The LSE International Studies series comprises a boutique and award-winning collection of books dealing with international transdisciplinary matters, published by Cambridge University Press in association with the London School of Economics. The series is centred on three main themes. First, it is transdisciplinary, prioritising texts that challenge disciplinary conventions and develop arguments that cannot be grasped within a single disciplinary field. The series includes work combining a wide range of fields, including international relations, international law, political theory, history, sociology and ethics. Second, it comprises books that contain an overtly international or transnational dimension—whatever their topic, published books deal with matters that necessarily exceed or transcend national boundaries. Finally, books accepted to the series address pressing contemporary concerns—though their approach to scholarly inquiry may be predominantly either theoretical or empirical.
The series also has websites at the LSE IR Department, LSE Law Department and at Cambridge University Press.
Books in the Series
Stephanie Lawson, Regional Politics in Oceania: From Colonialism and Cold War to the Pacific Century
Stephanie Lawson draws on a range of interdisciplinary sources to provide a systematic account of major issues facing Oceania and presents conceptual and theoretical issues in a sophisticated but accessible manner.
Ina Danewid, Resisting Racial Capitalism: An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal
Ida Danewid argues that state power is central to racial capitalism's violent regimes of extraction and accumulation. Tracing the global histories of four technologies of state violence, she excavates an antipolitical archive of anarchism.
Osman Balkan, Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe
Building on multi-sited fieldwork in Berlin and Istanbul, Dying Abroad offers a moving and powerful account of migrants' end-of-life dilemmas, illustrating how they are connected to ongoing political struggles over the stakes of citizenship, belonging, and collective identity in contemporary Europe.
Joseph MacKay, The Counterinsurgent Imagination: A New Intellectual History
Spanning several centuries and four detailed case studies, The Counterinsurgent Imagination unpacks and explores intellectual history through counterinsurgency manuals. This book explains how counter-insurrectionary war eventually took on its late twentieth and early twenty-first century forms, and how and why counterinsurgent ideas persist, despite recurring failures.
Eren Duzgun, Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Revisiting Turkish Modernity
This book offers a radical reinterpretation of the development of the modern world through the concept of Jacobinism. By tracing the world historical trajectory of Jacobinism, the book establishes a new way of understanding the origins and development of global modernity.
Ayşe Zarakol, Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders
Before the West offers a grand narrative of (Eur)Asia as a space connected by normatively and institutionally overlapping successive world orders originating from the Mongol Empire. It also uses that history to rethink the foundational concepts and debates of international relations, such as order and decline.
Andrew Phillips, How the East Was Won: Barbarian Conquerors, Universal Conquest and the Making of Modern Asia
Andrew Phillips reveals the crucial parallels uniting the Mughal Empire, the Qing Dynasty and the British Raj. Refuting existing accounts of the 'rise of the West', this book foregrounds the profoundly imitative rather than innovative character of Western colonialism to advance a new explanation of how universal empires arise and endure.
Chris Reus-Smit, On Cultural Diversity: International Theory in a World of Difference
Christian Reus-Smit details how the major theories of international relations have consistently misunderstood the nature and effects of culture, returning time and again to the idea of cultures as coherent, bounded, and constitutive.
Andrew Phillips and Chris Reus-Smit (eds), Culture and Order in World Politics
Through a pioneering interdisciplinary collaboration between leading historians, international lawyers, sociologists and international relations scholars, this book argues that cultural diversity in social life is ubiquitous rather than exceptional.
Winner: 2021 Best Edited Collection of the Year (Theory), International Studies Association
Daniela Lai, Socioeconomic Justice: International Intervention and Transition in Post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina
Daniela Lai provides the first systematic analysis of experiences of socioeconomic violence during war and how they give rise to strong, but unheeded justice claims in the aftermath.
Hendrik Spruyt, The World Imagined: Collective Beliefs and Political Order in the Sinocentric, Islamic and Southeast Asian International Societies
Taking an inter-disciplinary approach, Hendrik Spruyt explains the political organization of three non-European international societies from early modernity to the late nineteenth century: all of which differed in key respects from the modern Westphalian state system.
Winner: 2021 Best Book of the Year (Theory), International Studies Association
In production:
Naosuke Mukoyama, Fueling Sovereignty: Colonial Oil and the Creation of Unlikely States
Submissions
There is no requirement for authors to hold a formal link to either the CIS or LSE – to the contrary, the series will predominately publish work from scholars who have no connection with the school. If you are interested in submitting a manuscript, please send a proposal to the series editors (details below).
There is no prescribed length for proposals – they should contain as much information as prospective authors would want to see when evaluating a project themselves. All proposals should include the following:
- The proposed title of the book
- An outline of its rationale and scope, including how it relates to the series themes, and how it makes a significant contribution to existing scholarship
- A breakdown of detailed contents, i.e. a table of contents and chapter abstracts
- Details of proposed length and intended completion date. Please also flag up if the manuscript includes illustrations
- A description of the intended readership
- A short biographical note
Initial assessment will take place by the editors. Strong proposals will be sent, along with a full manuscript, to CUP, who will arrange for external review. Final decisions on manuscripts rest with CUP and the series editors.
Editors
George Lawson (Lead Editor)
Kirsten Ainley
Ayça Çubukçu
Stephen Humphreys
Imaobong Umoren