Critical Perspectives In International Studies

Critical Perspectives in International Studies offers an exciting survey of recent approaches to the study of international politics, including critical theory, radical theory, constructivism, postmodernism, system change, and feminist and gender perspectives. The authors--among the founders and leaders of these innovative ways to comprehend and re-present world politics--reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of each school of thought and suggest future research agendas.

Critical Perspectives on International Political Economy considers and revises the progress of critical thinking within IPE and engages with issues such as finance, the practices of health and work, the relevance of new social movements and the political economy of the Internet. In so doing it provides a possible map for the next stage of critical development in the study of International Political Economy.

This new book presents critical approaches towards Human Security, which has become one of the key areas for policy and academic debate within Security Studies and IR. The Human Security paradigm has had considerable significance for academics, policy-makers and practitioners. Under the rubric of Human Security, security policy practices seem to have transformed their goals and approaches, re-prioritising economic and social welfare issues that were marginal to the state-based geo-political rivalries of the Cold War era. Human Security has reflected and reinforced the reconceptualisation of international security, both broadening and deepening it, and, in so doing, it has helped extend and shape the space within which security concerns inform international policy practices. However, in its wider use, Human Security has become an amorphous and unclear political concept, seen by some as progressive and radical and by others as tainted by association with the imposition of neo-liberal practices and values on non-Western spaces or as legitimizing attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan. This book is concerned with critical perspectives towards Human Security, highlighting some of the tensions which can emerge between critical perspectives which discursively radicalise Human Security within frameworks of emancipatory possibility and those which attempt to deconstruct Human Security within the framework of an externally imposed attempt to regulate and order the globe on behalf of hegemonic power. The chapters gathered in this edited collection represent a range of critical approaches which bring together alternative understandings of human security. This book will be of great interest to students of human security studies and critical security studies, war and conflict studies and international relations.

The first in-depth analysis of how global governance impacts on the lives of ordinary people. This new volume includes four detailed case studies on labour, migration, children and development that explore the actual nature of governance policies in the GPE. Jean Grugel and Nicola Piper clearly show how global governance, the creation of global norms and regimes to regulate polities, economic and social actors, suggests and promotes ideals such as stable politics, democracy, human rights and individualism, with a strategy to create a more ordered and ultimately better world. They move away from the traditional focus on élites, states and global institutions to explore and analyze how liberal global governance is really affecting ordinary people and how this is often an obstacle to development, citizenship, voice and inclusion. Paying particular attention to the global South, Asia and Latin America, these expert authors trace the development of liberal global governance. They also clearly examine and study how this regulation has spread from areas such as trade and investment, to development, labour, migration, children and the environment.

This book provides critical perspectives on the role of global institutions such as the United Nations, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

This innovative book explores think tanks from the perspective of critical policy studies, showcasing how knowledge, power and politics intersect with the ways in which think tanks intervene in public policy.

This text provides a broad-ranging critique of, and re-introduction to, international relations, drawing on the most significant critical perspectives in recent social science theory. These perspectives are carefully introduced and systematically applied to the dominant traditions of contemporary international relations.

Comprising a plurality of perspectives, this timely Handbook is an essential resource for understanding past and current challenges to democracy, justice, social and gender equality, identity and freedom. It shows how critical international relations (IR) theory functions as a broad-based and diverse critique of society.