International Studies Book List ·

Peacebuilding, Power, and Politics in Africa

Peacebuilding, Power, and Politics in Africa is a critical reflection on peacebuilding efforts in Africa. The authors expose the tensions and contradictions in different clusters of peacebuilding activities, including peace negotiations; statebuilding; security sector governance; and disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration.…

Chocolate Islands

Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa

In Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa, Catherine Higgs traces the early-twentieth-century journey of the Englishman Joseph Burtt to the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe—the chocolate islands—through Angola and Mozambique, and finally to British Southern Africa.…

Violence

Analysis, Intervention, and Prevention

In a world desperate to comprehend and address what appears to be an ever-enlarging explosion of violence, this book provides important insights into crucial contemporary issues, with violence providing the lens.…

Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa

The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans, isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often framed written and visual representations of the region.…

Child Slaves in the Modern World

Child Slaves in the Modern World is the second of two volumes that examine the distinctive uses and experiences of children in slavery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This collection of previously unpublished essays exposes the global victimization of child slaves from the period of abolition of legal slavery in the nineteenth century to the human rights era of the twentieth century.…

Cultivating the Colonies

Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies

The essays collected in Cultivating the Colonies demonstrate how the relationship between colonial power and nature reveals the nature of power. Each essay explores how colonial governments translated ideas about the management of exotic nature and foreign people into practice, and how they literally “got their hands dirty” in the business of empire.…

Sugar Girls and Seamen

A Journey into the World of Dockside Prostitution in South Africa

Sugar Girls and Seamen illuminates the shadowy world of dockside prostitution in South Africa, focusing on the women of Cape Town and Durban who sell their hospitality to foreign sailors. Dockside “sugar girls” work at one of the busiest cultural intersections in the world.…

Making a World after Empire

The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives

In April 1955, twenty-nine countries from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East came together for a diplomatic conference in Bandung, Indonesia, intending to define the direction of the postcolonial world.…

Constructive Engagement?

Chester Crocker & American Policy in South Africa, Namibia & Angola, 1981–1988

The notion of engagement represents an indispensable tool in a foreign policy practitioner’s armory. The idea of constructive engagement is forwarded by governments as a method whereby pressure can be brought to bear on countries to improve their record on human rights, while diplomatic and economic contracts can be maintained.…

Organic Coffee

Sustainable Development by Mayan Farmers

Despite deepening poverty and environmental degradation throughout rural Latin America, Mayan peasant farmers in Chiapas, Mexico, are finding environmental and economic success by growing organic coffee.…

The Unpast

Elite Violence and Social Control in Brazil, 1954–2000

Portuguese and Brazilian slave-traders shipped at least four million slaves to Brazil—in contrast to the five hundred thousand slaves that English vessels brought to the Americas. Controlling the vast number of slaves in Brazil became of primary importance.…

Military Intervention after the Cold War

The Evolution of Theory and Practice

For hundreds of years, military intervention in another country was considered taboo and prohibited by international law. Since 1992, intervention has often been described as an international responsibility, and efforts have been made to give it legal justification.…

Civil War, Civil Peace

More than two hundred wars have been fought in the past halfcentury. Nearly all have been civil wars, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, more than thirty civil wars were being fought. The “rules” of interstate war do not apply; each atrocity provokes retribution, and civil war takes on a brutal dynamic of its own.…

Immigration, Diversity, and Broadcasting in the United States 1990—2001

The last decade of the twentieth century brought a maturing of the new racial and ethnic communities in the United States and the emergence of diversity and multiculturalism as dominant fields of discourse in legal, educational, and cultural contexts.…

Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution

Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas

In many Latin American countries, guerrilla struggle and feminism have been linked in surprising ways. Women were mobilized by the thousands to promote revolutionary agendas that had little to do with increasing gender equality.…

Threatening Others

Nicaraguans and the Formation of National Identities in Costa Rica

During the last two decades, a decline in public investment has undermined some of the national values and institutions of Costa Rica. The resulting sense of dislocation and loss is usually projected onto Nicaraguan “immigrants.…

Communities of Work

Rural Restructuring in Local and Global Contexts

The image of rural America portrayed in this illuminating study is one that is vibrant, regionally varied, and sometimes heroic. Communities of Work focuses on the ways in which rural people and places are affected by political, social, and economic forces far outside their control and how they sustain themselves and their communities in response.…

Writing Women in Central America

Gender and the Fictionalization of History

What is the relationship between history and fiction in a place with a contentious past? And of what concern is gender in the telling of stories about that past? Writing Women in Central America explores these questions as it considers key Central American texts.…

Gabriela Mistral

The Audacious Traveler

Gabriela Mistral is the only Latin American woman writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Even so, her extraordinary achievements in poetry, narrative, and political essays remain largely untold.…

Cultivating Coffee

The Farmers of Carazo, Nicaragua, 1880–1930

Many scholars of Latin America have argued that the introduction of coffee forced most people to become landless proletarians toiling on large plantations. Cultivating Coffee tells a different story: small and medium-sized growers in Nicaragua were a vital part of the economy, constituting the majority of the farmers and holding most of the land.…