They start from a single assertion: Leaders do whatever keeps them in power. They don’t care about the “national interest”—or even their subjects—unless they have to. This clever and accessible book shows that the difference between tyrants and democrats is just a convenient fiction. Governments do not differ in kind but only in the number of essential supporters, or backs that need scratching. The size of this group determines almost everything about politics: what leaders can get away with, and the quality of life or misery under them. The picture the authors paint is not pretty. But it just may be the truth, which is a good starting point for anyone seeking to improve human governance.

    The sources range from Dr. Sowell's letters, books, newspaper columns, and articles in both scholarly journals and popular magazines. The topics range from late-talking children to "tax cuts for the rich," baseball, race, war, the role of judges, medical care, and the rhetoric of politicians. These topics are dealt with by sometimes drawing on history, sometimes drawing on economics, and sometimes drawing on a sense of humor.The Thomas Sowell Reader includes essays on:* Social Issues* Economics* Political Issues* Legal Issues* Race and Ethnicity* Educational Issues* Biographical Sketches* Random Thoughts "My hope is that this large selection of my writings will reduce the likelihood that readers will misunderstand what I have said on many controversial issues over the years. Whether the reader will agree with all my conclusions is another question entirely. But disagreements can be productive, while misunderstandings seldom are." -- Thomas Sowell

    The term "Liberty" is so commonly used in our country that it has become a mere cliche. But do we know what it means? What it promises? How it factors into our daily lives? And most importantly, can we recognize tyranny when it is sold to us disguised as a form of liberty? Dr. Paul writes that to believe in liberty is not to believe in any particular social and economic outcome. It is to trust in the spontaneous order that emerges when the state does not intervene in human volition and human cooperation. It permits people to work out their problems for themselves, build lives for themselves, take risks and accept responsibility for the results, and make their own decisions. It is the seed of America. This is a comprehensive guide to Dr. Paul's position on fifty of the most important issues of our times, from Abortion to Zionism. Accessible, easy to digest, and fearless in its discussion of controversial topics, Liberty Defined sheds new light on a word that is losing its shape.

    Some went on to create governments that were accountable to their constituents. We take these institutions for granted, but they are absent or are unable to perform in many of today’s developing countries—with often disastrous consequences for the rest of the world.Francis Fukuyama, author of the bestselling The End of History and the Last Man and one of our most important political thinkers, provides a sweeping account of how today’s basic political institutions developed. The first of a major two-volume work, The Origins of Political Order begins with politics among our primate ancestors and follows the story through the emergence of tribal societies, the growth of the first modern state in China, the beginning of the rule of law in India and the Middle East, and the development of political accountability in Europe up until the eve of the French Revolution.Drawing on a vast body of knowledge—history, evolutionary biology, archaeology, and economics—Fukuyama has produced a brilliant, provocative work that offers fresh insights on the origins of democratic societies and raises essential questions about the nature of politics and its discontents.

    Drawing on historical records as well as his conversations with Chinese leaders over the past forty years, Kissinger examines how China has approached diplomacy, strategy, and negotiation throughout its history, and reflects on the consequences for the global balance of power in the 21st century. Since no other country can claim a more powerful link to its ancient past and classical principles, any attempt to understand China's future world role must begin with an appreciation of its long history. For centuries, China rarely encountered other societies of comparable size and sophistication; it was the "Middle Kingdom," treating the peoples on its periphery as vassal states. At the same time, Chinese statesmen-facing threats of invasion from without, and the contests of competing factions within-developed a canon of strategic thought that prized the virtues of subtlety, patience, and indirection over feats of martial prowess. In On China, Kissinger examines key episodes in Chinese foreign policy from the classical era to the present day, with a particular emphasis on the decades since the rise of Mao Zedong. He illuminates the inner workings of Chinese diplomacy during such pivotal events as the initial encounters between China and modern European powers, the formation and breakdown of the Sino-Soviet alliance, the Korean War, Richard Nixon's historic trip to Beijing, and three crises in the Taiwan Straits. Drawing on his extensive personal experience with four generation of Chinese leaders, he brings to life towering figures such as Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping, revealing how their different visions have shaped China's modern destiny. With his singular vantage on U.S.-China relations, Kissinger traces the evolution of this fraught but crucial relationship over the past 60 years, following its dramatic course from estrangement to strategic partnership to economic interdependence, and toward an uncertain future. With a final chapter on the emerging superpower's 21st-century world role, On China provides an intimate historical perspective on Chinese foreign affairs from one of the premier statesmen of the 20th century.

    Ben Carson helps us learn from our past in order to chart a better course for our future. From his personal ascent from inner-city poverty to international medical and humanitarian acclaim, Carson shares experiential insights that help us understand: … what is good about America … where we have gone astray … which fundamental beliefs have guided America from her founding into preeminence among nations Written by a man who has experienced America’s best and worst firsthand, America the Beautiful is at once alarming, convicting, and inspiring. You’ll gain new perspectives on our nation’s origins, our Judeo-Christian heritage, our educational system, capitalism versus socialism, our moral fabric, healthcare, and much more. An incisive manifesto of the values that shaped America’s past and must shape her future, America the Beautiful calls us all to use our God-given talents to improve our lives, our communities, our nation, and our world.

    Federal Election Commission trust in our government has reached an all-time low. More than ever before, Americans believe that money buys results in Congress, and that business interests wield control over our legislature.With heartfelt urgency and a keen desire for righting wrongs, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig takes a clear-eyed look at how we arrived at this crisis: how fundamentally good people, with good intentions, have allowed our democracy to be co-opted by outside interests, and how this exploitation has become entrenched in the system. Rejecting simple labels and reductive logic-and instead using examples that resonate as powerfully on the Right as on the Left-Lessig seeks out the root causes of our situation. He plumbs the issues of campaign financing and corporate lobbying, revealing the human faces and follies that have allowed corruption to take such a foothold in our system. He puts the issues in terms that nonwonks can understand, using real-world analogies and real human stories. And ultimately he calls for widespread mobilization and a new Constitutional Convention, presenting achievable solutions for regaining control of our corrupted-but redeemable-representational system. In this way, Lessig plots a roadmap for returning our republic to its intended greatness. While America may be divided, Lessig vividly champions the idea that we can succeed if we accept that corruption is our common enemy and that we must find a way to fight against it. In REPUBLIC, LOST, he not only makes this need palpable and clear-he gives us the practical and intellectual tools to do something about it.

    Combining original research with her personal story, it is a deeply thoughtful meditation on war as it is being waged around the world against millions of civilians -- primarily women and children. Samantha's boundless energy, dedication, and compassion shine through on every page as she lays out real, lasting solutions to these problems and shows how to move beyond outdated notions of charity towards a more progressive, inclusive, and respectful world view.

    . . or at least he wasn’t until these books came along. Made up of intensively edited speeches and interviews, they offer something not found anywhere else: pure Chomsky, with every dazzling idea and penetrating insight intact, delivered in clear, accessible, reader-friendly prose.Published as four short books in the famous Real Story series—What Uncle Sam Really Wants; The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many; Secrets, Lies and Democracy; and The Common Good—they’ve collectively sold almost 600,000 copies.And they continue to sell year after year after year because Chomsky’s ideas become, if anything, more relevant as time goes by. For example, twenty years ago he pointed out that “in 1970, about 90% of international capital was used for trade and long-term investment—more or less productive things—and 10% for speculation. By 1990, those figures had reversed.” As we know, speculation continued to increase exponentially. We’re paying the price now for not heeding him them.

    Instead, it is one ubiquitous superstition which infects the minds of people of all races, religions and nationalities, which deceives decent, well-intentioned people into supporting and advocating violence and oppression. Even without making human beings one bit more wise or virtuous, removing that one superstition would remove the vast majority of injustice and suffering from the world.

    Similarly the connection between US military interventions overseas and US domestic problems is rarely considered in any detail. In this brilliant new book, Michael Parenti reveals the true face of US imperialism. He documents how it promotes unjust policies across the globe including expropriation of natural resources, privatisation, debt burdens and suppression of democratic movements. He then demonstrates how this feeds into deteriorating living standards in the US itself, leading to increased poverty, decaying infrastructure and impending ecological disaster. The Face of Imperialism redefines empire and imperialism and connects the crisis in the US with its military escapades across the world.

    Poor and working-class whites have tended to be painted as spectators, reactionaries, and, even, racists. Most Americans, the story goes, just watched the political movements of the sixties go by. James Tracy and Amy Sonnie, who have been interviewing activists from the era for nearly ten years, reject this old narrative. They show that poor and working-class radicals, inspired by the Civil Rights movement, the Black Panthers, and progressive populism, started to organize significant political struggles against racism and inequality during the 1960s and 1970s. Among these groups: +  JOIN Community Union brought together southern migrants, student radicals, and welfare recipients in Chicago to fight for housing, health, and welfare . . .  +  The Young Patriots Organization and Rising Up Angry organized self-identified hillbillies, Chicago greasers, Vietnam vets, and young feminists into a legendary “Rainbow Coalition” with Black and Puerto Rican activists . . .   +  In Philadelphia, the October 4th Organization united residents of industrial Kensington against big business, war, and a repressive police force . . .  + In the Bronx, White Lightning occupied hospitals and built coalitions with doctors to fight for the rights of drug addicts and the poor. Exploring an untold history of the New Left, the book shows how these groups helped to redefine community organizing—and transforms the way we think about a pivotal moment in U.S. history.

