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The Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict is the longest-running dispute in Eurasia. This study looks beyond tabloid tropes of ‘frozen conflict’ or ‘Russian land-grab’, to unpack both unresolved territorial issues left over from the 1990s and the strategic rivalry that has built up around them since then. Unstable and overlapping conceptions of homeland have characterised the Armenian and Azerbaijani republics since their first emergence in 1918. Seventy years of incorporation into the Soviet Union did not resolve these issues. As they emerged from the Soviet collapse in 1991, Armenians and Azerbaijanis fought for sovereignty over Nagorny Karabakh, leading to its secession from Azerbaijan, the deaths of more than 25,000 people and the forced displacement of more than a million more. Since then, the conflict has evolved into an ‘enduring rivalry’, a particularly intractable form of long-term militarised competition between two states. Combining perspectives rarely found in a single volume, the study shows how these outcomes became intractably embedded within the regime politics, strategic interactions and international linkages of post-war Armenia and Azerbaijan. Far from ‘frozen’, this book demonstrates how more than two decades of dynamic conceptions of territory, shifting power relations, international diffusion and unsuccessful mediation efforts have contributed to the resilience of this stubbornly unresolved dispute – one of the most intractable of our times.

Contemporary democracy is in crisis. People are losing faith in in a system of democratic institutions that can cope with current social problems. The book sheds new light on this issue, drawing on the ideas of M. M. Bakhtin, American pragmatism, and others to show that dialogue in democracy can transcend both antagonistic and consensual perspectives. The author provides an overview of the history of the dialogue-vs.-antagonism opposition as it is embedded in modern political theory, and outlines the concept of dialogue in contemporary political thought. The author argues that dialogue is a value in and by itself and that it aims at better understanding rather than at consensus. Therefore, the main purpose of the democratic system is to promote better understanding. This idea is labelled as “non-consensual democracy.” The author goes on to demonstrate that Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism can usefully amend and augmet the ways in which community is addressed in political theory, allowing us to overcome allowing us to overcome the liberalism-vs.-communitarianism debate. To conclude, he introduces the concept of |”critical community,” i.e., a "dialogical, self-reflective community critical of its own tradition," to show that collective identities can be constructed in critical dialogue with the tradition and the values of a community.

Reagan and Thatcher’s Special Relationship offers a unique insight into one of the most controversial political relationships in recent history. An insightful and original study, it provides a new regionally focused approach to the study of Anglo-American relations. The Falklands War, the US invasion of Grenada, the Anglo-Guatemalan dispute over Belize and the US involvement in Nicaragua are vividly reconstructed as Latin American crises that threatened to overwhelm a renewal in US-UK relations in the 1980s. Reagan and Thatcher’s efforts to normalise relations, both during and after the crises, reveal a mutual desire to strengthen Anglo-American ties and to safeguard individual foreign policy objectives whilst cultivating a close personal and political bond that was to last well beyond their terms in office. This ground-breaking reappraisal analyses pivotal moments in their shared history by drawing on the extensive analysis of recently declassified documents while elite interviews reveal candid recollections by key protagonists providing an alternative vantage point from which to assess the contentious ‘Special Relationship’. Sally-Ann Treharne offers a compelling look into the role personal diplomacy played in overcoming obstacles to Anglo-American relations emanating from the turbulent Latin American region in the final years of the Cold War.

Rethinking Humanitarian Interventions in the 21^st Century examines the complex ethics and politics of humanitarian intervention since the end of the Cold War. These 12 essays focus on the challenges associated with interventions, conflict and attendant human rights violations, unmitigated and systematic violence, state re-building, and issues associated with human mobility and dislocation. In a context where layers to conflict are so complex and fluid, it is difficult to imagine one book could ‘rethink interventions’ to the extent that is required. Nevertheless, a contribution to debates can be made. In this collection, important choices were made in terms of how to bring a collection together that allows for the richness as well as maintaining coherence. The task of ‘rethinking’ has meant many of the chapters are underpinned by critical theory with structures of power and the ends that they are deployed to serve never far from discussion. Overall, the chapters in this book address three central themes pertaining to the evolution of 1) humanitarian interventions in a global era; 2) the limits of sovereignty and the ethics of interventions; and the 3) politics of post-intervention (re-)building and humanitarian engagement. As such, they provide a valuable contribution to academics, students, instructors and intellectual communities engaged in research pertaining to humanitarianism, conflict and interventions and different conceptions of security and international relations, and who agree that the present challenges require a basic rethinking of interventions.