Books in the Cambridge Studies in International Relations series

A provocative new history of counterinsurgency with major implications for the history and theory of war, but also the history of social, political and international thought and social, political and international studies more generally. This book will interest scholars and advanced students in the humanities and social sciences.

Dominant narratives have often served as the foundation for debates over national security. This book offers novel arguments about where these narratives come from, how they become dominant and when they collapse. It shows how these arguments shed light on US national security debates and policy from the 1930s through the 2000s.

This book provides one of the first systematic examinations of the role emotions play in world politics. Using extensive conceptual inquiries and empirical case studies, it shows how representations of trauma, from terrorist attacks and humanitarian crises to civil unrest, can generate emotional legacies that shape communities in international relations.

Nuclear Politics provides a compelling theory of nuclear proliferation, backed by extensive evidence on sixteen cases of nuclear development. Its theoretical rigor and historical richness make this book essential reading for anyone interested in understanding why countries acquire nuclear weapons - and what can be done to stem nuclear proliferation.

For decades, the starting point of international relations (IR) scholars was the anarchic nature of international politics. Recent examples of political and financial turmoil, however, have shown the inadequacies of existing theoretical frameworks. This ground-breaking book brings leading IR scholars together in order to move the discipline in a new direction.

This book examines how justice and reconciliation in world politics should be conceived in response to the injustice and alienation of modern colonialism?

Despite repeatedly being surprised by unexpected change, mainstream international relations continues to assume that the world is governed by calculable risk based on estimates of power. Protean Power highlights and challenges this assumption by arguing for the acknowledgement of uncertainty as an important condition of political and social life.

Allan argues that cosmological ideas arising from Western science altered the goals and purposes that underlie international orders. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations theory, international history, the history of science, and organizational and historical sociology.

International relations scholars typically assume the rationality of foreign policy makers when in fact leaders systematically vary in the rationality of their thinking. Through case studies of leaders like Churchill and Reagan, Rathbun shows that the imposed standard of rationality, based in objectivity and deliberation, was often absent.

Building on his research on constructivist theory, and communities and practices, Adler suggests cognitive evolution, a timely social and normative theory of world ordering. It explains why configurations of practices organize and govern social orders epistemically and normatively, and why and how they evolve from one social order to another.

Exploring the tensions of Christian practice in the modern world, Lynch demonstrates the ethical precarity that characterizes both religious and secular actions in international politics from early missions to contemporary humanitarianism. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of IR, religion and politics, and religious studies

To what extent are global rule-of-law norms, which external actors promote in post-conflict states, localized? Who decides whether global standards or local particularities prevail? This book offers a new approach to the debate about how the dilemma between the diffusion of global norms and their localization is dealt with in global politics. Studying the promotion of children's rights, access to public information, and an international commission against impunity in Guatemala, Lisbeth Zimmermann demonstrates that rule-of-law promotion triggers domestic contestation and thereby changes the approach taken by external actors, and ultimately the manner in which global norms are translated. However, the leeway in local translation is determined by the precision of global norms. Based on an innovative theoretical approach and an in-depth study of rule-of-law translation, Zimmermann argues for a shift in norm promotion from context sensitivity to democratic appropriation, speaking to scholars of international relations, peacebuilding, democratization studies, international law, and political theory.