Published Books

Renowned philosopher Susan Buck-Morss collaborates with conceptual apparel label Boot Boyz Biz's Kevin McCaughey and Inventory Press' Adam Michaels on this experimental image-text update of McLuhan and Benjamin.

Showing how the montage principle allows thought to occupy the space between two seemingly unrelated things, Seeing | Making Room for Thought both studies and embodies how an arrangement of images can be a form of thinking―in other words, images not as illustrations or objects of analysis but as a montage. In a close collaboration with designers Kevin McCaughey (founder of the popular conceptual clothing line Boot Boys Biz) and Adam Michaels of Inventory Press, renowned philosopher Susan Buck-Morss expands on her unique conception of montage, combining images and text―also integrating excerpts from Buck-Morss’ previous work―in an innovative way that provides insight into images and how they work together. In both design and content, Seeing | Making Room for Thought is directly in conversation with Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium Is the Massage, as well as the works of Walter Benjamin.

By Dan Skinner (Political Science, 2009), Jonathan Wynn (Sociology, 2006), and Berkeley Franz

A surprising look at how hospitals affect and are affected by their surrounding communities.
 
An enduring paradox of urban public health is that many communities around hospitals are economically distressed and, counterintuitively, medically underserved. In The City and the Hospital two sociologists, Jonathan R. Wynn and Berkeley Franz, and a political scientist, Daniel Skinner, track the multiple causes of this problem and offer policy solutions.

Celebrities in the United States have drawn significant attention and resources to the complex issue of human trafficking—a subject of feminist concern—and they are often criticized for promoting sensationalized and simplistic understandings of the issue. In this comprehensive analysis of celebrities’ anti-trafficking activism, however, Samantha Majic finds that this phenomenon is more nuanced: even as some celebrities promote regressive issue narratives and carceral solutions, others use their platforms to elevate more diverse representations of human trafficking and feminist analyses of gender inequality. Lights, Camera, Feminism? thus argues that we should understand celebrities as multilevel political actors whose activism is shaped and mediated by a range of personal and contextual factors, with implications for feminist and democratic politics more broadly.

Conventional readings of antiquity cast Athens against Jerusalem, with Athens standing in for "reason" and Jerusalem for "faith." And yet, Susan Buck-Morss reminds us, recent scholarship has overturned this separation. Naming the first century as a zero point--"year one"--that divides time into before and after is equally arbitrary, nothing more than a convenience that is empirically meaningless. In YEAR 1, Buck-Morss liberates the first century so it can speak to us in another way, reclaiming it as common ground rather than the origin of deeply entrenched differences.

This book provides a succinct but sophisticated understanding of humanitarianism and insight into the on-going dilemmas and tensions that have accompanied it since its origins in the early nineteenth century. An accessible and engaging work by two of the leading scholars in the field, Humanitarianism Contested is essential reading for all those concerned with the future of human rights and international relations.

Co-edited by James Cuno

A pathbreaking call to halt the intertwined crises of cultural heritage attacks and mass atrocities and mobilize international efforts to protect people and cultures.
 
Intentional destruction of cultural heritage has a long history. Contemporary examples include the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, mosques in Xinjiang, mausoleums in Timbuktu, and Greco-Roman remains in Syria. Cultural heritage destruction invariably accompanies assaults on civilians, making heritage attacks impossible to disentangle from the mass atrocities of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. Both seek to eliminate people and the heritage with which they identify.
 
Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities assembles essays by thirty-eight experts from the heritage, social science, humanitarian, legal, and military communities. Focusing on immovable cultural heritage vulnerable to attack, the volume's guiding framework is the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), a United Nations resolution adopted unanimously in 2005 to permit international intervention against crimes of war or genocide. Based on the three pillars of prevent, react, and rebuild, R2P offers today's policymakers a set of existing laws and international norms that can and—as this book argues—must be extended to the protection of cultural heritage. Contributions consider the global value of cultural heritage and document recent attacks on people and sites in China, Guatemala, Iraq, Mali, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen. Comprehensive sections on vulnerable populations as well as the role of international law and the military offer readers critical insights and point toward research, policy, and action agendas to protect both people and cultural heritage. A concise abstract of each chapter is offered online in Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish to facilitate robust, global dissemination of the strategies and tactics offered in this pathbreaking call to action.