    Underlying his reportage is a constant struggle with the nature of war and its impact on human civilization. "War is always about betrayal," Hedges notes. "It is about betrayal of the young by the old, of cynics by idealists, and of soldiers and Marines by politicians. Society's institutions, including our religious institutions, which mold us into compliant citizens, are unmasked."

    Much like the character in one of his best-selling books, Andy Andrews is first and foremost a Noticer. Sometimes, all one needs is a little perspective and Andy has been providing that perspective to some of the world’s most influential companies and organizations for the last 20 years. His ability to transform people by their own understanding and desires has made him loved by millions. Now, Andy Andrews brings his lessons and perspective into the important arena of government, citizenship, and what it means to completely uphold the truth. If the truth is what sets us free, what does it mean to live in a society where truth is absent? How do truth and lies in the past shape our destiny today? Through the lens of the Holocaust, best-selling author Andy Andrews examines the critical need for truth in our relationships, our communities, and our government. In this compact, nonpartisan book, Andrews urges listeners to be “careful students” of the past, seeking accurate, factual accounts of events and decisions that illuminate choices we face now. By considering how the Nazi German regime was able to carry out over 11 million institutional killings between 1933 and 1945, Andrews advocates for an informed population that demands honesty and integrity from its leaders and from each other.

    Now, in this one-of-a-kind collection of his most intimatethoughts, his favorite quotations by others, and his own most collectiblejokes, all culled from a newly disclosed set of personal notecards he keptthroughout his life and career, fans and admirers of the fortieth presidentwill find a unique window of insight into the soul of an American icon. Editedby Douglas Brinkley, editor of #1 NewYork Times bestseller The ReaganDiaries, this indispensible Reagan retrospective is perfect for fathers,graduates, and anyone looking to find inspiration in the thoughts and musingsof a great American leader.

    Written by a leading textbook author, it is engaging, stimulating and forward-looking, covering all the topics and theory students require at an introductory level.

    Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rely upon revenues from oil production, and in the places that have the greatest demand for energy.Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of energy so open to disruption that oligarchies in the West became vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant energy from oil, most notably from the Middle East, offered a means to reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in history to reorganize political life around the management of something now called “the economy” and the promise of its infinite growth. The politics of the West became dependent on an undemocratic Middle East.In the twenty-first century, the oil-based forms of modern democratic politics have become unsustainable. Foreign intervention and military rule are faltering in the Middle East, while governments everywhere appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy—the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of the ecological order.In making the production of energy the central force shaping the democratic age, Carbon Democracy rethinks the history of energy, the politics of nature, the theory of democracy, and the place of the Middle East in our common world.

    . . European nations at risk of defaulting on their loans . . . A possible global financial crisis. It happened before, in the 1970s . Oil Kings is the story of how oil came to dominate U.S. domestic and international affairs. As Richard Nixon fought off Watergate inquiries in 1973, the U.S. economy reacted to an oil shortage initiated by Arab nations in retaliation for American support of Israel in the Arab- Israeli war. The price of oil skyrocketed, causing serious inflation. One man the U.S. could rely on in the Middle East was the Shah of Iran, a loyal ally whose grand ambitions had made him a leading customer for American weapons. Iran sold the U.S. oil; the U.S. sold Iran missiles and fighter jets. But the Shah’s economy depended almost entirely on oil, and the U.S. economy could not tolerate annual double-digit increases in the price of this essential commodity. European economies were hit even harder by the soaring oil prices, and several NATO allies were at risk of default on their debt. In 1976, with the U.S. economy in peril, President Gerald Ford, locked in a tight election race, decided he had to find a country that would sell oil to the U.S. more cheaply and break the OPEC monopoly, which the Shah refused to do. On the advice of Treasury Secretary William Simon and against the advice of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Ford made a deal to sell advanced weaponry to the Saudis in exchange for a modest price hike on oil. Ford lost the election, but the deal had lasting consequences. The Shah’s economy was destabilized, and disaffected elements in Iran mobilized to overthrow him. The U.S. had embarked on a long relationship with the autocratic Saudi kingdom that continues to this day. Andrew Scott Cooper draws on newly declassified documents and interviews with some key figures of the time to show how Nixon, Ford, Kissinger, the CIA, and the State and Treasury departments—as well as the Shah and the Saudi royal family— maneuvered to control events in the Middle East. He details the secret U.S.-Saudi plan to circumvent OPEC that destabilized the Shah. He reveals how close the U.S. came to sending troops into the Persian Gulf to break the Arab oil embargo. The Oil Kings provides solid evidence that U.S. officials ignored warning signs of a potential hostage crisis in Iran. It discloses that U.S. officials offered to sell nuclear power and nuclear fuel to the Shah. And it shows how the Ford Administration barely averted a European debt crisis that could have triggered a financial catastrophe in the U.S. Brilliantly reported and filled with astonishing details about some of the key figures of the time, The Oil Kings is the history of an era that we thought we knew, an era whose momentous reverberations still influence events at home and abroad today.

    In the tradition of Gideon's Trumpet, Adam Winkler uses the landmark 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, which invalidated a law banning handguns in the nation's capital, as a springboard for a groundbreaking historical narrative. From the Founding Fathers and the Second Amendment to the origins of the Klan, ironically as a gun control organization, the debate over guns has always generated controversy. Whether examining the Black Panthers' role in provoking the modern gun rights movement or Ronald Reagan's efforts to curtail gun ownership, Winkler brilliantly weaves together the dramatic stories of gun rights advocates and gun control lobbyists, providing often unexpected insights into the venomous debate that now cleaves our nation.

    With the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Americans formally claimed their rights, and that tinder exploded into a new age for mankind.But more than 200 years later, the flames of freedom are dying. We cry that Washington has failed us, but that is not where the blame lies.With our rights, We the People were given the duty to maintain them. We the People are the problem. And We the People are the solution. Our republic will be restored not through political revolution, but through a revolution of the soul -- not as we point fingers upward, but as we turn inward.In an age of blame, this is uncommon sense. And it's precisely what America needs to rekindle her light.

    Too Many People? provides a clear, well-documented, and popularly written refutation of the idea that "overpopulation" is a major cause of environmental destruction, arguing that a focus on human numbers not only misunderstands the causes of the crisis, it dangerously weakens the movement for real solutions.No other book challenges modern overpopulation theory so clearly and comprehensively, providing invaluable insights for the layperson and environmental scholars alike.Ian Angus is editor of the ecosocialist journal Climate and Capitalism, and Simon Butler is co-editor of Green Left Weekly.

    The common thread for oligarchs across history is that wealth defines them, empowers them, and inherently exposes them to threats. The existential motive of all oligarchs is wealth defense. How they respond varies with the threats they confront, including how directly involved they are in supplying the coercion underlying all property claims, and whether they act separately or collectively. These variations yield four types of oligarchy: warring, ruling, sultanistic, and civil. Oligarchy is not displaced by democracy but rather is fused with it. Moreover, the rule of law problem in many societies is a matter of taming oligarchs. Cases studied in this book include the United States, ancient Athens and Rome, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, medieval Venice and Siena, mafia commissions in the United States and Italy, feuding Appalachian families, and early chiefs cum oligarchs dating from 2300 BCE.

    From the disgrace of Watergate to the humiliation of the Iran hostage crisis, the American Dream seemed to be falling apart. In this magisterial new history, Dominic Sandbrook re-creates the schizophrenic atmosphere of the 1970s, the world of Henry Kissinger and Edward Kennedy, Anita Bryant and Jerry Falwell, Bruce Springsteen and Tom Landry. He takes us back to an age when feminists were on the march and the Communists seemed to be winning the Cold War, but also when a new kind of right-wing populism was transforming American politics from the ground up. Those years gave us organic food, disco music, gas lines, and gay rights—but they also gave us Proposition 13, the neoconservative movement, and the rise of Ronald Reagan.From the killing fields of Vietnam to the mean streets of Manhattan, this is a richly compelling picture of the turbulent age in which our modern-day populist politics was born. For those who remember the days when you could buy a new Ford Mustang II but had to wait hours to fill the tank, this could hardly be a more vivid book. And for those born later, it is the perfect guide to a tortured landscape that shaped our present, from the financial boardroom to the suburban bedroom: the extraordinary world of 1970s America.

     George McGovern has been a leading figure of the Democratic Party for more than fifty years. From this true liberal comes a thoughtful examination of what being a Democrat really means. McGovern admonishes current Democratic politicians for losing sight of their ideals as they subscribe to an increasingly centrist policy agenda. Applying his wide- ranging knowledge and expertise on issues ranging from military spending to same-sex marriage to educational reform, he stresses the importance of creating policies we can be proud of. Finally, with 2012 looming, McGovern's "What It Means to Be a Democrat" offers a vision of the Party's future in which ideological coherence and courage rule.

    By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results, even in Iran, Burma, the Philippines, and the Palestinian Territories.Combining statistical analysis with case studies of specific countries and territories, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed and, sometimes, causing them to fail. They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement and commitment, and that higher levels of participation contribute to enhanced resilience, greater opportunities for tactical innovation and civic disruption (and therefore less incentive for a regime to maintain its status quo), and shifts in loyalty among opponents' erstwhile supporters, including members of the military establishment.Chenoweth and Stephan conclude that successful nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war. Presenting a rich, evidentiary argument, they originally and systematically compare violent and nonviolent outcomes in different historical periods and geographical contexts, debunking the myth that violence occurs because of structural and environmental factors and that it is necessary to achieve certain political goals. Instead, the authors discover, violent insurgency is rarely justifiable on strategic grounds.

