Empire S Proxy

Explores the impact of colonial domination and defends Puerto Rican anti-imperialist struggles.

Someone’s Else’s Empire coolly reassesses Britain’s relationship with the United States. Elite descriptions of Britain’s position in the world (‘punching above our weight’) are untenable, Tom Stevenson argues. Yet there is a refusal, in most parts of society, to examine the assumptions behind them. Half a century after British withdrawal from “east of Suez,” why has the Indo-Pacific tilt become a Whitehall priority? Why are newly opened Persian Gulf bases working side by side with Saudi and Emirati forces engaged in the catastrophic war on Yemen? The impetus for so many decisions about British foreign policy comes from a desire to maintain lieutenant rank with Washington. But British leaders and defence specialists tend to dislike seeing Britain framed by American power. A great effort is required to clear away the build-up of irrelevant, nostalgic detritus around “Global Britain.” Stevenson looks at the infrastructure of a US world order re-energised by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and fits the UK into the picture without the usual euphemisms. It is one thing to station military forces around the world to maintain your empire, he observes, but quite another to do so for someone else’s.

While proxy relationships can be an effective means international actors use to transfer risk and lower their costs to compete, they also enable actors to circumvent international norms as well as create moral hazards that can make the practice self-defeating if not simply unethical. Applying the framework of the Just War Tradition, this book highlights some of these ethical gaps and addresses how proxy relationships introduce additional obligations for both sponsor and proxy. The author examines specific examples of how current precedents set a very high bar for accountability, and perversely incentivizes sponsors to employ proxies while discouraging any effort to moderate proxy behavior since that could imply effective control. In light of this, the book offers policy recommendations on how to best manage these relationships while maintaining certain moral commitments.

Because Delaware corporate law has virtually become national corporate law, its statutes and cutting-edge case law regarding corporations and alternative business entities have attracted practitioners nationwide to look to Delaware as the place of formation for corporations and other business entities. The definitive section-by-section guide to the country's most important corporate law, the Sixth Edition of Folk on the Delaware General Corporation Law is the place to turn for accurate, up-to-date, authoritative coverage of the Delaware statute. Its uniquely logical code section organization with penetrating and extensively annotated commentary brings you the best in: Effective strategies and options for specific business decisions and activities under the statute Detailed analysis of each key statutory provision and judicial decision Coverage of all the major cases, many of them unreported and unavailable in any other source Analysis organized by code section, with incisive and extensively annotated commentary Because it is a widely accepted authority in the field, Folk on the Delaware General Corporation Law is regularly cited by courts in states other than Delaware. Its section-by-section coverage makes it easy to quickly find the complete law text and analysis, including astute commentary on recent legislation and the most significant cases (including unreported opinions) with special attention to the more complex areas of practical concern.

This groundbreaking volume examines the extraordinary artistic and cultural traditions of the African region known as the western Sahel, a vast area on the southern edge of the Sahara desert that includes present-day Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, and Niger. This is the first book to present a comprehensive overview of the diverse cultural achievements and traditions of the region, spanning more than 1,300 years from the pre Islamic period through the nineteenth century. It features some of the earliest extant art from sub Saharan Africa as well as such iconic works as sculptures by the Dogon and Bamana peoples of Mali. Essays by leading international scholars discuss the art, architecture, archaeology, literature, philosophy, religion, and history of the Sahel, exploring the unique cultural landscape in which these ancient communities flourished. Richly illustrated and brilliantly argued, Sahel brings to life the enduring forms of expression created by the peoples who lived in this diverse crossroads of the world.

How the collapse of empires helps explain the efforts of China, Iran, Russia, and Turkey to challenge the international order “This is a must read to understand the backstory of conflicts from Crimea to Xinjiang.”—Fiona Hill, author of There Is Nothing for You Here Eurasia’s major powers—China, Iran, Russia, and Turkey—increasingly intervene across their borders while seeking to pull their smaller neighbors more firmly into their respective orbits. While analysts have focused on the role of leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in explaining this drive to dominate neighbors and pull away from the Western-dominated international system, they have paid less attention to the role of imperial legacies. Jeffrey Mankoff argues that what unites these contemporary Eurasian powers is their status as heirs to vast terrestrial empires, whose collapse left all four states deeply entangled with the lands and peoples along their peripheries but outside their formal borders. Today, they have all found new opportunities to project power within and beyond their borders in patterns shaped by their respective imperial pasts.

In the 1880s Europeans grabbed vast swaths of the African continent, using documents, not guns, as their weapon of choice. Steven Press follows a paper trail of questionable contracts to discover the confidence men who exploited a loophole in international law to assert sovereignty over lands, and whose actions touched off the Scramble for Africa.

Japan's invasion of China in 1937 saw most major campaigns north of the Yangtze River, where Chinese industry was concentrated. The southern theater proved a more difficult challenge for Japan because of its enormous size, diverse terrain, and poor infrastructure, but Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek made a formidable stand that produced a veritable quagmire for a superior opponent--a stalemate much desired by the Allied nations. In the first book to cover this southern theater in detail, David Macri closely examines strategic decisions, campaigns, and operations and shows how they affected Allied grand strategy. Drawing on documents of U.S. and British officials, he reveals for the first time how the Sino-Japanese War served as a "proxy war" for the Allies: by keeping Japan's military resources focused on southern China, they hoped to keep the enemy bogged down in a war of attrition that would prevent them from breaching British and Soviet territory. While the most immediate concern was preserving Siberia and its vast resources from invasion, Macri identifies Hong Kong as the keystone in that proxy war-vital in sustaining Chinese resistance against Japan as it provided the logistical interface between the outside world and battles in Hunan and Kwangtung provinces; a situation that emerged because of its vital rail connection to the city of Changsha. He describes the development of Anglo-Japanese low-intensity conflict at Hong Kong; he then explains the geopolitical significance of Hong Kong and southern China for the period following the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Opening a new window on this rarely studied theater, Macri underscores China's symbolic importance for the Allies, depicting them as unequal partners who fought the Japanese for entirely different reasons-China for restoration of its national sovereignty, the Allies to keep the Japanese preoccupied. And by aiding China's wartime efforts, the Allies further hoped to undermine Japanese propaganda designed to expel Western powers from its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. As Macri shows, Hong Kong was not just a sleepy British Colonial outpost on the fringes of the empire but an essential logistical component of the war, and to fully understand broader events Hong Kong must be viewed together with southern China as a single military zone. His account of that forgotten fight is a pioneering work that provides new insight into the origins of the Pacific War.