The idea that military strength is virtually synonymous with security is deeply entrenched and widely held. But while the threat or use of military force may sometimes be necessary, it cannot keep us as safe as we would be by building relationships t...

Have the diplomatic efforts of the Obama administration toward Iran failed? Was the Bush administration's emphasis on military intervention, refusal to negotiate, and pursuit of regime change a better approach? How can the United States best address...

Education is a contested topic, and not just politically. For years scholars have approached it from two different points of view: one empirical, focused on explanations for student and school success and failure, and the other philosophical, focused...

For sale in CIS only! Afghanistan's people have contended with an almost continuous series of foreign interventions in their local affairs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Not only have external powers such as British India, the Soviet Uni...

In "The Normality of Civil War", Teresa Koloma Beck uses theories of the everyday to analyze the social processes of civil war, specifically the type of conflict that is characterized by the expansion of violence into so-called normal life. She looks...

For decades, Israel and Palestine have been locked in ongoing conflict over land that each claims as its own. The conflict is often considered a calculated landgrab, but this characterization does little to take into account the myriad motivations th...

In "Change", Mo Yan – China's foremost novelist – personalizes the political and social changes in his country over the past few decades in a novella disguised as autobiography (or vice-versa). Unlike most historical narratives from China, which are...

For sale in CIS only! Twenty-five years after Gorbachev came to power and two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the questions that lay behind the reform efforts at the start of Perestroika are still relevant: how to modernise the econo...

For sale in CIS only! Policing is not a popular topic of serious scholarly research. Although a vast literature on policing exists, it is mostly technical in nature and only rarely analytical. Even the police forces of Western Europe and North Ameri...

Georgi Dimitrov (1882-1949) was a high-ranking Bulgarian and Soviet official, one of the most prominent leaders of the international Communist movement and a trusted member of Stalin's inner circle. Accused by the Nazis of setting the Reichstag fire...