    This work builds on the volume that Professor Williamson Murray edited with Allan Millett on military innovation (a quite different problem, though similar in some respects). In Clausewitzian terms, war is a contest, an interactive duel, which is of indeterminate length and presents a series of intractable problems at every level, from policy and strategy down to the tactical. Moreover, the fact that the enemy is adapting at the same time presents military organizations with an ever-changing set of conundrums that offer up no easy solutions. As the British general, James Wolfe, suggested before Quebec: War is an option of difficulties. Dr. Murray provides an in-depth analysis of the problems that military forces confront in adapting to these difficulties.

    After nine years on death row, DNA testing cast doubt on his conviction and saved his life. However, he spent another eight years in prison before more sophisticated DNA technology proved his innocence and convicted the guilty man.DNA exonerations have shattered confidence in the criminal justice system by exposing how often we have convicted the innocent and let the guilty walk free. In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA testing.Based on trial transcripts, Garrett's investigation into the causes of wrongful convictions reveals larger patterns of incompetence, abuse, and error. Evidence corrupted by suggestive eyewitness procedures, coercive interrogations, unsound and unreliable forensics, shoddy investigative practices, cognitive bias, and poor lawyering illustrates the weaknesses built into our current criminal justice system. Garrett proposes practical reforms that rely more on documented, recorded, and audited evidence, and less on fallible human memory.Very few crimes committed in the United States involve biological evidence that can be tested using DNA. How many unjust convictions are there that we will never discover? "Convicting the Innocent" makes a powerful case for systemic reforms to improve the accuracy of all criminal cases.

    “I actually wrote them myself.” The teachers exploded in laughter. They got the joke: lesser politicians were not bright enough to do the same. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama supporters pointed to the first of those two books, the 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, as proof of Obama’s superior intellect. Time magazine called Dreams “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.” The Obama campaign machine traded on the candidate’s literary reputation, encouraging volunteers to “get out the vote and keep talking to others about the genius of Barack Obama.” There was just one small flaw, as writer and literary detective Jack Cashill discovered months before the November 2008 election: nothing in Obama’s history suggested he was capable of writing either Dreams or his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope. In fact, as Cashill continued his research, he came to the shocking conclusion that the real craftsman behind Dreams was terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers. “This was a charge,” David Remnick admits in his definitive Obama biography, The Bridge, “that if ever proved true, or believed to be true among enough voters, could have been the end of the candidacy.” Deconstructing Obama tells the story of what happens when a citizen journalist discovers a game-changing reality that the media refuse to acknowledge. Despite their rejection, Cashill expanded his research into Obama’s literary canon. As he came to see, if Dreams serves as sacred text, the poem “Pop” is the Rosetta stone, the key to deciphering Obama’s shrouded past, his fragile psyche, and his uniquely cryptic political life. In unlocking that past, Cashill discovered that the story that Obama has been telling all his life varies from the true story in ways big and small. In fact, much of Obama’s life story appears to be a wholly constructed fabrication, one that Jack Cashill “deconstructs” to show the world just who Barack Obama really is.

    Kregg Hetherington shows that the ideal of transparent information, meant to depoliticize bureaucratic procedures, has become a battleground for a new kind of politics centered on legal interpretation and the manipulation of official documents. In late-twentieth-century Paraguay, peasant land politics moved unexpectedly from the roads and fields into the documentary recesses of state bureaucracy. When peasants, bureaucrats, and development experts encountered one another in state archives, conflicts ensued about how bureaucracy ought to function, what documents are for, and who gets to narrate the past and the future of the nation. Hetherington argues that Paraguay’s neoliberal democracy is predicated, at least in part, on an exclusionary distinction between model citizens and peasants. Despite this, peasant activists have found ways to circumvent their exclusion and in so doing question the conceptual foundations of international development orthodoxy.

    Unexpected atrocity coexists alongside the quiet subtleties of mercy, and people and nations currently encounter a world in which not even the certainties of existence remain even as grace can sometimes arise under the most difficult circumstances. Ultimately, Forgiveness and Power in the Age of Atrocity is a book about the alienation and intimacy at war within us all. Ferch speaks to categorical human transgressions in the hope that readers will be compelled to examine their own prejudices and engage the moral responsibility to evoke in their own personal life, work life, and larger national communities a more humane and life-giving coexistence. In addition to a primary focus on servant leadership, the book addresses three interwoven aspects of social responsibility: 1) the nature of personal responsibility 2) the nature of privilege and the conscious and unconscious violence against humanity often harbored in a blindly privileged stance, and 3) the encounter with forgiveness and forgiveness-asking grounded in a personal and collective obligation to the well-being of humanity. Modernist and postmodernist notions of the will to meaning are considered against the philosophical notion of the will to power. The book examines the everyday existence of human values in a time when we inhabit a world filled as much with unwarranted cruelty as with the disarming nature of authentic and life-affirming love. The book asks the question: Can ultimate forgiveness change the heart of violence? In Forgiveness and Power, people are challenged not only by the work of profound thought leaders such as Mandela, Tutu, but also Simone Weil, Vaclav Havel, Emerson, Mary Oliver, Martin Luther King, Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Robert Greenleaf. The hope of the book is that people of all ages and creeds come to a deeper understanding and of personal and collective responsibility for leadership that helps heal the heart of the world.

    By contrast, in Armed with Abundance, Meredith Lair focuses on the noncombat experiences of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, redrawing the landscape of the war so that swimming pools, ice cream, visits from celebrities, and other comforts share the frame with combat.To address a tenuous morale situation, military authorities, Lair reveals, wielded abundance to insulate soldiers--and, by extension, the American public--from boredom and deprivation, making the project of war perhaps easier and certainly more palatable. The result was dozens of overbuilt bases in South Vietnam that grew more elaborate as the war dragged on. Relying on memoirs, military documents, and G.I. newspapers, Lair finds that consumption and satiety, rather than privation and sacrifice, defined most soldiers' Vietnam deployments. Abundance quarantined the U.S. occupation force from the impoverished people it ostensibly had come to liberate, undermining efforts to win Vietnamese hearts and minds and burdening veterans with disappointment that their wartime service did not measure up to public expectations. With an epilogue that finds a similar paradigm at work in Iraq, Armed with Abundance offers a unique and provocative perspective on modern American warfare.

    Specialists in banking, however, tell a story with less emotional resonance but a better correspondence to the evidence: the crisis was sparked by the international regulatory accords on bank capital levels, the Basel Accords.In one of the first studies critically to examine the Basel Accords, Engineering the Financial Crisis reveals the crucial role that bank capital requirements and other government regulations played in the recent financial crisis. Jeffrey Friedman and Wladimir Kraus argue that by encouraging banks to invest in highly rated mortgage-backed bonds, the Basel Accords created an overconcentration of risk in the banking industry. In addition, accounting regulations required banks to reduce lending if the temporary market value of these bonds declined, as they did in 2007 and 2008 during the panic over subprime mortgage defaults.The book begins by assessing leading theories about the crisis--deregulation, bank compensation practices, excessive leverage, too big to fail, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--and, through careful evidentiary scrutiny, debunks much of the conventional wisdom about what went wrong. It then discusses the Basel Accords and how they contributed to systemic risk. Finally, it presents an analysis of social-science expertise and the fallibility of economists and regulators. Engagingly written, theoretically inventive, yet empirically grounded, Engineering the Financial Crisis is a timely examination of the unintended--and sometimes disastrous--effects of regulation on complex economies.

    Transnational progressives and transnational pragmatists in the UN, EU, post-modern states of Europe, NGOs, corporations, prominent foundations, and most importantly, in America’s leading elites, seek to establish “global governance.” Further, they understand that in order to achieve global governance, American sovereignty must be subordinated to the “global rule of law.” The U.S. Constitution must incorporate “evolving norms of international law.” Sovereignty or Submission examines this process with crystalline clarity and alerts the American public to the danger ahead.Global governance seeks legitimacy not in democracy, but in a partisan interpretation of human rights. It would shift power from democracies (U.S., Israel, India) to post-democratic authorities, such as the judges of the International Criminal Court. Global governance is a new political form (a rival to liberal democracy), that is already a significant actor on the world stage. America faces serious challenges from radical Islam and a rising China. Simultaneously, it faces a third challenge (global governance) that is internal to the democratic world; is non-violent; but nonetheless threatens constitutional self-government. Although it seems unlikely that the utopian goals of the globalists could be fully achieved, if they continue to obtain a wide spread influence over mainstream elite opinion, they could disable and disarm democratic self-government at home and abroad. The result would be the slow suicide of American liberal democracy. Whichever side prevails, the existential conflict?global governance versus American sovereignty (and democratic self-government in general) will be at the heart of world politics as far as the eye can see.

    In this book Katherine Fierlbeck provides an in-depth discussion of how health care decisions are shaped by politics and why there is so much disagreement over how to fix the system.Many Canadians point to health care as a source of national pride; others are highly critical of the system's shortcomings and call for major reform. Yet meaningful debate cannot occur without an understanding of how the system actually operates. In this overview, Fierlbeck outlines the basic framework of the health care system with reference to specific areas such as administration and governance, public health, human resources, drugs and drug policy, and mental health. She also discusses alternative models in other countries such as Britain, the United States, and France. As health care becomes increasingly complex, it is crucial that Canadians have a solid grasp of the main issues within both the policy and political environments. With its balanced and accessible assessment of the main political and theoretical debates, Health Care in Canada is an essential guide for anyone with a stake in Canada's health system.

