It is warming, melting, and thawing in a manner that threatens fundamental state-change. For communities that call the Arctic 'home' this is unwelcome. A warming Arctic brings with it the spectre of costly disruption and interference in indigenous lives and communal welfare. For others, the disappearance of sea ice makes the Arctic appear more accessible and less remote...

Ice humanities is a pioneering collection of essays that tackles the existential crisis posed by the planet's diminishing ice reserves. By the end of this century, we will likely be facing a world where sea ice no longer reliably forms in large areas of the Arctic Ocean, where glaciers have not just retreated but disappeared, where ice sheets collapse, and where permafrost is far from permanent. The ramifications of such change are not simply geophysical and biochemical. They are ...

Conversations defining the Arctic region often provoke debate and controversy -- for scientists, this lies in the imprecise and imaginary line known as the Arctic Circle; for countries like Canada, Russia, the United States, and Denmark, such discussions are based in competition for land and resources; for indigenous communities, those discussions are also rooted in issues of rights. These shifting lines are only made murkier by the threat of global climate change. In the Arctic Ocean, the...

This book discusses the representational geographies of the Bond film franchise and how they inform our reading of 007 as a hero. Offering a new and interdisciplinary lens through which the franchise can be analyzed, Funnell and Dodds explore a range of topics that have been largely, if not entirely, overlooked in Bond film scholarship. These topics include: the shifting and gendering of geopolitical relations; the differing depiction and evaluation of vertical/modern and horizontal/pre-mo...

The Antarctic is one the most hostile natural environments in the world. It is an extraordinary physical space, which changes significantly in shape and size with the passing of the seasons. Politically, it is unique as it contains one of the few areas of continental space not claimed by any nation-state. Scientifically, the continental ice sheet has provided us with vital evidence about the Earth's past climate. In this Very Short Introduction, Klaus Dodds provides a modern accou...