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Recent generations have experienced dramatic improvements in the quality of human life across the globe. Wars between states are fought less frequently and are less lethal. Food is more plentiful and more easily accessed. In most parts of the world, birthrates are down and life expectancy up. Significantly fewer people live in extreme poverty, relative to the overall population. Statistics would argue that the human race has never before flourished as it has in this moment. And yet, even with this progress, we face a number of seemingly intractable challenges to the welfare of both states and individuals, including: Governmental instability undermining the lives of citizens, both within and beyond their borders; Persistent and recurring intrastate conflict due to ineffective conflict management strategies; Marginally successful development efforts and growing income inequality, both within and between nations, as a result of uncoordinated and ineffective global development strategies; Internecine conflict in multiethnic societies, manifested by exclusion, discrimination, and ultimately violence, the inevitable consequence of an insufficient focus on managing the inherent tensions in diverse societies; Global climate change with the possibility of catastrophic long-term consequences, following an inability to effectively come to terms with and respond to the impact of human activity on our environment. These challenges require a newly collaborative, intentional, and systematic approach. This book offers a blueprint for how to get there, calling for increased leadership responsibility, clarity of mission, and empowerment of states and individuals. It is designed to transform lofty but often vague agendas into concrete, measurable progress. It believes in the capacity of humanity to rise to the occasion, to come together to address these increasingly critical global problems, and offers one way forward.
This Very Short Introduction explores different approaches to myth from several disciplines, including science, religion, philosophy, literature, and psychology. In this new edition, Robert Segal considers both the future study of myth as well as the impact of areas such as cognitive science and the latest approaches to narrative theory.
In February of 2011, Libyan citizens rebelled against Muammar Qaddafi and quickly unseated him. The speed of the regime's collapse confounded many observers, and the ensuing civil war showed Foreign Policy's index of failed states to be deeply flawed--FP had, in 2010, identified 110 states as being more likely than Libya to descend into chaos. They were spectacularly wrong, but this points to a larger error in conventional foreign policy wisdom: failed, or weak and unstable, states are not anomalies but are instead in the majority. More states resemble Libya than Sweden. Why are most states weak and unstable? Taking as his launching point Charles Tilly's famous dictum that 'war made the state, and the state made war, ' Arjun Chowdhury argues that the problem lies in our mistaken equation of democracy and economic power with stability. But major wars are the true source of stability: only the existential crisis that such wars produced could lead citizens to willingly sacrifice the resources that allowed the state to build the capacity it needed for survival. Developing states in the postcolonial era never experienced the demands major interstate war placed on European states, and hence citizens in those nations have been unwilling to sacrifice the resources that would build state capacity. For example, India and Mexico are established democracies with large economies. Despite their indices of stability, both countries are far from stable: there is an active Maoist insurgency in almost a quarter of India's districts, and Mexico is plagued by violence, drug trafficking, and high levels of corruption in local government. Nor are either effective at collecting revenue. As a consequence, they do not have the tax base necessary to perform the most fundamental tasks of modern states: controlling organized violence in a given territory and providing basic services to citizens. By this standard, the majority of states in the world--about two thirds--are weak states. Chowdury maintains that an accurate evaluation of international security requires a normative shift: the language of weakness and failure belies the fact that strong states are exceptions. Chowdhury believes that dismantling this norm is crucial, as it encourages developing states to pursue state-building via war, which is an extremely costly approach--in terms of human lives and capital. Moreover, in our era, such an approach is destined to fail because the total wars of the past are highly unlikely to occur today. Just as importantly, the non-state alternatives on offer are not viable alternatives. For better or worse, we will continue to live in a state-dominated world where most states are weak. Counterintuitive and sweeping in its coverage, The Myth of International Order demands that we fundamentally rethink foundational concepts of international politics like political stability and state failure.
Are nuclear weapons useful for coercive diplomacy? This book argues that they are useful for deterrence but not for offensive purposes.
This book explores the origin and propagation of myths in international relations. The 16 contributions demonstrate how formative historical events are often transformed into handy cliche s which are subsequently drawn on by politicians and journalists who apply these simplistic patterns to current events. Myths discussed include the Spanish Civil War, Yalta, British difference, and the German Sonderweg. The book focuses on the relationship of these myths to current policy-making. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
This edited volume offers arguably the first systemic and critical assessment of the debates about and contestations to the construction of a putative Chinese School of IR as sociological realities in the context of China’s rapid rise to a global power status. Contributors to this volume scrutinize a particular approach to worlding beyond the West as a conscious effort to produce alternative knowledge in an increasingly globalized discipline of IR. Collectively, they grapple with the pitfalls and implications of such intellectual creativity drawing upon local traditions and concerns, knowledge claims, and indigenous sources for the global production of knowledge of IR. They also consider critically how such assertions of Chinese voices and articulation of their ambition for theoretical innovation from the disciplinary margins contribute to the emergence of a Global IR as a truly inclusive discipline that recognizes its multiple and diverse foundations. Reflecting the varied perspectives of both the active participants in the Chinese School of IR debates within China and the observers and critics outside China, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars of IR theory, Non-Western IR and Chinese Studies.
Forfatterens mål med denne bog er: 1) Analyse af de gældende teorier for international politik og hvad der heri er lagt størst vægt på. 2) Konstruktion af en teori for international politik som kan kan råde bod på de mangler, der er i de nu gældende. 3) Afprøvning af den rekonstruerede teori på faktiske hændelsesforløb.
The International Civil Service: Changing Role and Concepts focuses on the roles and concepts of international civil service and suggestions of possible directions for international administration. The manuscript first offers information on the changing concepts of international civil service, including the traditional view and conflicting concepts of an international civil service. The selection then takes a look at recruitment and United Nations system. Recruitment policy relative to programs and budget planning and elements of recruitment policy and personnel policy are also discussed. The recruitment policies of the International Labor Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization, World Health Organization, and International Telecommunications Union are presented. The book examines career development in the United Nations system, including areas for potential interagency cooperation or system-wide programs and provisions on an improved career development system. The text also underscores the involvement of women in international civil service. The selection is a valuable reference for readers interested in international civil service.
For fascism, myth was reality—or was realer than the real. Fascist notions of the leader, the nation, power, and violence were steeped in mythic imagery and the fantasy of transcending history. A mythologized primordial past would inspire the heroic overthrow of a debased present to achieve a violently redeemed future. What is distinctive about fascist mythology, and how does this aspect of fascism help explain its perils in the past and present? Federico Finchelstein draws on a striking combination of thinkers—Jorge Luis Borges, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Schmitt—to consider fascism as a form of political mythmaking. He shows that Borges’s literary and critical work and Freud’s psychoanalytic writing both emphasize the mythical and unconscious dimensions of fascist politics. Finchelstein considers their ideas of the self, violence, and the sacred as well as the relationship between the victims of fascist violence and the ideological myths of its perpetrators. He draws on Freud and Borges to analyze the work of a variety of Latin American and European fascist intellectuals, with particular attention to Schmitt’s political theology. Contrasting their approaches to the logic of unreason, Finchelstein probes the limits of the dichotomy between myth and reason and shows the centrality of this opposition to understanding the ideology of fascism. At a moment when forces redolent of fascism cast a shadow over world affairs, this book provides a timely historical and critical analysis of the dangers of myth in modern politics.