Let’s celebrate our colleagues’ remarkable achievements — five new books hot off the press!

• A comprehensive and user-friendly A–Z guide to key concepts and terms in the global effort to implement the Sustainable Development Goals, offering practical examples and insights into political and societal processes for transformative change.
• A handbook examining how advanced welfare states adapt to ongoing pressures and crises, assessing both theoretical frameworks and practical effectiveness in driving essential reforms.
• A state-of-the-art overview of feminist foreign policy analysis, showcasing how feminist scholarship reshapes understanding of foreign policy across areas like trade, peacebuilding, and development.
• An in-depth exploration of women’s epistemic agency in war, highlighting gendered knowledge production across diverse conflict-affected contexts and critically engaging with the Women, Peace and Security agenda.
• A thought-provoking study of memory politics and its influence on the quality of peace in post-conflict societies, introducing the concept of mnemonic formations and analyzing how inclusive and plural memory practices can foster just peace.

Such impressive and thought-provoking work — congratulations to all authors!

These are the five new books (full presentation below):

1. Essential Concepts for Implementing the Sustainable Development Goals: An A-Z Guide 
   Edited by Thomas Hickmann and Yi hyun Kang from our Department, together with Frank Biermann,  Carole-Anne Sénit, and Yixian Sun. Also, six further colleagues have contributed to the book as authors, including Magdalena Bexell, Matteo De Donà, Kristina Jönsson, Marie Stissing Jensen, Jakob Skovgaard, and Fariborz Zelli.
2. The Handbook on Welfare State Reform 
   Edited by Bernhard Ebbinghaus and Moira Nelson
3. Feminist Foreign Policy Analysis - A New Subfield 
   Edited by Karin Aggestam  and Jacqui True
4. The Production of Gendered Knowledge of War - Women and Epistemic Power 
   Edited by Annika Björkdahl and Johanna Mannergren
5. Peace and the politics of memory 
   Authors: Johanna Mannergren, Annika Björkdahl, Susanne Buckley-Zistel, Stefanie Kappler, and Timothy Williams

Essential Concepts for Implementing the Sustainable Development Goals: An A-Z Guide

edited by Frank Biermann, Thomas Hickmann, Yi hyun Kang, Carole-Anne Sénit, Yixian Sun

This book provides a highly accessible and user-friendly overview of the essential concepts and terms related to the current global endeavour to implement the Sustainable Development Goals.

With the first decade of the 15-year timespan of the 2030 Agenda now past, the SDGs show limited progress and several goals are even regressing. It is imperative that SDG implementation is accelerated until 2030 and beyond to foster transformations and set the world onto a sustainable and resilient path. The book starts with a thematic introduction to contextualize the topic and set the stage for the individual entries. It then follows an A-Z format, with over 100 entries which describe an important concept or term, using practical examples to illustrate how it connects to the overall debate about sustainable development. It offers swift introductions to key concepts and terms that are discussed and explained by scholarly and policy experts from around the world in a concise and user-friendly way.

The guide is comprehensive in scope, practically oriented and focused on political and societal processes to drive change on a larger scale. With cross-references to related terms in the entries, this book will be a highly valuable resource for students and practitioners engaged with the SDGs and sustainable development more broadly.

Handbook on Welfare State Reform 

edited by Bernhard Ebbinghaus and Moira Nelson 

This comprehensive Handbook examines the capacity of advanced welfare states to adapt to sustained pressures and unforeseen crises. It explores the enduring relevance of established frameworks in explaining welfare state change as well as their effectiveness in addressing essential areas for reform.

Feminist Foreign Policy Analysis – A New Subfield 

edited by Karin Aggestam and Jacqui True

How can feminist scholarship advance the field of foreign policy analysis to better understand contemporary foreign policy actions and challenges? This groundbreaking book provides the state-of-the-art in the study of gender, feminisms and foreign policy. Bringing together contributors from around the world, chapters offer new analyses of foreign policy topics, including trade, defence, environment, peacebuilding, disinformation and development assistance.

The Production of Gendered Knowledge of War | Women and Epistemic Power

edited by Annika Björkdahl and Johanna Mannergren

This edited volume critically investigates women’s knowledge about war and explores the epistemic agency of women in a range of contemporary settings across the globe. Women are deeply affected by war, participate in war and resist war. At the same time, knowledge production often ignores and marginalizes women’s experiences and gendered ways of knowing war. From Colombia to Israel and Palestine, Liberia, Mali, Myanmar, Nepal, North America, Northern Iraq and Ukraine, the chapters in this book illuminate gendered knowledge production in and about different conflict-affected sites. By taking the embodied and narrative epistemic agency of local ‘knowers’ seriously, new insights are thereby presented about the role women play in producing knowledge about war. This book proposes new theoretical vantage points in order to understand how epistemic power and epistemic violence are closely related. Bringing the topic of knowledge production into the so-called ‘Women, Peace and Security’ (WPS) agenda, it analyses how knowledge of the gendered nature of war and security is produced and circulated, and argues that the WPS agenda is a system of knowledge with its own omissions and silences. By theorizing gendered knowledge production and amplifying the voices of women as epistemic agents, this book advances scholarship on gender and war. This book will be of much interest to students of feminist studies, peace studies, war and conflict studies and International Relations.

Peace and the politics of memory

Authors: Johanna Mannergren, Annika Björkdahl, Susanne Buckley-Zistel, Stefanie Kappler, and Timothy Williams

This book explores memory politics and its impact on the quality of peace in societies transitioning from a violent past. Situating the book in the literature of critical Peace Research and Memory Studies, the authors introduce the idea that the quality of peace is affected by the extent to which memories are entangled. It advances and employs an original theoretical framework to study mnemonic formations. Mnemonic formations are societally salient topics regarding a particular facet of a conflict-affected society’s memoryscape that bring memory and politics together. We investigate mnemonic formations through the interplay between sites, agency, narratives and events. Acknowledging the entanglement of memory in mnemonic formations, this book renders visible the fluidity of memory-making and the political frictions between competing memories. It provides rich empirical case studies that analyse and compare mnemonic formations in Cyprus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, South Africa and Cambodia. Through this comparative investigation the book assesses how and why memory politics contributes to the construction of a just peace or the perpetuation of conflict, or nuances in between. This analysis shows that three elements of memory politics play a key role in relation to the quality of peace: inclusivity, pluralism and dignity. Suggesting that memory politics affect the quality of peace, the book concludes that when the mnemonic formation consists of multiple, intersectional entanglements and overlaps, there is more room for just peace.