    S. Fox, a recent recruit, finds that his new life in the office block is every bit as dangerous as in his native forest. In a set of letters written to his cousin, Arctic Fox, we follow his trials, as he tries to navigate a way through the forests of bureaucracy. Before his eyes, factions tear the office world apart. S. Fox must keep his head off the paper guillotine, when waves of oppression, revolution and counter-revolution engulf the ministry. His world is complicated further by messengers from another. The un-dead headless chicken, a transdimensional cat and a phantom Afghan hound, stalk the sleepless fox. All call on him to avenge them, and to grab power for himself. This satire of everything from political history to corporate management is witty and entertaining, making Letters from the Ministry the Animal Farm for the 21st century.

    soldiers were deployed to Afghanistan at the height of the campaign, fighting the longest war in the nation's history. But what do Americans know about the land where this conflict is taking place? Many have come to have a grasp of the people, history, and geography of Iraq, but Afghanistan remains a mystery.Originally published by the U.S. Army to provide an overview of the country's terrain, ethnic groups, and history for American troops and now updated and expanded for the general public, Afghanistan Declassified fills in these gaps. Historian Brian Glyn Williams, who has traveled to Afghanistan frequently over the past decade, provides essential background to the war, tracing the rise, fall, and reemergence of the Taliban. Special sections deal with topics such as the CIA's Predator drone campaign in the Pakistani tribal zones, the spread of suicide bombing from Iraq to the Afghan theater of operations, and comparisons between the Soviet and U.S. experiences in Afghanistan.To Williams, a historian of Central Asia, Afghanistan is not merely a theater in the war on terror. It is a primeval, exciting, and beautiful land; not only a place of danger and turmoil but also one of hospitable villagers and stunning landscapes, of great cultural diversity and richness. Williams brings the country to life through his own travel experiences--from living with Northern Alliance Uzbek warlords to working on a major NATO base. National heroes are introduced, Afghanistan's varied ethnic groups are explored, key battles--both ancient and current--are retold, and this land that many see as only a frightening setting for prolonged war emerges in three dimensions.

    Frontiers were devised and alien dynasties imposed on the populations as arbitrarily as in mediaeval times. It was destined from the outset to failure. Promises had been made to the Arabs during the War, but were not honoured, and brief hopes for Arab unity were dashed, leading to a bitter belief in western perfidy that persists to the present day. Britain was quick to see the riches promised by the black pools of oil that lay on the ground around Baghdad, and when France too grasped their importance, bitter differences opened up between the two allies, and the areas became a focus of a return to the traditional enmity between them.

    Almost two decades later, however, the prospects of a dignified life of wage-earning work remain unattainable for most South Africans. Through extensive archival and ethnographic research, Franco Barchiesi documents and interrogates this important dilemma in the country's democratic transition: economic participation has gained centrality in the government's definition of virtuous citizenship, and yet for most workers, employment remains an elusive and insecure experience. In a context of market liberalization and persistent social and racial inequalities, as jobs in South Africa become increasingly flexible, fragmented, and unprotected, they depart from the promise of work with dignity and citizenship rights that once inspired opposition to apartheid. Barchiesi traces how the employment crisis and the responses of workers to it challenge the state's normative imagination of work, and raise decisive questions for the social foundations and prospects of South Africa's democratic experiment.

    When the Supreme Court sided with the darter, Congress changed the rules. The dam was built, the river stopped flowing, and the snail darter went extinct on the Little Tennessee, though it survived in other waterways. A young Al Gore voted for the dam; freshman congressman Newt Gingrich voted for the fish.A lot has changed since the 1970s, and Joe Roman helps us understand why we should all be happy that this sweeping law is alive and well today. More than a general history of endangered species protection, Listed is a tale of threatened species in the wild--from the whooping crane and North Atlantic right whale to the purple bankclimber, a freshwater mussel tangled up in a water war with Atlanta--and the people working to save them.Employing methods from the new field of ecological economics, Roman challenges the widely held belief that protecting biodiversity is too costly. And with engaging directness, he explains how preserving biodiversity can help economies and communities thrive. Above all, he shows why the extinction of species matters to us personally--to our health and safety, our prosperity, and our joy in nature.

    She found herself in the midst of a storied land, a place Mexicans call their country's “little waist,” a place long known for its strong women, spirited marketplaces, and deep sense of independence. She also landed in the middle of a ferocious battle over plans to industrialize the region, where most people still fish, farm, and work in the forests. In the decade that followed her first visit, Call witnessed farmland being paved for new highways, oil spilling into rivers, and forests burning down. Through it all, local people fought to protect their lands and their livelihoods—and their very lives.  Call’s story, No Word for Welcome, invites readers into the homes, classrooms, storefronts, and fishing boats of the isthmus, as well as the mahogany-paneled high-rise offices of those striving to control the region. With timely and invaluable insights into the development battle, Call shows that the people who have suffered most from economic globalization have some of the clearest ideas about how we can all survive it.

    Either they collapsed in chaos, or society returned to commodity money before that could happen. Drawing upon novel new research, "Paper Money Collapse" conclusively illustrates why paper money systems--those based on an elastic and constantly expanding supply of money as opposed to a system of commodity money of essentially fixed supply--are inherently unstable and why they must lead to economic disintegration.These highly controversial conclusions clash with the present consensus, which holds that elastic state money is superior to inflexible commodity money (such as a gold standard), and that expanding money is harmless or even beneficial for as long as inflation stays low. Contradicting this, "Paper Money Collapse" shows that: The present crisis is the unavoidable result of continuously expanding fiat moneyThe current policy of accelerated money production to "stimulate" the economy is counterproductive and could lead to a complete collapse of the monetary systemWhy many in financial markets, in media, and in the policy establishment are unable (and often unwilling) to fully appreciate the underlying problems with elastic moneyThis compelling new book looks at the breakdown of modern economic theory and the fallacy of mathematical models. It is an analysis of the current financial crisis and shows in very stark terms that the solutions presented by paper money-enthusiasts around the world are misguided and inherently flawed.

    Reading Karl Marx in an original way, Karatani developed a theory of history based on the repetitive cycle of crises attending the expansion and transformation of capital. His work led to a rigorous analysis of political, economic, and literary forms of representation that recast historical events as a series of repeated forms forged in the transitional moments of global capitalism. "History and Repetition" cemented Karatani's reputation as one of Japan's premier thinkers, capable of traversing the fields of philosophy, political economy, history, and literature in his work. The first complete translation of "History and Repetition" into English, undertaken with the cooperation of Karatani himself, this volume opens with his innovative reading of "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," tracing Marx's early theoretical formulation of the state. Karatani follows with a study of violent crises as they recur after major transitions of power, developing his theory of historical repetition and introducing a groundbreaking interpretation of fascism (in both Europe and Japan) as the spectral return of the absolutist monarch in the midst of a crisis of representative democracy. For Karatani, fascism represents the most violent materialization of the repetitive mechanism of history. Yet he also seeks out singularities that operate outside the brutal inevitability of historical repetition, whether represented in literature or, more precisely, in the process of literature's demise. Closely reading the works of Oe Kenzaburo, Mishima Yukio, Nakagami Kenji, and Murakami Haruki, Karatani compares the recurrent and universal with the singular and unrepeatable, while advancing a compelling theory of the decline of modern literature. Merging theoretical arguments with a concrete analysis of cultural and intellectual history, Karatani's essays encapsulate a brilliant, multidisciplinary perspective on world history.

    At the time when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Japanese Canadians numbered well over 20,000. From the first arrivals in the late nineteenth century, they had taken up work in many parts of BC, established communities, and become part of the Canadian society even though they faced racism and prejudice in many forms. With war came wartime hysteria. Japanese Canadian residents of BC were rounded up, their homes and property seized, and forced to move to internment camps with inadequate housing, water, and food. Men and older boys went to road camps while some families ended up on farms where they were essentially slave labour. Eventually, after years of pressure, the Canadian government admitted that the internment was wrong and apologized for it. This book uses a wide range of historical photographs, documents, and images of museum artefacts to tell the story of the internment. The impact of these events is underscored by first-person narrative from five Japanese Canadians who were themselves youths at the time their families were forced to move to the camps.

    David Malone identifies relevant aspects of Indian history, examines the role of domestic politics and internal and external security challenges, and of domestic and international economic factors.He analyzes the specifics of India's policy within its South Asian neighborhood, and with respect to China, the USA, West Asia, East Asia, Europe, and Russia as well as multilateral diplomacy. The book also touches on Indian ties to Africa and Latin America, and the Caribbean.India's 'soft power', the role of migration in its policy, and other cross-cutting issues are analyzed, as is the role and approach of several categories of foreign policy actors in India. Substantive conclusions touch on policies India may want or need to adjust in its quest for internationalstature.This book will appeal to both scholars and students of international relations as well as policymakers, diplomats, journalists, strategic affairs experts, and informed readers.

