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The Domestic Dimension of Public Diplomacy
This book explores new grounds that public diplomacy is entering today, as domestic publics come to the forefront of the policy – acting both as foreign policy constituencies and public diplomacy actors cooperating with their foreign counterparts. The author discusses the phenomena of public diplomacy’s domestic dimension described as government’s ability to engage its own society in foreign policy practices through information, cooperation and identity-defining. By analysing data from over 80 recorded interviews with Australian, Norwegian and American public diplomacy practitioners, this volume illustrates both successful and unsuccessful models of such cooperation. From Norwegian Peace Diplomacy, through Australia’s ambivalent engagement with Asia, to U.S. Government-sponsored exchange programs, the author argues that governments around the world are slowly accepting a paradigm shift in diplomatic practice from monological/dialogical to a more collaborative public diplomacy. This book is an essential resource for students, scholars, experts and diplomats interested in world’s best-practices of engaging domestic civil society actors in foreign policy statecraft.
Mediating the World in the Novels of Iain Banks
Katarzyna Pisarska's Mediating the World is a pioneering attempt at a structural-semiotic analysis of Iain Banks's literary fiction considered as a single oeuvre. All Banks's fictions, she argues, are organized around the question of mediation between character and world, whether the mediation be social, impersonal and objective on the one hand, or individual, personal and subjective on the other. This insight gives rise to a typology of four different kinds of 'world modeling'. All four, she argues, derive from The Wasp Factory, but thereafter one or other is dominant in each of the later no.
The Lives of Texts
The Lives of Texts: Exploring the Metaphor examines various instances of “textual subsistence” implied by the title. Drawing on the parallel between a text and a living organism, the contributors analyze various literary texts ranging from the Middle Ages to postmodernity, as well as film adaptations and the graphic novel. Apart from the works of canonical writers, attention is also drawn to some long-forgotten authors, along with the most recent instances of popular literature and culture. The exploration of the title metaphor allows the contributors to trace life-like phenomena (e.g. textual birth, maturation, dissemination, death and resurrection) in the texts of writers so remote from each other as Layamon, Thomas More, Mary Shelley, Charles Williams, Ursula Le Guin, A. S. Byatt, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Banks, J. K. Rowling, or Neil Gaiman.
The Epistemology of Utopia
The emergence of Utopian Studies as a dynamic field of inquiry situated at the crossroads of several disciplines is a striking development of the past few decades. It is symptomatic of a general trend towards the overcoming of epistemological and institutional boundaries, and has borne fruit in a number of ways. The traditions of utopianism have come to be valued as an important nurturing of possibilities, devoted to the critique and the transformation of the world. By undertaking the critical interrogation of the given, utopia is a figure not only of inversion, but of transcendence and fulfilment. The present volume takes into account the international development of Utopian Studies in recent decades. Its aim is to provide critical revisions (revisitings) of the assumptions and methods of the discipline through a set of theoretically-informed essays that focus on a number of different manifestations of utopianism. The topics covered range from Plato’s Republic and More’s Utopia to modern-day cosmopolitics, “glocalization”, and the intersections of fiction with esotericism and science.
The Routledge Handbook of Soft Power
The Routledge Handbook of Soft Power (2nd Edition) offers a comprehensive, detailed, and ground-breaking examination of soft power – a key factor in cultural diplomacy, cultural relations, and public diplomacy. Interrogating soft power as influence, the handbook examines manifestations in media, public mind, policy, and theory – in a fraught geopolitical climate, one demanding reconceptualization of soft power’s role in state and civic society behaviour. Part I provides important new conceptualization and critical analysis of soft power from international relations, philosophical, and other social theoretical perspectives; analyses multiple methods of soft power measurement and makes p...
Reimagining the International Legal Order
International law is usually conservative, with lawyers and judges emphasizing consistency, stability and predictability as the major advantages of the law. Legal scholars often prefer not to challenge the status quo, to suggest amendments, or to reform institutions, advocating simply to focus on the implementation of the laws that already exist. This collection stands different. It shares the authors’ discomfort with the present legal order and some of its institutions and courts, and dives into either a corrective or a profound reimagination of these, so that they can better address rising global challenges. Leading experts in their areas present their new and cutting-edge perspectives. Divided into six parts, the volume paints a vast yet solid thematic landscape of unique and critical approaches. The book invites and allows for a deep engagement with a wide range of opinions from across the world. It enables a free and courageous reimagining of the international legal order, detached from the endless feasibility skepticism. The work will be fascinating reading for students, academics and researchers working in the areas of International Law and International Relations.
Worlds So Strange and Diverse
This book represents an analysis of contemporary fantasy (non-mimetic) literature in all its richness and diversity, and offers a preliminary definition of the major fields of taxonomical interest, in addition to marking some of the unmapped territories of “fantastic” fiction. In its first part, the book presents an overview of all major previous theoretical discussions of the issue, particularly those by Tzvetan Todorov, Rosemary Jackson, Darko Suvin, Brian Attebery, Marek Oziewicz and Farah Mendlesohn. The second part of the book provides an interesting comprehensive taxonomy of its own, based on the notion of supragenological types of literature, first introduced by Andrzej Zgorzelski.
Dystopia(n) Matters
The volume is divided into two parts, separated by an Intermezzo. The first part, “Dystopia Matters”, benefits from the contribution of reputed scholars of the field of Utopian Studies, who were asked to make a statement explaining why dystopia is important. The Intermezzo completes this part and offers the reader an informed discussion of the concepts of utopia, dystopia and anti-utopia whilst providing ground for the case studies presented in the second part, in the sections devoted to literature, film, and theatre. In one way or another, despite the variety of approaches, all contributors argue for the idea that, if dystopia has invaded most forms of contemporary discourse, its sibling, utopia, has not been eradicated from the scene. Furthermore, the studies show that the tension between the two concepts is instrumental to our cautious, conscious, and tentative construction of the future.
