Introduction to International Political Economy


David N. Balaam - 1995
    This comprehensive introduction to international political economy clearly shows students how politics and economics come together in today's global environment. The text demonstrates how an understanding of IPE can help students make sense of global news, business investments, and government policies - by presenting the theories, institutions, and relationships found in IPE in simple ways that retain the complexity of the world issues and intellectual problems addressed. *New - Revised chapters throughout - Takes into account the number of important IPE events, especially the growing discussion of and concern about economic globalization, the financial crises in Asia and elsewhere, and the advent of a single currency in Europe, the Euro. *New - A survey of four theoretical perspectives - Rational choice; feminist; green; and post-modern. - Provides students with theories that challenge and enrich the traditional study of IPE. *New - Coverage of global security structure (Ch. 9) - Uproots the discussion from the previous focus on the Cold War. - Asks students to consider security as a

Tennis and the Masai


Nicholas Best - 1987
    Drop him into a ghastly Kenya prep school in the middle of Rider Haggard country. A school where cricketing news comes by carrier pigeon, leopards are assaulted with a red-hot poker, and runaway boys are hunted down with spearmen and a pack of foxhounds... For Martin Riddle, the experience is unforgettable. For the riding mistress, Lady Bullivant, it is all part of the day's work. And for the headmaster, a disreputable ex-Guards officer, it is simply a means of staving off bankruptcy for a few more weeks. As for the Masai, tennis may be on the curriculum at Haggard Hall, but midnight meetings with naked warriors definitely are not! 'The funniest book I have read since David Lodge's Small World' - Sunday Times 'Wickedly funny' - Daily Mail 'Less savage than Evelyn Waugh, Best is every bit as sharp... an immensely enjoyable book' - Evening Standard 'Very good entertainment' - Sir Alec Guinness (Sunday Times book of the year) Nicholas Best's books have been translated into many languages. He was the Financial Times's fiction critic for ten years and was long-listed in 2010 for the Sunday Times-EFG Bank 30,000 award, the biggest short story prize in the world. For more details, see www.nicholasbest.co.uk

Gangster State: Unravelling Ace Magashule's Web of Capture


Pieter-Louis Myburgh - 2019
    At the centre of the old guard’s fightback efforts is Ace Magashule, a man viewed by some as South Africa’s most dangerous politician. In this explosive book, investigative journalist Pieter-Louis Myburgh ventures deeper than ever before into Magashule’s murky dealings, from his time as a struggle activist in the 1980s to his powerful rule as premier of the Free State province for nearly a decade, and his rise to one of the ANC’s most influential positions. Sifting through heaps of records, documents and exclusive source interviews, Myburgh explores Magashule’s relationship with the notorious Gupta family and other tender moguls; investigates government projects costing billions that enriched his friends and family but failed the poor; reveals how he was about to be arrested by the Scorpions before their disbandment in the late 2000s; and exposes the methods used to keep him in power in the Free State and to secure him the post of ANC secretary-general.Most tellingly, Myburgh pieces together a pack of leaked emails and documents to reveal shocking new details on a massive Free State government contract and Magashule’s dealings with a businessman who was gunned down in Sandton in 2017. These files seem to lay bare the methods of a man who usually operated without leaving a trace. Gangster State is an unflinching examination of the ANC’s top leadership in the post–Jacob Zuma era, one that should lead readers to a disconcerting conclusion: When it comes to the forces of capture, South Africa is still far from safe.

African Ways Again: More recollections of life in South Africa


Valerie Poore - 2018
    It tells what happened next in Valerie Poore's life in South Africa's rural Kwa-Zulu Natal in the 1980s. More bittersweet than the first book, Val and her family move down the mountain from the farm where they spent the three happy years described in African Ways. In this second book, life changes dramatically for the author and her small daughters, but the anecdotes she shares are still filled with colour, humour and everything that she loves about Africa and its people.

Star of the Morning


Pamela Jooste - 2007
    We were colored girls in a white world that didn’t want us."  Born on the wrong side of a racial divide in apartheid-torn Cape Town, young sisters Ruby and Rose exist in a world where they are not welcome. As part of the Cape Colored community, they are considered socially inferior, yet even within their own social group the sisters live in the poor end of town. Their father was killed when they were very small, so when their mother dies after a protracted illness, Ruby and Rose’s fate falls into the hands of Aunt Olive. Ruby knows without being told that their aunt’s home will not be opened up to them – charity does not extend to the poor relations who would cast a smudge on such a respectable house. Aunt Olive condemns her nieces to the local orphanage, relieving her conscience with monthly invitations to Sunday lunch. In the orphanage the girls grow up sheltered from a divided world that they do not yet fully understand, but the day approaches when Ruby and Rose must forge their own paths in life and confront the lessons that apartheid enforces. Like the award-winning Dance with a Poor Man’s Daughter, this beautifully observed novel of sisterly love once again displays Pamela Jooste’s poignant understanding of human nature.