    Under the influence of intellectuals and academics in Western universities, intellectuals such as Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, Edward Said, and Noam Chomsky, and destructive intellectual fashions such as post-modernism, moral relativism, and multiculturalism, the West has lost all self-confidence in its own values, and seems incapable and unwilling to defend those values. By contrast, resurgent Islam, in all its forms, is supremely confident, and is able to exploit the West's moral weakness and cultural confusion to demand ever more concessions from her. The growing political and demographic power of Muslim communities in the West, aided and abetted by Western apologists of Islam, not to mention a compliant, pro-Islam U.S. administration, has resulted in an ever-increasing demand for the implementation of Islamic law, sharia, into the fabric of Western law, and Western constitutions. There is an urgent need to examine why sharia is totally incompatible with Human Rights and the US Constitution. This book, the first of its kind, proposes to examine the Sharia and its potential and actual threat to democratic principles.This book defines and defends Western values, strengths and freedoms often taken for granted. This book also tackles the taboo subjects of racism in Asian culture, Arab slavery, and Islamic imperialism. It begins with a homage to New York City, as a metaphor for all we hold dear in Western culture: pluralism, individualism, freedom of expression and thought, the complete freedom to pursue life, liberty and happiness unhampered by totalitarian regimes, and theocratic doctrines.

    Terrorism is an extreme form of radicalization, and the book describes pathways to terrorism to demonstratethe twelve mechanisms at work.Written by two psychologists who are acknowledged radicalization experts and consultants to the Department of Homeland Security, Friction draws heavily on case histories. The case material is wide-ranging - drawn from Russia in the late 1800s, the US in the 1970s, and the radical Islam encouraged bythe fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Taken together, the twelve mechanisms show how unexceptional people are moved to exceptional violence in the conflict between states and non-state challengers. Captivating, and with psychological overtones, this timely book covers one of the most pressingissues of our time.

    In it Strauss argues that the basis for Hobbes’s natural and political science is his interest in “self-knowledge of man as he really is.” The writings collected in this book, each written prior to that classic volume, complement that account. Thus at long last, this book allows us to have a complete picture of Strauss’s interpretation of Hobbes, the thinker pivotal to the fundamental theme of his life’s work: the conflicting demands of philosophy and revelation, or as he termed it, “the theologico-political problem.” It is no exaggeration to say that Strauss’s work on Hobbes’s critique of religion is essential to his analysis of Hobbes’s political philosophy, and vice versa. This volume will spark new interest in Hobbes’s explication of the Bible and in his understanding of religion by revealing previously neglected dimensions and motives of Hobbes’s “theology.” At the same time, scholars interested in the intellectual development of Leo Strauss will find in these writings the missing link, as it were, between his two early books, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion and The Political Philosophy of Hobbes. In addition, this volume makes available for the first time in English a letter, a book outline, an extended review, an engagement with legal positivism, and an account of Strauss’s work on Hobbes by Heinrich Meier, all of which shed light on Strauss’s concerns and his approach to Hobbes in particular, as well as to modern political thought and life.

    In short, Americans have maintained much friendlier ties with traditional forms of religion than their European counterparts. What explains this transatlantic religious divide? Accessing the topic though nineteenth and early twentieth-century European commentary on the United States, Thomas Albert Howard argues that an 'Atlantic gap' in religious matters has deep and complex historical roots, and enduringly informs some strands of European disapprobation of the United States. While exploring in the first chapters 'Old World' disquiet toward the young republic's religious dynamics, the book turns in the final chapters and focuses on more constructive European assessments of the United States. Acknowledging the importance of Alexis de Tocqueville for the topic, Howard argues that a widespread overreliance on Tocqueville as interpreter of America has had a tendency to overshadow other noteworthy European voices. Two underappreciated figures here receive due attention: the Protestant Swiss-German church historian, Philip Schaff, and the French Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain. While the transatlantic religious divide has received commentary from journalists and sociologists in recent decades, this is the first major work of cultural and intellectual history devoted to the subject.

    The Chinese people had been ravaged by long years of domestic struggle, terrible famine and economic and political isolation. Today, China has the world's second largest economy and is a major player in global diplomacy. This volume, written by some of the leading experts in the field, tracks China's extraordinary transformation from the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, through the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the death of Chairman Mao, to its dynamic rise as a superpower in the twenty-first century. The latest edition of the book includes a new introduction and a seventh chapter which focuses on the legacy of Deng Xiaoping, the godfather of China's transformation, under his successors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. Under Mao, China challenged the outside world ideologically and militarily. Today China's challenge as an economic and diplomatic superpower may prove even more formidable. As a comprehensive and authoritative appraisal of China's last sixty years, this book will be invaluable for professionals working in the region and for students assessing what China will mean for their futures.

    ...

    Since then, the country’s new leadership has undertaken a highly ambitious effort to refashion Rwanda’s politics, economy, and society, and the country’s accomplishments have garnered widespread praise. Remaking Rwanda is the first book to examine Rwanda’s remarkable post-genocide recovery in a comprehensive and critical fashion. By paying close attention to memory politics, human rights, justice, foreign relations, land use, education, and other key social institutions and practices, this volume raises serious concerns about the depth and durability of the country’s reconstruction.            Edited by Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf, Remaking Rwanda brings together experienced scholars and human rights professionals to offer a nuanced, historically informed picture of post-genocide Rwanda—one that reveals powerful continuities with the nation’s past and raises profound questions about its future.  Best Special Interest Books, selected by the American Association of School Librarians Best Special Interest Books, selected by the Public Library Reviewers

    Group Agency offers a new approach to that question and is relevant, therefore, in a range of fields from philosophy to law, politics, and the social sciences. Christian List and Philip Pettit take the line that there really are group or corporate agents, over and above the individual agents who compose them, and that a proper social science and a proper approach to law, morality, and politics have to take account of this fact. Unlike some earlier defences of group agency, their account is entirely unmysterious in character and, despite not being technically difficult, is grounded in cutting-edge work in social choice theory, economics, and philosophy.

    In response to their governor's move to strip workers of the right to organize, Wisconsinites fought back--occupying their Capitol for days on end and protesting in record numbers throughout the freezing winter. Their bold action inspired progressives across the country, sparking a new conversation on organized labor, direct action, and civil resistance. "We Are Wisconsin" provides an up-close view of the struggle, in the words of the grassroots activists, independent journalists, and Wisconsinites who led the fight. Alongside the real-time, fast-paced story of the Capitol occupation told by those on the inside, this collection looks at what happened, what it means, and what comes next.Contributors include Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Van Jones, John Nichols, Medea Benjamin, Mike Elk, Andy Kroll, Tony Schultz, Ian Murphy, Allison Kilkenny, Billy Wimsatt, Chris Bowers, and more.

    Mounting evidence suggests that economic power, not popular will, determines public policy, and that elections consistently fail to keep public officials accountable to the people. John P. McCormick confronts this dire situation through a dramatic reinterpretation of Niccolo Machiavelli's political thought. Highlighting previously neglected democratic strains in Machiavelli's major writings, McCormick excavates institutions through which the common people of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance republics constrained the power of wealthy citizens and public magistrates, and he imagines how such institutions might be revived today. Machiavellian Democracy fundamentally reassesses one of the central figures in the Western political canon and decisively intervenes into current debates over institutional design and democratic reform. Inspired by Machiavelli's thoughts on economic class, political accountability and popular empowerment, McCormick proposes a citizen body that excludes socioeconomic and political elites and grants randomly selected common people significant veto, legislative, and censure authority within government and over public officials.

    Immigration Nation critically analyses the human rights impact of this tightening of US immigration policy. Golash-Boza reveals that it has had consequences not just for immigrants, but for citizens, families and communities. She shows that even though family reunification is officially a core component of US immigration policy, it has often torn families apart. This is a critical and revealing look at the real life - frequently devastating - impact of immigration policy in a security conscious world.

    He paints a magisterial portrait not only of his subject but the tumultuous times in which he acted.

    But how can we explain this proliferation of armed conflicts? What caused them and what were their main characteristics? And what did the world's governments do to stop them? In this fully revised and updated second edition of his popular text, Paul Williams offers an in-depth and wide-ranging assessment of more than six hundred armed conflicts which took place in Africa from 1990 to the present day - from the continental catastrophe in the Great Lakes region to the sprawling conflicts across the Sahel and the web of wars in the Horn of Africa. Taking a broad comparative approach to examine the political contexts in which these wars occurred, he explores the major patterns of organized violence, the key ingredients that provoked them and the major international responses undertaken to deliver lasting peace. Part I, Contexts provides an overview of the most important attempts to measure the number, scale and location of Africa's armed conflicts and provides a conceptual and political sketch of the terrain of struggle upon which these wars were waged. Part II, Ingredients analyses the role of five widely debated features of Africa's wars: the dynamics of neopatrimonial systems of governance; the construction and manipulation of ethnic identities; questions of sovereignty and self-determination; as well as the impact of natural resources and religion. Part III, Responses, discusses four major international reactions to Africa's wars: attempts to build a new institutional architecture to help promote peace and security on the continent; this architecture's two main policy instruments, peacemaking initiatives and peace operations; and efforts to develop the continent. War and Conflict in Africa will be essential reading for all students of international peace and security studies as well as Africa's international relations.

    Though Obama’s election showed progress, the John McCain–Sarah Palin campaign and the Republican Party used age-old smear campaign tactics. Their operators pulled out all the stops in an attempt to win and spread falsehoods about Obama that have only multiplied after the election.The Obama Haters seeks to answer the following questions: Who are these Obama haters? Why do they despise him? Why do various news organizations, commentators, and political entities treat the same facts differently? Why are these pundits so powerful? In order to do so, John Wright first lays out the democratic principles and civility toward which Americans should strive. Next, he investigates the persistent expressions of hatred for President Obama, connecting historic antecedents of political mudslinging along with the background of virulent right-wing smear tactics over the past two decades. And finally, he shines a harsh spotlight on the haters and fear mongers and their tactics. While Americans have the right to criticize their political leadership, their reasons for disapproval should be based on facts. Those who invent and repeat lies to hurt the reputation of leaders weaken the democratic ideal. This book is for anyone who wishes to learn how to cut through the hypocrisy and propaganda to make informed decisions based on truth.

