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The book explores the breakdown of the elite consensus on America's role in the world. By emphasising military restraint and 'leading from behind' President Obama challenged the Washington foreign policy establishment and its strategic vision of liberal hegemony from within.Highlighting the identity performing function and discursive construction of grand strategy, the book demonstrates how the geopolitical identity of American exceptionalism is linked to the conduct of an activist and interventionist foreign policy, resulting in a dominant grand strategy of American primacy and global military pre-eminence. An intertextual framework of analysis is used to examine the political performance and validity of this dominant identity-policy link, and the success of countering discourses of cooperative engagement and restraint under the Obama presidency. The nexus of geopolitical identity and national security is traced through a multidimensional perspective that considers the common sense status of popular culture and media, the expertise of Washington think tanks and foreign policy experts, and the political decisions taken in the White House and the Pentagon.From an in-depth analysis of various competing discourses of national security and foreign policy, the book concludes that American grand strategy under Obama no longer represented a coherent and consistent equation of material resources and political ends, but a contested discursive space, where identity and policy no longer matched. This resulted in the conflicted and contradictory nature of the Obama Doctrine.

This book addresses a critical question embedded within a heated debate about the ‘failure’ of American intelligence in a post 9/11 age: have Western experts in some fundamental way failed to understand the dynamics, leaders and culture of the Middle East? Looking back in recent history through a series of seminal case studies culminating in Sadat’s dramatic assassination, this monograph explores whether, how and why the most knowledgeable and powerful intelligence agencies in the world have been so notoriously caught off guard in this region. The story begins after the tripartite invasion of the Suez Canal in 1956 which triggered a ripple of ideological and geopolitical transformations that continue to shape the politics and borders of the modern Middle East. Revolutions swept across Syria, Iraq and Yemen; the three devastating Arab-Israeli wars ravaged the holy lands; and finally, a fraught and contested bilateral treaty bound Egypt and Israel to uneasy peace. The West and the Soviet Union vied for control over the Middle East’s destiny through its political centre, Egypt. The transition from Gamal Abdel Nasser to Anwar el Sadat witnessed the decline of an ardently anti-imperialist Arab nationalism, supplanted by a radical quest to realign Egypt’s identity towards the Western world. As revolutionary turmoil and conflict continue to unfold throughout the Middle East today, The Arab World and Western Intelligence is the untold story of how the British and American intelligence services have anticipated and reacted to crisis and upheaval in the region’s recent history.

This book argues that Internet diffusion and use in the Middle East enables meaningful micro-changes in citizens’ lives, even in states where no Arab Spring revolution occurred. Using ethnographic evidence, and conversations with Internet users in the Middle East, collected between 1996 and 2014 in Kuwait, Jordan, and Egypt, and a handful of short term research trips to other Arab states, including Tunisia (2000), Morocco (1997), UAE (1997; 2010-13), Oman (2004), Qatar (2011-2013), and Saudi Arabia (2012-13), this manuscript presents a grass roots look at how new media use fits into the practice of everyday life. It explores why citizens leverage social media to digitally route around state and other forms of power at work in their lives. As state capacity for buying public loyalty wanes throughout the Middle East, any increase in citizen civic engagement, supported by new media use, offers the possibility of a new order of things, from redefining patriarchal power relations at home, to reconfigurations of citizens’ relationships with the state, broadly defined. For reasons explored throughout this manuscript, new media channels offer pathways to empowerment widely and cheaply in the Middle East.

Christian Gilliam argues that a philosophy of ‘pure’ immanence is integral to the development of an alternative understanding of ‘the political’; one that re-orients our understanding of the self toward the concept of an unconscious or ‘micropolitical’ life of desire. He argues that here, in this ‘life’, is where the power relations integral to the continuation of post-industrial capitalism are most present and most at stake. Through proving its philosophical context, lineage and political import, Gilliam ultimately justifies the conceptual necessity of immanence in understanding politics and resistance, thereby challenging the claim that ontologies of ‘pure’ immanence are either apolitical or politically incoherent.

