Browse

In an era of globalization, issues of language diversity have economic and political implications. Transnational labor mobility, trade, social inclusion of migrants, democracy in multilingual countries, and companies’ international competitiveness all have a linguistic dimension; yet economists in general do not include language as a variable in their research. This volume demonstrates that the application of rigorous economic theories and research methods to issues of language policy yields valuable insights. The contributors offer both theoretical and empirical analyses of such topics as the impact of language diversity on economic outcomes, the distributive effects of policy regarding official languages, the individual welfare consequences of bilingualism, and the link between language and national identity. Their research is based on data from countries including Canada, India, Kazakhstan, and Indonesia and from the regions of Central America, Europe, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Theoretical models are explained intuitively for the nonspecialist. The relationships among linguistic variables, inequality, and the economy are approached from different perspectives, including economics, sociolinguistics, and political science. For this reason, the book offers a substantive contribution to interdisciplinary work on languages in society and language policy, proposing a common framework for a shared research area Contributors: Alisher Aldashev, Katalin Buzási, Ramon Caminal, Alexander M. Danzer, Maxime Leblanc Desgagné, Peter H. Egger, Ainhoa Aparicio Fenoll, Michele Gazzola, Victor Ginsburgh, Gilles Grenier, François Grin, Zoe Kuehn, Andrea Lassmann, Stephen May, Serge Nadeau, Suzanne Romaine, Selma K. Sonntag, Stefan Sperlich, José-Ramón Uriarte, François Vaillancourt, Shlomo Weber, Bengt-Arne Wickström, Lauren Zentz

Although the United States is considered the world’s only superpower, other major powers seek to strengthen the roles they play on the global stage. Because of the Iraq War and its repercussions, many countries have placed an increased emphasis on multilateralism. This new desire for a multipolar world, however, may obscure the obvious question of which objectives other powerful countries seek. Few scholars and policymakers have addressed the role of the other major powers in a post-9/11 world. This book offers analyses of China, Japan, Russia, India, and the European Union in this global context. Analysts, including Zbigniew Brzezinski, C. Raja Mohan, David Shambaugh, Dmitri Trenin, Akio Watanabe, and Wu Xinbo, examine the policies and positions of these global players from both international and domestic perspectives. This book discusses each power’s domestic politics, sources of power, post-9/11 changes, relationship with the United States, adjustments to globalization, and vision of its place in the world.

The United States is addicted to crude oil. In this book, Andrew Price-Smith argues that this addiction has distorted the conduct of American foreign policy in profound and malign ways, resulting in interventionism, exploitation, and other illiberal behaviors that hide behind a facade of liberal internationalism. The symbiotic relationship between the state and the oil industry has produced deviations from rational foreign energy policy, including interventions in Iraq and elsewhere that have been (at the very least) counterproductive or (at worst) completely antithetical to national interests. Price-Smith argues for a reformulation of liberal internationalism (which he terms shadow liberalism) that takes into account the dark side of American foreign policy. Price-Smith contends that the “free market” in international oil is largely a myth, rendered problematic by energy statism and the rise of national oil companies. He describes the United States' grand energy strategy, particularly in the Persian Gulf, as illiberal at its core, focused on the projection of power and on periodic bouts of violence. Washington’s perennial oscillation between liberal phases of institution building and provision of public goods and illiberal bellicosity, Price-Smith argues, represents the shadow liberalism that is at the core of US foreign policy.

In the second half of the twentieth century, worldwide attitudes toward whaling shifted from widespread acceptance to moral censure. Why? Whaling, once as important to the global economy as oil is now, had long been uneconomical. Major species were long known to be endangered, yet nations had continued to support whaling. This book argues that the change was brought about not by changing material interests but by a powerful anti-whaling discourse which successfully recast whales as extraordinary and intelligent endangered mammals that needed to be saved. It presents whaling as both an object of analysis in its own right and as a lens for examining discursive power and how language, materiality, and action interact to shape international relations. By focusing on discourse, the author develops an approach to the study of agency and the construction of interests that brings non-state actors and individuals into the analysis of international politics. She analyzes the “society of whaling states” as a set of historical practices through which the dominant discourse of the day legitimated the killing of whales rather than their protection. The author then looks at this whaling world’s mirror image: the rise from the political margins of an anti-whaling discourse that orchestrated one of the first successful global environmental campaigns, in which saving the whales ultimately became shorthand for saving the planet. Finally, the book considers the continued dominance of a now taken-for-granted anti-whaling discourse, including its creation of identity categories that align with and sustain the existing international political order.

States, nationalist movements, and ethnic groups in conflict with one another are often forced to choose between violent and nonviolent strategies. Although major wars between sovereign states have become rare, contemporary world politics is filled with internal conflict, ethnic cleansing, and violence against civilians. This book asks how, why, and when states and non-state actors use violence against one another and examines the effectiveness of various forms of political violence. In the process of addressing these issues, the essays make two conceptual moves that illustrate the need to reconsider how violence by states and non-state actors have typically been studied and understood. The first is to think of violence not as dichotomous, or as either present or absent, but to consider the wide range of violent and nonviolent options available and ask why actors come to embrace particular strategies. The second is to explore the dynamic nature of violent conflicts, developing explanations that can account for the eruption of violence at particular moments in time. The arguments focus on how changes in the balance of power between and among states and non-state actors generate uncertainty and threats, thereby creating an environment conducive to violence. This way of understanding violence deemphasizes the role of ethnic cleavages and nationalism in modern conflict.

Through an analysis of prominent transboundary natural resource management negotiation cases, Winning Together outlines how government, industry, and NGOs can effectively overcome past grievances, break the status quo, resolve conflicts, and create mutual gains in high-stakes water, energy, and environmental disputes. The book examines two landmark international negotiations between the United States and Mexico, both with agreements signed in 2012 after several decades of deadlock. The first case involves the conflict over the shared hydrocarbon reservoirs in the Gulf of Mexico, containing significant oil and natural gas resources. The second analyzes the dispute, amidst severe drought and increased climate risks, over the environmental resources and shared waters of the Colorado River, providing irrigation and water supply to more than 40 million people. For the first time, the two countries established a binational framework to co-develop and jointly manage these transboundary natural resources, as partners. Through unprecedented interviews with over 70 negotiators on both sides of the border, the book underscores strategies by which resource management practitioners can effectively increase river basin supply, re-think irrigation and storage infrastructure, restore ecosystems and habitats, enhance coordination between private and state owned companies, improve energy transition and planning, and re-define the scope and impact of diplomatic partnerships. Winning Together shows how developed and developing countries can move beyond hard-bargaining tactics and avoid the ultimatums that accompany the presumption that there are not enough resources to go around, and that one side must win and the other must inevitably lose.

When the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) metamorphosed into the WTO in 1994, it seemed that the third pillar of the international economic superstructure was finally put in place. And yet with the failure if member countries to close the Doha Round of trade negotiations and the emergence of bilateral and plurilateral preferential trade agreements (PTAs) such as the Trans-Pacific-Partnership (TPP) , the future of the world trade system seems uncertain. In this volume leading economists examine issues in trade policy that have arisen during this shift. The contributors discuss trends in the world trade system and discuss such topics as the effect of the trade on poverty and inequality, the use of antidumping measures within trade agreements, PTAs and litigation between trading partners, the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement and the relationship between trade liberalization and food security. They also offer regional perspectives on the TPP and transatlantic free trade.