Buffer States In World Politics

Buffer States In World Politics PDF Author: John Chay
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429712375
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Buffer states—countries geographically and/or politically situated between two or more regional or global powers—function to maintain peace between the larger powers. Contributors to this book, the first devoted to the buffer state concept, analyze the geographical and political factors necessary for the establishment and maintenance of a buffer state and examine its role in helping to maintain world peace. The problems and prospects of buffer states and buffer zones and the multiple roles played by the buffer in international politics are also explored. Using information from a number of countries, including Lebanon, Afghanistan, Korea, and Uruguay, the contributors argue that the function of the buffer state has not diminished with the advance of modern technology, but that the prospects for a long life for any particular buffer state are tenuous. Nevertheless, they conclude that although the international benefits from any one buffer state tend to be short term, the continued existence of the system will be an important element in preventing armed conflict in many parts of the world.

Buffer States In World Politics

Buffer States In World Politics PDF Author: John Chay
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429712375
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Get Book Here

Book Description
Buffer states—countries geographically and/or politically situated between two or more regional or global powers—function to maintain peace between the larger powers. Contributors to this book, the first devoted to the buffer state concept, analyze the geographical and political factors necessary for the establishment and maintenance of a buffer state and examine its role in helping to maintain world peace. The problems and prospects of buffer states and buffer zones and the multiple roles played by the buffer in international politics are also explored. Using information from a number of countries, including Lebanon, Afghanistan, Korea, and Uruguay, the contributors argue that the function of the buffer state has not diminished with the advance of modern technology, but that the prospects for a long life for any particular buffer state are tenuous. Nevertheless, they conclude that although the international benefits from any one buffer state tend to be short term, the continued existence of the system will be an important element in preventing armed conflict in many parts of the world.

Afghanistan

Afghanistan PDF Author: Bojan Petrovic
Publisher: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company
ISBN: 9780757580697
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description


Laos

Laos PDF Author: Vatthana Pholsena
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
The authors provide a full, frank, and engaging survey of Laos today, assessing its history, prospects, and hopes.

Laos: Buffer State Or Battleground

Laos: Buffer State Or Battleground PDF Author: Hugh Toye
Publisher: London ; New York [etc.] : Oxford U.P
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description


Through the Buffer State

Through the Buffer State PDF Author: John MacGregor
Publisher: Applewood Books
ISBN: 1429091401
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description


The Search for Peace in Afghanistan

The Search for Peace in Afghanistan PDF Author: Barnett R. Rubin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780195799903
Category : Afghanistan
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description


Watershed Management for Potable Water Supply

Watershed Management for Potable Water Supply PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309172683
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 569

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Book Description
In 1997, New York City adopted a mammoth watershed agreement to protect its drinking water and avoid filtration of its large upstate surface water supply. Shortly thereafter, the NRC began an analysis of the agreement's scientific validity. The resulting book finds New York City's watershed agreement to be a good template for proactive watershed management that, if properly implemented, will maintain high water quality. However, it cautions that the agreement is not a guarantee of permanent filtration avoidance because of changing regulations, uncertainties regarding pollution sources, advances in treatment technologies, and natural variations in watershed conditions. The book recommends that New York City place its highest priority on pathogenic microorganisms in the watershed and direct its resources toward improving methods for detecting pathogens, understanding pathogen transport and fate, and demonstrating that best management practices will remove pathogens. Other recommendations, which are broadly applicable to surface water supplies across the country, target buffer zones, stormwater management, water quality monitoring, and effluent trading.

State Death

State Death PDF Author: Tanisha Fazal
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400841445
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
If you were to examine an 1816 map of the world, you would discover that half the countries represented there no longer exist. Yet since 1945, the disappearance of individual states from the world stage has become rare. State Death is the first book to systematically examine the reasons why some states die while others survive, and the remarkable decline of state death since the end of World War II. Grappling with what is a core issue of international relations, Tanisha Fazal explores two hundred years of military invasion and occupation, from eighteenth-century Poland to present-day Iraq, to derive conclusions that challenge conventional wisdom about state death. The fate of sovereign states, she reveals, is largely a matter of political geography and changing norms of conquest. Fazal shows how buffer states--those that lie between two rivals--are the most vulnerable and likely to die except in rare cases that constrain the resources or incentives of neighboring states. She argues that the United States has imposed such constraints with its global norm against conquest--an international standard that has largely prevented the violent takeover of states since 1945. State Death serves as a timely reminder that should there be a shift in U.S. power or preferences that erodes the norm against conquest, violent state death may once again become commonplace in international relations.