    Wars are fought and opposed in its name. It is invoked to claim rights and to challenge them, to indict or support political leaders, to distribute resources and to expand or limit the powers of domestic and international institutions. International law is part of the way political (and economic) power is used, critiqued, and sometimes limited. Despite its claim for neutrality and impartiality, it is implicit in what is just, as well as what is unjust in the world. To understand its operation requires shedding its ideological spell and examining it with a cold eye. Who are its winners, and who are its losers? How - if at all - can it be used to make a better or a less unjust world?In this collection of essays Professor Martti Koskenniemi, a well-known practitioner and a leading theorist and historian of international law, examines the recent debates on humanitarian intervention, collective security, protection of human rights and the 'fight against impunity' and reflects on the use of the professional techniques of international law to intervene politically. The essays both illustrate and expand his influential theory of the role of international law in international politics. The book is prefaced with an introduction by Professor Emmanuelle Jouannet (Sorbonne Law School), which locates the texts in the overall thought and work of Martti Koskenniemi.

    Jonathan Chaplin introduces Dooyeweerd for the first time to many English readers by critically expounding Dooyeweerd's social and political thought and by exhibiting its pertinence to contemporary civil society debates.Chaplin begins by contextualizing Dooyeweerd's thought, first in relation to present-day debates and then in relation to the work of the Dutch philosopher Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920). Chaplin outlines the distinctive theory of historical and cultural development that serves as an essential backdrop to Dooyeweerd's substantive social philosophy; examines Dooyeweerd's notion of societal structural principles; and sets forth his complex classification of particular types of social structure and their various interrelationships. Chaplin provides a detailed examination of Dooyeweerd's theory of the state, its definitive nature, and its proper role vis-a-vis other elements of society. Dooyeweerd's contributions, Chaplin concludes, assist us in mapping the ways in which state and civil society should be related to achieve justice and the public good."This superb study simultaneously introduces and critically engages the work of one of the most important and neglected Christian thinkers of the twentieth century, while showing its connection to the pluralist tradition and bringing it to bear on the contemporary debate about civil society. More than just providing an overview of Dooyeweerd's thought, it seeks to advance his intellectual project and show its contemporary relevance. It is essential reading not only for those interested in the neo-Calvinist tradition, but for anyone interested in Christian social thought, structural pluralism, or the nature and fate of civil society." --Kenneth L. Grasso, Texas State University "The subtlety, scope, and insightfulness of Dooyeweerd's social philosophy were unparalleled among Protestant thinkers in the past century. Yet his contributions are not well known. Jonathan Chaplin promises to remedy this neglect. His lucid and masterful study brings a new and transformative voice to contemporary debates about the future of a democratic society." --Lambert Zuidervaart, Institute for Christian Studies and University of Toronto"Finally, an authoritative book that brings to brilliant light and life Herman Dooyeweerd's Christian philosophy of law, politics, and society. For the past half century, the profound and original teachings of this prolific Dutch sage have been lost on most readers. Jonathan Chaplin has rescued Dooyeweerd from his own obscure prose, poor translations, and cultic mystique to reveal his astonishing and engaging insights into our lives as persons and peoples, rulers and citizens, preachers and parishioners, parents and children. This will be the go-to book on Dooyeweerd for many years to come." --John Witte, Jr., Emory University"Herman Dooyeweerd was both deep and original. Much of his writing is an articulation of rather undeveloped lines of thought in his Dutch predecessor, Abraham Kuyper. In the course of his exposition, Chaplin effectively highlights Dooyeweerd's significance for a theory of civil society and for present-day social theory in general." --Nicholas Wolterstorff, Yale University and the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Virginia

    Exploring the Ottoman origins of this ideological battle, this book moves on to discuss how rival identity groups competed to shape foreign policy in different periods of the Republican era. It traces the rise and decline of political parties and movements representing these ideological positions and their competition to shape and utilize foreign policy in line with their values and interests. A special focus is given to discussion of foreign policy during the last eight years under the Justice and Development Party.

    In Syria, state-business involvement through informal networks has contributed to an erratic economy. With unique access to private businessmen and select state officials during a critical period of transition, this book examines Syria's political economy from 1970 to 2005 to explain the nation's pattern of state intervention and prolonged economic stagnation.As state income from oil sales and aid declined, collusion was a bid for political security by an embattled regime. To achieve a modicum of economic growth, the Syrian regime would develop ties with select members of the business community, reserving the right to reverse their inclusion in the future. Haddad ultimately reveals that this practice paved the way for forms of economic agency that maintained the security of the regime but diminished the development potential of the state and the private sector.

    Today most people assume that FDR's reelection was assured. Yet, as David M. Jordan's engrossing account reveals, neither the outcome of the campaign nor even the choice of candidates was assured. Just a week before Election Day, pollster George Gallup thought a small shift in votes in a few key states would award the election to Thomas E. Dewey. Though the Democrats urged voters not to "change horses in midstream," the Republicans countered that the war would be won "quicker with Dewey and Bricker." With its insider tales and accounts of party politics, and campaigning for votes in the shadow of war and an uncertain future, FDR, Dewey, and the Election of 1944 makes for a fascinating chapter in American political history.

    JFK vs. Nixon: bringing history to life and intrigue readers with tales of high drama while simultaneously presenting the issues, personalities, and controversies of this pivotal era with laser-like clarity.

    It has been a true counterrevolution, says Pierre Rosanvallon--the end of the age of growing equality launched by the American and French revolutions. And just as significant as the social and economic factors driving this contemporary inequality has been a loss of faith in the ideal of equality itself. An ambitious transatlantic history of the struggles that, for two centuries, put political and economic equality at their heart, "The Society of Equals" calls for a new philosophy of social relations to reenergize egalitarian politics.For eighteenth-century revolutionaries, equality meant understanding human beings as fundamentally alike and then creating universal political and economic rights. Rosanvallon sees the roots of today's crisis in the period 1830-1900, when industrialized capitalism threatened to quash these aspirations. By the early twentieth century, progressive forces had begun to rectify some imbalances of the Gilded Age, and the modern welfare state gradually emerged from Depression-era reforms. But new economic shocks in the 1970s began a slide toward inequality that has only gained momentum in the decades since.There is no returning to the days of the redistributive welfare state, Rosanvallon says. Rather than resort to outdated notions of social solidarity, we must instead revitalize the idea of equality according to principles of singularity, reciprocity, and communality that more accurately reflect today's realities.

    Given the diversity in national trajectories, this book covers fifteen countries. This enables the volume to shed light on different kinds of relationships between these groups and the state, as well as on the way they have evolved in recent decades. The Lesbian and Gay Movement and the State: Comparative Insights into a Transformed Relationship fills an important gap in the literature on lesbian and gay activism. However, this book also provides important and innovative insights into broader issues in international political science, public policy and comparative politics, as well as issues in social movement studies. These include the role of the state in constructing citizen identities, the heteronormative way in which many traditional citizen entitlements and benefits were constructed, state - civil society relations, judicial activism, the impact of federalism, and the increasing globalization of sexual identities.

    Since the turn of the nineteenth century, a certain anti-foundational conception of history has served to undermine law's foundations, such that we tend to think of law as nothing other than a species of politics. Thus viewed, the activity of unelected, common law judges appears to be an encroachment on the space of democracy. However, Kunal M. Parker shows that the world of the nineteenth century looked rather different. Democracy was itself constrained by a sense that history possessed a logic, meaning, and direction that democracy could not contravene. In such a world, far from law being seen in opposition to democracy, it was possible to argue that law - specifically, the common law - did a better job than democracy of guiding America along history's path.

    Poverty, Health and Law presents health in the broader social context of people's lives, providing insights into the advancement of health through legal advocacy and interdisciplinary solutions to complex social problems. Focusing on basic legal rights and their relation to health -- income and employment, housing, education, legal status, and personal safety -- the authors provide information and insight into how the law may be used as a tool to improve health and how health care providers and lawyers can work together to invoke more effective and preventive remedies for patients and clients. As America prepares for major reform of its health care system, Poverty, Health and Law brings to the forefront the need to address the root causes of illness and poor health, particularly among vulnerable populations, by exploring remedies and innovations both within and outside of the health care system.

    Soft power is much cheaper than the hard power of military force, and it is more compatible with the culture of a principally liberal American society. All too often, military force seems to fail as an instrument of policy and, as a consequence, it invites the view that it is becoming obsolescent and even anachronistic. Dr. Colin Gray subjects hard and soft power to close critical scrutiny and finds that the latter is significantly misunderstood and, as a consequence, misassessed as a substitute for the threat or use of military force. Each kind of power has its limitations, but the obvious and familiar challenges characteristic of military force do not mean that therefore soft power should be our policy instrument of choice. The author warns against expecting too much of soft power.

    This book is much more than the biography of an important politician--it is also an analysis of issues, movements, and political conflicts that marked the late pre-Independence and early post-Independence era. This book is volume I of a multi-volume work on The Politics of Northern India: 1937 to 1987.

