Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy

Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy
Author: Stacie E. Goddard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2010
Genre: History
ISBN: 052143985X

This book challenges the conventional wisdom that territorial conflicts in Jerusalem and Northern Ireland were inevitable. Stacie Goddard's research shows that it was radical political rhetoric, and not ancient hatreds, that rendered these territories indivisible, preventing negotiation and compromise and leading to violence and war.

When Right Makes Might

When Right Makes Might
Author: Stacie E. Goddard
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2018-12-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1501730320

Why do great powers accommodate the rise of some challengers but contain and confront others, even at the risk of war? When Right Makes Might proposes that the ways in which a rising power legitimizes its expansionist aims significantly shapes great power responses. Stacie E. Goddard theorizes that when faced with a new challenger, great powers will attempt to divine the challenger’s intentions: does it pose a revolutionary threat to the system or can it be incorporated into the existing international order? Goddard departs from conventional theories of international relations by arguing that great powers come to understand a contender’s intentions not only through objective capabilities or costly signals but by observing how a rising power justifies its behavior to its audience. To understand the dynamics of rising powers, then, we must take seriously the role of legitimacy in international relations. A rising power’s ability to expand depends as much on its claims to right as it does on its growing might. As a result, When Right Makes Might poses significant questions for academics and policymakers alike. Underpinning her argument on the oft-ignored significance of public self-presentation, Goddard suggests that academics (and others) should recognize talk’s critical role in the formation of grand strategy. Unlike rationalist and realist theories that suggest rhetoric is mere window-dressing for power, When Right Makes Might argues that rhetoric fundamentally shapes the contours of grand strategy. Legitimacy is not marginal to international relations; it is essential to the practice of power politics, and rhetoric is central to that practice.

The Geography of Ethnic Violence

The Geography of Ethnic Violence
Author: Monica Duffy Toft
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1400835747

The Geography of Ethnic Violence is the first among numerous distinguished books on ethnic violence to clarify the vital role of territory in explaining such conflict. Monica Toft introduces and tests a theory of ethnic violence, one that provides a compelling general explanation of not only most ethnic violence, civil wars, and terrorism but many interstate wars as well. This understanding can foster new policy initiatives with real potential to make ethnic violence either less likely or less destructive. It can also guide policymakers to solutions that endure. The book offers a distinctively powerful synthesis of comparative politics and international relations theories, as well as a striking blend of statistical and historical case study methodologies. By skillfully combining a statistical analysis of a large number of ethnic conflicts with a focused comparison of historical cases of ethnic violence and nonviolence--including four major conflicts in the former Soviet Union--it achieves a rare balance of general applicability and deep insight. Toft concludes that only by understanding how legitimacy and power interact can we hope to learn why some ethnic conflicts turn violent while others do not. Concentrated groups defending a self-defined homeland often fight to the death, while dispersed or urbanized groups almost never risk violence to redress their grievances. Clearly written and rigorously documented, this book represents a major contribution to an ongoing debate that spans a range of disciplines including international relations, comparative politics, sociology, and history.

Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy

Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy
Author: Stacie E. Goddard
Publisher:
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2010
Genre: Jerusalem
ISBN: 9780511634642

This book challenges the conventional wisdom that territorial conflicts in Jerusalem and Northern Ireland were inevitable.--Résumé de l'éditeur.

Understanding Territorial Withdrawal

Understanding Territorial Withdrawal
Author: Rob Geist Pinfold
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2023-05-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0197658873

From Ukraine to Afghanistan and beyond, occupations and exit dilemmas permeate contemporary geopolitics. However, the existing literature on territorial conflict rarely scrutinizes a pivotal, related question: what makes a state withdraw from an occupied territory, or entrench itself within it? In Understanding Territorial Withdrawal, Rob Geist Pinfold addresses this research gap. He focuses primarily on Israel, a unique but important milieu that offers pertinent lessons for other states facing similar policy problems. As Pinfold demonstrates, occupiers choose to either perpetuate or abandon an occupation because of three factors: their relations with the occupied, interactions with third parties, and the occupier's domestic politics. He argues that each withdrawal is the culmination of a gradual process of policy re-assessment. Critically, it is a combination of local violence and international pressure that causes popular and elite opinion within the occupier to endorse an exit, rather than perpetuate the status quo. To affirm this pattern, Pinfold constructs a generalizable framework for understanding territorial withdrawal. He then applies this framework to multiple case studies, which include: Israel's withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula between 1974-1982; its "unilateral" withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000; and its "unilateral disengagement" from the Gaza Strip in 2005, as well as Israel's non-withdrawals from the West Bank and Golan Heights. Overall, Understanding Territorial Withdrawal delineates commonalities that manifested in each exit yet were absent in the cases of occupation without exit. A powerful analysis of a central concern for the study of international security, territorial conflict, and the Arab-Israel conflict alike, this book provides a critical intervention that identifies why occupiers either retain, or leave, occupied territory.

