Maritime Piracy is now a pressing global issue, and this work seeks to provide a concise and informative introduction to the area. Never truly having receded into a romanticized past, seaborne banditry’s rapid growth was stimulated by low risks and increasingly high rewards. Currently, obsolete, incomplete and complicating structures and norms of governance, together with advances in technology, enable a lucrative business model for pirates, as they effectively operate with impunity and cl...

The twenty-first century has seen a rise in the global middle class that brings an unprecedented convergence of interests and perceptions, cultures and values. Kishore Mahbubani is optimistic. We are creating a new global civilization. Eighty-eight percent of the world's population outside the West is rising to Western living standards, and sharing Western aspirations. Yet Mahbubani, one of the most perceptive global commentators, also warns that a new global order needs new policies and a...

Some have claimed that "War is too important to be left to the generals," but P. W. Singer asks "What about the business executives?" Breaking out of the guns-for-hire mold of traditional mercenaries, corporations now sell skills and services that until recently only state militaries possessed. Their products range from trained commando teams to strategic advice from generals. This new "Privatized Military Industry" encompasses hundreds of companies, thousands of employees, and billions of...

Pack your cutlass and blunderbuss--it's time to go a-pirating! The Invisible Hook takes readers inside the wily world of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century pirates. With swashbuckling irreverence and devilish wit, Peter Leeson uncovers the hidden economics behind pirates' notorious, entertaining, and sometimes downright shocking behavior. Why did pirates fly flags of Skull & Bones? Why did they create a "pirate code"? Were pirates really ferocious madmen? And what made...

Natural resources like oil and minerals are the largest source of unaccountable power in the world. Petrocrats like Putin and the Saudis spend resource money on weapons and oppression; militants in Iraq and in the Congo spend resource money on radicalization and ammunition. Resource-fueled authoritarians and extremists present endless crises to the West-and the source of their resource power is ultimately ordinary consumers, doing their everyday shopping at the gas station and the mall. In...

Everyone knows: wars are getting worse, more civilians are dying, and peacemaking achieves nothing, right? Wrong.Despite all the bad-news headlines, peacekeeping is working. Fewer wars are starting, more are ending, and those that remain are smaller and more localized. But peace doesn’t just happen; it needs to be put into effect. Moreover, understanding the global decline in armed conflict is crucial as America shifts to an era of lower military budgets and operations.

In Navigating a New World Lloyd Axworthy charts how we can become active citizens in the demanding world of the twenty-first century, to make it safer, more sustainable and more humane. Throughout he emphasizes the human story. As we meet refugees from civil war and drought, child soldiers and landmine victims, the moral imperative is clear: this is a deeply compassionate appeal to confront poverty, war and environmental disaster.Before Lloyd Axworthy entered globa...

Forty thousand people died trying to cross international borders in the past decade, with the high-profile deaths along the shores of Europe only accounting for half of the grisly total.Reece Jones argues that these deaths are not exceptional, but rather the result of state attempts to contain populations and control access to resources and opportunities. "We may live in an era of globalization," he writes, "but much of the world is increasingly focused on limiting the free movemen...

Today, American sovereignty is more challenged than ever before, not from enemies that threaten us militarily but from friends” who urge us to share or reduce our sovereignty for larger global objectives. How Barack Obama is Endangering our National Sovereignty reveals what sovereignty means to Americans, not as an abstraction but as a vibrant component of self government.Former Ambassador to the U.N. John R. Bolton looks at specific threats to U.S. sovereignty, from global gover...

In 2006, the remote Ontario First Nation of Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI) said no to a mining company, was sued for $10 billion, had its leaders found in contempt of court and jailed but eventually prevailed when, three years later, the Ontario government paid the company $5 million to go away. This is how it happened.

A short history of piracy and capitalismWhen capitalism spread along the trade routes toward the Indies…when radio opened an era of mass communication . . . when the Internet became part of the global economy…pirates were there. And although most people see pirates as solitary anarchists out to destroy capitalism, it turns out the opposite is true. They are the ones who forge the path.In The Pirate Organization, Rodolphe Durand and Jean-Philippe Ve...

The multi-billion dollar business of the international conventional arms trade involves virtually every country in the world. Around the globe, people's lives are being irrevocably changed by the effects of guns, tanks, and missiles. These weapons have the potential to cause a deadly and current threat - one responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths a year.This succinct and accessible new book explores the complexities and realities of the global conventional weapons trade. T...