International Studies

Politics are being transformed by religion, namely in China - within the next 30 years, one-third of this potential superpower could be Christian. If this religious transformation occurs, China would be one of the largest Christian nations in the world.

As late as the 1960s, tacos were virtually unknown outside Mexico and the American Southwest. Within fifty years the United States had shipped taco shells everywhere from Alaska to Australia, Morocco to Mongolia. But how did this tasty hand-held food - and Mexican food more broadly - become so ubiquitous? In Planet Taco, Jeffrey Pilcher traces the historical origins and evolution of Mexico's national cuisine, explores its incarnation as a Mexican American fast-food, shows how surfers became global pioneers of Mexican food, and how Corona beer conquered the world.

US-born historian of Europe Timothy Snyder first published Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin in 2010. In it, he argues that previous accounts of World War II have kept Nazi and Soviet crimes unduly separate, with much more attention paid to Adolf Hitler's atrocities than Joseph Stalin's. Snyder's view is that a definitive history of the period must depict the suffering of all of the conflict's victims.

A self-educated man, Eric Hoffer was most likely born in 1898. He wrote in his spare time after doing shifts on the San Francisco docks, where he continued to work, even after becoming a successful author. Hoffer began writing The True Believer in the 1940s, as Nazism and fascism spread across Europe. Most analysts who were trying to work out how these movements became so powerful focused on their leaders and the ideas they trumpeted.

The world needs to change. We have unleashed an ecological mega-crisis which is threatening the future of life on Earth. The actions we take over the next decade are critical. They will determine the destiny of our descendants and the fate of our world. How Soon Is Now presents a compelling manifesto for personal and planetary change. It proposes a revolutionary new narrative for a unified social movement. Through global cooperation, we can face this collective threat ecologically, socially, politically and spiritually.

Out in the Pacific Ocean, there is a war taking place. It is a "warm war", a shoving match between the United States, since World War II the uncontested ruler of the seas, and China, which now possesses the world's largest navy. The Chinese regard the Pacific, and especially the South China Sea, as their ocean, and they're ready to defend it. Each day the heat between the two countries increases as the Chinese try to claim the South China Sea for their own, and the United States insists on asserting freedom of navigation.

David Rowan travels the globe in search of the most exciting and pioneering start-ups building the future. He’s got to know the founders of WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Google, Spotify, Xiaomi, Didi, Nest, Twitter and countless other ambitious entrepreneurs disrupting businesses in almost every sector. And yet too often the companies they’re disrupting don’t get it. They think they can innovate through jargon: with talk of change agents and co-creation gurus, ideas portals and webinars, make-a-thons and hackfests, paradigm shifts and pilgrimages to Silicon Valley.

Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez's 1971 book, A Theology of Liberation, provides an inspiring and groundbreaking argument as to how Christians and the Roman Catholic Church should act in support of the poor. The Catholic Church had traditionally seen itself as politically neutral. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, reformers such as Gutiérrez urged it to seriously address real-world issues such as poverty and oppression.

Ever since he became a Christian at the age of 40, it has been Poirot actor David Suchet's dream to make an audio recording of the Bible. In between filming the final episodes of Poirot, David Suchet spent over 200 hours in the recording studio to create the very first full-length audio version of the NIV Bible spoken by a single British actor. This recording is an excerpt of that Bible.

For almost a decade, Richard Herring has been answering sexist trolls on International Women's Day when they ask 'when is International Men's Day?' in the mistaken belief there isn't one. If only the trolls had learned to use Google they'd realise that there is an International Men's Day - it's on November 19th. In The Problem with Men Richard expands on his Twitter discussions and tackles some of the big questions surrounding the problems of toxic masculinity - for women, but also for men.

The NIV Daily Scripture will help you on your journey through the Bible in one year. From day one, each audio installment includes a portion from the Old Testament, the New Testament, and a Psalm or Proverb. Before each day’s segment, a succinct applicational overview section will set the stage for that day’s portion, helping you step right back in where you left off the prior day. You don’t even have to wait until January 1st to start; the daily segments are not date-specific, so you can begin your 365-day journey at any point in the year.

Søren Kierkegaard has long been considered the father of the philosophical movement known as Christian existentialism, which focuses on the living human being. In his major 1849 work, The Sickness unto Death, he takes listeners on a journey from the human self, its spirit, despair and sin, through to faith.

First published in 1948, Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks is an important Marxist work that says we must understand societies both in terms of their economic relationships and their cultural beliefs. Gramsci wanted to explore why Russia had undergone a socialist revolution in 1917 while other European countries had not. So he developed the concept of hegemony, which is the idea that those who hold power in a society can maintain and use that power because of their own grip on cultural values and economic relationships.

Clifford Geertz's first collection of essays, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), made him a leading voice of anthropology's "symbolic" movement, which believed scholars should read the signs and symbols of a culture from the perspective of its natives. Geertz's approach helped anthropology reinvent itself as a scientific discipline that is still relevant today, making him - in the words of one critic - "a true giant of social and cultural theory."

This is more than a Bible you listen to; it’s an experience that helps you enter God’s word...so God’s word can enter you. Narrated by George Sarris, a well-known spokesperson for several Fortune 500 companies and a talented communicator, this audio edition of the Old Testament in the beloved New International Version (NIV) will reignite your passion for the word of God.

The Easter Story, performed by today's leading African-American actors, musicians, and clergy.

The United States has been the world's dominant power for more than a century. Now, many analysts believe that other countries are rising and the United States is in decline. Is the unipolar moment over? Is America finished as a superpower? In this book, Michael Beckley argues that the United States has unique advantages over other nations that, if used wisely, will allow it to remain the world's sole superpower throughout this century. We are not living in a transitional, post-Cold War era.

Anthropologist Geert Hofstede's 1980 work, Culture's Consequences, was the first study to look at cultural differences using data. The Dutchman took advantage of the enormous global span of his employer, the technology company IBM, to gather survey data in 20 languages and across 70 countries, and to produce a unique study of national values.

Published in 1925, The Gift is one of French sociologist Marcel Mauss's few non-collaborative works. In it, he elevates what might appear to be a simple gift from the status of innocent object to something that has the capacity to motivate people and define social relationships. The Gift analyzes cultures across the world and across time, with the way gifts are given and received working as a guide to understanding the rules and traditions of many different societies.

Can the Subaltern Speak? is a classic of postcolonial studies, the discipline that examines the impact of colonial control on countries that gained their independence from European powers from the 1940s onwards. The essay, written in 1988 by Calcutta-born scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, argues that a core problem for the poorest and most marginalized in society (the subalterns) is that they have no platform to express their concerns, and no voice to affect policy debates or demand a fairer share.