On Roads That Echo: A bicycle journey through Asia and Africa


Charlie Walker - 2019
    The two-and-a-half-year journey spanned the mountains and deserts of former Soviet Republics, Afghanistan on the fearful brink of foreign withdrawal, and remote corners of the Congolese jungle. From hiking through sandstorms in the Gobi desert to barrelling down rapids in a dugout canoe, this perilous adventure, and Charlie’s many encounters along the way, gives insight into the past, present, and future of often-overlooked places during periods of great change. 'A first class adventure by a first class adventurer - packed with compelling incident and insight.' - BENEDICT ALLEN ‘An epic adventure, told candidly and vividly. Charlie’s words make me want to go back and experience these places with the same depth.’ - MARK BEAUMONT. ‘A mammoth journey that makes me yearn for the formative freedom of the open road.’ - ALASTAIR HUMPHREYS

The Contemporaries: Travels in the 21st-Century Art World


Roger White - 2015
    Since then, painting has been declared dead several times over, and contemporary art has now expanded to include just about any object, action, or event: dance routines, slideshows, functional hair salons, seemingly random accretions of waste. In the meantime, being an artist has gone from a join-the-circus fantasy to a plausible vocation for scores of young people in America.But why--and how and by whom--does all this art get made? How is it evaluated? And for what, if anything, will today's artists be remembered? In The Contemporaries, Roger White, himself a young painter, serves as our spirited, skeptical guide through this diffuse creative world.White takes us into the halls of the RISD graduate program, where students learn critical lessons that go far beyond how to apply paint to canvases. In New York, we meet the neophytes who assist established artists--and who walk the fine line between "assistance" and "making the art." In Milwaukee, White trails a group of friends trying to create a viable scene where rent is cheap, but where the spotlight rarely shines. And he gives us an intimate perspective on three wildly different careers: that of Dana Schutz, an emerging star who is revitalizing painting; Mary Walling Blackburn, whose challenging art defies market forces; and Stephen Kaltenbach, a '70s wunderkind who is back on the critical radar, perhaps in spite of his own willful obscurity.From young artists trying to elbow their way in to those working hard at dropping out, White's essential book offers a once-in-a-generation glimpse of the inner workings of the American art world at a moment of unparalleled ambition, uncertainty, and creative exuberance.

Alarums and Excursions: Improvising Politics on the European Stage


Luuk van Middelaar - 2019
    An organization originally designed to regulate and enforce rules about fishing rights, wheat quotas and product standards has found itself on the global stage forced to grapple with problems of identity, sovereignty and solidarity without a script or prompt. From Paris to Berlin, London to Athens, European leaders have had to improvise on issues that the Union was never set up to handle and which threaten to engulf this unique political entity. And they have had to do so in full view of an increasingly disenchanted and dissonant public audience.In this candid and revealing portrayal of a Europe improvising its way through a politics of events and not rules, Luuk van Middelaar makes sense of the EU’s political metamorphosis over its past ten years ofcrisis management. Forced into action by a tidal wave of emergencies, Van Middelaar shows how Europe has had to reinvent itself by casting off its legal straitjacket and confronting hard issues of power, territorial borders and public authority. Alarums and Excursions showcases the fascinating relationship between the Union and the European heads of government, and the stresses it must withstand in dealing with real world events. For anyone seekingto understand the inner power play and constitutional dynamics of this controversial, but no less remarkable, political institution, this book provides compelling reading.

The Canadian Manifesto


Conrad Black - 2019
    It is our turn," writes Conrad Black in this scintillating manifesto for how Canada can achieve an exalted role in world affairs. For over 400 years we have toiled in the shadows of our potential and achieved an indifferent recognition among other nations. Chipper, patient, and courteous, we have pursued an improbable destiny as a splendid nation in the northern section of the new world, a demi-continent of relatively good and ably self-governing people, but most would agree we have neither developed a vivid national personality nor realized our true potential. Our main chance, writes Black, is now before us and it is not in the usual realms of military or economic dominance. With the rest of the West engaged in a sterile and platitudinous left-right tug of war, Canada has the opportunity to lead the advanced world to its next stage of development in the arts of government. By transforming itself into a controlled and sensible public policy laboratory, it can forge new solutions to the tiresome problems besetting welfare, education, health care, foreign policy, and other governmental sectors the world over, and make an enormous contribution to the welfare of mankind. Canada has no excuse not to lead in this field, argues Black, who offers nineteen visionary policy proposals of his own. "This is the destiny, and the vocation, Canada could have, not in the next century, but in the next five years of imaginative government.

