Search Results: Returned 19 Results, Displaying Titles 1 - 19
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2018., Adult, Signal, an imprint of McClelland & Stewart Call No: 909.83 H254l Edition: First edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Shares insights into such present-day issues as the role of technology in transforming humanity, the epidemic of false news, and the modern relevance of nations and religion.
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-- How barriers between nations are changing our world.2018., Adult, Scribner Call No: 320.905 M367a Edition: First Scribner hardcover edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: Politics of place Volume: book 3.Summary Note: Walls are going up. Nationalism and identity politics are on the rise once more. Thousands of miles of fences and barriers have been erected in the past ten years, and they are redefining our political landscape. There are many reasons why we erect walls, because we are divided in many ways: wealth, race, religion, politics. In Europe the ruptures of the past decade threaten not only European unity, but in some countries liberal democracy itself. In China, the Party's need to contain the divisions wrought by capitalism will define the nation's future. In the USA the rationale for the Mexican border wall taps into the fear that the USA will no longer be a white majority country in the course of this century. Understanding what has divided us, past and present, is essential to understanding much of what's going on in the world today.
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By Traub, James2006., Farrar, Straus and Giroux Call No: 341.23 T777b Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your LibraryClick here to watch Click here to view Summary Note: A man who had won the Nobel Peace Prize, widely counted one of the greatest UN Secretary Generals, was nearly hounded from office by scandal. Indeed, both Kofi Annan and the institution he incarnates were so deeply shaken after the Bush Administration went to war in Iraq in the face of UN opposition that critics, and even some friends, began asking whether this sixty-year-old experiment in global policing has outlived its usefulness. Journalist Traub recounts the dramatically entwined history of Annan and the UN from 1992 to 2006. In Annan he sees a conscientious idealist given too little credit for advancing causes like humanitarian intervention, and an honest broker crushed between American conservatives and Third World opponents--but also a UN careerist who has absorbed that culture and can not, in the end, escape its limitations.--From publisher description.
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-- World-wide struggle for Internet freedom.c2012., Basic Books Call No: 302.231 M158c Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Google has a history of censoring at the behest of Communist China. Research in Motion happily opens up the BlackBerry to such stalwarts of liberty as Saudi Arabia. Yahoo has betrayed the email accounts of dissidents to the PRC. Facebook's obsession with personal transparency has revealed the identities of protestors to governments. For all the overheated rhetoric of liberty and cyber-utopia, it is clear that the corporations that rule cyberspace are making decisions that show little or no concern for their impact on political freedom. In Consent of the Networked, internet policy specialist Rebecca MacKinnon argues that it's time for us to demand that our rights and freedoms are respected and protected before they're sold, legislated, programmed, and engineered away. The challenge is that building accountability into the fabric of cyberspace demands radical thinking in a completely new dimension. The corporations that build and operate the technologies that create and shape our digital world are fundamentally different from the Chevrons, Nikes, and Nabiscos whose behavior and standards can be regulated quite effectively by laws, courts, and bureaucracies answerable to voters.The public revolt against the sovereigns of cyberspace will be useless if it focuses downstream at the point of law and regulation, long after the software code has already been written, shipped, and embedded itself into the lives of millions of people. The revolution must be focused upstream at the source of the problem. Political innovation - the negotiated relationship between people with power and people whose interests and rights are affected by that power - needs to center around the point of technological conception, experimentation, and early implementation. The purpose of technology - and of the corporations that make it - is to serve humanity, not the other way around. It's time to wake up and act before the reversal becomes permanent. -- From publisher description.
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c2005., Crown Forum Call No: 355.02 T584c Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your LibraryClick here to watch
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2019., Henry Holt and Company Call No: 327.73 L668e Edition: First U.S. edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "The Empire and the Five Kings is a cri de coeur that draws upon lessons from history and the eternal touchstones of human culture to reveal the stakes facing the West as America retreats from its leadership role, a process that did not begin with Donald Trump's presidency and is not likely to end with him. The crisis is one whose roots can be found as far back as antiquity and whose resolution will require the West to find a new way forward if its principles and values are to survive."--Jacket flap.
