Analyzes security challenges facing Georgia since a more democratic government took over in 2003, including secessionist crises within its borders and regional instability in the Caucasus.

Alternative forms of government and statehood exist in the Middle East and North African regions. The chapters in this volume demonstrate this and explore the notion of power from a non-statist perspective, highlighting the limits of states and their governance. Using empirical evidence from Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Tunisia, Iraq, Yemen, and Mali, the authors explore non-standard cases where power may be retained by a state but must be shared with a number of local actors, resulting in limited statehood and hybrid governance, which leads to competition and sharing of symbolic and political power within a state. This book is intended to prompt a critical reflection on the meaning of governance. It will illuminate informal structures which deserve attention when studying governance and power dynamics within a state or a region. This book was originally published as a special issue of Small Wars & Insurgencies.

This thought-provoking book addresses the legal questions raised by areas of limited statehood, in which the State lacks the ability to exercise the full depth of its governmental authority. Featuring original contributions written by renowned international scholars, chapters investigate key issues arising at the junction between both domestic and international rule of law and areas of limited statehood, as well as the alternative modes of governance that develop therein.

Democratic and consolidated states are taken as the model for effective rule-making and service provision. In contrast, this book argues that good governance is possible even without a functioning state.

This book provides a unique account of the pursuit of security at the edge of the global order. It sheds light on reform of state police and armed forces, and analyses the alternative security structures that emerge in the absence of the state. This book remains open-minded as to which 'model' for security is better.

This study of international relations is often cut off from the study of domestic affairs, but this insulation of the international from the domestic is wrong. International forces profoundly influence the core structures of sovereign statehood, including their political military, economic and normative substance. Conversely, the very nature of international relations is determined by the internal structure of states. In an important contribution to the debate, Georg Sørensen puts forward an original analysis of this critical interplay between internal and external forces. He explores the development and change of the sovereign state and offers a new agenda for the study of international relations. Changes in Statehood will be essential reading for students and researchers in international relations, political science and security.

In Secession and Security, Ahsan I. Butt argues that states rather than separatists determine whether a secessionist struggle will be peaceful, violent, or genocidal. He investigates the strategies, ranging from negotiated concessions to large-scale repression, adopted by states in response to separatist movements. Variations in the external security environment, Butt argues, influenced the leaders of the Ottoman Empire to use peaceful concessions against Armenians in 1908 but escalated to genocide against the same community in 1915; caused Israel to reject a Palestinian state in the 1990s; and shaped peaceful splits in Czechoslovakia in 1993 and the Norway-Sweden union in 1905. Butt focuses on two main cases—Pakistani reactions to Bengali and Baloch demands for independence in the 1970s and India's responses to secessionist movements in Kashmir, Punjab, and Assam in the 1980s and 1990s. Butt's deep historical approach to his subject will appeal to policymakers and observers interested in the last five decades of geopolitics in South Asia, the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and ethno-national conflict, separatism, and nationalism more generally.