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This book reinterprets the history of Chile, the CIA and the Cold War. It blends national, regional, and world-historical trends from Chile -- from the appearance of its labor movement in the late nineteenth century to the end of the Pinochet dictatorship in the late twentieth -- into both the inter-American and transatlantic communities. It argues that Chileans made their own history as highly engaged internationalists while reassessing American and other foreign-directed intelligence operations in Chile and southern South America while recontextualizing and reassessing United States, particularly CIA, influence.

Belief, Bias and Intelligence outlines an approach for reducing the risk of cognitive biases impacting intelligence analysis that draws from experimental research in the social sciences. It critiques the reliance of Western intelligence agencies on the use of a method for intelligence analysis developed by the CIA in the 1990’s, the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH). The book shows that the theoretical basis of the ACH method is significantly flawed, and that there is no empirical basis for the use of ACH in mitigating cognitive biases. It puts ACH to the test in an experimental setting against two key cognitive biases with unique empirical research facilitated by UK’s Professional Heads of Intelligence Analysis unit at the Cabinet Office, includes meta-analysis into which analytical factors increase and reduce the risk of cognitive bias and recommends an alternative approach to risk mitigation for intelligence communities. Finally, it proposes alternative models for explaining the underlying causes of cognitive biases, challenging current leading theories in the social sciences.

Every day in the People's Republic of China tens of millions of people receive help from the state through the minimum livelihood guarantee (dibao). What began as a reform in the city of Shanghai in the early 1990s is now a key component in the measures used by the Communist Party of China to maintain social stability and legitimacy. While scholars regularly discuss how effective dibao has been in alleviating poverty very little addresses what influenced its development. This book argues that in order to understand dibao we need to look at how the programme emerged and how it has developed in the years since. Drawing on newspaper articles, government reports and interviews with key officials and researchers, the book also addresses debate on the policy process in China as a whole.

While debt has the capacity to sustain social relations by joining together the two parties of a debt relation, it also contains the risk of deteriorating into domination and bargaining. Throughout history, different understandings of debt have therefore gravitated between reciprocity and domination, making it a key concept for understanding the dynamics of both social cohesion and fragmentation. The book considers the social, spatial and temporal meanings of this ambiguity and relates them to contemporary debates over debts between North and South in Europe, which in turn are embedded in a longer global history of North-South relations. The individual chapters discuss how debts incurred in the past are mobilised in political debates in the present. This dynamic is highlighted with regard to regional and global North-South relations. An essential feature in debates on this topic is the difficult question of retribution and possible ways of “paying” – a term that is etymologically connected to “pacification” – for past injustice. Against this backdrop, the book combines a discussion of the multi-layered European and global North-South divide with an effort to retrieve alternatives to the dominant and divisive uses of debt for staking out claims against someone or something. Discovering new and forgotten ways of thinking about debt and North-South relations, the chapters are divided into four sections that focus on 1) debt and social theory, 2) Greece and Germany as Europe’s South and North, 3) the ‘South’ between the local, the regional and the global, and 4) debt and the politics of history.

Settlement projects are sustained clusters of policies that allow states to strategically plan, implement and support the permanent transfer of nationals into a territory not under their sovereignty. Once a common feature of the international system, settlement projects are now rare, and contradict international norms. Yet, these modern projects had been an important feature of some of the longest conflicts of our times, such as Israel-Palestine and Morocco-Western Sahara. Moreover, they had a profound effect on conflicts: they led to their prolongations, affected their levels of violence, patterns of resolution, as well as post-conflict stability. With this significance in mind, the book asks why states launched new settlement projects during the era of decolonization, against common practice and against international norms. The book introduces the international environment as an important enabling variable for the launch of these projects. By drawing comparisons between three such major projects--Israel in the West Bank and Gaza, Morocco in Western Sahara and Indonesia in East-Timor—the book classifies post-colonial settlement projects as a distinct cluster of cases that warrant a different analytical approach to traditional colonial studies, including settler-colonialism approaches. Built on a careful synthesis of existing principles in international relations theory and empirical research, the book advances a clearly formulated theoretical position on the launch of post-colonial settlement projects. The result yields a number of fresh insights into the relationship between conflict, territory and international norms.

