In the contemporary world, war rivals infectious disease as a global cause of morbidity and mortality. Since the end of World War II, there have been at least 160 wars around the world with as many as 25 million (and probably many more) people killed, most of them civilians. Directly or indirectly, war touches the lives of most people on the planet, often with lasting and costly impact. Framed by the holistic and ethnographically grounded theoretical perspective of critical medical anthrop...

For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results, even in Iran, Burma, the Philippines, and the Pale...

In her major address to the 99th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association on August 16, 2004, "Public Power in the Age of Empire," broadcast nationally on C-Span Book TV and on Democracy Now! and Alternative Radio, writer Arundhati Roy brilliantly examines the limits to democracy in the world today. Bringing the same care to her prose that she brought to her Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things, Roy discusses the need for social movements to contest the occupat...

“It’s a time of change in the world, with dictators toppling and new opportunities rising, but any revolution that doesn’t create equality for women will be incomplete. The time has come to realize the full potential of half the world’s population.” —Christiane Amanpour, from the forewordThe Unfinished Revolution tells the story of the global struggle to secure basic rights for women and girls, including in the Middle East where the Arab Spring raised high hopes, but the p...

Objective, critical, optimistic, and with a global focus, this textbook combines international relations theory, history, up-to-date research, and current affairs to give students a comprehensive, unbiased understanding of international politics. It integrates theory and traditional approaches with globalization and research on such topics as terrorism, new economic superpowers, and global communications and social networking to offer unusual breadth and depth for an undergraduate course. ...

Understanding Foreign Policy Decision Making presents a psychological approach to foreign policy decision making. This approach focuses on the decision process, dynamics, and outcome. The book includes a wealth of extended real-world case studies and examples that are woven into the text. The cases and examples, which are written in an accessible style, include decisions made by leaders of the United States, Israel, New Zealand, Cuba, Iceland, United Kingdom, and others. In addition to cov...

Where are the women? In traditional historical and scholarly accounts of the making and fighting of wars, women are often nowhere to be seen. With few exceptions, war stories are told as if men were the only ones who plan, fight, are injured by, and negotiate ends to wars. As the pages of this book tell, though, those accounts are far from complete. Women can be found at every turn in the (gendered) phenomena of war. Women have participated in the making, fighting, and concluding of wars t...

Our inalienable human rights were enshrined over 50 years ago in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, what does that mean to someone who is tortured, denied education or work, or unable to find asylum?This No-Nonsense Guide looks at the theories of rights and universalism. It explores the difficult task of protecting human rights in times of war, the advances in international laws that have led to some rights abusers facing justice, and the conflicts that ca...

While the booming humanitarian sector faces daunting challenges, humanitarian economics emerges as a new field of study and practice--one that encompasses the economics and political economy of war, disaster, terrorism and humanitarianism. Carbonnier's book is the first to present humanitarian economics to a wide readership, defining its parameters, explaining its utility and convincing us why it matters. Among the issues he discusses are: how are emotions and altruism incorporated within ...

Oil is the world's single most important commodity and its political effects are pervasive. Jeff Colgan extends the idea of the resource curse into the realm of international relations, exploring how countries form their foreign policy preferences and intentions. Why are some but not all oil-exporting 'petrostates' aggressive? To answer this question, a theory of aggressive foreign policy preferences is developed and then tested, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Petro-Aggre...

As the war on terror dominates world headlines and conflicts of all kinds abound, this No-Nonsense Guide provides a refreshing antidote. Can conflict be prevented? If not, how can it be contained?Drawing on the authors’ wide range of experience, from the UN to the local village, Conflict and Peace will help readers to understand why conflicts persist—and how they can be transformed.

The relationship between drugs and todayÆs wars has grown more noticeable since the end of the Cold War and will likely gather strength in this era of increased globalization. Many violent groups and governments have recently turned to illicit narcotics in their entrepreneurial quests to stay viable in the postûCold War world. It is no coincidence that many of the most violent and ongoing conflicts, from the Balkans to the Hindu Kush, from the Andes to the Golden Triangle, occur in areas of w...