The Revenge of Geography

The Revenge of Geography PDF Author: Robert D. Kaplan
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812982223
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this “ambitious and challenging” (The New York Review of Books) work, the bestselling author of Monsoon and Balkan Ghosts offers a revelatory prism through which to view global upheavals and to understand what lies ahead for continents and countries around the world. In The Revenge of Geography, Robert D. Kaplan builds on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene. Kaplan traces the history of the world’s hot spots by examining their climates, topographies, and proximities to other embattled lands. The Russian steppe’s pitiless climate and limited vegetation bred hard and cruel men bent on destruction, for example, while Nazi geopoliticians distorted geopolitics entirely, calculating that space on the globe used by the British Empire and the Soviet Union could be swallowed by a greater German homeland. Kaplan then applies the lessons learned to the present crises in Europe, Russia, China, the Indian subcontinent, Turkey, Iran, and the Arab Middle East. The result is a holistic interpretation of the next cycle of conflict throughout Eurasia. Remarkably, the future can be understood in the context of temperature, land allotment, and other physical certainties: China, able to feed only 23 percent of its people from land that is only 7 percent arable, has sought energy, minerals, and metals from such brutal regimes as Burma, Iran, and Zimbabwe, putting it in moral conflict with the United States. Afghanistan’s porous borders will keep it the principal invasion route into India, and a vital rear base for Pakistan, India’s main enemy. Iran will exploit the advantage of being the only country that straddles both energy-producing areas of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. Finally, Kaplan posits that the United States might rue engaging in far-flung conflicts with Iraq and Afghanistan rather than tending to its direct neighbor Mexico, which is on the verge of becoming a semifailed state due to drug cartel carnage. A brilliant rebuttal to thinkers who suggest that globalism will trump geography, this indispensable work shows how timeless truths and natural facts can help prevent this century’s looming cataclysms.

Atlas of Lebanon

Atlas of Lebanon PDF Author: Collectif
Publisher: Presses de l’Ifpo
ISBN: 2351595491
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
After fifteen years of reconstruction in a relatively peaceful environment spanning the years 1990 to 2004, Lebanon has experienced successive violent political events resulting from complex entangled internal and external struggles. The Syrian crisis and its political, economic and demographic consequences on Lebanon have increased these tensions. This atlas sheds light on these new challenges and adds new data that complete the analyses already published in the Atlas du Liban. Territoires et société (Atlas of Lebanon. Territories and Society) released in 2007 by the same research team. Some of its components are included in this edition. Beyond the international regional crisis and the population movements, it takes into account Lebanon’s socio-economic dimensions, the environmental issues linked to uncontrolled urbanization and to natural risks, as well as conflicts due to local territorial management. This atlas is the result of a collaborative endeavor between French and Lebanese researchers. It uses a geographical approach that puts in the foreground a spatial analysis of social and natural phenomena. Public sources are scarce in Lebanon, especially at the local scale. They are sometimes less reliable and difficult to access. It is particularly the case for the Lebanese census data, conversely data are abundantly available on the refugees population, which is less known than the population of refugees. International data help compare Lebanon to its neighbors. Thematic data produced by some ministries are helpful to provide a detailed view regarding specific domains. Analyses processed on aerial and satellite images have produced essential data on urbanization and environment. Local thematic fieldwork surveys have provided additional data. The book consists of seven chapters. The first one deals with the territorial state-building seen in the light of regional geopolitics, and emphasizes internal violence and the reemergence of militias and armed groups that fight each other and the state army. Lebanon is once again perceived as a territory divided between multiple allegiances. The second chapter is devoted to the analysis of population dynamics, despite the lack of reliable data whose sources are subject to discussion. It includes analyses of internal population flows, the Lebanese diaspora, and the assessment of Syrian refugees’ influx. The third chapter shows the fragility of the Lebanese economic model. Its dependency on foreign investments and on the remittances of the diaspora, as well as the deadlocks of industry and agriculture, which aggravate social imbalances. The fourth chapter is an assessment of urbanization in the country, which has increased by 80% in surface in twenty years at the expense of natural spaces and agriculture. The shore is highly coveted and widely artificialized and damaged. Multiple signs of environmental degradation are examined in chapter five. They seem to announce the global climate change and its local effects. In addition to that, there is a direct link between massive urbanization and many risks, measured and mapped in an increasingly detailed way. Chapter six tackles the dysfunctional public services that exploit natural resources: water and energy supply, both marked by massive shortages, and the management of solid waste hit by a serious crisis. The seventh and last chapter studies the mutations of the local territorial management, which is marked by the retreat of the state, if not its marginalization, and the rise of other actors, notably municipalities, local powers and also civil society organizations.After fifteen years of reconstruction in a relatively peaceful environment spanning the years 1990 to 2004, Lebanon has experienced successive violent political events resulting from complex entangled internal and external struggles. The Syrian crisis and its political, economic...