LSE Monographs in International Studies

Naosuke Mukoyama, Fueling Sovereignty: Colonial Oil and the Creation of Unlikely States

European colonialism was often driven by the pursuit of natural resources, and the resulting colonization and decolonization processes have had a profound impact on the formation of the majority of sovereign states that exist today. But how exactly have natural resources influenced the creation of formerly colonized states? And would the world map of sovereign states look significantly different if not for these resources? These questions are at the heart of Fueling Sovereignty, which focuses primarily on oil as the most significant natural resource of the modern era. Naosuke Mukoyama provides a compelling analysis of how colonial oil politics contributed to the creation of some of the world's most “unlikely” states. Drawing on extensive archival sources on Brunei, Qatar and Bahrain, he sheds light on how some small colonial entities achieved independence despite their inclusion in a merger project promoted by the metropole and regional powers.

Stephanie Lawson, Regional Politics in Oceania: From Colonialism and Cold War to the Pacific Century

Stephanie Lawson's book is by far the most comprehensive study of regional politics in Oceania produced to date. Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary sources, she provides a systematic account of major issues facing the region and presents conceptual and theoretical issues in a sophisticated but accessible manner. She traces the trajectories of regional politics from the earliest human settlements to European exploration and colonization, the period of formal regionalization in the post-war period, decolonization, the Cold War, and key geopolitical developments in the post-Cold War period. She also focuses on identity politics, manifest at various levels from the local through to the national, subregional and regional, as well as broader configurations around the West/non-West divide. This book will be of interest to anyone engaged with the history and politics of Oceania or comparative regional studies, especially given the relevance of themes to Asian, African and Latin American contexts.

Ida Danewid, Resisting Racial Capitalism: An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal

What does freedom mean without, and despite, the state? Ida Danewid argues that state power is central to racial capitalism's violent regimes of extraction and accumulation. Tracing the global histories of four technologies of state violence: policing, bordering, wastelanding, and reproductive control, she excavates an antipolitical archive of anarchism that stretches from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the borderlands of Europe, the poisoned landscape of Ogoniland, and the queer lifeworlds of Delhi. Thinking with a rich set of scholars, organisers, and otherworldy dreamers, Danewid theorises these modes of refusal as a utopian worldmaking project which seeks not just better ways of being governed, but an end to governance in its entirety. In a time where the state remains hegemonic across the Left–Right political spectrum, Resisting Racial Capitalism calls on us to dream bolder and better in order to (un)build the world anew.

Osman Balkan, Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe

On any given day, the remains of countless deceased migrants are shipped around the world to be buried in ancestral soils. Others are laid to rest in countries of settlement, sometimes in cemeteries established for religious and ethnic minorities, where available. For immigrants and their descendants, perennial questions about the meaning of home and homeland take on a particular gravitas in death. When the boundaries of a nation and its members are contested, burial decisions are political acts. Building on multi-sited fieldwork in Berlin and Istanbul – where the author worked as an undertaker – Dying Abroad offers a moving and powerful account of migrants' end-of-life dilemmas, vividly illustrating how they are connected to ongoing political struggles over the stakes of citizenship, belonging, and collective identity in contemporary Europe.

Joseph Mackay, The Counterinsurgent Imagination: A New Intellectual History

Counterinsurgency, the violent suppression of armed insurrection, is among the dominant kinds of war in contemporary world politics. Often linked to protecting populations and reconstructing legitimate political orders, it has appeared in other times and places in very different forms – and has taken on a range of politics in doing so. How did it arrive at its present form, and what generated these others, along the way?

Eren Duzgun, Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Revisiting Turkish Modernity

This book offers a radical reinterpretation of the development of the modern world through the concept of Jacobinism. It argues that the French Revolution was not just another step in the construction of capitalist modernity, but produced an alternative (geo)political economy – that is, 'Jacobinism.' Furthermore, Jacobinism provided a blueprint for other modernization projects, thereby profoundly impacting the content and tempo of global modernity in and beyond Europe.

Ayşe Zarakol, Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders

How would the history of international relations in 'the East' be written if we did not always read the ending – the Rise of the West and the decline of the East – into the past? What if we did not assume that Asia was just a residual category, a variant of 'not-Europe', but saw it as a space of with its own particular history and sociopolitical dynamics, not defined only by encounters with European colonialism? How would our understanding of sovereignty, as well as our theories about the causes of the decline of Great Powers and international orders, change as a result?

Andrew Phillips, How the East Was Won: Barbarian Conquerors, Universal Conquest and the Making of Modern Asia

How did upstart outsiders forge vast new empires in early modern Asia, laying the foundations for today's modern mega-states of India and China? In How the East Was Won, Andrew Phillips reveals the crucial parallels uniting the Mughal Empire, the Qing Dynasty and the British Raj.

Chris Reus-Smit, On Cultural Diversity: International Theory in a World of Difference

Christian Reus-Smit details how the major theories of international relations have consistently misunderstood the nature and effects of culture, returning time and again to the idea of cultures as coherent, bounded, and constitutive.

Andrew Phillips and Chris Reus-Smit (eds), Culture and Order in World Politics

Through a pioneering interdisciplinary collaboration between leading historians, international lawyers, sociologists and international relations scholars, this book argues that cultural diversity in social life is ubiquitous rather than exceptional.

Winner: 2021 Best Edited Collection of the Year (Theory), International Studies Association

Daniela Lai, Socioeconomic Justice: International Intervention and Transition in Post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina

Daniela Lai provides the first systematic analysis of experiences of socioeconomic violence during war and how they give rise to strong, but unheeded justice claims in the aftermath.

Hendrik Spruyt, The World Imagined: Collective Beliefs and Political Order in the Sinocentric, Islamic and Southeast Asian International Societies

Taking an inter-disciplinary approach, Hendrik Spruyt explains the political organization of three non-European international societies from early modernity to the late nineteenth century: all of which differed in key respects from the modern Westphalian state system.

Winner: 2021 Best Book of the Year (Theory), International Studies Association