Now, with the collapse of Communist regimes across Europe and the loosening pf the Cold War'd clamp on East-West relations, a surge of nationalism has swept the world stage. In Blood and Belonging, Ignatieff makes a thorough examination of why blood ties--inplaces as diverse as Yugoslavia, Kurdistan, Northern Ireland, Quebec, Germany, and the former Soviet republics--may be the definitive factor in international relation today. He asks how ethnic pride turned into ethnic cleansing, whether modern citizens can lay the ghosts of a warring past, why--and whether--a people need a state of their own, and why armed struggle might be justified. Blood and Belonging is a profound and searching look at one of the most complex issues of our time.

    When Satan told Eve nothing would happen if she bit the apple, that was disinformation. But the rise of social media has made disinformation even more pervasive and pernicious in our current era. In a disturbing turn of events, governments are increasingly using disinformation to create their own false narratives, and democracies are proving not to be very good at fighting it.During the final three years of the Obama administration, Richard Stengel, the former editor of Time and an Under Secretary of State, was on the front lines of this new global information war. At the time, he was the single person in government tasked with unpacking, disproving, and combating both ISIS's messaging and Russian disinformation. Then, in 2016, as the presidential election unfolded, Stengel watched as Donald Trump used disinformation himself, weaponizing the grievances of Americans who felt left out by modernism. In fact, Stengel quickly came to see how all three players had used the same playbook: ISIS sought to make Islam great again; Putin tried to make Russia great again; and we all know about Trump.In a narrative that is by turns dramatic and eye-opening, Information Wars walks readers through of this often frustrating battle. Stengel moves through Russia and Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and introduces characters from Putin to Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Mohamed bin Salman to show how disinformation is impacting our global society. He illustrates how ISIS terrorized the world using social media, and how the Russians launched a tsunami of disinformation around the annexation of Crimea - a scheme that became the model for their interference with the 2016 presidential election. An urgent book for our times, Information Wars stresses that we must find a way to combat this ever growing threat to democracy.

    President Woodrow Wilson, in his Fourteen Points, had called for a free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, giving equal weight would be given to the opinions of the colonized peoples and the colonial powers. Among those nations now paying close attention to Wilson's words and actions were the budding nationalist leaders of fourdisparate non-Western societies--Egypt, India, China, and Korea. That spring, Wilson's words would help ignite political upheavals in all four of these countries.This book is the first to place the 1919 Revolution in Egypt, the Rowlatt Satyagraha in India, the May Fourth movement in China, and the March First uprising in Korea in the context of a broader Wilsonian moment that challenged the existing international order. Using primary source material fromAmerica, Europe, and Asia, historian Erez Manela tells the story of how emerging nationalist movements appropriated Wilsonian language and adapted it to their own local culture and politics as they launched into action on the international stage. The rapid disintegration of the Wilsonian promiseleft a legacy of disillusionment and facilitated the spread of revisionist ideologies and movements in these societies; future leaders of Third World liberation movements--Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Jawaharlal Nehru, among others--were profoundly shaped by their experiences at the time.The importance of the Paris Peace Conference and Wilson's influence on international affairs far from the battlefields of Europe cannot be underestimated. Now, for the first time, we can clearly see just how the events played out at Versailles sparked a wave of nationalism that is still resonatingglobally today.

     Sandro was a crucial witness to the collapse of his family. He was the cousin, brother-in-law and close friend of the last tsar, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. He was with Nicky when thousands of Russian peasants died at Khodynka Field during Nicky’s coronation; he was with Nicky in the lead-up to the disastrous Russo-Japanese War; he was with Nicky during the failed revolution of 1905-6; he was with Nicky when the Russian Duma was established in an attempt to ward off future revolutions; he was with Nicky as Russia moved determinedly toward a military showdown with Germany; he was with Nicky fighting the German army of the Eastern Front during the First World War; he was with Nicky when he abdicated in favour of his brother, Michael, who refused the throne. This is a riveting first-hand account of the final days of the Russian Empire and of what it was like to be a member of the Russian Imperial Family at that time. And to our great good fortune, while Sandro may have been no Stolypin, he was a keen observer and an excellent writer. Anyone intrigued by the last days of the Romanovs as the ruling family of Russia should read this book.

