Books from Ukraine
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Promoted Content
April 2021Ukraine's fateful years 2013–2019
Vol. 1: The Maidan uprising in 2013/2014 Vol. 2: The annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbass
by Winfried Schneider-Deters
— Comprehensive and detailled analysis of the Euromaidan and the ongoing war in Ukraine — Brussels versus Moscow, Russian aggression and geopolitical interests — China's role in a new East-West conflict The years between 2013 and 2019 were almost as significant for Ukraine as the attainment of independence in 1991, as this very independence was in danger of being lost again after the Euromaidan. The nationwide popular uprising against the regime of President Yanukovych had led to a change of power: the former parliamentary opposition formed a new government, resulting in a loss of influence for Russia. Russian agents therefore tried to bring about a "Crimea scenario", another secession in the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine. The resulting "Ukraine conflict", often called a civil war, is in fact a Russian war of attrition against Ukraine. President Putin intends to resolve it on his terms in the Minsk process: through a de facto "autonomous" part of the Donbass in the Ukrainian state, independent of Kiev, as a lever for Russian political influence. Winfried Schneider- Deters, a renowned expert on Ukraine, analyses narratively and in detail the events from 2013 to 2019 and places the Russian- Ukrainian conflict in the context of the dawning "Chinese century".
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Promoted Content
May 2022In the Shadow of War
Diary notes from Ukraine
by Christoph Brumme
"What can you learn in war? Do you become numb, do you get used to it at some point? Does war make you "hard", uncaring, above pain? No. These are just clichés. Every day brings new horrors. At best, one learns for some time to suppress strong feelings, because to give in to them would weaken one's life instinct." In a very stirring and shocking, but sometimes humorous language, Christoph Brumme tells of the situation in Ukraine, the everyday life of his family and friends, of fears, longings and political assessments. The diary entries of the war and the resistance of the Ukrainians, starting from the first signs of the impending war in mid-January 2022 until the printing of this book, 1st May 2022, impressively bear witness to the brutality of these events.
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Trusted Partner
2024Where is Russia Heading?
by Jens Siegert
Vladimir Putin has been ruling Russia for 25 years. There is no end in sight to his dictatorship. He relies on repression at home and is waging a war of destruction against a neighbouring country. The conflict with the West has long become a systemic conflict between an illiberal-autocratic ideology and liberal-democratic principles. Nothing will change as long as Putin remains in power. Nevertheless, as far as can be ascertained under unfree conditions, the majority of the population seems to be supporting Putin. Does this mean that too many people in Russia do not want democracy or peace? Will everything remain the same after Putin? Or is there a chance that Russia will eventually take a different, more democratic path? Whatever the outcome of the war in Ukraine, Russia is not going to disappear. We will still have to deal with our big neighbour in the east. This makes it all the more important to focus on longer-term developments. As a recognised expert on Russian history and society, the author outlines what the post-Putin era might look like. His in-depth analysis makes it clear that Russia is partly Putin, but Putin is not everything about Russia.
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Trusted Partner
June 2025Proxy war in Afghanistan
The politics of state-wrecking
by Abbas Farasoo
This book provides a compelling analysis of proxy warfare and its far-reaching implications for statehood, focusing on the conflict in Afghanistan. Introducing the innovative concept of "state-wrecking," it bridges theory and practice to unravel how external support for insurgent actors fuels violence, undermines territorial control and sovereignty, intensifies violence, and dismantles political legitimacy. The work shifts the discourse on proxy wars from the strategies of global powers to the procedural and structural impacts within target states. Grounded in rigorous empirical research, including interviews, archival data, and conflict analysis, the book critically examines the Pakistan-Taliban nexus and the limitations of US-led interventions. By blending a robust theoretical framework with in-depth case studies, it reveals how proxy dynamics shape conflicts, disrupt governance, and challenge international security. This is an essential resource for those seeking to understand the entanglements of modern warfare and the fragility of states under external influence.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMay 2026The racial politics of police warfare
by Jasbinder S. Nijjar
Amid renewed anti-racist resistance to violent policing, The racial politics of police warfare unpacks the racisms that rationalise militarised policing in contemporary Britain. Jasbinder S. Nijjar shatters prevailing myths about British police as an impartial public service, by revealing it as an institution where racism and war reinforce one another. In examining flagship anti-gang and counter-terrorism policies and practices, the book offers a unique analysis of the relationship between anti-black and anti-Muslim racisms, to demonstrate how racialised populations are institutionalised as common enemies of modernity. Combining perspectives from sociology, history, criminology and social policy, Nijjar illustrates how British policing defends law and order and national security from the perceived threat of race through hyper-intrusive, pre-emptive and deathly measures. Accordingly, he gives a fresh take on resisting racial police warfare, calling for strategies that are at once political, collective, anti-militaristic and abolitionist.