In the past 15 years, anti-militarist activists in the UK have auctioned off a tank outside an arms fair, superglued themselves to Lockheed Martin’s central London offices and stopped a battleship with a canoe. They have also challenged militarism on an everyday level in many other ways. This book tells the story of their resistance. It explores why anti-militarists take part in such actions, considers the politics of different tactics and examines the tensions and debates within the movement. Resisting Militarism draws on a range of critical theoretical traditions including anarchist, feminist, postcolonial, poststructural and queer theory. These are engaged to both animate and interrogate anti-militarist politics, with particular emphasis placed on activists’ use of prefigurative direct action. As it explores the multifaceted, imaginative and highly subversive world of anti-militarism, the book also makes two overarching arguments. First, that anti-militarists can help us to understand militarism in novel and useful ways. And secondly, that the methods and ideas used by anti-militarists can be a potent force for radical political change.

This book develops a political philosophic approach to restitution and repatriation of objects, by arguing that the development of restitutive norms in the West has been auxiliary to the emergence of modern state sovereignty. It draws on critiques of international law of cultural heritage return, and of its Western humanistic underpinnings, including the ontological binary distinction between things and persons. Rather than accept the restitutive goals of politics and law seeking to do justice for the past and to ‘undo’ the expropriations and dispossessions that have occurred, and are still occurring (be it in contexts of coloniality or war), this book looks at the limits and aporias of restitution in texts of philosophy, literature and social theory. As such, it identifies figures and objects situated beyond the possibility of restitution and repair. This includes analysis of the social fantasies and imaginaries that ‘prop’ our contemporary reparative politics—making the past ‘unhappen’, or cancelling out the occurrence of wrongs. What the analysed texts have in common is that they articulate restitution through the motifs of undoing and making-unhappen, as a reparative and curative procedure, and a prelapsarian return to a place, time or condition prior to the event of violence. Insofar as this reading uncovers the mythical-religious ‘substrate’ of the restitutive tradition, and illuminates the political and affective allures of prelapsarianism, this book also offers insights into Western secularism, not as disappearance of religious thought in the public domain, but as its ‘repression’ (in a psychoanalytic sense).

Examines the startling revival of the Scottish Conservative Party under Ruth Davidson’s leadership: A very timely retrospective study of the Scottish Conservative Party's revival under Ruth Davidson's leadership (November 2011–August 2019). Analyses the Scottish Conservative Party under Ruth Davidson’s in the context of gender and LGBT politics; its relationships with the SNP, Northern Ireland, the Scottish media and the UK Tory Party; and its use of Scottish national identity. Helps inform Scottish political and academic discourse ahead of the 2021 Holyrood elections. When Ruth Davidson was elected leader of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party in 2011, it was considered something of a joke: in electoral decline for decades, politically irrelevant and seemingly past the point of no return. But by 2017, ‘Ruth Davidson’s Conservatives’ had become Scotland’s second party at Holyrood and Westminster, and its leader spoken of as a future leader of the UK Conservative Party, if not the next Scottish First Minister. Then, in August 2019, Ruth Davidson resigned.

This book identifies 88 Soviet intelligence officers who defected from 1924 to 1954 and provides an aggregate analysis of their information to uncover Soviet strategic priorities and concerns. When intelligence officers defect, they take with them privileged information and often communicate it to the receiving state, and thereby they open a window into a closed national security decision making system. The book provides the most comprehensive list of Soviet intelligence officer defectors compiled to date representing a variety of specializations. Through the information they provided in now-declassified debriefings, documents they brought with them, and post-defection publications and public appearances, this book shows the evolution of Soviet threat perceptions and the development of the "main enemy" concept in the Soviet national security system. It also shows fluctuations in the Soviet recruitment and vetting of personnel for sensitive national security positions, corresponding with fluctuations in the stability of the Soviet government. The shifting motivations of these officers also reveals the pressures that they were experiencing at the time, leading to their choice to break with the Soviet Union.

Turkey’s democratic regime and its vicissitudes are dependent on a necropolitical undercurrent. This book presents a bold collection of essays that evaluate Turkey’s recent history from the perspective of the necropolitical underpinnings of its precarious democracy. Combining cutting edge research and a diverse range of approaches from multiple disciplines, including political theory, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, international relations, and gender and sexuality studies, the book examines the multiple ways in which lives are brought into the fold of power and analyses how they are subjected to mechanisms of death and destruction, as well as modalities of infrastructural violence, strategic neglect and exposure. Focusing on themes such as martyrdom, counterinsurgency warfare, enforced disappearances and conscientious objection; sites such as emergency zones, cemeteries, monuments and borderlands; and institutions such as prisons, courts and the army, the collection offers a sobering and original analysis of contemporary Turkey and, thus indirectly, of the changing political dynamics of the Middle East. It points to the emergence of new forms of impoverishment, inequality and disposability. It provides a new and rich lexicon that makes a sophisticated contribution to the growing research program on violence in the critical humanities.