Bøger af Spyridon N. Litsas

Small States theory supports the argument that small international actors have a vital role in the international system. After 9/11, it emerged as a more focused attempt to show that 'small' can be 'attractive and functional' in an era of normative political and religious radicalism. This book argues that Small States Theory is not relevant to the perplexities of the post-multipolar international system and produces a new theory, the Smart States Theory. Based on structural and neoclassical realism, it attempts to identify the origins of 'state-smartness' in foreign policy, leadership, and domestic politics. The United Arab Emirates will be used as the case study of this novel theoretical approach. The impressive evolution of the Trucial States to a modern nation-state of high technology, dynamic foreign policy as the recent pandemic fully showed, unique leadership, and unparalleled tolerance towards other religions and cultures, make the UAE a brilliant example of a smart state of the 21st century. The reader of the book will be introduced to a new theory in International Relations as well as to the history, politics, society, and leadership of a state that plays a pivotal role not only in the Gulf region but in the broader framework of the Middle East too; the United Arab Emirates.

This book examines US foreign policy in the Eastern Mediterranean and the region's key role in the practice and evolution of American exceptionalism.

This book examines the present crisis of Greece's political economy as a crisis of stateness, tackling the domestic as well as the international dimensions. It represents the first attempt by Greek academics to put forward a theoretically-informed, interdisciplinary analysis of Greece's fiscal, economic, and political crisis. The approach aims to fill a major gap, combining insights from comparative politics, political economy, international relations theory, and legal-institutional analysis, in a theoretically informed account of the Greek case in comparative and theoretical perspective. The book tackles the issue of the possible next steps for the EU under the influence of the crisis of the eurozone, including a thorough analysis of national sovereignty seen from a domestic and an international point of view, focusing on critical processes in the international arena such as interdependency and dependency, while a legal-institutional chapter demonstrates the erratic way in which Greek government dealt with sovereign debt. The project comes at the right time in order to address a highly contentious chapter in the political development of the Greek state and of the European South. As the crisis in the eurozone's weaker periphery unfolds, Lavdas, Litsas, and Skiadas use the Greek crisis in order to address a much larger and critical issue: the role and predicament of stateness in the developing EU.

The wider region of the Eastern Mediterranean is in transition. This collective project by leading experts represents a unique combination of International Theory and International Politics analysis that deals exclusively with the wider Eastern Mediterranean. It scrutinizes in a multidimensional manner the current geostrategic and geopolitical conditions that include the latest domestic socio-political events, as well as the active involvement of the Great Powers in the region. This book should be of interest to academics, decision-makers and a general reading public focusing on a significant and influential region in flux.