    Since the Cold-War, unrecognized states have been involved in conflicts over sovereign statehood in the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, South Asia, the Horn of Africa, and the South Pacific; some of which elicited major international crises and intervention, including the use of armed force.Yet they remain subject to many myths and simplifications. Drawing on a number of contemporary and historical cases, from Nagorno Karabakh and Somaliland to Taiwan, this timely new book provides a comprehensive analysis of unrecognized states. It examines their origins, the factors that enable them to survive and explores their likely future trajectories. But it is not just a book about unrecognized states; it is a book about sovereignty and statehood; one which does not shy way from addressing crucial issues such as how these anomalies survive in a system of sovereign states and how the context of non-recognition affects their attempts to build effective state-like entities.Ideal for students and scholars of global politics, peace and conflict studies, Unrecognized States offers a much needed and engaging account of the development of unrecognized states in the modern international system.

    Use at the beginning and midway through the semester to deepen your understanding through clear explanations, corresponding hypothetical fact patterns, and analysis. Then use to study for finals by reviewing the hypotheticals as well as the structure and reasoning behind the accompanying analysis. Designed to complement your casebook, the trusted Examples & Explanations titles get right to the point in a conversational, often humorous style that helps you learn the material each step of the way and prepare for the exam at the end of the course. The unique, time-tested Examples & Explanations series is invaluable to teach yourself the subject from the first day of class until your last review before the final. Each guide: helps you learn new material by working through chapters that explain each topic in simple language challenges your understanding with hypotheticals similar to those presented in class provides valuable opportunity to study for the final by reviewing the hypotheticals as well as the structure and reasoning behind the corresponding analysis quickly gets to the point in conversational style laced with humor remains a favorite among law school students is often recommended by professors who encourage the use of study guides works with ALL the major casebooks, suits any class on a given topic provides an alternative perspective to help you understand your casebook and in-class lectures

    These decisions set in place a pattern which formed the political shape of the region as we know it today, including the popular uprisings witnessed in Egypt and Tunisia in 2011. From the Paris Peace Conference right up to the 2011 clashes in Tahrir Square and Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, Fraser gives a relevant and complete overview in this critical time for the Middle East and its people.This book explores the complex interactions of the high politics of the conferences with how Arabs, Jews, and Turks created new realities on the ground, often confounding what the statesmen had decided. With events in the Middle East rarely absent from the world’s headlines, this book offers a scholarly and objective analysis of a critical phase in its development.TG Fraser is professor emeritus of the University of Ulster. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Andrew Mango is the author of the definitive biography of Atatürk (2002) as well as The Turks Today (2004).Robert McNamara is currently a lecturer in international history at the University of Ulster at Coleraine.

    The Constitution and Bill of Rights are the culmination of centuries of hard-won experience. Each block in the foundation of liberty gave us greater protections of our rights. This book presents the 700+ year history that gave us our founding documents and provides the citizen with a solid foundation to trust the contents of those documents.

    It was the culmination of more than five decades of constitutional wrangling, and has been called the most important conference since the Fathers of Confederation got together in Quebec City in 1864. Faced with the threat of Quebec independence, the ambitions of Western Canada, and the provinces’ demands for more power, Trudeau was embattled. But he was fiercely determined to make Canadians fully independent and to entrench a Charter of Rights and Freedoms.What happened that day still reverberates. It severed the last important link to Canada’s colonial past. It guaranteed individual liberty and minority rights in the future. It weakened the grip of the elites and gave ownership of the constitution to Canadians. But it came at a price.Quebec alone refused to sign the final deal. René Lévesque, its separatist premier, claimed he had been betrayed by his allies in the Gang of Eight. The legend of the "Night of the Long Knives"took hold, precipitating a series of events that came close to destroying the country.Thirty years later, author Ron Graham delivers a gripping account of the fractious debates and secret negotiations. He uses newly uncovered documents and the candid recollections of many of the key participants to create a vivid record of that momentous twenty-four hours. Authoritative and engaging, The Last Act is a remarkable combination of scholarly research and historical narrative.

    The author deals with war and the means by which international law attempts to contain and, as it were, "humanize" organized violence. But the ambitions of the author go beyond the battlefield. The book explores the many complex ways in which law functions to regulate warfare, in theory and practice. The author looks into treaties and other sources of international law, but he also tries to step outside the boundaries of "black-letter law"to deal broadly with such matters as the influence of culture in shaping the norms on war, the institutions that develop those norms and work for their universal acceptance, the networks of humanitarian actors in this area and the legal procedures in which the law of war and its various institutions are embedded. The book demonstrates that even wars are, in various ways, conducted in "the shadow of the law."

    Following his death, however, both Emerson’s political activism and his political thought faded from public memory, replaced by the myth of the genteel man of letters and the detached sage of individualism. In the 1990s, scholars rediscovered Emerson’s antislavery writings and began reviving his legacy as a political activist. A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson is the first collection to evaluate Emerson’s political thought in light of his recently rediscovered political activism.What were Emerson’s politics? A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson authoritatively answers this question with seminal essays by some of the most prominent thinkers ever to write about Emerson—Stanley Cavell, George Kateb, Judith N. Shklar, and Wilson Carey McWilliams—as well as many of today’s leading Emerson scholars. With an introduction that effectively destroys the “pernicious myth about Emerson’s apolitical individualism” by editors Alan M. Levine and Daniel S. Malachuk, A Political Companion to Emerson reassesses Emerson’s famous theory of self-reliance in light of his antislavery politics, demonstrates the importance of transcendentalism to his politics, and explores the enduring significance of his thought for liberal democracy. Including a substantial bibliography of work on Emerson’s politics over the last century, A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson is an indispensable resource for students of Emerson, American literature, and American political thought, as well as for those who wrestle with the fundamental challenges of democracy and liberalism.

    It explains Australia's increasingly close connections to the rest of the world, in defense, trade, financial markets, aid, human rights, and its response to refugees.

    Divided into four parts, each describes a facet of Islamic political economy: - A general introduction to Islam and Islamic political economy- A brief historical overview- A summary of dominant Islamic political-economic thinking- A look at the 'praxis' of Islamic political economy, exploring the different attempts at Islamicisation.A conclusion looks at the prospects for Islamic political economy in the 21st century. The book incorporates numerous concrete examples and case studies, illustrative quotes from the Qur'an and the Hadith, and from Islamic thinkers past and present. There is also an extensive bibliography, a substantial glossary and a comprehensive list of research institutes and internet resources.Intended for a broad readership, it is accessible enough to be read by non-specialists.

    Covering topics as varied as terrorism, nuclear proliferation, energy security and international trade, TNI is regularly read by government officials and members of Congress, key members of the foreign-policy establishment, and prominent academics. A more sophisticated foreign policy starts here.Culling the right minds on the right topics, The National Interest delivers in-depth and cutting edge analysis of politics, matters of national security and economics. More than just news, TNI is the source for what readers truly need to know to master the issues of the day.Since 1985: the thinker's guide to foreign policy.The Kindle Edition of The National Interest includes all essays and book reviews found in the print edition.

    The authors also address a number of long-standing American political principles and practices that are not discussed in the Constitution, though many Americans think they are. A selection of related documents is included, as well as a list of recommended online resources for further reading and research. The Second Edition includes expanded headnotes, coverage of recent Supreme Court decisions, and other important updates.

    Using current election data, the authors specifically challenge the predominant conjecture that the impact of new technology will not affect the electoral outcomes and illustrate that the use of the internet is causing a marked shift in not just who votes, but who wins.

    It identifies the seeds of a potential seventh in the collective dignity deficits generated by poor governance paradigms and exacerbated by geopolitical competition for the region’s natural resources.

    . .  the book will appeal to legal academics and students, lawyers involved in e-commerce and cyberspace legal issues, technologists, moral philosophers, and intelligent lay readers interested in high tech issues, privacy, [and] robotics.” —Kevin Ashley, University of Pittsburgh School of LawAs corporations and government agencies replace human employees with online customer service and automated phone systems, we become accustomed to doing business with nonhuman agents. If artificial intelligence (AI) technology advances as today’s leading researchers predict, these agents may soon function with such limited human input that they appear to act independently. When they achieve that level of autonomy, what legal status should they have?Samir Chopra and Laurence F. White present a carefully reasoned discussion of how existing philosophy and legal theory can accommodate increasingly sophisticated AI technology. Arguing for the legal personhood of an artificial agent, the authors discuss what it means to say it has “knowledge” and the ability to make a decision. They consider key questions such as who must take responsibility for an agent’s actions, whom the agent serves, and whether it could face a conflict of interest.

    Yet as human rights scholars Alison Brysk and Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick argue, most current work tends to be more descriptive and focused on trafficking for sexual exploitation.In From Human Trafficking to Human Rights, Brysk, Choi-Fitzpatrick, and a cast of experts demonstrate that it is time to recognize human trafficking as more a matter of human rights and social justice, rooted in larger structural issues relating to the global economy, human security, U.S. foreign policy, and labor and gender relations. Such reframing involves overcoming several of the most difficult barriers to the development of human rights discourse: women's rights as human rights, labor rights as a confluence of structure and agency, the interdependence of migration and discrimination, the ideological and policy hegemony of the United States in setting the terms of debate, and a politics of global justice and governance.Throughout this volume, the argument is clear: a deep human rights approach can improve analysis and response by recovering human rights principles that match protection with empowerment and recognize the interdependence of social rights and personal freedoms. Together, contributors to the volume conclude that rethinking trafficking requires moving our orientation from sex to slavery, from prostitution to power relations, and from rescue to rights. On the basis of this argument, From Human Trafficking to Human Rights offers concrete policy approaches to improve the global response necessary to end slavery responsibly.

