front cover of The U.S.–China Trade War
The U.S.–China Trade War
Global News Framing and Public Opinion in the Digital Age
Louisa Ha
Michigan State University Press, 2022
Drawing on data from three national surveys, three content analyses, computational topic modeling, and rhetorical analysis, The U.S.–China Trade War sheds light on the twenty-first century’s most high-profile contest over global trade to date. Through diverse empirical studies, the contributors examine the effects of news framing and agenda-setting during the trade war in the Chinese and U.S. news media. Looking at the coverage of Chinese investment in the United States, the use of peace and war journalism frames, and the way media have portrayed the trade war to domestic audiences, the studies explore how media coverage of the trade war has affected public opinion in both countries, as well as how social media has interacted with traditional media in creating news. The authors also analyze the roles of traditional news media and social media in international relations and offer insights into the interactions between professional journalism and user-generated content—interactions that increasingly affect the creation and impact of global news. At a time when social media are being blamed for spreading misinformation and rumors, this book illustrates how professional and user-generated media can reduce international conflicts, foster mutual understanding, and transcend nationalism and ethnocentrism.
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The Use of Confessionary Evidence under the Counter-Terrorism Laws of Sri Lanka
An Interdisciplinary Study
Visakesa Chandrasekaram
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
For more than three decades, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) fought a gruesome war for independence against the majoritarian Sinhalese government of Sri Lanka. Even as the government fought LTTE on the battlefield, it also pursued a legal war through the enactment of counterterrorism laws that permitted indefinite detention and the use of confessions as sole evidence. This book applies theoretical insights from the work of philosophers such as Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben, and Michel Foucault to the Sri Lankan context to examine the conflicting narratives relating to these laws produced by both sides in the conflict.
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A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization
And How to Save It
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Pluto Press, 2010

It often seems that different crises are competing to devastate civilisation. This book argues that financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages need to be considered as part of the same ailing system.

Most accounts of our contemporary global crises such as climate change, or the threat of terrorism, focus on one area, or another, to the exclusion of others. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed argues that the unwillingness of experts to look outside their own fields explains why there is so much disagreement and misunderstanding about particular crises. This book attempts to investigate all of these crises, not as isolated events, but as trends and processes that belong to a single global system. We are therefore not dealing with a 'clash of civilisations', as Huntington argued. Rather, we are dealing with a fundamental crisis of civilisation itself.

This book provides a stark warning of the consequences of failing to take a broad view of the problems facing the world and shows how catastrophe can be avoided.

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Uses Of The Other
“The East” in European Identity Formation
Iver B. Neumann
University of Minnesota Press, 1998

Examines identity politics in the context of international relations.

The field of international relations has recently witnessed a tremendous growth of interest in the theme of identity and its formation, construction, and deconstruction. In Uses of the Other, Iver B. Neumann demonstrates how thinking about identity in terms of the self and other may prove highly useful in the study of world politics.

Neumann begins by tracing the four different paths along which this thinking has developed during this century-ethnographic, psychological, Continental philosophical, and “Eastern excursion”-and he shows how these blended at the margins of the discipline of international relations at the end of the 1980s. There follow several incisive readings of European identity formations on the all-European, regional, and national levels. The theme that draws these readings together is how “the East” is used as a sign of otherness at all three levels. Whereas previous studies framed this process as part of colonial and postcolonial developments, this book suggests that “Easternness” is also present as a marker in contemporary discourses about Russia, Turkey, Central Europe, and Bashkortostan, among others. Situating his work in contemporary critical debates, Neumann argues that, while the self/other perspective is always of relevance, it is now more in need of being used as a perspective on specific sequences of identity formation than of further embellishment.ISBN: 0-8166-3082-8 Cloth $49.95xxISBN: 0-8166-3083-6 Paper $19.95x248 Pages 5-7/8x9 NovemberBorderlines Series, Volume 9Translation inquiries:
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Using Gramsci
A New Approach
Michele Filippini
Pluto Press, 2016
The notebooks kept by Antonio Gramsci while he was in prison in fascist Italy in the 1920s have been an inspiration to Marxist political thinkers and activists around the world for decades. With Using Gramsci, Michele Filippini teases out a number of previously ignored aspects of Gramsci’s works to create a book that stands apart from previous analyses. While Filippini does examine the aspects of Gramsci’s thought that have long attracted scholars—including his thinking on hegemony, organic intellectuals, and civil society—she foregrounds new concepts, including the individual, crisis, and space and time. The result is a rethinking of Gramsci for our era  that offers a number of promising new ways forward.
 