What the evolving fight for transgender rights reveals about government power, regulations, and the law

Every government agency in the United States, from Homeland Security to Departments of Motor Vehicles, has the authority to make its own rules for sex classification. Many transgender people find themselves in the bizarre situation of having different sex classifications on different documents. Whether you can change your legal sex to “F” or “M” (or more recently “X”) depends on what state you live in, what jurisdiction you were born in, and what government agency you’re dealing with. In Sex Is as Sex Does, noted transgender advocate and scholar Paisley Currah explores this deeply flawed system, showing why it fails transgender and non-binary people.

Co-authored by Luke Elliott-Negri (Ph.D. candidate, Sociology), Isaac Jabola-Carolus (Ph.D. candidate, Sociology), Marc Kagan (Ph.D. candidate, History), Jessica Mahlbacher (Ph.D. '21, Political Science), Manès Weisskircher , and Anna Zhelnina (Ph.D. '20, Sociology)

Presents cutting edge theory about the consequences of social movements and protest while asking what kind of trade-offs protest movements face in trying to change the world around them.

Many scholars have tried to figure out why some social movements have an impact and others do not. By looking inside movements at their component parts and recurrent strategic interactions, the authors of Gains and Losses show that movements usually produce a variety of effects, including recurring packages of gains and losses. They ask what kinds of trade-offs and dilemmas these packages reflect by looking at six empirical cases from around the world: Seattle's conflict over the $15 an hour minimum wage; the establishment of participatory budgeting in New York City; a democratic insurgency inside New York City's Transport Workers' Union; a communist party's struggle to gain votes and also protect citizen housing in Graz, Austria; the internal movement tensions that led to Hong Kong's umbrella occupation; and Russia's electoral reform movement embodied in Alexei Navalny. They not only examine the diverse players in these cases involved in politics and protest, but also the many strategic arenas in which they maneuver. While each of these movements made some remarkable gains, this book shows how many also suffered losses, especially in the longer run.

Delegating Responsibility explores the politics of migration in the European Union and explains how the EU responded to the 2015–17 refugee crisis. Based on 86 interviews and fieldwork in Greece and Italy, Nicholas R. Micinski proposes a new theory of international cooperation on international migration. States approach migration policies in many ways — such as coordination, collaboration, subcontracting, and unilateralism — but which policy they choose is
based on capacity and on credible partners on the ground. Micinski traces the 50-year evolution of EU migration management, like border security and asylum policies, and shows how EU officials used “crises” as political leverage to further Europeanize migration governance. In two in-depth case studies, he explains how Italy and Greece responded to the most recent refugee crisis. He concludes with a discussion of policy recommendations regarding contemporary as well as long-term aspirations for migration management in the EU. 

Micinski received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Graduate Center in 2019.

Across the global South, poor women’s lives are embedded in their social relationships and governed not just by formal institutions — rules that exist on paper — but by informal norms and practices. Village Ties takes the reader to Bangladesh, a country that has risen from the ashes of war, natural disaster, and decades of resource drain to become a development miracle. The book argues that grassroots women’s mobilization programs can empower women to challenge informal institutions when such programs are anti-oppression, deliberative, and embedded in their communities. Qayum dives into the work of Polli Shomaj (PS), a program of the development organization BRAC to show how the women of PS negotiate with state and society to alter the rules of the game, changing how poor people access resources including safety nets, the law, and governing spaces. These women create a complex and rapidly transforming world where multiple overlapping institutions exist – formal and informal, old and new, desirable and undesirable. In actively challenging power structures around them, these women defy stereotypes of poor Muslim women as backward, subservient, oppressed, and in need of saving.

Qayum received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2014.

Co-edited by Rorden Wilkinson

Global Governance Futures addresses the crucial importance of thinking through the future of global governance arrangements. It considers the prospects for the governance of world order approaching the middle of the twenty-first century by exploring today’s most pressing and enduring health, social, ecological, economic, and political challenges. Each of the expert contributors considers the drivers of continuity and change within systems of governance and how actors, agents, mechanisms, and resources are and could be mobilized. 

