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International Relations has rarely been considered a synthesis of humanistic and social sciences approaches to understand the complex connections of a global, and globalizing, world. One of the few scholars to have accomplished this creative blend was Hayward R. Alker. Alker and IR presents a set of visionary and original essays from scholars who have been profoundly influenced by Alker's approach to global studies. They build on the foundation he laid, demonstrating the practicality and usefulness of ethically grounded, theoretically informed and interdisciplinary research for producing knowledge. They show how substantive boundaries can be crossed and methodological rules rewritten in the search for a deeper, more contextualized approach to global politics. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of international relations and global politics --Book Jacket.

First published in 1993, this title explores the underlying ideologies and decision-making procedures that codify the rules of the post-World War II liberal, now defunct Soviet socialist, mercantilist and South preferential trade regimes. Food Fights presents a rich case study and rigorous data analysis of organised agrictultural trade that uncovers similarities between these diverse economic systems and identifies the principle trends governing the new global economy

The turn to materialism emerging in world politics scholarship promises fruitful ways of understanding power and political life by focusing on agency in the physical world. Yet immaterial information and 'the virtual' seem to dominate our lives. How can we understand the relationship between the material and the informational? Does this understanding promise any further insight into agency, power, and world politics? The focus in this paper is on the materiality (corporeality) and information of the human body as a special case. Embodied information is the information contained in the body that can potentially be accessed by others through an act of power. The way in which embodied knowledge is implicated in practices of world politics is exemplified by surveillance, DNA databases, and organ trade. Bodies are also the means by which information becomes sensible: we understand information from various sources and with various kinds of content through our bodies' ability to sense. This knowing body is also implicated in power, as exemplified by the use of sound and the augmentation of the senses through technology. Drawing on the interpretation of embodied information and knowing bodies, this article provides a pragmatic model of world politics in which to control how information flows, how it is extracted from the body, how it is inserted or received, how quickly, and to what end, is to have power or to be powerful.