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Humanities & Social SciencesFebruary 2022Psychoanalysis and the family in twentieth-century France
Françoise Dolto and her legacy
by Richard Bates, David Hopkin, Maire Cross, Jennifer Sessions
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, if French people had a parenting problem or dilemma there was one person they consulted above all: Françoise Dolto (1908-88). But who was Dolto? How did she achieve a position of such influence? What ideas did she communicate to the French public? This book connects the story of Dolto's rise to two broader histories: the dramatic growth of psychoanalysis in postwar France and the long-running debate over the family and the proper role of women in society. It shows that Dolto's continued reputation in France as a liberal and enlightened educational thinker is at best only partially deserved and that conservative and anti-feminist ideas often underpinned her prominent public interventions. While Dolto retains the status of a national treasure, her career has had far-reaching and sometimes harmful repercussions for French society, particularly in the treatment of autism.
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Trusted Partner
Humanities & Social SciencesFebruary 2026Make cheese not war
Transnational resistance and the Larzac in modern France
by Andrew W. M. Smith
In 1971, the French government announced a massive extension of its military base on the Larzac plateau in southern France. Land was to be expropriated from 107 farms around the small town of La Cavalerie. Limited resistance was expected, but what happened next exceeded all expectations. Local sheep farmers set up protest camps and occupied the land. They soon attracted an astonishing level of support, pioneering a form of regional radicalism with global implications. Drawing out the international dimensions of the protest, Make cheese not war explores a transnational resistance movement in the 1970s that challenged dominant visions of modernity and became a wellspring of radical alternatives. Exploring previously unconsulted archives in France and elsewhere, the book offers an in-depth analysis of the decade-long peasant movement and its aftermath. Repositioning the Larzac struggle within a wider network of French and international solidarities, from the US to the UK, Germany, Burkina Faso, New Caledonia and Japan, the book retraces political networks of pacifist activism, as well as environmental movements and anti-nuclear protest. It shows how this French peasant campaign became both a platform and a model for popular engagement.
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Trusted Partner
Humanities & Social SciencesAugust 2018Flight MH17, Ukraine and the new Cold War
by Kees van der Pijl, Radhika Desai, Alan Freeman
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Humanities & Social SciencesNovember 2024The rise of global Islamophobia in the War on Terror
by Naved Bakali, Farid Hafez
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2017Britain in China
by Robert Bickers
This is a study of Britain's presence in China both at its peak, and during its inter-war dissolution in the face of assertive Chinese nationalism and declining British diplomatic support. Using archival materials from China and records in Britain and the United States, the author paints a portrait of the traders, missionaries, businessmen, diplomats and settlers who constituted "Britain-in-China", challenging our understanding of British imperialism there. Bickers argues that the British presence in China was dominated by urban settlers whose primary allegiance lay not with any grand imperial design, but with their own communities and precarious livelihoods. This brought them into conflict not only with the Chinese population, but with the British imperial government. The book also analyzes the formation and maintenance of settler identities, and then investigates how the British state and its allies brought an end to the reign of freelance, settler imperialism on the China coast. At the same time, other British sectors, missionary and business, renegotiated their own relationship with their Chinese markets and the Chinese state and distanced themselves from the settler British.
