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Taming the Imperial Imagination marks a novel intervention into the debate on empire and international relations, and offers a new perspective on nineteenth-century Anglo-Afghan relations. Martin J. Bayly shows how, throughout the nineteenth century, the British Empire in India sought to understand and control its peripheries through the use of colonial knowledge. Addressing the fundamental question of what Afghanistan itself meant to the British at the time, he draws on extensive archival research to show how knowledge of Afghanistan was built, refined and warped by an evolving colonial state. This knowledge informed policy choices and cast Afghanistan in a separate legal and normative universe. Beginning with the disorganised exploits of nineteenth-century explorers and ending with the cold strategic logic of the militarised 'scientific frontier', this book tracks the nineteenth-century origins of contemporary policy 'expertise' and the forms of knowledge that inform interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere today.

"During the 1920s and 1930s, Britain faced many challenges in the international arena, and alternative polices were hotly debated not only in Parliament but also in wider political circles. These two decades constituted one of the few periods in British history when the country has experienced three-party politics. However, until now there has been no major study of the Liberal Party's central role in party-political debates on international policy. Richard Grayson's book fills that gap by documenting and assessing the party's views on foreign and imperial policy."

Most would agree that the recent emergence of the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics in Ukraine, and perhaps the Islamic State, will soon find their place in the already growing literature on contested states. Yet, despite the historical and present importance of these entities for the study of alternative forms of political authority, sovereignty, statehood, international legitimacy, as well as wars within and between states, there is very little agreement in the existing literature on what constitutes a contested state. After illustrating some of the theoretical and empirical shortcomings of the current conceptual approaches in the treatment of these entities, this article proposes and adopts an ontological approach to conceptualizing and studying contested states in international relations. I argue that the contested state's internal nature can be understood through four constitutive dimensions, which accentuate the phenomenon's distinct interaction with its environment when compared to other phenomena. The article also provides a way to resolve the discord that currently exists on what the theoretical concept of contested state ought to capture empirically, by introducing an explicit and systematic procedure when applying the concept to the empirical world.

The article tackles upon the problem of global civil society, this structure has formed within the national states but now it functions in the international level and it has a number of principal characteristics which make it different from national civil societies. One can distinguish among them following: It has a horizontal vertical structure, there is no any kind of its center and it is aimed to protect human rights and freedom without reference to the national location. The basis which is necessary for the formation of this structure are not only the transformation processes in the system of national civil societies and the output of their functioning on a new level, but it is also connected with the changes that have occurred in the realm of national sovereignty, allowing structures of global civil society rather actively intervene into the aspects relating to the domestic sphere. But they also tackle upon the interests of the entire international community, for example, in the environmental issues. It happens in the form of interaction between public organizations operating internationally with local or national representatives of public bodies for solving a specific problem. This phenomenon is accompanied by limited cooperation permanency in the sphere of problem management specific problem; it is not a kind of systematic cooperation, at least in most cases. Gradually, the structure of global civil society are transformed with the help of modern information and communication tools into informal supervisory body of the planet, it has a capacity to participate in today's political process as an equal actors. But there still exist some outstanding issues: the definition of the legal status of global civil society and a clear delineation of its relationship with the nation-states. It is not possible now, because the dynamics of the creation of additional global civil structures remain relatively high.