Geopolitics History

La Cina è davvero "vicina" come recitava il titolo di un vecchio film d'autore? No, sostiene Giada Messetti nel suo "Nella testa del Dragone". È, anzi, molto lontana. Soprattutto, è diversa. Perché ― continua l'autrice, sinologa, che in Cina ha vissuto sei anni ― esistono dieci, cento, mille Cine. Esplorarle è come fare un viaggio su una macchina del tempo, passando da villaggi remoti rimasti all'epoca preindustriale a smart city avveniristiche dove, fermo al semaforo in motorino, può capitare che un drone ti intimi di indossare il casco se vuoi evitare una multa salata.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crash, Daniel W. Drezner, like so many others, looked at the smoking ruins of the global economy and wondered why global economic governance structure had failed so spectacularly, and what could be done to reform them in the future. But then a funny thing happened. As he surveyed their actions in the wake of the crash, he realized that the evidence pointed to the exact opposite conclusion: global economic governance had succeeded.

Isolationism became one of the most influential political trends in American history. From the founding era until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States shunned strategic commitments abroad, making only brief detours during the Spanish-American War and World War I. Amid World War II and the Cold War, Americans abandoned isolationism; they tried to run the world rather than run away from it. But isolationism is making a comeback. Author Charles Kupchan explores the enduring connection between the isolationist impulse and the American experience.

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the most ambitious infrastructure project ever undertaken, and will ultimately result in more than one trillion dollars of investment by the time it is finished. The initiative is breathtaking in its scope and scale, with scores of countries participating and dozens of massive dams, railways, roads, and power projects transforming the landscape throughout the developing world.

Pro Jahr mehr als 1.500 Kilometer neue Gleise für Hochgeschwindigkeitszüge, über ein Dutzend neue Wolkenkratzer allein in Shenzhen und mindestens 1,38 Millionen neue Patente: Chinas Diktatur treibt eine hocheffiziente Wirtschaft an. Sie baut einen digitalen Überwachungsapparat auf, wie ihn die Welt noch nicht gesehen hat, und dehnt im Stil einer neuen Kolonialmacht ihren Einfluss aus - ob in Afrika, bei der neuen Seidenstraße oder durch Investitionen in Griechenland oder Portugal, für die im Gegenzug Linientreue bei EU-Resolutionen gezeigt werden muss.

Gefährlicher Drache statt gemütlicher Panda: Mit welchen Strategien China die Welt erobert. Chinas Aufstieg zur Weltmacht ist unaufhaltsam. Lange erwartete man, dass sich das Land mit zunehmendem Wohlstand demokratisieren würde. Doch das Gegenteil ist der Fall. Die Kommunistische Partei Chinas will sich mit allen Mitteln an der Macht halten. Dafür werden Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft im eigenen Land auf Linie gebracht und ein weitreichendes Programm wurde entwickelt, mit dem China die westlichen Demokratien unterwandert und eine neue Weltordnung etablieren will.

In We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, Laurie Calhoun examines the 21st-century practice of remote-control killing of suspects located in third-world countries and challenges listeners to reflect upon the long-range implications - moral, political, psychological, and cultural - of this new form of “warfare”. Through the use of provocative analogies and examples, We Kill Because We Can clarifies and criticizes targeted killing as incompatible with the values and principles of modern Western democratic societies.

The Jihadi Next Door provides unprecedented information that can be used to actually combat terrorism. By laying bare the tactics used by ISIS to deceive and exploit new recruits and exposing the veneer these extremists operate under, Dr. Mehlman-Orozco hopes to empower listeners with the knowledge needed to prevent future recruitment and thereby preventing acts of terrorism.

Borders can no longer simply be understood as the geographical divisions between nation-states. Today, their form and function has become too complex, too hybrid. What we need now is a theory of the border that can make sense of this hybridity across multiple domains of social life. Rather than viewing borders as the result or outcome of pre-established social entities like states, Thomas Nail reinterprets social history from the perspective of the continual and constitutive movement of the borders that organize and divide society in the first place.

This book is written by two of the leading terrorist experts in the world. Hacking ISIS will explain in graphic detail how ISIS produces religious cultism, recruits vulnerable young people of all religions and nationalities and disseminates their brutal social media to the world. More, the book will map out the cyberspace-level tactics on how ISIS spreads its terrifying content, how it distributes tens of thousands of pieces of propaganda daily and is winning the battle in cyberspace and how to stop it in its tracks.

David Headley, the American Pakistani also known as Daood Gilani, lived a double life. One day he would stroll through Central Park in his tailored Armani suit as a true New Yorker, and the next he would browse in the bazaar in Lahore wearing traditional Pakistani clothes. One day he would drink champagne at the most extravagant clubs; on another he would prostrate himself in prayer in remote Pakistan and pledge fidelity to Allah.

As a boy, Robert D. Kaplan listened to his truck-driver father's evocative stories about traveling across America as a young man, travels in which he learned to understand the country from a ground-level perspective. In Earning the Rockies, Kaplan undertakes his own cross-country journey to recapture an appreciation and understanding of American geography that is often lost in the jet age.

The title of Norwegian-born historian Odd Arne Westad's 2005 work - The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times - offers a window into his thesis. Between the end of World War II and the early 1990s, both the Soviet Union and the United States "intervened" (or "offered aid and support to") developing nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In Westad's view, these interventions were more important than events in Europe, where most studies of the Cold War focus.

A new understanding of the post-World War II era, showing what occurred when the British Empire wouldn't step aside for the rising American superpower - with global insights for today.

The American war in Vietnam was concluded in 1973 after eight years of fighting, bloodshed, and loss. Yet the terms of the truce that ended the war were effectively identical to what had been offered to the Nixon administration four years earlier. Those four years cost America and Vietnam thousands of lives and billions of dollars, and they were the direct result of the supposed master plan of the most important voice in American foreign policy: Henry Kissinger.

Oklahoma City. Indianapolis. Charleston. Des Moines. What do these cities have in common? They are cities of modest size but outsized accomplishment, powered by a can-do spirit, valuing compromise over confrontation and progress over political victory. These are the cities leading America...and they're not waiting for Washington's help. As mayor of one of America's most improved cities, Cornett used a bold, creative, and personal approach to orchestrate his city's renaissance. Once regarded as a forgettable city in "flyover country", Oklahoma City has become one of our nation's most dynamic places - and it is not alone.

What would the world look like if America were to reduce its role as a global leader in order to focus all its energies on solving its problems at home? And is America really in decline? Robert Kagan, New York Times best-selling author and one of the country’s most influential strategic thinkers, paints a vivid, alarming picture of what the world might look like if the United States were truly to let its influence wane.

A probing work of narrative history that reveals the hidden story of immigrant detention in the United States, deepening urgent national conversations around migration.

Historian Jay Sexton contends that our national narrative is not one of halting yet inevitable progress, but of repeated disruptions brought about by shifts in the international system. Sexton shows that the American Revolution was a consequence of the increasing integration of the British and American economies; that a necessary precondition for the Civil War was the absence, for the first time in decades, of foreign threats; and that we cannot understand the New Deal without examining the role of European immigrants and their offspring in transforming the Democratic Party.

As Great Britain and France eyed the Illinois country and the Tennessee, Ohio, and Wabash River valleys for their respective empires, the Overhill Cherokees were coalescing and maintaining a conspicuous presence throughout the territory. Contrary to the traditional narrative of westward expansion, the Europeans were not the drivers behind the ensuing contest over the Tennessee corridor. The Overhills traded, negotiated, and fought with other Indigenous peoples along this corridor, in the process setting parameters for European expansion.