The aim is not merely to understand state, intergovernmental, and non-state actors. It is also to draw attention to those underappreciated aspects of global governance that push understanding beyond strictures of traditional conceptualizations and offer better insights into the future of world order.

Nicholas R. Micinski
 

UN Global Compacts is a concise introduction to the key concepts, issues, and actors in global migration governance and presents a comprehensive analysis of the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, the Global Compact on Refugees, and the Global Compact for Migration. 

The book places the declaration and compacts within their historical context, traces the evolution of global migration governance, and evaluates the implementation of the compacts. Ultimately, the global compacts were the result of three wider shifts in global governance from hard to soft law, from rights to aid, and from Cold War politics to nationalism. The book is an important contribution to international relations and migration studies and provides essential information on the NY declaration and the global compacts, in addition to an examination of the:

• Negotiating blocs and strategies
• Populist backlash to the Global Compact for Migration
• Responsibility sharing for refugee protection
• Human rights of migrants
• Principle of non-refoulement
• Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework
• UNHCR, IOM, and the UN Network on Migration

The book will be of interest to practitioners, students, and scholars of international cooperation, global governance, migrants, and refugees, and will be essential reading for graduate and undergraduate courses on international law, international organizations, and migration.

Micinski received his Ph.D. in Political Science in 2019 from The Graduate Center.

Co-authored by Tatiana Carayannis

The Third UN is the ecology of supportive non-state actors-intellectuals, scholars, consultants, think tanks, NGOs, the for-profit private sector, and the media-that interacts with the intergovernmental machinery of the First UN (member states) and the Second UN (staff members of international secretariats) to formulate and refine ideas and decision-making at key junctures in policy processes. Some advocate for particular ideas, others help analyze or operationalize their testing and implementation; many thus help the UN 'think'. While think tanks, knowledge brokers, and epistemic communities are phenomena that have entered both the academic and policy lexicons, their intellectual role remains marginal to analyses of such intergovernmental organizations as the United Nations.

Alexander Zamalin

The first history of racial injustice to examine how civility and white supremacy are linked, and a call for citizens who care about social justice to abandon civility and practice civic radicalism

The idea and practice of civility has always been wielded to silence dissent, repress political participation, and justify violence upon people of color. Although many progressives today are told that we need to be more polite and thoughtful, less rancorous and angry, when we talk about race in America, civility maintains rather than disrupts racial injustice.

Spanning two hundred years, Zamalin's accessible blend of intellectual history, political biography, and contemporary political criticism shows that civility has never been neutral in its political uses and impacts. The best way to tackle racial inequality is through "civic radicalism," an alternative to civility found in the actions of Black radical leaders including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Audre Lorde. Civic radicals shock and provoke people. They name injustice and who is responsible for it. They protest, march, strike, boycott, and mobilize collectively rather than form alliances with those who fundamentally oppose them.

In Against Civility, citizens who care deeply about racial and socioeconomic equality will see that they need to abandon this concept of discreet politeness when it comes to racial justice and instead more fully support disruptive actions and calls for liberation, which have already begun with movements like #MeToo, the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, and Black Lives Matter.

Zamalin recieved his Ph.D. in Political Science in 2014 from The Graduate Center.

Edited By Alyson Cole and Estelle Ferrarese

By using the concept of capitalism as a “form of life”, the authors in this volume reconceive capitalism, its mechanisms and effects on our bodies and on our common life.

The idea that capitalism is more than a discrete economic system and instead a “form of life” that shapes our relationships with others, our sense of ourselves and our capacities, practices, bodies, and actions in the material world should be rather obvious. Yet efforts – whether through criticism or policy remedies – to redress the vast inequalities, inherent exploitation, alienation, and the manifold destructive effects of capitalism on the environment, typically proceed without grappling fully with the entwinement of the economic with the social and cultural, much less the ethical, ontological, and phenomenological. This volume proposes “form of life” as a heuristic tool, connecting literatures that often remain isolated from one another –  the Frankfurt School, neo-materialism, Wittgenstein’s philosophy, Foucault’s and Agamben’s biopolitics, and Marx’s discussion of reproduction. In emphasizing economic practices, as opposed to capitalism as a system, they conceive of “the economic” as an integral and integrated dimension of life, and thus develop new possibilities for critique. Viewing human beings as “economic bios,” provides a needed alternative to analyses that position neoliberalism as an economic logic imposed upon the social and cultural.

