Books in the Hot Spots in Global Politics series

With more than 500,000 people killed and at least half the population displaced, Syria's conflict is the most deadly of the twenty-first century. Russia's decision to join the war has broken the long military and political stalemate but it looks unlikely to deliver any of the core demands that spawned the original uprising against the Ba'athist regime.In this fully revised second edition of his acclaimed text, Samer Abboud provides an in-depth analysis of Syria's descent into civil war, the subsequent stalemate, and the consequences of Russian military involvement after 2015. He unravels the complex and multi-layered drivers of the conflict and demonstrates how rebel fragmentation, sustained regime violence, international actors, and the emergence of competing centers of power tore Syria apart in wholly irreversible ways. A resolution to the Syrian catastrophe seems to have emerged in the aftermath of Russia's intervention, but, as Abboud argues, this "authoritarian peace" contains the seeds of continued and future conflict in Syria. While the Assad regime has so far survived, the instability, violence, and insecurity that continue to shape everyday life for the Syrian people portend an uncertain future that will have repercussions on the wider Middle East for years to come.

Libya is teetering on the edge of collapse, having become a new safe haven for transnational terrorist organizations and the epicenter of the Mediterranean refugee crisis. This is the first book to document and explain the political, security, and humanitarian crises that have engulfed Libya -- Africa's largest oil exporting country -- since 2011.

Egypt is one of the few great empires of antiquity that exists today as a nation state.

Few countries can claim to have endured such a difficult and tortuous history as that of Iraq. Its varied peoples have had to contend with externally imposed state-building at the end of the First World War, through to the rise of authoritarian military regimes, to the all-encompassing power of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship.

The Horn of Africa is a deeply troubled region engulfed in three interlocking crises. The first is a security crisis characterized by a range of devastating inter-state and inter-communal conflicts, including civil wars.

This book penetrates the veil surrounding the Korean conflict and North Korea's missile and nuclear programmes. It provides a thorough historical analysis of relations between the two Koreas since the Korean War, which traces both North Korea's path to economic ruin and South Korea's transition from struggling dictatorship to vibrant democracy.

For almost three decades the troubles in Northern Ireland raged, claiming over 3,600 lives, with civilians accounting for almost half the fatalities. In this book, Jonathan Tonge examines the reasons for that conflict; the motivations of the groups involved and explores the prospects for a post-conflict Northern Ireland.

Afghanistan has become synonymous with violence. In the past 25 years alone, the country has endured Russian invasion and occupation, civil war and a US--led military campaign, resulting in the combined loss of over 2 million lives, most of them civilian.