This innovative volume applies cutting-edge critical theories—including feminist, queer and human security perspectives—to analyse NATO's evolving role as a security and defence institution.Moving beyond traditional problem-solving approaches, it features diverse international contributors and employs a comprehensive methodological toolkit from discourse analysis to creative research methods. It also reveals how social, political and geopolitical forces shape NATO whilst examining ...

In this book, Edenborg studies contemporary conflicts of community as enacted in Russian media, from the ‘homosexual propaganda’ laws to the Sochi Olympics and the Ukraine war, and explores the role of visibility in the production and contestation of belonging to a political community.The book examines what it is that determines which subjects and narratives become visible and which are occluded in public spheres; how they are seen and made intelligible; and how those processes are...

The first comprehensive overview of the innovative new discipline of global historyUntil very recently, historians have looked at the past with the tools of the nineteenth century. But globalization has fundamentally altered our ways of knowing, and it is no longer possible to study nations in isolation or to understand world history as emanating from the West. This book reveals why the discipline of global history has emerged as the most dynamic and innovative fie...

This book argues that there is a new, Sinological form of orientalism at work in the world. It has shifted from a logic of ‘essential difference’ to one of ‘sameness’ or general equivalence. "China" is now in a halting but inevitable process of becoming-the-same as the USA and the West. Orientalism is now closer to the cultural logic of capitalism, even as it shows the afterlives of colonial discourse. This shift reflects our era of increasing globalization; the migration of orientalism to...

Ernest Gellner was a multilingual polymath who set the agenda in the study of nationalism and the sociology of Islam for an entire generation of academics and students. This definitive biography follows his trajectory from his early years in Prague, Paris and England to international success as a philosopher and public intellectual. Known both for his highly integrated philosophy of modernity and for combining a respect for nationalism with an appreciation for science, Gellner was passiona...

While the construction of architecture has a place in architectural discourse, its destruction, generally seen as incompatible with the very idea of "culture," has been neglected in theoretical and historical discussion. Responding to this neglect, Herscher examines the case of the former Yugoslavia and in particular, Kosovo, where targeting architecture has been a prominent dimension of political violence. Rather than interpreting violence against architecture as a mere representation of ...

Through careful historical and ethnographic research and extensive use of local scholarly works, this book provides a persuasive and careful analysis of the production of knowledge in Central Asia. The author demonstrates that classical theories of science and society are inadequate for understanding the science project in Central Asia. Instead, a critical understanding of local science is more appropriate.In the region, the professional and political ethos of Marxism-Leninism was ...

Race and Racism in Russia identifies the striking changes in racial ideas, practices, exclusions and violence in Russia since the 1990s, revealing how 'Russianness' has become a synonym for racial whiteness. This ground-breaking book provides new theories and substantive insights into race and ethnicity in a Russian context.

In 2009 Slavoj Zizek brought together an acclaimed group of intellectuals to discuss the continued relevance of communism. Unexpectedly the conference attracted an audience of over 1,000 people.The discussion has continued across the world and this book gathers responses from the conference in Seoul. It includes the interventions of regular contributors Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, as well as work from across Asia, notably from Chinese scholar Wang Hui, offering regional perspect...

Increasingly, as the production, distribution and audience of films cross national boundaries, film scholars have begun to think in terms of ‘transnational’ rather than national cinema. This book is positioned within the emerging field of transnational cinema, and offers a groundbreaking study of the relationship between transnational cinema and ideology. The book focuses in particular on the complex ways in which religion, identity and cultural myths interact in specific cinematic represe...

In Postsocialism and Cultural Politics, Xudong Zhang offers a critical analysis of China’s “long 1990s,” the tumultuous years between the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. The 1990s were marked by Deng Xiaoping’s market-oriented reforms, the Taiwan missile crisis, the Asian financial crisis, and the end of British colonial rule of Hong Kong. Considering developments including the state’s cultivation of a market economy, th...

Although Chinese Marxism—primarily represented by Maoism—is generally seen by Western intellectuals as monolithic, Liu Kang argues that its practices and projects are as diverse as those in Western Marxism, particularly in the area of aesthetics. In this comparative study of European and Chinese Marxist traditions, Liu reveals the extent to which Chinese Marxists incorporate ideas about aesthetics and culture in their theories and practices. In doing so, he constructs a wholly new understa...