Social science

Foreign Relations of the PRC: The Legacies and Constraints of China's International Politics since 1949

by Robert G. Sutter

This cogent but comprehensive book examines the international relations of the People’s Republic of China since its founding in 1949. Noted scholar Robert G. Sutter provides a balanced assessment of the country’s...

The Quest for Press Freedom: One Hundred Years of History of the Media in Ethiopia

by Meseret Chekol Reta

This book is about press development and freedom in Ethiopia, with a focus on the state media. It examines the political and social situations of the monarchy era, the Marxist military regime, and the current...

Migration-Trust Networks: Social Cohesion in Mexican Us-Bound Emigration

by Nadia Yamel Flores-Yeffal

In an important new application of sociological theories, Nadia Y. Flores-Yeffal offers fresh insights into the ways in which social networks function among immigrants who arrive in the United States from Mexico...

The City

by Deborah Stevenson

This book is a fresh and engaging analysis of the city as a central concept in contemporary social thought. It probes the contested and negotiated ways in which cities are built, understood, lived and imagined....

New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era

by Mary Kaldor

Mary Kaldor's New and Old Wars has fundamentally changed the way both scholars and policy-makers understand contemporary war and conflict. In the context of globalization, this path-breaking book has shown that...

Twenty Observations on a World in Turmoil

by Ulrich Beck

Translated by Ciaran Cronin.

The world is a state of turmoil. From the financial crisis to the chaos in the eurozone, from the Arab uprisings to protests in Athens, Barcelona, New York and elsewhere, many of...

Virilio and the Media

by John Armitage

In books such as The Aesthetics of Disappearance, War and Cinema, The Lost Dimension, and The Vision Machine, Paul Virilio has fundamentally changed how we think about contemporary media culture. Virilio’s...

Nationalism

by Anthony D. Smith

For the last two centuries, nationalism has been a central feature of society and politics. Few ideologies can match its power and resonance, and no other political movement and symbolic language has such worldwide...

National Security Intelligence

by Loch Johnson

National security intelligence is a vast, complicated, and important topic, made doubly hard for citizens to understand because of the thick veils of secrecy that surround it.

This definitive introduction to...

Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict

by Janie L. Leatherman

Every year, hundreds of thousands of women become victims of sexual violence in conflict zones around the world; in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone, approximately 1,100 rapes are reported each month....

Terrorism: A History

by Randall Law

Terrorism is one of the forces defining our age, but it has also been around since some of the earliest civilizations. This one-of-a-kind study of the history of terrorism — from ancient Assyria to the post-9/11...

State Power

by Bob Jessop

Bob Jessop presents an up-to-date account of his distinctive approach to the dialectics of structure and strategy in the exercise of state power. While his earlier work critically surveys other state theories,...

Ubiquitous Photography

by Martin Hand

The rise of digital photography and imaging has transformed the landscape of visual communication and culture. Events, activities, moments, objects, and people are ‘captured' and distributed as images on an...

Water

by David L. Feldman

Water is our planet’s most precious resource. It is required by every living thing, yet a huge proportion of the world’s population struggles to access clean water daily. Agriculture, aquaculture, industry,...

War and Conflict in Africa

by Paul D. Williams

After the Cold War, Africa earned the dubious distinction of being the world's most bloody continent. But how can we explain this proliferation of armed conflicts? What caused them and what were their main characteristics?...

Pluralism

by Peter Lassman

The problem of value pluralism permeates modern political philosophy. Its presence can be felt even when it is not explicitly the central topic under investigation. Political thinkers such as Max Weber, Isaiah...

Welfare

by Mary Daly

Welfare is an important concept in the social sciences. It is also challenged and contested not only by alternative concepts but also as a political goal in itself. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, this...

Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts

by Zygmunt Bauman

The production of 'human waste' - or more precisely, wasted lives, the 'superfluous' populations of migrants, refugees and other outcasts - is an inevitable outcome of modernization. It is an unavoidable side-effect...

The Small Nation Solution: How the World's Smallest Nations Can Solve the World's Biggest Problems

by John H. Bodley

In The Small Nation Solution, John Bodley argues that the contemporary global problems of poverty, conflict, and environmental degradation are problems of scale and power. Bodley’s solution involves keeping...

Glasgow: The Real Mean City: True Crime and Punishment in the Second City of the Empire

by Malcolm Archibald

There cannot be many cities where crime could mean anything from singing a seditious song to stealing a ship, but nineteenth-century Glasgow was a unique place with an amazing dynamism. Immigrants poured in...