    This fascinating collection includes essays from the last ten years on Islam and freedom, Orwell as an informer, the Lives of Others and Gunter Grass in the Waffen-SS. Timothy Garton Ash witnessed the fall of Milosevic in Serbia, visited Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, watched the Orange revolution in Ukraine and talked to militant mullahs in Iran, and all these are recorded here, alongside critical reflections on the future of Europe, multiculturalism and terroris, all in these last ten years. The literature of fact is a theme that runs through the whole volume. When is it legitimate to cross that heavily mined frontier between fact and fiction? How do we know when a writer (Ryszard Kapuscinski, for example, or Paul Theroux) has strayed across the line? How do we ever know what we can know, given the notorious unreliability of eyewitnesses? We all have a novelist in our heads called Memory, and (s)he starts rewriting the script the minute after something happens. Yet Tim Garton Ash maintains against every post-modernist in the world that there are facts, and that establishing them is both a political and a moral imperative. And an aesthetic one, too. 'I will bring you,' the poet Craig Raine has written, 'the beauty of facts'.

      Lambert demonstrates how creating maritime identities made these states more dynamic, open, and inclusive than their lumbering continental rivals. Only when they forgot this aspect of their identity did these nations begin to decline. Recognizing that the United States and China are modern naval powers—rather than seapowers—is essential to understanding the current affairs, as well as long-term trends in world history. This volume is a highly original “big think” analysis of five states whose success—and eventual failure—is a subject of enduring interest, by a scholar at the top of his game.

    From France in the 1790s to Vietnam in the 1970s, social revolutions have been rare but undeniably of enormous importance in modern world history. States and Social Revolutions provides a new frame of reference for analyzing the causes, the conflicts, and the outcomes of such revolutions. And it develops in depth a rigorous, comparative historical analysis of three major cases: the French Revolution of 1787 through the early 1800s, the Russian Revolution of 1917 through the 1930s, and the Chinese Revolution of 1911 through the 1960s. Believing that existing theories of revolution, both Marxist and non-Marxist, are inadequate to explain the actual historical patterns of revolutions, the author urges us to adopt fresh perspectives. Above all, she maintains that states conceived as administrative and coercive organizations potentially autonomous from class controls and interests must be made central to explanations of revolutions.

    Do these historical analogies actually shape policy, or are they primarily tools of political justification? Yuen Foong Khong argues that leaders use analogies not merely to justify policies but also to perform specific cognitive and information-processing tasks essential to political decision-making. Khong identifies what these tasks are and shows how they can be used to explain the U.S. decision to intervene in Vietnam. Relying on interviews with senior officials and on recently declassified documents, the author demonstrates with a precision not attained by previous studies that the three most important analogies of the Vietnam era--Korea, Munich, and Dien Bien Phu--can account for America's Vietnam choices. A special contribution is the author's use of cognitive social psychology to support his argument about how humans analogize and to explain why policymakers often use analogies poorly.

    Their motives, long held by historians to have had an ideological thrust, were, in fact, to gain control over access to oil and claim geographic and strategic advantage. In his new book, Rashid Khalidi, considered the foremost U.S. historian of the Middle East, makes the compelling case that the dynamics that played out during the Cold War continue to exert a profound influence even decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union.The pattern of superpower intervention during the Cold War deeply affected and exacerbated regional and civil wars throughout the Middle East, and the carefully calculated maneuvers fueled by the fierce competition between the United States and the USSR actually provoked breakdowns in fragile democracies. To understand the momentous events that have occurred in the region over the last two decades-including two Gulf wars, the occupation of Iraq, and the rise of terrorism-we must, Khalidi argues, understand the crucial interplay of Cold War powers there from 1945 to 1990.Today, the legacy of the Cold War continues in American policies and approaches to the Middle East that have shifted from a deadly struggle against communism to a War on Terror, and from opposing the Evil Empire to targeting the Axis of Evil. The current U.S. deadlock with Iran and the upsurge of American-Russian tensions in the wake of the conflict in Georgia point to the continued centrality of the Middle East in American strategic attention. Today, with a new administration in Washington, understanding and managing the full impact of this dangerous legacy in order to move America toward a more constructive and peaceful engagement in this critical arena is of the utmost importance.