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Demonstrations & protest movementsJuly 2014Worker protests in post-communist Romania and Ukraine
Striking with tied hands
by Mihai Varga
Worker protests in post-communist Romania and Ukraine is a book about strategies of trade unions confronting employers in difficult conditions. The book's main idea is to study why and how successful forms of workers' interest representation could emerge in a hostile context. The post-communist context makes it difficult for workers and trade unions to mobilise, pose threats to employers, and break out of their political isolation, but even under such harsh conditions strategy matters for defending workers' rights and living standards. The cases studied in this book are 18 conflict episodes at 10 privatised plants in the Romanian steel industry and Ukraine's civil machine-building sector in the 2000s. This book should be relevant for anyone taking interest in how and to what extent workers can reassert their influence over the conditions of production in regions and economic sectors characterised by disinvestment (of which outsourcing and 'lean' methods of production are instances).
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Humanities & Social SciencesApril 2026Christ’s war
Holiness, heroism and horror in Carolingian poetry, c.730-c.900 CE
by Matthew Bryan Gillis
Christ's war examines Carolingian holy war from the forging of their empire in the eighth century to its dissolution in the late ninth century during the Northmen's attacks. It argues that the Franks understood their wars to be holy when their soldiers were without sin and, therefore, were holy themselves. God heard their prayers as they begged for divine aid, and he helped them overcome and slaughter their foes. Therefore, the Carolingian vision of holy war differed from the pious, apocalyptic military pilgrimages of the subsequent Crusades. Latin poetry serves as an important source in this study for understanding holy war, including how poets dramatized glorious victories or horrifying defeats for their audiences. The book offers important insights into the religious nature of Frankish warfare, while also contributing a fresh and innovative perspective on medieval holy war overall.
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Trusted Partner
MedicineDecember 2020African nurses and everyday work in twentieth-century Zimbabwe
by Clement Masakure, Jane Schultz
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Humanities & Social SciencesFebruary 2022Psychoanalysis and the family in twentieth-century France
by Richard Bates
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Humanities & Social SciencesSeptember 2023Civil war London
Mobilizing for parliament, 1641–5
by Jordan S. Downs
This book looks at London's provision of financial and military support for parliament's war against King Charles I. It explores for the first time a series of episodic, circumstantial and unique mobilisations that spanned from late 1641 to early 1645 and which ultimately led to the establishment of the New Model Army. Based on research from two-dozen archives, Civil war London charts the successes and failures of efforts to move London's vast resources and in the process poses a number of challenges to longstanding notions about the capital's 'parliamentarian' makeup. It reveals interactions between London's Corporation, parochial communities and livery companies, between preachers and parishioners and between agitators, propagandists and common people. Within these tangled webs of political engagement reside the untold stories of the movement of money and men, but also of parliament's eventual success in the English Civil War.
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Humanities & Social SciencesApril 2022Chinese religion in contemporary Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan
The cult of the Two Grand Elders
by Fabian Graham
In Singapore and Malaysia, the inversion of Chinese Underworld traditions has meant that Underworld demons are now amongst the most commonly venerated deities in statue form, channelled through their spirit mediums, tang-ki. The Chinese Underworld and its sub-hells are populated by a bureaucracy drawn from the Buddhist, Taoist and vernacular pantheons. Under the watchful eye of Hell's 'enforcers', the lower echelons of demon soldiers impose post-mortal punishments on the souls of the recently deceased for moral transgressions committed during their prior incarnations. Chinese religion in contemporary Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan offers an ethnography of contemporary Chinese Underworld traditions, where night-time cemetery rituals assist the souls of the dead, exorcised spirits are imprisoned in Guinness bottles, and malicious foetus ghosts are enlisted to strengthen a temple's spirit army. Understanding the religious divergences between Singapore and Malaysia (and their counterparts in Taiwan) through an analysis of socio-political and historical events, Fabian Graham challenges common assumptions about the nature and scope of Chinese vernacular religious beliefs and practices. Graham's innovative approach to alterity allows the reader to listen to first-person dialogues between the author and channelled Underworld deities. Through its alternative methodological and narrative stance, the book intervenes in debates on the interrelation between sociocultural and spiritual worlds, and promotes the destigmatisation of spirit possession and discarnate phenomena in the future study of mystical and religious traditions.