    The incident initiated one of the worst outbreaks of Hindu-Muslim violence since India's independence. As mobs of Hindus thronged the streets of Gujarat's cities and villages, local and state-level politicians made inflammatory speeches and distributed weapons for revenge, excusing the police from their responsibility to protect citizens from harm. In the end, the bloodshed claimed the lives of more than two thousand people.Based on an extensive ethnographic study of Gujarat's local politics, this volume introduces a novel approach to comprehending the processes fostering communal violence. Ward Berenschot argues that the difficulties faced by Indians, especially the poor, in dealing with state institutions enable political actors to incite communal violence with ease. Guiding readers through Gujarat's shadowy local politics, Berenschot details the capacities of various rioters, from local criminals and Hindu-nationalist activists to neighborhood leaders, politicians, and the police, and their ability to organize and perpetrate violence. Specifically, he explains how different official positions allow some individuals to exploit patronage networks supplying access to state resources.

    After nine months in solitary confinement, the suspect now awaits court-martial in Fort Leavenworth. He is twenty-four, comes from Crescent, Oklahoma and his name is Bradley Manning.Who is Private First Class Bradley Manning? Why did he allegedly commit the largest security breach in American history–and why was it so easy? Is Manning a traitor or a whistleblower? Is long-term isolation an outrage to American values–or the new norm? Are the leaks revolutionary or a sensational nonevent? Which is the greater security threat, routinized elite secrecy or flashes of transparency? And what impact does new information really have?The astonishing leaks attributed to Bradley Manning are viewed from many angles, from Tunisia to Guantánamo Bay, from Foggy Bottom to Baghdad to small-town Oklahoma. Around the world, the eloquent alleged act of one young man obliges citizens to ask themselves if they have the right to know what their government is doing.

    In Thinking about Congress, Lawrence Dodd reminds us that Congress seemed equally intransigent at times the past, yet change and rejuvenation came. Reading his classic essays, one sees Congress move from Committee Government in mid-twentieth century to Liberal Democratic reforms in the 1970s to the 1994 Republican Revolution to Party Government today. Simultaneously, one proceeds with Dodd to an ever-deeper understanding of the dynamic character of Congress.　Across forty years of watching paralysis give way to change, Dodd crafts a theory of congressional cycles - essay by essay - that explains why Congress evolves. However permanent periods of intransigency appear, the theory argues, they can and do give way to growing concern by legislators and parties for the collective public-interest; to citizen demand for change generated by social crises; and to innovative ideas about politics and policy. With these developments come policy breakthrough, institutional renewal, and enormous social progress.　　A rare book, Thinking about Congress holds out hope for the future while illuminating both the process and object of inquiry.

    Power has passed to multi-national corporations who have no country, owe allegiance to no government, and answer to no nation. They have become supra-national. This book is a history of corporations, as they grew from small tightly-controlled public works to huge quasi-governmental behemoths who now have literal veto power over elected national governments.

    From instability in the Middle East, to stock market crashes and concerns over the health of the world economy, to wars that seem to break out unexpectedly around the world, to discussions of global warming, and even speculation over the fate of mankind, oil is usually lurking somewhere in the background. To many, oil markets and their linkages to a whole spectrum of events remain something of a mystery. Unfortunately, most of the easily obtained information on oil is deeply flawed. Whole web-conspiracy sites depict ruthless insiders and reckless dictators manipulating energy markets at will. The 30 essays in this volume, written by the leading experts in the field, attempt to set the record straight.

    The essays explore the ways in which European colonial projects structured and shaped much of modern political theory, how concepts from political philosophy affected and were realized in colonial and imperial practice, and how we can understand the intellectual and social world left behind by a half-millennium of European empires. The volume ranges from the beginning of modernity to the present day, examining colonialism and colonial legacies in India, Africa, Latin America, and North America.

    It is an atrocity that transcends borders-with some regions known as exporters of trafficking victims and others recognized as destination countries. Edited by three global experts and composed of the work of an esteemed panel of contributors, Human Trafficking: Exploring the International Nature, Concerns, and Complexities examines techniques used to protect and support victims of trafficking as well as strategies for prosecution of offenders.Topics discussed include:How data on human trafficking should be collected and analyzed, and how data collection can be improved through proper contextualization The importance of harmonization and consistency in legal definitions and interpretations within and among regions The need for increased exchange of information and cooperation between the various actors involved in combating human trafficking, including investigators, law enforcement and criminal justice professionals, and social workers Problems with victim identification, as well as erroneous assumptions of the scope of victimization Controversy over linking protection measures with cooperation with authoritiesHighlighting the issues most addressed by contemporary scholars, researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers, this volume also suggests areas ripe for further inquiry and investigation. Supplemented by discussion questions in each chapter, the book is sure to stimulate debate on a troubling phenomenon.

    

    C. Spivak, Upendra Baxi; Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Ranci�re), while in the middle, an American intermezzo (Richard Rorty, Wendy Brown) functions as a genuine Derridian supplement: always already contaminating the purity of the two theoretical schools, preventing their enclosure and, hence, fuelling and complicating further their mutual confrontation. As in any authentic dialogue, the introduction and the conclusion each claim victory for one of the sides by changing the very terms and rules of the dialogue, picturing it as a confrontation between emancipatory universalism and inefficient particularism (from the perspective of the post-Althusserians), or as a split between hypocrisy and truth (from the perspective of the post-colonialists).

    They argue that the fate of leaders and the way leadership changes shapes leaders' decisions to initiate international conflict. Leaders who anticipate regular removal from office, through elections for example, have little to gain and much to lose from international conflict, whereas leaders who anticipate a forcible removal from office, such as through coup or revolution, have little to lose and much to gain from conflict. This theory is tested against an extensive analysis of more than 80 years of international conflict and with an intensive historical examination of Central American leaders from 1848 to 1918. Leaders and International Conflict highlights the political nature of the choice between war and peace and will appeal to all scholars of international relations and comparative politics.

    Jae-Jae Spoon, in contrast, argues that the decisions made by small parties themselves determine their ability to balance the dual goals of remaining true to their ideals while maximizing their vote and seat shares, thereby enabling them to survive even in adverse electoral systems.Spoon employs a mixed-methods approach in order to explore the policy, electoral, and communication strategies of West European Green Parties from 1980 to the present. She combines cross-national data on these parties with in-depth comparative case studies of two New Politics parties, the French and British Green Parties, that have survived in similar national-level plurality electoral systems. Both of these parties have developed as organizations which run candidates in elections at the local, national, and European levels in their respective countries. The parties’ survival, Spoon asserts, results from their ability to balance their competing electoral, policy, and communication goals.

    With advances in communication, transportation and information processing technologies, it is clear that the pace of events in global politics is speeding up at an alarming rate. The implications of this new speed however, continue to be a significant source of debate. Will acceleration lead to a more interconnected, productive, peaceful, and humane world; or a nightmarish descent into ecological devastation, economic exploitation and increasingly violent warfare?The Politics of Speed attempts to map the contours of the new global space of speed, and investigates key issue areas - including democratic governance, warfare, capitalism, globalization and transnational activism - to uncover the ways in which acceleration is shaping the world. The book uses contemporary political theory (especially the works of Deleuze and Guattari) to develop an ontological account of speed, showing how its effects are frequently far more complex and surprising than we might expect. The result is an attempt to craft a way of engaging with global acceleration that might help avoid the dangers of speed, while embracing the possibilities it provides us with to produce a safer, more egalitarian, democratic and pluralistic world.

    Yet modern statehood is an anomaly, both historically and within the contemporary international system, while the condition of "limited statehood," wherein countries lack the capacity to implement central decisions and monopolize force, is the norm. Limited statehood, argue the authors in this provocative collection, is in fact a fundamental form of governance, immune to the forces of economic and political modernization.Challenging common assumptions about sovereign states and the evolution of modern statehood, particularly the dominant paradigms supported by international relations theorists, development agencies, and international organizations, this volume explores strategies for effective and legitimate governance within a framework of weak and ineffective state institutions. Approaching the problem from the perspectives of political science, history, and law, contributors explore the factors that contribute to successful governance under conditions of limited statehood. These include the involvement of nonstate actors and nonhierarchical modes of political influence. Empirical chapters analyze security governance by nonstate actors, the contribution of public-private partnerships to promote the United Nations Millennium Goals, the role of business in environmental governance, and the problems of Western state-building efforts, among other issues. Recognizing these forms of governance as legitimate, the contributors clarify the complexities of a system the developed world must negotiate in the coming century.

    Shari a Politics maps the ideals and organization of these movements and examines their implications for the future of democracy, citizen rights, and gender relations in the Muslim world. These studies of eight Muslim-majority societies, and state-of-the-field reflections by leading experts, provide the first comparative investigation of movements for and against implementation of sharia. These essays reveal that the Muslim public's interest in sharia does not spring from an unchanging devotion to received religious tradition, but from an effort to respond to the central political and ethical questions of the day.

    Randall W. Stone argues that formal rules apply in ordinary times, while informal power allows leading states to exert control when the stakes are high. International organizations are therefore best understood as equilibrium outcomes that balance the power and interests of the leading state and the member countries. Presenting a new model of institutional design and comparing the IMF, WTO and EU, Stone argues that institutional variations reflect the distribution of power and interests. He shows that US interests influence the size, terms and enforcement of IMF programs, and new data, archival documents and interviews reveal the shortcomings of IMF programs in Mexico, Russia, Korea, Indonesia and Argentina.