All International Politics Is Local

How does regional interdependence influence the prospects for conflict, integration, and democratization? Some researchers look at the international system at large and disregard the enormous regional variations. Others take the concept of sovereignty literally and treat each nation-state as fully independent. Kristian Skrede Gleditsch looks at disparate zones in the international system to see how conflict, integration, and democracy have clustered over time and space. He argues that the most interesting aspects of international politics are regional rather than fully global or exclusively national. Differences in the local context of interaction influence states' international behavior as well as their domestic attributes. In All International Politics Is Local, Gleditsch clarifies that isolating the domestic processes within countries cannot account for the observed variation in distribution of political democracy over time and space, and that the likelihood of transitions is strongly related to changes in neighboring countries and the prior history of the regional context. Finally, he demonstrates how spatial and statistical techniques can be used to address regional interdependence among actors and its implications. Kristian Skrede Gleditsch is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.

Health is political. It entails fierce battles over the allocation of resources, arguments over the imposition of regulations, and the mediation of dueling public sentiments—all conflicts that are often narrated from a national, top-down view. In All Health Politics Is Local, Merlin Chowkwanyun shifts our focus, taking us to four very different places—New York City, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Central Appalachia—to experience a national story through a regional lens. He shows how racial uprisings in the 1960s catalyzed the creation of new medical infrastructure for those long denied it, what local authorities did to curb air pollution so toxic that it made residents choke and cry, how community health activists and bureaucrats fought over who'd control facilities long run by insular elites, and what a national coal boom did to community ecology and health. All Health Politics Is Local shatters the notion of a single national health agenda. Health is and has always been political, shaped both by formal policy at the highest levels and by grassroots community battles far below.

Bringing together internationally renowned as well as emerging scholars, this book presents concrete case studies framed by theoretical concern with the issue of scale. It demonstrates that a diverse array of theoretical, methodological and empirical perspectives can productively converge on a common set of problems related to social, temporal and spatial scales and contemporary globalization. Local Politics, Global Impacts will stimulate empirical and theoretical research that focuses on understanding how political concepts, practices, and instruments translate across scales, and contribute to the emergence of a self-aware community of scholars and practitioners focusing explicitly on modelling the dynamics of local-regional-global interactions.

Globalization today is as much a problem for international harmony as it is a necessary condition of living together on our planet. Increasing interconnectedness in ecology, economy, technology, and politics has brought nations and societies into even closer contact, creating acute demands for cooperation. Earthly Politics argues that in the coming decades global governance will have to accommodate differences even as it obliterates distance, and will have to respect many aspects of the local while developing institutions that transcend localism. This book analyzes a variety of environmental-governance approaches that balance the local and the global in order to encourage new, more flexible frameworks of global governance. On the theoretical level, it draws on insights from the field of science and technology studies to enrich our understanding of environmental-development politics. On the pragmatic level, it discusses the design of institutions and processes to address problems of environmental governance that increasingly refuse to remain within national boundaries. The cases in the book display the crucial relationship between knowledge and power—the links between the ways we understand environmental problems and the ways we manage them—and illustrate the different paths by which knowledge-power formations are arrived at, contested, defended, or set aside. By examining how local and global actors ranging from the World Bank to the Makah tribe in the Pacific Northwest respond to the contradictions of globalization, the authors identify some of the conditions for creating more effective engagement between the global and the local in environmental governance.

The comprehensively revised second edition of this successful text provides an up-to-date analysis of the changing world of local politics in Britain. Substantial new sections have been added on local political parties, hung councils, the politics of non-elected local government, recent developments in privatisation, and the politics of the poll tax. The book now provides a systematic treatment of the Thatcher legacy in local politics, the philosophy and strategy which underpinned it and likely futures in the post-Thatcher era. Reviews of the 1st edition: 'Should be read by anyone seeking to understand local government and its possible futures.' - George Jones, Local Government Chronicle. 'An excellent and stimulating introductory text.' - Peter McLaverty, Sociological Review.

Nishikawa explores how international norms have been adopted in the local context in Myanmar to project a certain international image, while in fact the authorities are exploiting these norms to protect their own interests. In the liberal international world order promoted since the end of the Cold War, democracy, rule of law and human rights have become key components in state and peace-building around the world. Many donor governments and international organisations have promoted them in their aid and assistance. However, the promotion of these international norms is based on a flawed understanding of sovereignty and the world. For this reason, the enforcement of these international norms in Myanmar not only fails to protect vulnerable people but also, in some instances, exacerbates the situation, thereby generating critical insecurity to the most vulnerable people. A vital resource for scholars of Myanmar’s politics, as well as a valuable case study for International Relations scholars more broadly.

The most difficult questions of sustainability are not about technology; they are about values. Answers to such questions cannot be found by asking the "experts," but can only be resolved in the political arena. In The Local Politics of Global Sustainability, author Thomas Prugh, with Robert Costanza and Herman Daly, two ofthe leading thinkers in the field of ecological economics, explore the kind of politics that can help enable us to achieve a sustainable world of our choice, rather than one imposed by external forces. The authors begin by considering the biophysical and economic dimensions of the environmental crisis, and tracing the crisis in political discourse and our public lives to its roots. They then offer an in-depth examination of the elements of a re-energized political system that could lead to the development of more sustainable communities. Based on a type of self-governance that political scientist Benjamin Barber calls "strong democracy," the politics is one of engagement rather than consignment, empowering citizens by directly involving them in community decisionmaking. After describing how it should work, the authors provide examples of communities that are experimenting with various features of strong democratic systems. The Local Politics of Global Sustainability explains in engaging, accessible prose the crucial biophysical, economic, and social issues involved with achieving sustainability. It offers a readable exploration of the political implications of ecological economics and will be an essential work for anyone involved in that field, as well as for students and scholars in environmental politics and policy, and anyone concerned with the theory and practical applications of the concept of sustainable development.

There is a major contradiction in contemporary politics: there has been a wave of democratization that has swept across much of the world, while at the same time globalization appears to have reduced the social forces that have built democracy historically. This book, by an international group of authors, analyzes the ways in which local politics in developing countries - often neglected in work on democratization - render democratic experiments more or less successful in realizing substantial democracy.