"Examines post-Cold War discourses about the use of power to promote international security. Uses case studies of United Nations interventions in Haiti and Croatia to highlight the dynamics at play in encounters between local societies and international peacekeepers"--Provided by publisher.

Indigenous groups are facing unprecedented global challenges in this time of unparalleled environmental and geopolitical change, a time that has intensified human-rights concerns and called for political and economic restructuring. Within this landscape of struggle, the Kayapó, an indigenous nation in the central Brazilian Amazon, emerge as leaders in the fight. Radical Territories in the Brazilian Amazon sheds light on the creative and groundbreaking efforts Kayapó peoples deploy to protect their lands and livelihoods. Now at the front lines of cultivating diversified strategies for resistance, the Kayapó are creating a powerful activist base, experimenting with nontimber forest projects, and forging strong community conservation partnerships. Tracing the complex politics of the Kayapó’s homeland, Laura Zanotti advances approaches to understanding how indigenous peoples cultivate self-determination strategies in conflict-ridden landscapes. Kayapó peoples are providing a countervision of what Amazonia can look like in the twenty-first century, dominated neither by agro-industrial interests nor by uninhabited protected landscapes. Instead, Kayapó peoples see their homeland as a living landscape where indigenous vision engages with broader claims for conservation and development in the region. Weaving together anthropological and ethnographic research with personal interactions with the Kayapó, Zanotti tells the story of activism and justice in the Brazilian Amazon, and how Kayapó communities are using diverse pathways to make a sustainable future for their peoples and lands. The author interweaves Kayapó perspectives with a political ecology framework to show how working with indigenous peoples is vital to addressing national and global challenges in the present time, when many environmentally significant conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human activities.

While the relevance of ontological commitments for epistemology and methodology in International Relations have been the subject of growing debate for several years, the implications for ethics and political agency of embracing an ontology of entanglement have remained unexplored. This work focuses on the importance of addressing the ontological and epistemological assumptions of the discipline of International Relations. There is increased awareness of the limits of abstract principles as ways of adjudicating real life political and ethical choices regarding International Intervention and international development for both practitioners and scholars. The work challenges IR prevailing ontological imaginaries rooted upon Newtonian physics and argues that non-substantialist ontological positions nurture a political ethos that privileges ‘modest’ engagements of practical solidarity and weights political choices with regard to the consequences and distributive effects they may produce in the context where they are made rather than based upon their universal normative aspirations. While the book is firmly rooted in metatheory, Zanotti also highlights the easiness with which political failures are dismissed as unintended consequences and argues that the current crisis in Syria, and genocides in Srebrenica and Rwanda have shown that advocating abstract ethical principles, be they the Responsibility to Protect, impartiality, or following rules can lead to disaster and can foster violent and exclusionary practices. She also exemplifies how an alternative ethos can be practiced through the example of an international NGO in Haiti. Highlighting the need for critically re-thinking the way we conceptualize political agency and validate ethics, this work will be of interest to scholars of International Relations theory, ethics and critical security studies.

Peacebuilding Through Community-Based NGOs explores the contested but increasingly relevant role nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) play in processes aimed at bringing about international peace and security and in the invention of alternatives for resolving conflict. Through case studies of Partners In Health (Haiti), Women in Black (Serbia), and the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland highlight the range of ways these organizations are involved in post-conflict social reconstruction efforts and with whom and for what purposes they interact as they do so. The authors argue for analyses that take into account the rich mosaic that is the civil society sector rather than treating all of these entities with one broad brush. At once a celebration and a critique, this book provides guidance for those seeking to understand the complexities and potential of the civil society sector for facilitating social justice and transformation.