The Territorial Peace

The Territorial Peace
Author: Douglas M. Gibler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2012-09-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1107016215

Douglas M. Gibler argues that threats to homeland territories force domestic political centralization within the state. Using an innovative theory of state development, he explains patterns of international conflict and democracy in the world over time.

Theories of International Relations and Northern Ireland

Theories of International Relations and Northern Ireland
Author: Timothy J. White
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2017-01-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526113961

This book uses the case of Northern Ireland to evaluate theoretical approaches in international relations. It investigates the process of negotiation that led to the signing of the Good Friday or Belfast Agreement and the continuing challenges to peace reconciliation in Northern Ireland. Incorporating the work of leading scholars, it explores a wide range of topics, including the function of deception in promoting peace, the question of partition and how it was reimagined by nationalists such as John Hume, and how the decommissioning process led to a role in internal policing for paramilitaries. The influence of outside actors - notably the United States and the European Union - is also considered, along with the involvement of the Catholic Church and the marginalization of women. This book will be important for academics interested in theories of international relations and to a wider public interested in understanding the Northern Ireland peace process.

Rethinking Sovereign Debt

Rethinking Sovereign Debt
Author: Odette Lienau
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2014-02-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0674726405

Conventional wisdom holds that all nations must repay debt. Regardless of the legitimacy of the regime that signs the contract, a country that fails to honor its obligations damages its reputation. Yet should today's South Africa be responsible for apartheid-era debt? Is it reasonable to tether postwar Iraq with Saddam Hussein's excesses? Rethinking Sovereign Debt is a probing analysis of how sovereign debt continuity--the rule that nations should repay loans even after a major regime change, or else expect consequences--became dominant. Odette Lienau contends that the practice is not essential for functioning capital markets, and demonstrates its reliance on absolutist ideas that have come under fire over the last century. Lienau traces debt continuity from World War I to the present, emphasizing the role of government officials, the World Bank, and private markets in shaping our existing framework. Challenging previous accounts, she argues that Soviet Russia's repudiation of Tsarist debt and Great Britain's 1923 arbitration with Costa Rica hint at the feasibility of selective debt cancellation. Rethinking Sovereign Debt calls on scholars and policymakers to recognize political choice and historical precedent in sovereign debt and reputation, in order to move beyond an impasse when a government is overthrown.

Homelands

Homelands
Author: Nadav G. Shelef
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2020-07-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1501709720

Why are some territorial partitions accepted as the appropriate borders of a nation's homeland, whereas in other places conflict continues despite or even because of division of territory? In Homelands, Nadav G. Shelef develops a theory of what homelands are that acknowledges both their importance in domestic and international politics and their change over time. These changes, he argues, driven by domestic political competition and help explain the variation in whether partitions resolve conflict. Homelands also provides systematic, comparable data about the homeland status of lost territory over time that allow it to bridge the persistent gap between constructivist theories of nationalism and positivist empirical analyses of international relations.

Territorial Designs and International Politics

Territorial Designs and International Politics
Author: Boaz Atzili
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2018-12-07
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 135126270X

Territory is back with a vengeance. Although territorial politics never really went away, it was often perceived that way in public discussion and among scholars. The territorial conflicts of the last several years, however, have raised new academic and policy questions, revived old debates that were nearly forgotten, and forced us to rethink many of our common conceptions. Social scientists broadly agree that territory, as well as the boundaries that confine it and group identity that relates to it, are socially constructed rather than natural or primordial. But how and through which mechanisms is the meaning of territory constructed? By whom? For which purposes and by what tools? Which forces influence such “territorial designs”? How do different territorial designs affect state behavior in particular, and the dynamics of international politics in general? This book brings together political scientists and geographers—both disciplines in which scholars have long researched such questions—to create a mutually fertilizing dialogue, which will advance our understanding of territorial designs. The authors tackle core theoretical questions, institutions and ideas of territoriality, borders, space, place, and identity, as well as the methodologies used to study them. They utilize case studies as far apart as the Ottoman Empire, the colonization of Ireland, and current day Middle East; and they interrogate the characteristics of spaces as different as land, air, and water. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Territory, Politics, Governance.