Reframing Neutrality

'An ambitious team of young and established academics have collaborated with policy makers for this very welcome collection of important essays. They bring refreshing insights into the constantly changing dimensions of neutrality in global international politics. Together, they show how neutrality is elusive, but still persistent and very relevant today.' * Anne Deighton, University of Oxford, UK *
'In an era characterised by the deep entrenchment of the military industrial complex in governmental networks of influence and policy-making, and plummeting levels of public trust in the corporate mass media, linked to markedly increased news avoidance globally partially due to perceived limitations of war reporting, it is vital to have access to high-quality, rigorous research on neutrality. This volume provides important insights into how neutrality is thought about, organised, and put into practice in its many guises, by peoples in tribes, nations and transnational organisations, in the pursuit of peace. Forging a refreshing approach beyond the traditional, narrowly state-centric, post-Cold War neocolonialism frames of understanding, the contributors have provided insights into neutrality’s continued relevance to global humanitarian-ecological survival and the infliction of military violence and ‘might-is-right’ doctrinaire warfare. Amid new capitalist, technological, mediatised incursions coercively seeking to normalise destruction and death, and to silence those raising legitimate questions about plausible alternatives for a foreign policy motivated by the common good, these accounts of neutrality offer a reader empirical and theoretical glimpses into portals of peace, prised open through the principles and practices of active neutrality.' * Karen Devine, Dublin City University, Ireland *