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Author: Katrin Buchmann
Buchmann analyses the work of UK, German, Danish and Swedish embassies in the USA and China on climate change in the late 2000s and early 2010s. She relates which coalitions and narratives embassies sought to develop to convince China and the United States that a more progressive climate policy was possible, to achieve gains supporting an agreement under the UNFCCC. This book shows that a key interpretation of climate diplomacy was selling/trade: Europe selling technology “solutions” to solve climate change. In this narrative, Europe has already done what needs to be done and outsourcing of production to China e.g. is ignored. In the USA, embassies entered coalitions with states, faith groups and the military, arguing that a more progressive climate policy was mandated by either God or security concerns. State politicians, including Democrats, often actually didn’t implement any climate policies. Any gains were reversed through climate denial lobbying funded by corporations. Embassies did not address this.
Maps and Territory-Building in the Northern Indochinese Peninsula (1885-1914)
Author: Marie de Rugy
Translator: Saskia Brown
This book delivers a connected history of imperial margins in Southeast Asia by comparing the British and French geographical policies and practices at the end of the 19th century. It focuses on a time of scramble in Asia: the English incorporated Upper Burma in the Raj after the third Anglo-Burmese war (1885), whereas the French created a protectorate on Annam-Tonkin (the Northern part of present-day Vietnam). The volume shows how these border areas, disputed by colonial and national states, have been represented and fashioned by different actors: British, French and Chinese empires, the Siam realm and local populations. Laying these discourses alongside the geographical practices of the time and emplacing both within the longue durée allows us to shed light on the original process of territorial construction that they generated.

This work is a translated and updated after the French work Aux confins des empires. Cartes et constructions territoriales dans le nord de la péninsule indochinoise (1885-1914) published by Éditions de la Sorbonne (Paris, France), in 2018.