This paper analyses the rise of Swedish trade and shipping in the Mediterranean in the eighteenth century. It focuses on three factors that shaped Sweden’s role in the area: foreign policy interest, foreign trade policy (mercantilism), and commodity demand and supply. The foreign policy interest is represented by attempts to build an alliance with the Ottoman Empire against Russia. An outcome…
‘Who is in and who is out? – these are the first questions that any political community must answer about itself’ (Walzer 1993: 55). We can agree with Michael Walzer on this point, but there is one important question that precedes asking who is in and who is out and that is, why are we in this together in the first place? How did a concrete political community come into being, and why doe…
The digital pdf of Chapter 5 is available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This collection brings together leading figures in the study of international relations to explore praxis as a perspective on international politics and law. With its focus on competent judgments, the praxis approach holds the promise to overcome the divide between knowing and acting that marks positivist internati…
The sequencing of the entire human genome has opened up unprecedented possibilities for healthcare, but also ethical and social dilemmas about how these can be achieved, particularly in developing countries. UNESCO's Bioethics Programme was established to address such issues in 1993. Since then, it has adopted three declarations on human genetics and bioethics (1997, 2003 and 2005), set up nume…
"This book examines the key dimensions of 21st century war, and shows that orthodox thinking about war, particularly what it is and how it is fought, needs to be updated. Accelerating societal, economic, political and technological change affects how we prepare, equip and organise for war, as well as how we conduct war – both in its low-tech and high-tech forms, and whether it is with high in…
This chapter argues for the significance of semiotic organisation of messaging in communicating the country-of-origin (COO) of a brand in advertising, and ultimately–brand itself. The author analyses persuasive structures of human thought used in visual advertising. Metaphorical thinking, narrativisation, using stereotypes, mythisation, and the accompanying aestheticisation in advertising bec…
Massive displacements, forced labor migration, and large-scale resettlements ordered by colonial states, but also internal and transnational migration, have stimulated specific forms of homemaking in urban and rural regions throughout sub-Saharan Africa. The chapter first briefly scrutinizes earlier forms of housebuilding and migration in colonial African contexts that let to various forms of s…
Emerging from the superpowers’ covert attempts to counter their political and ideological influence without direct military confrontations, the Cold War was also enacted in the cultural sphere of many third world countries, especially Africa, which became a ‘site of encounter’ for the staging of US-Soviet theatre of influence. In West Africa, Ghana and Nigeria were strategically adopted a…
This chapter explores how the revision of national myths in Early Modern Britain and France reflects conflicts and contradictions between the perspectives of the dominant nations, England and France, and those of two subordinate nations, Wales and Brittany, formally annexed by their larger neighbours in the 16th century, and how the national myths in turn impinged on the status of the vernacula…
The digital pdf of Chapter 5 is available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This collection brings together leading figures in the study of international relations to explore praxis as a perspective on international politics and law. With its focus on competent judgments, the praxis approach holds the promise to overcome the divide between knowing and acting that marks positivist internati…