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2017., Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company Call No: 320.973 C548g Edition: First edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: The American empire projectSummary Note: In wide-ranging interviews with David Barsamian, his longtime interlocutor, Noam Chomsky asks us to consider a world imperiled by climate change and the growing potential for nuclear war. These twelve interviews, conducted from 2013 to 2016, examine the latest developments around the globe: the devastation of Syria, the reach of state surveillance, growing anger over economic inequality, the place of religion in American political culture, and the bitterly contested 2016 U.S. presidential election. In accompanying personal reflections on his Philadelphia childhood and his eighty-seventh birthday, Chomsky also describes his own intellectual journey.
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2023., Hurst & Company Call No: NEW 321.8 N331l Availability:0 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: A specter is haunting Europe and the specter of anti-democratic, right-wing nationalism. This has finally exposed as ill-based the astonishingly widely shared belief that unleashing capitalism will, sooner or later, lead societies to democratic politics. It's nothing more than the big liberal myth. Krishnan Nayar explores the history of six major pioneers of modernity--Britain, America, France, Germany, Russia and Japan-- from the seventeenth century's Cromwellian revolution to Donald Trump's election, via the Age of Darwinian the pre-Second World War, pre-consumerist, pre-welfare state capitalism of severe economic instability and a penurious working class. Nayar shows that, in this period, capitalist industrialization was far more likely to lead to modernized right-wing autocracy than democracy, which got a chance thanks simply to fortunate circumstances in a few countries. Capitalism only underpinned democracy in the post-war period due to transient the existence and character of the post-1945 Western welfare systems owed far more than is admitted by most historians to the challenge posed by the Russian and Chinese revolutions. The return of large-scale, extremist right-wing politics should not, therefore, come as a surprise. As autocratic China grows in strength, and Russia returns to expansionism, can democracy be rescued from a capitalism of dire instability and inequality?
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2017., McGill-Queen's University Press Call No: 909.83 J72m Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: The 1990s were a decade characterized by optimism about a great future that lay ahead for generations to follow. Major challenges were approached with a realization that the world leadership had the capacity not only to meet them, but to turn them into unprecedented opportunities for global social and economic progress. In Missing the Tide, Donald Johnston demonstrates that none of these opportunities achieved their objectives, and in some cases failed completely. Scrutinizing some of the most significant unfulfilled hopes, he looks at the failure of the West to engage effectively with a democratic Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the European Unionœs fractious path to intending to become historyœs largest and most competitive economy, the expansion of the Marshall Plan concept to regions fractured by division and conflict, the diminishing prospect of global free trade and investment to stimulate economic growth and increase prosperity in the developing world, the absence of coordinated international actions to combat climate change, the pervasive corruption in corporate governance undermining healthy capitalism, and the growing threats to democracy. Sifting through the economic, social, and environmental wreckage of the past twenty years, Johnston reflects on the failures and frustrations of international public policy. Can this rapid decline be arrested and reversed? In assessing the impotency of the international community to meet these challenges, Missing the Tide extracts some lessons to be learned and looks with cautious optimism to the future.
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-- Next hundred years.c2009., Doubleday Call No: 303.49 F911n Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library
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c2011., Adult, Doubleday Call No: 909.83 F899n Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "The author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Next 100 Years now focuses his geopolitical forecasting acumen on the next decade and the imminent events and challenges that will test America and the world, specifically addressing the skills that will be required by the decade<U+2019>s leaders. The next ten years will be a time of massive transition. The wars in the Islamic world will be subsiding, and terrorism will become something we learn to live with. China will be encountering its crisis. We will be moving from a time when financial crises dominate the world to a time when labor shortages will begin to dominate. The new century will be taking shape in the next decade. In The Next Decade, George Friedman offers readers a pro<U+00AD>vocative and endlessly fascinating prognosis for the immedi<U+00AD>ate future. Using Machiavelli<U+2019>s The Prince as a model, Friedman focuses on the world<U+2019>s leaders --particularly the American president -- and with his trusted geopolitical insight analyzes the complex chess game they will all have to play. The book also asks how to be a good president in a decade of extraordinary challenge, and puts the world<U+2019>s leaders under a microscope to explain how they will arrive at the decisions they will make -- and the consequences these actions will have for us all." --From the publisher.