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The ArtsSeptember 2024The renewal of post-war Manchester
Planning, architecture and the state
by Richard Brook
A compelling account of the project to transform post-war Manchester, revealing the clash between utopian vision and compromised reality. Urban renewal in Britain was thrilling in its vision, yet partial and incomplete in its implementation. For the first time, this deep study of a renewal city reveals the complex networks of actors behind physical change and stagnation in post-war Britain. Using the nested scales of region, city and case-study sites, the book explores the relationships between Whitehall legislation, its interpretation by local government planning officers and the on-the-ground impact through urban architectural projects. Each chapter highlights the connections between policy goals, global narratives and the design and construction of cities. The Cold War, decolonialisation, rising consumerism and the oil crisis all feature in a richly illustrated account of architecture and planning in post-war Manchester.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJuly 2025Urbicide in Syria
A postcolonial understanding of civil war
by Gabriel Garroum Pla
This book provides an exhaustive analysis of the relationship between violence, urban space, and political subjectivity in Syria. It does so through an exploration of how urbicide, the violent destruction and alteration of the urban fabric, becomes a tool for the regime's governmental and sovereign exercise of power, decisively redefining state-society dynamics and cementing political loyalty in Syria. Adopting a critical and postcolonial perspective, and through the cases of Damascus and Aleppo, the volume presents a unique perspective on the civil war by examining socio-material changes in everyday political spaces and processes, from mundane destruction to urban development and reconstruction efforts, and how these are experienced by local communities. Featuring rich data collection through interviews, archival research, and aesthetic sources, the book ultimately foregrounds Syrians' political agency and creativity despite ruination.
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Literature & Literary StudiesOctober 2025Early modern drama and the theatre of war
Militarism, conflict and disruption in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries
by Bronwen Price, Hilary Hinds
This volume explores the disruptive effects of militarism, war and social unrest in early modern drama. Engaging with Simon Barker's seminal work on dramatic representations of war and militarism, contributors highlight what often lies hidden beneath the surface of martial narratives, treating them as formative interventions in contemporary discourses, whether in justifying war, excluding dissident voices or shaping cultural identities. Discussions include new examinations of militarism, the figure of the soldier and early modern theories of war in Shakespearean tragedy, history and comedy, alongside antimasque and dramatic satire by lesser-known playwrights. The essays investigate how ideas of war underpin emerging concepts of gender, leadership, marriage and the family, as well as the continuing mobilisation of Shakespearean drama in the context of modern armed conflict. Together, they offer rich new contributions to the current lively critical debates on this topic.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2026US cultural diplomacy after the Cold War
Decline, recovery, and fall
by Jeffrey H. Michaels, Giles Scott-Smith
In the decades following the USSR's collapse, the US has gone from unrivalled hegemon to a position of relative decline. With America 'triumphant' after 1991, its culture, like its diplomatic, military and economic power, remained unmatched. Such favourable circumstances seemed to undercut the need for cultural diplomacy. Why should the US government sell a product that was already selling so well? After 9/11, however, it was apparent the US image was less popular than previously assumed. To reverse this negative image, cultural diplomacy was revived. Despite being beset by internal and external challenges, US officials supported various cultural initiatives and partnerships to promote the American brand globally. Along the way, cultural diplomacy has made use of new forms of expression to promote American culture and build positive foreign relations. The arrival of the second Trump administration in 2025 has clearly signalled an end to using cultural diplomacy to further causes of empowerment and diversity, making the future uncertain for this field of activity.