    An urgent wake-up call that identifies our foes; unveils their methods; and charts the dire consequences for government, business, and individuals.Shortly after 9/11, Joel Brenner entered the inner sanctum of American espionage, first as the inspector general of the National Security Agency, then as the head of counterintelligence for the director of national intelligence. He saw at close range the battleground on which our adversaries are now attacking us-cyberspace. We are at the mercy of a new generation of spies who operate remotely from China, the Middle East, Russia, even France, among many other places. These operatives have already shown their ability to penetrate our power plants, steal our latest submarine technology, rob our banks, and invade the Pentagon's secret communications systems.Incidents like the WikiLeaks posting of secret U.S. State Department cables hint at the urgency of this problem, but they hardly reveal its extent or its danger. Our government and corporations are a "glass house," all but transparent to our adversaries. Counterfeit computer chips have found their way into our fighter aircraft; the Chinese stole a new radar system that the navy spent billions to develop; our own soldiers used intentionally corrupted thumb drives to download classified intel from laptops in Iraq. And much more.Dispatches from the corporate world are just as dire. In 2008, hackers lifted customer files from the Royal Bank of Scotland and used them to withdraw $9 million in half an hour from ATMs in the United States, Britain, and Canada. If that was a traditional heist, it would be counted as one of the largest in history. Worldwide, corporations lose on average $5 million worth of intellectual property apiece annually, and big companies lose many times that.The structure and culture of the Internet favor spies over governments and corporations, and hackers over privacy, and we've done little to alter that balance. Brenner draws on his extraordinary background to show how to right this imbalance and bring to cyberspace the freedom, accountability, and security we expect elsewhere in our lives.In America the Vulnerable, Brenner offers a chilling and revelatory appraisal of the new faces of war and espionage-virtual battles with dangerous implications for government, business, and all of us.

    In The Chinese Economy, Barry Naughton provides both an engaging, broadly focused introduction to China's economy since 1949 and original insights based on his own extensive research. The book will be an essential resource for students, teachers, scholars, business people, and policymakers. It is suitable for classroom use for undergraduate or graduate courses.After presenting background material on the pre-1949 economy and the industrialization, reform, and market transition that have taken place since, the book examines different aspects of the modern Chinese economy. It analyzes patterns of growth and development, including population growth and the one-child family policy; the rural economy, including agriculture and rural industrialization; industrial and technological development in urban areas; international trade and foreign investment; macroeconomic trends and cycles and the financial system; and the largely unaddressed problems of environmental quality and the sustainability of growth.The text is notable also for placing China's economy in interesting comparative contexts, discussing it in relation to other transitional or developing economies and to such advanced industrial countries as the United States and Japan. It provides both a broad historical and macro perspective as well as a focused examination of the actual workings of China's complex and dynamic economic development. Interest in the Chinese economy will only grow as China becomes an increasingly important player on the world's stage. This book will be the standard reference for understanding and teaching about the next economic superpower.

    Not for long. By 1919, White Russians were fighting the Bolsheviks (Reds) for control of their country, and Winston Churchill (then Minister for War) wanted to see Communism 'strangled in its cradle'. So a volunteer R.A.F. squadron, flying Sopwith Camels and DH9 bombers, went there to duff up the Reds. 'There's a splendid little war going on,' a British staff officer told them. 'You'll like it.' Looked like fun. But the war was neither splendid nor little. It was big and it was brutal, a grim conflict of attrition, marked by cruelty, betrayal and corruption. Before it ended, the squadron wished that both sides would lose. If that was a joke, nobody was laughing. "A Splendid Little War" tests the pilots' gallows humour in a world of armoured trains and elegant barons, gruesome religious sects and anarchist guerrillas, unreliable allies and pitiless enemies. The comedy of this war, if it exists, is very bleak. Derek Robinson is at once our finest living comic novelist and a master of military fiction. Biggles was never like this.