International Politics

Award-winning journalist Alexis Madrigal sculpts an intricate tableau of the city of Oakland that is at once a groundbreaking big-idea book, a deeply researched work of social and political history, and an intimate portrait of an essential American city that has been at the crossroads of the defining themes of the twenty-first century. Oakland’s stories encompass everything from Silicon Valley’s prominence and the ramifications of a compulsively digital future to the underestimated costs of technological innovation on local communities.

A large, widening gap has opened between Western democracies' international ambitions and their domestic political capacity to support them. On issues ranging from immigration and international trade to national security, new political parties on the left and the right are rejecting the core foreign policy principles that Western governments have championed for over half a century. In Geopolitics and Democracy, Peter Trubowitz and Brian Burgoon provide a powerful new explanation for the rise of anti-globalism in the West.

In the fifth edition of his best-selling Very Short Introduction work, Manfred B. Steger considers the major dimensions of globalization: economic, political, cultural, ideological, and ecological. He looks at its causes and effects, and engages with the hotly contested question of whether globalization is, ultimately, a good or a bad thing.

The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy is a critically acclaimed narrative that illuminates the globalization debates and reveals the key factors to success in global business. Tracing a T-shirt's life story from a Texas cotton field to a Chinese factory and back to a US storefront before arriving at the used clothing market in Africa, the book uncovers the political and economic forces at work in the global economy.

Drawing on decades of firsthand experience as a foreign correspondent and military embed for The Atlantic, as well as encounters with preeminent realist thinkers, Kaplan outlines the timeless principles that should shape America's role in a turbulent world: a respect for the limits of Western-style democracy; a delineation between American interests and American values; an awareness of the psychological toll of warfare; a projection of power via a strong navy; and more.

The concept of prosecuting war criminals is not unique to the modern world. Individuals who breached the "rules of war" were tried in ancient Greece, and probably earlier. However, those early prosecutions were hardly examples of fair and impartial international justice. Underpinning the prosecutions, however, was a notion that, even in war, there are certain rules which must be obeyed.

Amid the fear following 9/11 and other recent terror attacks, it is easy to forget the most important fact about terrorist campaigns: the always come to an end - and often far more quickly than expected. Contrary to what many assume, when it comes to dealing with terrorism it may be more important to understand how it ends than how it begins.

Hastings has been a life-long student of warfare, a ‘chronicler of conflict’, working first as a foreign correspondent on battlefields, then as a prolific prize-winning historian of the 20th century’s greatest struggles. He has now been studying warfare for over fifty years, published thirty books, and given hundreds of talks and lectures. Here are thirteen of the best. Addressing questions of truth versus myth and revisiting many last-generation narratives, Hastings leads us through the most important conflicts in recent times.

In Jawbreaker, Gary Berntsen, until recently one of the CIA's most decorated officers, comes out from under cover for the first time to describe his no-holds-barred pursuit of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

A riveting, real-life thriller about 1983 - the year tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union nearly brought the world to the point of nuclear Armageddon. The year 1983 was an extremely dangerous one - more dangerous than 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the United States, President Reagan vastly increased defense spending, described the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," and launched the "Star Wars" Strategic Defense Initiative to shield the country from incoming missiles.

Spying is the family business. Amanda Cole is a brilliant young CIA officer following in the footsteps of her father, who was a spy during the Cold War. It takes grit to succeed in this male-dominated world—but one hot summer day, when a Russian defector walks into her post, Amanda is given the ultimate chance to prove herself. The defector warns of the imminent assassination of a US senator. Though Amanda takes the warning seriously, her superiors don’t. Twenty-four hours later, the senator is dead. And the assassination is just beginning.

The buried contents of a Nazi train. An aging SS mass-murderer - with one last unexpected sting in his tail. And the war secrets of a US presidential hopeful’s Jewish family, hidden in London for 70 years. Joe Johnson is more than intrigued when he learns of a link between the financing for the presidential candidate’s campaign, the Nazi train, and a ruthless British blackmail plot. But the investigation becomes bigger and more deeply personal than Johnson expects when it turns out the SS Holocaust killer escaped his net years earlier.

Before the Civil War, the American people did not have to worry about a federal tax collector coming to their door. The reason why was the tariff, taxing foreign goods and imports on arrival in the United States. Tariff Wars and the Politics of Jacksonian America attempts to show why the tariff was an important part of the national narrative in the antebellum period. The debates in Congress over the tariff were acrimonious, with pitched arguments between politicians, interest groups, newspapers, and a broader electorate.

Former Marine Force Reconnaissance officer Logan West emerges from a blackout after drinking away the worries of his ruined marriage and PTSD, an all too familiar scene for the recovering alcoholic. But he wakes to more than a killer hangover: A professional mercenary has been sent to capture him. After an embattled showdown, Logan impulsively answers the dead man's ringing phone, triggering a hasty rescue of Logan's estranged wife and a global race against the clock to track down an unknown organization....

Jorge Dezcallar ha dedicado toda su vida profesional a la diplomacia y a la política exterior. Una experiencia que, en los últimos y turbulentos años, le ha permitido reflexionar sobre adónde va el mundo y plasmarlo en este ameno libro, en el que nos deja inquietudes, sugerencias y algunas ideas sobre cuál puede ser el rumbo de la geopolítica a partir de ahora.

American diplomacy is in shambles, but beneath the daily chaos is an erosion of the postwar order that is even more dangerous.

African Friends and Money Matters started as notes for Westerners when they traveled and worked in Africa by providing a lens to understand customs and cultures outside of their home culture. Maranz uses his experiences in Africa to discuss how different cultures manage money, time, and personal relationships, and how these differences sometimes result in friction and misunderstanding. He prompts the listener to reflect on the different goals of African and Western economic systems, and shares ninety specific observations he made regarding money while living in Africa.

The Dead Hand is the suspense-filled story of the people who sought to brake the speeding locomotive of the arms race, then rushed to secure the nuclear and biological weapons left behind by the collapse of the Soviet Union—a dangerous legacy that haunts us even today.The Cold War was an epoch of massive overkill.

The nature of money as gates and letters revealed gives light to the nations of humankind to find in troubled times a historic luxury and modern necessity in the FML FIREs. These are the first constitutional centers of foundation money law governance and the prize of digital revolution.

Russia has been locked into a winter of authoritarian rule at home and military adventures abroad under Vladimir Putin. In Kremlin Winter, Robert Service, one of our finest historians of Russia, plots the seasonal shifts in events since 2012 and those that may be expected in the immediate future. When Mikhail Gorbachëv introduced perestroika in the mid-1980s, the USSR went through a springtime of growth and release.