Books
Hughes, James (ed.) (2010) EU Conflict Management. Routledge, London. | Order now
The EU's self promotion as a 'conflict manager' is embedded in a discourse about its 'shared values' and their foundation in a connection between security, development and democracy. This book provides a collection of essays based on the latest cutting edge research into the EU's active engagement in conflict management. It maps the evolution of EU policy and strategic thinking about its role, and the development of its institutional capacity to manage conflicts.
Case studies of EU conflict management within the Union, in its neighbourhood and further afield, explore the consistency, coherence, and politicization of EU strategy at the implementation stage. The essays examine the extent to which the EU can exert influence on conflict dynamics and outcomes. Such influence depends on a number of changing factors: how the EU conceptualizes conflict and policy solutions; the balance of interests within the EU on the issue (divided or concerted) and the degree of politicization in the EU's role; the scope for an external EU role; and the value attached by the conflict parties to EU engagement - a value that is almost wholly bound to their interest in a membership perspective (or other strong relationship to the EU) rather than to 'shared values' as an end in themselves.
This book was based on a special issue of Ethnopolitics, 8:3 (2009).
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Hughes, James (2007) Chechnya: from nationalism to Jihad. National and ethnic conflict in the 21st century. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. | Order now
The sheer scale and brutality of the hostilities between Russia and Chechnya stand out as an exception in the mostly peaceful breakup of the Soviet Union. Chechnya: From Nationalism to Jihad provides a fascinating analysis of the transformation of secular nationalist resistance in a nominally Islamic society into a struggle that is its antithesis, jihad. Hughes locates Chechen nationalism within the wider movement for national self-determination that followed the collapse of the Soviet empire. When negotiations failed in the early 1990s, political violence was instrumentalized to consolidate opposing nationalist visions of state-building in Russia and Chechnya. The resistance in Chechnya also occurred in a regional context where Russian hegemony over the Caucasus, especially the resources of the Caspian basin, was in retreat, and in an international context of rising Islamic radicalism. Alongside Bosnia, Kashmir, and other conflicts, Chechnya became embedded in Osama Bin Laden's repertoire of jihadist rhetoric against the "West." It was not simply Russia's destruction of a nationalist option for Chechnya, or "Wahabbist" infiltration from without, that created the political space for Islamism. Rather, we must look also at how the conflict was fought. The lack of proportionality and discrimination in the use of violence, particularly by Russia, accelerated and intensified the Islamic radicalization and thereby transformed the nature of the conflict.
This nuanced and balanced study provides a much-needed antidote to the mythologizing of Chechen resistance before, and its demonization after, 9/11. The conflict in Chechnya involves one of the most contentious issues in contemporary international politics - how do we differentiate between the legitimate use of violence to resist imperialism, occupation, and misgovernment, and the use of terrorism against legitimate rule? This book sets out indispensable lessons for understanding conflicts involving the volatile combination of nationalist insurgency, jihad, and terrorism, most notably for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Hughes, James and Sasse, Gwendolyn and Gordon, Claire E. (2004) Europeanization and regionalization in the EU's enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe: the myth of conditionality. Palgrave, Basingstoke, UK. | Order now
EU Enlargement to the Central and Eastern European candidate countries is widely understood as having been an important mechanism for Europeanization. The conditionality for EU membership is seen as providing incentives and sanctions for compliance or non-compliance with EU norms and rules, such as the 'Copenhagen Criteria' and the transposition of the acquis communautaire into domestic law. Critically engaging with the concepts of 'Europeanization' and conditionality within which enlargement is generally addressed, this book takes a broader comparative approach. It is the first systematic theoretical and empirical analysis of the key linkages between the simultaneous processes of enlargement, Europeanization and post-communist transition. Drawing from an unprecedented number of interviews with elites in the Central and Eastern European Candidate Countries (CEECs) and officials in Brussels, together with a thorough examination of the official documentation, the authors identify and assess the dynamic interactions between the Commission and the CEECs over regional policy - one of the most important policy areas for enlargement and the future of the EU. The nebulous nature of enlargement conditionality, how the Commission shifted the parameters over time, and the many paradoxes and weaknesses in its use made conditionality more of a myth than a coherent instrument for Europeanization.
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Keating, Michael and Hughes, James, (eds.) (2003) The regional challenge in Central and Eastern Europe: territorial restructuring and European integration. Peter Lang, Brussels, Belgium. | Order now
Central and eastern European countries are undergoing internal transformations, to liberal democracy and the market economy. At the same time, they must meet the criteria for European integration. This book examines the territorial dimension of these challenges. Central and eastern Europe has its own distinct histories of territorial politics and state structures, which continue to influence the present. Like their western neighbours the countries of the region must confront a world in which politics and policy making are changing in scale, with the emergence of new local and intermediate levels. The market economy and free trade can lead to increasing economic disparities. National and ethnic minorities create a demand for local and regional devolution. The European Commission and other external agents have posed requirements for new administrative structures to manage European funding. All this creates a complex set of pressures to which the transition countries must respond. This book, by an international group of scholars, examines these challenges from a diversity of angles, historical, economic, political and institutional.
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Hughes, James and Sasse, Gwendolyn, (eds.) (2001) Ethnicity and territory in the former Soviet Union: regions in conflict. Routledge, London, UK. | Order now
The collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991 removed a decades-long system of successful control of potential ethnic and regional conflict . The result was the eruption of numerous conflicts over state-building, some of which degenerated into violence and some of which were resolved or prevented by strategies of accommodation. This volume explores the common trends and differences in the responses of the new post-Soviet states to the problems of state-building in ethnically and regionally divided societies, focusing on the impact of ethnic and regional conflicts on post-communist transition and institutional development. The book will be essential reading for specialists and students alike who are interested in conflict regulation and post-Soviet politics.
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Dowding, Keith and Hughes, James and Margetts, Helen, (eds.) (2001) Challenges to democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK. | Order now
This collection brings together leading political scientists in order to address the challenges faced by democracy in the twenty-first century. The contributors tackle the changing nature of democratic ideas, in particular equality in society and the satisfaction of citizens. They examine changing patterns of political involvement, from voting to new forms of participation and protest using the Internet and new technologies. Finally, they look at the challenge to democracy posed by the changing nature of state institutions: party systems, bureaucracy and e-government, regulation and the processes of institutional development.
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Hughes, James (1996) Stalinism in a Russian province: a study of collectivization and dekulakization in Siberia. Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK. | Order now
Stalinism in a Russian Province reexamines the agrarian policy pillars of Stalin's 'revolution from above' initiated in 1929-30, and is the first major study of its kind since the opening of Soviet archives. Through a pioneering application of the theoretical approaches of moral and political economy to Stalin's peasant policy, Hughes reevaluates the causes and processes involved in the great political, economic and social changes in the Soviet countryside. Rather than a bipolarized conflict between state and peasant, he profiles the socially variegated response of different peasant groups to collectivization and dekulakization and argues that it was as much a process involving social conflict between peasants.
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Hughes, James (1991) Stalin, Siberia and the crisis of the New Economic Policy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. | Order now
This book makes an important contribution to the current re-evaluation of the origins of Stalinism. Although it is widely acknowledged by Western scholars that the Soviet grain crisis of 1927-8 and Stalin's Siberian tour of January 1928 were crucial factors in the decision to abandon the New Economic Policy (NEP) and return to a more ideologically rigid policy of collectivisation and rapid industrialisation, studies have hitherto concentrated on the role of leading personalities and "high politics". In this book, James Hughes presents an in depth examination of the crisis of the NEP from the regional perspective of Siberia and analyses the events and pressures "from below", at the grassroots level of Soviet society.