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2008., Knopf Call No: 909.82 K11r Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Hopes for a new peaceful international order after the end of the Cold War have been dashed by sobering realities: Great powers are once again competing for honor and influence. Nation-states remain as strong as ever, as do the old, explosive forces of ambitious nationalism. The world remains "unipolar," but international competition among the United States, Russia, China, Europe, Japan, India, and Iran raise new threats of regional conflict. Communism is dead, but a new contest between western liberalism and the great eastern autocracies of Russia and China has reinjected ideology into geopolitics. Finally, radical Islamists are waging a violent struggle against the modern secular cultures and powers that, in their view, have dominated, penetrated, and polluted their Islamic world. The grand expectation that after the Cold War the world would enter an era of international geopolitical convergence has proven wrong." "For the past few years, the liberal world has been internally divided and distracted by issues both profound and petty. Now, in The Return of History and the End of Dreams, Robert Kagan poses the most important questions facing the liberal democratic countries, challenging them to choose whether they want to shape history or let others shape it for them."--BOOK JACKET.
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2016., Adult, House of Anansi Press Call No: 901 W462r Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: Massey lectures series.Summary Note: "In 1989, as the Berlin Wall crumbled and the Cold War dissipated, the American political commentator Francis Fukuyama wrote a famous essay, entitled "The End of History." Fukuyama argued that the demise of confrontation between Communism and capitalism, and the expansion of Western liberal democracy, signalled the endpoint of humanity's sociocultural and political evolution, the waning of traditional power politics, and the path toward a more peaceful world. At the heart of his thesis was the audaciously optimistic idea of "progress" in history. But a quarter of a century after Fukuyama's bold prediction, history has returned. The twenty-first century has not seen unfettered progress toward peace and a single form of government, but the reappearance of trends and practices many believed had been erased: arbitrary executions, attempts to annihilate ethnic and religious minorities, the starvation of besieged populations, invasion and annexation of territory, and the mass movement of refugees and displaced persons. It has also witnessed cracks and cleavages within Western liberal democracies, particularly as a result of deepening economic inequality at levels not seen since the end of the nineteenth century. The Return of History both illustrates and explains this return of history. But it also demonstrates how the reappearance of acts deemed "barbaric" or "medieval" has a modern twist. Above all, it argues that the return of history should encourage us all to remember that our own liberal democratic society was not inevitable and that we must all, as individual citizens, take a more active role in its preservation and growth. Jennifer Welsh is Professor and Chair in International Relations at the European University Institute in Florence (Italy) and a Fellow of Somerville College, University of Oxford."--Provided by publisher.
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-- Seductive lure of authoritarianism.2020., Adult, Signal Call No: 321.9 A646t Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Offers a guide to understanding the appeal of the strongman as a leader and an explanation for why authoritarianism is back with a menacing twenty-first century twist. Across the world today, from the Americas to Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege while populism and nationalism are on the rise. Anne Applebaum offers an unexpected explanation: that there is a deep and inherent appeal to authoritarianism, to strongmen, and, especially, to one-party rule -- that is, to political systems that benefit true believers, or loyal soldiers, or simply the friends and distant cousins of the Leader, to the exclusion of everyone else. People, she argues, are not just ideological; they are also practical, pragmatic, opportunistic. They worry about their families, their houses, their careers. Some political systems offer them possibilities, and others don't. In particular, the modern authoritarian parties that have arisen within democracies today offer the possibility of success to people who do not thrive in the meritocratic, democratic, or free-market competition that determines access to wealth and power.
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2010., Penguin Books Call No: 355.02 S617w Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: A military expert reveals how science fiction is fast becoming reality on the battlefield, changing not just how wars are fought, but also the politics, economics, laws, and ethics that surround war itself.
