This book reintroduces the U.N. Charter to the global audience by describing the Charter as the most important seculardocument in the world, for it is essentially the constitution of global governance to which all nations are bound, even if some honor it in the breach. The co-authors explain the core principles embedded in the Charter, which embodies codified customary international law for all nations. But the book also introduces pragmatic interpretations of key Charter provisions to mod...

This book explains the most significant cases and jurisprudence emerging from the thirty-two-year record of the judicial institutions highlighted in the book. It explains the principles of international law emerging from and being strengthened by the jurisprudence of tribunal judges. These include: the legal authority of the UN Security Council, the UN General Assembly, and regional organizations like the African Union and Council of Europe to create ad hoc or hybrid war crimes tribunals; ...

American reluctance to join the International Criminal Court illuminates important trends in international security and a central dilemma facing U.S. Foreign policy in the 21st century. The ICC will prosecute individuals who commit egregious international human rights violations such as genocide. The Court is a logical culmination of the global trends toward expanding human rights and creating international institutions. The U.S., which fostered these trends because they served American na...

The behind-the-scenes story of how today's war crimes tribunals came to beWithin days of Madeleine Albright's confirmation as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1993, she instructed David Scheffer to spearhead the historic mission to create a war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. As senior adviser to Albright and then as President Clinton's ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, Scheffer was at the forefront of the efforts that led to criminal tr...

The Sit Room brings you inside the secretive Situation Room of the White House, the most important deliberative room in the world, during the early 1990s when the author was one of the policymakers who framed the Clinton Administration's policy towards the bloody Balkans War. Drawing upon newly declassified documents and his own notes, David Scheffer, who later became America's first Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, weaves the true story of how policy options were debate...

There have been many political dilemmas that impose structural constraints on the effort to legalize, judicialize, and criminalize normatively deviant behavior in international politics. The annual costs of these tribunals has peaked at approximately $400 million, of which $140 million is allocated to the ICC, the latter now having spent $1 billion in its first decade of existence. What has been the track record of these international criminal courts with jurisdiction to try heads of state...

American politics seems to grow more contentious and complicated by the day, and whether American democracy works well is hotly debated. Amidst all this roiling partisan argument and confusing claims and counterclaims, there has never been a greater need for an impartial primer on the basics of the American political system. This Very Short Introduction gives readers a concise, accessible, and sophisticated overview of the vital elements of American democracy, emphasizing both how these el...

"A brilliant and iconoclastic assault on American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War" from the bestselling author of The Sorrows of Empire ( Los Angeles Times ).The term "blowback," invented by the CIA, refers to the unintended consequences of American policies. In this sure-to-be-controversial book, Chalmers Johnson lays out in vivid detail the dangers faced by our ov...

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The urgent and influential guide to the forces that have undermined democracies across the globe—forces running rampant in the United States today—hailed as “a touchstone” (The New Yorker) that “comes at exactly the right moment” (The Washington Post)“Comprehensive, enlightening, and terrifyingly timely.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)“[Levitsky and Ziblatt] expand the conversation beyond Tr...

When President Clinton sent Richard Holbrooke to Bosnia as America's chief negotiator in late 1995, he took a gamble that would eventually redefine his presidency. But there was no saying then, at the height of the war, that Holbrooke's mission would succeed. The odds were strongly against it.As passionate as he was controversial, Holbrooke believed that the only way to bring peace to the Balkans was through a complex blend of American leadership, aggressive and cr...

The New York Times–bestselling author and Fox News judicial analyst examines the effects of two US presidents on personal freedom."Either the Constitution means what it says, or it doesn't."America's founding fathers saw freedom as a part of our nature to be protected—not to be usurped by the federal government—and so enshrined separation of powers and guarantees of freedom in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But a little over a hundred years...

A decade-and-a-half after President William Jefferson Clinton first took the oath of office, biographer Nigel Hamilton tells the riveting story of what was possibly the greatest self-reinvention of a president in office in modern times. The Clinton presidency began disastrously -- kicking off with the worst transition in living memory and deteriorating through a series of fiascos, from gays in the military to Hillary Clinton's failed health care reform. How Bill Clinton faced up to his fai...