Doug Stokes is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent, Canterbury.[1]
His first book, America's Other War: Terrorizing Colombia(ISBN 978-1842775479) examines US intervention in Colombia and argues that it has primarily been driven by a desire to secure a stable supply of oil and to pacify threats to US economic and political interests. The author states that Plan Colombia is in fact subordinate to a wider counter-insurgency war against the FARC and Colombian civil society. The book received a foreword by Noam Chomsky[2] and numerous endorsements.
His second book is an edited volume with Professor Michael Cox (LSE) entitled US foreign policy (Oxford University Press, 2008; 2nd edition 2011). The book includes contributions from some of the world's leading scholars on US foreign policy / American foreign relations.[3]
Stokes' third book (co-authored with Sam Raphael) examines US oil interventions outside of the Middle East and the role played by US policy in the construction of the liberal international order in the post-war world. The book argues that US foreign policy has long been characterised by a "dual logic" that seeks to both maintain US hegemony within global politics and to maintain an open global economy that works in the interests of other great powers. The recent moves by the American State to diversify oil acquisition outside of the Middle East is an attempt to transnationalize non Middle Eastern political economies whilst fostering strategic dependence on US power by other states: a key plank of US post-war hegemony. See for example,.[4] The book is called Energy Security and American Hegemony (Johns Hopkins University Press in June 2010). Stokes is currently working on a new book on US grand strategy, due out in 2015.
Stokes is the editor of the leading journal of interdisciplinary International Relations, Global Society. His latest co-edited book on the work of Michel Foucault is called Foucault and International Relations: New Critical Engagements, (Routledge in 2010).
Stokes started his career at the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth in 2003 before moving to Kent in 2006. He received his BSc at the University of London (1997) and an MSc and PhD from the University of Bristol in 1999 and 2003 respectively}.
Outside of the Academy Doug enjoys practicing the ancient Thai martial art of Muay Thai.