"A social history of West Germany's Bundesgrenzschutz (BGS, Federal Border Police) that complicates the telling of the country's history as a straightforward success story. The 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers shows that police violence is still a problem in Western democracies. Floyd's murder prompted some critics to hail the German police as a model of democratic policing that should be emulated. After 1945, Germany's police forces had supposedly shed the militarization and authoritarian impulses still prevalent in other nations' forces. These uncritical appraisals, however, deserve closer analysis. This book is a social history of West Germany's Bundesgrenzschutz (BGS), a federal border guard established in 1951 that became re-unified Germany's first national police force. It argues that the BGS revived authoritarian traditions of militarized policing and kept them alive long into the postwar era even though the country was supposedly consigning these problematic legacies to its past. The BGS was staffed and led by Wehrmacht and SS veterans until the late 1970s, and while West Germany was democratizing, BGS commanders were still planning to fight wars and were teaching its officers "street fighting" tactics. While the end outcome was positive, the study contributes to the growing body of recent research that complicates the writing of the Federal Republic's history as a "success story." Dealing explicitly with post-fascist West Germany's struggle to establish a democratic police force, the book enters a conversation with studies concerned with democratization, security, and Germany's effort to overcome its Nazi past. DAVID M. LIVINGSTONE holds a PhD in History from the University of California-San Diego. He is retired as Chief of Police of Simi Valley, California and is an adjunct professor at California Lutheran University"--

Bangladesh did not exist as an independent state until 1971. Willem van Schendel's state-of-the-art history navigates the extraordinary twists and turns that created modern Bangladesh through ecological disaster, colonialism, partition, a war of independence and cultural renewal. In this revised and updated edition, Van Schendel offers a fascinating and highly readable account of life in Bangladesh over the last two millennia. Based on the latest academic research and covering the numerous historical developments of the 2010s, he provides an eloquent introduction to a fascinating country and its resilient and inventive people. A perfect survey for travellers, expats, students and scholars alike.

Groundbreaking new approach to the idea of treason in medieval England, showing the profound effect played by gender.

The first systematic examination of the expectations people had of the law in the middle ages.

Fills a serious gap in German historical literature by providing the first political biography of Jung, a leading figure of the anti-Nazi Right. By the time of his death, Edgar Julius Jung (1894-1934) was well known in Germany and Europe as one of the foremost ideologues of the political movement that called itself the Conservative Revolution and as a right-wing opponent of the Nazis. He was speechwriter for and confidant of Franz von Papen (first Hitler's predecessor as chancellor, then Hitler's vice-chancellor), which put him at the center of political events right up until the Nazi seizure of power. Considered by Baldur von Schirach and Goebbels to be one of the worst enemies of the Nazis, Jung was assassinated by the Nazi regime in June 1934. The eleven years of Nazi rule that followed contributed to Jung's neglect by historians, as did distaste, since the war's end and the founding of the Federal Republic on democratic principles, for his strongly antidemocratic stance. Although there have been several studies on Jung's political thought, there has been until now no biography in German or English. Roshan Magub's book therefore fills a serious gap in German historical literature. It shows that Jung's opposition to National Socialism dates from the earliest days andthat he had a very close relationship with the Ruhr industry, which supported him financially and enabled him to reach a nationwide audience. Magub uses, for the first time, all the available material from the archives in Munich, Koblenz, Cologne, and Berlin, and the whole of Jung's Nachlass. Her book sheds new light on Jung and demonstrates his importance in Germany's political history. Roshan Magub holds a PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London.

At first glance, the U.S. decision to escalate the war in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, China's position on North Korea's nuclear program in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the EU resolution to lift what remained of the arms embargo against Libya in the mid-2000s would appear to share little in common. Yet each of these seemingly unconnected and far-reaching foreign policy decisions resulted at least in part from the exercise of a unique kind of coercion, one predicated on the intentional creation, manipulation, and exploitation of real or threatened mass population movements. In Weapons of Mass Migration, Kelly M. Greenhill offers the first systematic examination of this widely deployed but largely unrecognized instrument of state influence. She shows both how often this unorthodox brand of coercion has been attempted (more than fifty times in the last half century) and how successful it has been (well over half the time). She also tackles the questions of who employs this policy tool, to what ends, and how and why it ever works. Coercers aim to affect target states' behavior by exploiting the existence of competing political interests and groups, Greenhill argues, and by manipulating the costs or risks imposed on target state populations. This "coercion by punishment" strategy can be effected in two ways: the first relies on straightforward threats to overwhelm a target's capacity to accommodate a refugee or migrant influx; the second, on a kind of norms-enhanced political blackmail that exploits the existence of legal and normative commitments to those fleeing violence, persecution, or privation. The theory is further illustrated and tested in a variety of case studies from Europe, East Asia, and North America. To help potential targets better respond to—and protect themselves against—this kind of unconventional predation, Weapons of Mass Migration also offers practicable policy recommendations for scholars, government officials, and anyone concerned about the true victims of this kind of coercion—the displaced themselves.

The first up-to-date study in English of the Saar dispute, an important stage in French-German postwar relations and thus significant for European integration.