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US-Japan Human Rights Diplomacy Post 1945
Trafficking, Debates, Outcomes and Documents
Roger Buckley
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Comprising two volumes, this is a pioneering study which examines how the United States has deployed public diplomacy with Japan to confront Japanese sexual and labour trafficking, while also charting the successes and failures of the US’s own record on anti-trafficking practices at home and abroad. The subject is an important aspect of human rights advocacy where much remains either unknown or imprecise with regard to a phenomenon that involves millions of people across all continents and within all nation states. The approach is largely chronological and country-based, using documentary evidence from 1945 onwards to trace national and international responses to what is frequently termed ‘modern slavery’, placed within the broader and still evolving context of respect for the full panoply of human rights. Volume 1 comprises the analysis, debates and outcomes, together with ten primary documents relating to the years 1945–1999, as well as a bibliography and index. Volume 2 comprises a further 34 documents relating to the years 2000–2020, including international covenants, US Trafficking In Persons and Congressional reports, and Japanese government papers.
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The USSR and Iraq
The Soviet Quest for Influence
Oles M. Smolansky, with Bettie M. Smolansky
Duke University Press, 1991
In The USSR and Iraq, the first major study of Soviet-Iraqi relations, Oles M. Smolansky examines the history of the relationship between these two countries during the past twenty years and attempts to dispel the misconception that the Soviet Union has enjoyed undue influence over Iraq.
Drawing on ten years of research in Western, Arab, and Soviet sources, Smolansky analyzes the complex issues at the center of Soviet-Iraqi relations from 1968 through 1988, including the nationalization of the oil industry, the Kurdish question, the Iraqi Communist Party, the affairs of the Persian/Arabian Gulf, and, ultimately, the war between Iraq and Iran.
Smolansky concludes that Iraq has never been under the dominant influence of Moscow, nor has it even been a loyal Soviet ally. In fact, Iraq has managed to reap major benefits from the relationship without losing its autonomy or sacrificing its major interests. The author discusses the Soviet Union and Iraq within the larger framework of the nature of influence relationships between great and small powers.
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Utopia and Modernity in China
Contradictions in Transition
David Margolies
Pluto Press, 2022
The contradictions of modernization run through the whole of modern Chinese history. The abundance of manufactured goods being sold in the West attests to China's industrial revolution, but this capitalist vision of 'utopia' sits uneasily with traditional Chinese values. It is also in conflict with the socialism that has been the bedrock of Chinese society since the foundation of the People's Republic in 1949.

Utopia and Modernity in China examines the conflicts inherent in China's attempt to achieve a 'utopia' by advancing production and technology. Through the lenses of literature, arts, law, the press and the environment, the contributors interrogate the contradictions of modernization in Chinese society and its fundamental challenges.

By unpicking both China's vision of utopia and its realities and the increasing tension between traditional Chinese values and those of the West, this book offers a unique insight into the cultural forces that are part of reshaping today's China.
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Utopia Limited
The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern
Marianne DeKoven
Duke University Press, 2004
Utopia Limited is an original, engaging account of how postmodernism emerged from the political and cultural upheaval of the 1960s. Marianne DeKoven argues that aspects of sixties radical politics and culture simultaneously embodied the full, final flowering of the modern and the beginning of the postmodern. Analyzing classic sixties texts, DeKoven shows where the utopian master narratives underlying the radical and countercultural movements gave way to the “utopia limited” of the postmodern as a range of competing political values and desires came to the fore. She identifies the pivots where the modern was superseded by the nascent postmodern: where modern mass culture was replaced by postmodern popular culture, modern egalitarianism morphed into postmodern populism, and modern individualism fragmented into postmodern politics and cultures of subjectivity.

DeKoven rigorously analyzes a broad array of cultural and political texts important in the sixties—from popular favorites such as William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch to political manifestoes including The Port Huron Statement, the founding document of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). She examines texts that overtly discuss the conflict in Vietnam, Black Power, and second-wave feminism—including Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex; experimental pieces such as The Living Theatre’s Paradise Now; influential philosophical works including Roland Barthes’s Mythologies and Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man; and explorations of Las Vegas, the prime location of postmodernity. Providing extensive annotated bibliographies on both the sixties and postmodernism, Utopia Limited is an invaluable resource for understanding the impact of that tumultuous decade on the present.

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UW Struggle
When a State Attacks Its University
Chuck Rybak
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

A Wisconsin story that serves as a national warning

UW Struggle provides an on-the-ground view of the smoldering attack on public higher education in Wisconsin. Chuck Rybak, who works in the University of Wisconsin System, provides important glimpses into the personal lives of those affected, the dismantling of tenure protections, the diminishment of shared governance, and how faculty remain the scapegoat for all of the university’s problems. This is a chronicle of failed leadership and what actions, if any, can protect this vital American institution.

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Uyghur Nation
Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier
David Brophy
Harvard University Press, 2016

The meeting of the Russian and Qing empires in the nineteenth century had dramatic consequences for Central Asia’s Muslim communities. Along this frontier, a new political space emerged, shaped by competing imperial and spiritual loyalties, cross-border economic and social ties, and the revolutions that engulfed Russia and China in the early twentieth century. David Brophy explores how a community of Central Asian Muslims responded to these historic changes by reinventing themselves as the modern Uyghur nation.

As exiles and émigrés, traders and seasonal laborers, a diverse diaspora of Muslims from China’s northwest province of Xinjiang spread to Russian territory, where they became enmeshed in political and intellectual currents among Russia’s Muslims. From the many national and transnational discourses of identity that circulated in this mixed community, the rhetoric of Uyghur nationhood emerged as a rallying point in the tumult of the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War. Working both with and against Soviet policy, a shifting alliance of constituencies invoked the idea of a Uyghur nation to secure a place for itself in Soviet Central Asia and to spread the revolution to Xinjiang. Although its existence was contested in the fractious politics of the 1920s, in the 1930s the Uyghur nation achieved official recognition in the Soviet Union and China.

Grounded in a wealth of little-known archives from across Eurasia, Uyghur Nation offers a bottom-up perspective on nation-building in the Soviet Union and China and provides crucial background to the ongoing contest for the history and identity of Xinjiang.

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