Into The Lion's Den


Martin Chimes - 2015
    Ben will stop at nothing to save his son, but what awaits him is an evil, more dangerous and insidious than he could have ever anticipated. Into the Lion’s Den is a fast-paced action thriller, a compelling saga of the love of family and the indomitable will to survive in the face of an implacable malevolence.

The Young Lions


Tony Maxwell - 2013
    Her long dark auburn hair cascaded over her shoulders and her pale, attractive face, wide set eyes and full sensuous lips took his breath away. Robert could not help staring at her in frank amazement. He found it difficult to equate this alluring woman with the tall, awkward girl he vaguely remembered while a young boy at Fairlee Manor in Scotland.* * *Action, adventure and erotic entanglements loom large in young Robert Hamilton’s future as he seeks to make his fortune in the rough and tumble world of the Johannesburg goldfields in the closing years of the nineteenth century.Robert’s business interests and adventures in the wilds of South Africa, bring him into close contact with the Boer peoples of the Transvaal Republic. As the threat of a British invasion looms large over the country, his support for the Boer cause finds him on the opposing side to his fellow uitlanders – foreigners. He is dismayed to discover that both of his brothers have enlisted in Canadian regiments ready to fight on the side of Britain in the Anglo-Boer War.

The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa


Irene Yuan Sun - 2017
    Chinese entrepreneurs are flooding into the continent, investing in long-term assets such as factories and heavy equipment.Considering Africa's difficult history of colonialism, one might suspect that China's activity there is another instance of a foreign power exploiting resources. But as author Irene Yuan Sun vividly shows in this remarkable book, it is really a story about resilient Chinese entrepreneurs building in Africa what they so recently learned to build in China--a global manufacturing powerhouse.The fact that China sees Africa not for its poverty but for its potential wealth is a striking departure from the attitude of the West, particularly that of the United States. Despite fifty years of Western aid programs, Africa still has more people living in extreme poverty than any other region in the world. Those who are serious about raising living standards across the continent know that another strategy is needed.Chinese investment gives rise to a tantalizing possibility: that Africa can industrialize in the coming generation. With a manufacturing-led transformation, Africa would be following in the footsteps of the United States in the nineteenth century, Japan in the early twentieth, and the Asian Tigers in the late twentieth. Many may consider this an old-fashioned way to develop, but as Sun argues, it's the only one that's proven to raise living standards across entire societies in a lasting way. And with every new Chinese factory boss setting up machinery and hiring African workers--and managers--that possibility becomes more real for Africa.With fascinating and moving human stories along with incisive business and economic analysis, The Next Factory of the World will make you rethink both China's role in the world and Africa's future in the globalized economy.

Western Political Thought


O.P. Gauba
    

Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present


Frederick Cooper - 2002
    Bridging the divide between colonial and post-colonial history, it shows what political independence did and did not signify and how men and women, peasants and workers, religious leaders and local leaders sought to refashion the way they lived, worked, and interacted with each other.

الثورة 2.0


Wael Ghonim - 2012
    Brutal regimes that had been in power for many decades were suddenly swarmed by unstoppable mobs of freedom-seekers. Now, one of the key figures behind the Egyptian uprising tells the riveting inside story of what happened and presents lessons for all of us on how to unleash the power of crowds.  Wael Ghonim was a little-known 30-year-old Google executive in the fall of 2010 when he anonymously launched a Facebook page to protest the death of one Egyptian man at the hands of security forces. The page’s followers expanded quickly and moved from online protests to non-confrontational public gatherings. Then, on January 14, 2011, they made history when they announced a revolution. Over 350,000 friends clamored to join. On January 25, as the revolution began in earnest, Ghonim was captured and held for twelve days of brutal interrogation—and when he emerged and gave a speech on national television, the protests grew even more intense. Four days later, Mubarak was gone.  The lessons Ghonim draws will inspire each of us: Forget the past. Don’t plan ahead. Let the crowd make its own decisions. Welcome to Revolution 2.0.