Recommending Books for Purchase (Bulletin 72 - May 2020): Area Studies

This edited volume focuses on various forms of regionalism and neighborhoods in the Baltic-Black Sea area. In the light of current reshaping of borderlands and new geopolitical and military confrontations in Europe's eastern margins, such as the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas, this book analyzes different types and modalities of regional integration and region-making from a comparative perspective. It conceptualizes cooperative and conflictual encounters as a series of networks and patchworks that differently link and relate major actors to each other and thus shape these interconnections as domains of inclusion and exclusion, bordering and debordering, securitization and desecuritization. This peculiar combination of geopolitics, ethnopolitics and biopolitics makes the Baltic-Black Sea trans-national region a source of inspiring policy practices, and, in the light of new security risks, a matter of increased concern all over Europe. The contributors from various disciplines cover topics such as cultural and civilizational spaces of belonging and identity politics, the rise of right-wing populism, region building under the condition of multiple security pressures, and the influence and regional strategies of different external powers, including the EU, Russia, and Turkey, on cross- and trans-regional relations in the area.

Nicolas Fromm explores norm-based strategies small states can use to distinguish themselves internationally in order to compensate for their lesser geopolitical weight. Using the example of Qatar, the author shows that such strategies might include a sort of norm entrepreneurship which goes beyond the advocacy of universal norms and implies the development of genuinely new norms ('norm crafting') in pursuit of regional political influence. To shed light on the stunning rise of Qatar from a background actor to a protagonist in international diplomacy, the case study analyses the distinctive use of norm crafting in the country's Middle East diplomacy under the reign of Emir Hamad (1995-2013). To unfold the potential of strategic normative innovation, Qatar seems to have imitated the attitudes and attributes of established norm entrepreneurs such as international organizations.

Diplomatic issues, i.e. the textbook discussion, the Yasukuni debate, and the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands dispute cause political shocks to Japan-China relations, but economic exchange is maintained. Franziska Schultz discusses political shocks within bilateral relations, analyzing shocks in 2005, 2010 and 2012 causing economic spillovers, such as boycotts, property damage and decreasing numbers of Chinese tourists to Japan. The correlation of monthly trade data with political conflict values (2005-2014) created by the author is analyzed with a vector autoregression (VAR) model. A qualitative content analysis of reports by the Japan-China Economic Association (1981-2015) according to Früh (2011) evaluates whether spillovers play a role for Japanese economic actors involved in China business.

The work draws on wide-ranging area analysis to develop inductively new concepts and approaches for further use in explanation and application.  Divided into two parts, it begins with analysis of revolution and socio-political unrest, followed by models of ethnic conflict and elite circulation in developing societies. It presents the cultural dialectic present in Islam.  It then lays out the patterns of mediation and negotiation in managing and resolving conflict, culminating with an analysis of intractables. Part two on governance lays out the nature of world order, cooperation, and conciliation.  It then turns to the challenges of identity, ideology, and interest, with some specific attention to the nature of borders and borderlands, and focuses on governance as conflict management and as negotiation.   - This book encompasses a new analysis of a neglected part of International Relation, the prevention and management of conflict. -  The book confronts sources and patterns of contentious politics with systems and methods of governance. - The book lays out a comprehensive conceptualization of the process of conflict management and negotiation, including questions of when as well as how.  

This volume focuses on one of the most innovative deep integration constructs, The Pacific Alliance, which aims at expanding the frontiers of trade and investment governance in Latin America. It draws on a conference held at Externado University in Bogota, Colombia, in November 2015, bringing together leading scholars, practitioners and officers of public, regional and international organisations interested in a critical analysis of the Alliance, its distinctiveness and likely future directions. The volume features contributions from the multi-disciplinary lens of law, political science and economics. The Pacific Alliance, comprising Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru, aims through a participatory and consensual manner to promote the free circulation of goods, services, capital and persons among its members, and to secure deep economic integration through collaboration across a broader set of policy areas than typically obtains in more traditional preferential trade agreements. This volume is of interest to policy makers and staff of international organizations involved in trade and investment negotiations, international economic governance in general as well as faculty, researchers and graduate students of these topics and of international political economy and comparative regionalism.