Whether people in some society are able to secure enough food, healthcare or education seems to be an important way of assessing that society. However, as a philosophical ideal sufficiency faces many problems. Chief among these is that the ideal has been understood in ways that give rise to powerful objections that make it seem less attractive than ideals of equality. This book offers a new characterization of sufficiency as a demand of justice called shift-sufficientarianism. The book argues that shift-sufficientarianism is an attractive ideal that is indispensable to sound assessments of societies. In particular, the author argues that securing enough education, enough autonomy and a good enough upbringing are important requirements of any just society. This author also goes on to argue that this understanding of sufficiency sheds important light on what we may owe to non-compatriots as a matter of global justice.

This book critically reflects on the failure of the 2003 intervention to turn Iraq into a liberal democracy, underpinned by free-market capitalism, its citizens free to live in peace and prosperity. The book argues that mistakes made by the coalition and the Iraqi political elite set a sequence of events in motion that have had devastating consequences for Iraq, the Middle East and for the rest of the world. Today, as the nation faces perhaps its greatest challenge in the wake of the devastating advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and another US-led coalition undertakes renewed military action in Iraq, understanding the complex and difficult legacies of the 2003 war could not be more urgent. Ignoring the legacies of the Iraq War and denying their connection to contemporary events could mean that vital lessons are ignored and the same mistakes made again.

This book explores the critical debate between multicultural and intercultural approaches in both political theory and practice. Both interculturalism and multiculturalism address the question of how states should forge unity from ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity. But what are the dividing lines between interculturalism and multiculturalism? This volume brings together some of the most prominent scholars in the field to address these two different approaches. There are some who believe that an alternative to multiculturalism must be sought in order to understand and live with diversity. They share the view that multiculturalism is no longer a persuasive intellectual or policy approach, which invites the question of how interculturalism differs from multiculturalism. The book spans European, North-American, and Latin-American debates.

Questions arose about what it meant to support a country whose political future the author has no say in as a Diaspora Jew. The questions became all the more pronounced the more I learned about Israel’s history. Many Jews feel the same way, and often are uncomfortable with what such an obligation can mean, in no small part because of concerns over being identified with Israel because of one’s Jewish heritage or because of the overwhelming significance that Israel has come to have for Jewish identity. Israel’s significance is matched by how much is published about Israel. Increasingly, this literature is not only about trying to explain Israel’s wars, the military occupation or other parts of its history, but about the relationship between Diaspora1 Jewry and Israel.

Why is it that states emerging from intervention, peacebuilding and statebuilding over the last 25 years appear to be ‘failed by design’? This book explores the interplay of local peace agency with the (neo)liberal peacebuilding project. It looks at how far local ‘peace formation’ dynamics can go to counteract the forces of violence and play a role in rebuilding the state, consolidate peace processes and induce a more progressive form of politics. By looking at local agency related to peace formation, the book finds answers to the pressing question of how large-scale peacebuilding or statebuilding may be significantly improved and made more representative of the lives, needs, rights, and ambitions of its subjects.

On 18 September 2014, a referendum took place in Scotland to determine the question of Scottish independence. Soon after, the independence issue recurred strongly as a topic in the UK general election of May 2015. This volume examines the media coverage of the referendum, analyzing how it was reported and structured in the media in Scotland, the wider United Kingdom, and in other parts of the world which had a direct interest in the outcome. In twenty chapters encompassing a rich variety of perspectives, scholars, commentators and journalists from Scotland, the rest of Britain, Europe, Canada and Australia examine how the media across the world presented the debate. By exploring how the media in their particular nations constructed coverage of the Scottish political debate, contributors from outside the UK illuminate a range of attitudes to nationalism and separatism in various countries which saw significance for themselves in the Scottish case. The book’s investigation of the shifting nature of Scottish – and British - identity thus revealed is thereby placed in an emphatically international context, alongside specific contributions from England, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as Scotland itself. The consequences of the referendum are traced in the media until the aftermath of the May general election of 2015.