The United States has never had a president quite like Donald J. Trump. He violated every rule of conventional presidential campaigns to win a race that almost no one, including at times he himself, thought he would win. In so doing, Trump set off cataclysmic shock waves across the country and world that have not subsided and are unlikely to as long as he remains in office. Critics of Trump abound, as do anonymously sourced speculations about his motives, yet the real man behind this unprecedented presidency remains largely unknown. In this innovative analysis, American presidency scholar and trained psychoanalyst Stanley Renshon reaches beyond partisan narrative to offer a serious and substantive examination of Trump's real psychology and controversial presidency. He analyzes Trump as a preemptive president trying to become transformative by initiating a Politics of American Restoration. Rigorously grounded in both political science and psychology scholarship, The Real Psychology of the Trump Presidency offers a unique and thoughtful perspective on our controversial 45th president.

Joshua Sperber

Consumer Management in the Internet Age: How Customers Became Managers in the Modern Workplace analyzes online consumer management, a practice in which customers monitor, report on, and — sometimes unwittingly — discipline workers through writing and posting online reviews. Based on case studies of the websites Yelp and Rate My Professors, Sperber analyzes how online reviewing, a popular contemporary hobby, tells us much about the collapse of the barriers separating work and leisure as well as our need for collective purpose and community wherever we can find it. This book explores the economic implications of online reviews, as reviews provide both valuable free content for websites and surveillance of, respectively, restaurant servers and college instructors.

Sperber received his Ph.D. in political science from The Graduate Center in 2017.

Daniel Skinner

How the politics of "medical necessity" complicates American health care

The definition of medical necessity has morphed over the years, from a singular physician's determination to a complex and dynamic political contest involving patients, medical companies, insurance companies, and government agencies. In this book, Daniel Skinner constructs a comprehensive understanding of the politics of defining this concept, arguing that sustained political engagement with medical necessity is essential to developing a health care system that meets basic public health objectives.

From medical marijuana to mental health to reproductive politics, the concept of medical necessity underscores many of the most divisive and contentious debates in American health care. Skinner's close reading of medical necessity's production illuminates the divides between perceptions of medical need as well as how the gatekeeper concept of medical necessity tends to frame medical objectives. He questions the wisdom of continuing to use medical necessity when thinking critically about vexing health care challenges, exploring the possibility that contracts, rights, and technology may resolve the contentious politics of medical necessity.

Skinner ultimately contends that a major shift is needed, one in which health care administrators, doctors, and patients admit that medical necessity is, at its base, a contestable political concept.

Skinner received his Ph.D. in political science from The Graduate Center in 2009.

Susan Buck-Morss asks: What does revolution look like today? How will the idea of revolution survive the inadequacy of the formula, “progress = modernization through industrialization,” to which it has owed its political life?

Socialism plus computer technology, citizen resistance plus a global agenda of concerns, revolutionary commitment to practices that are socially experimental and inclusive of difference — these are new forces being mobilized to make another future possible.

In a moving account that includes over 100 photos and images, many in color, Revolution Today celebrates the new political subjects that are organizing thousands of grassroots movements to fight racial and gender violence, state-led terrorism, and capitalist exploitation of people and the planet worldwide.

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas is a groundbreaking revisionist take on the Supreme Court justice everyone knows about but no one knows.

Most people can tell you two things about Clarence Thomas: Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, and he almost never speaks from the bench. Here are some things they don’t know: Thomas is a black nationalist. In college he memorized the speeches of Malcolm X. He believes white people are incurably racist.

In the first examination of its kind, Corey Robin — one of the foremost analysts of the right — delves deeply into both Thomas’s biography and his jurisprudence, masterfully reading his Supreme Court opinions against the backdrop of his autobiographical and political writings and speeches. The hidden source of Thomas' conservative views, Robin shows, is a profound skepticism that racism can be overcome. Thomas is convinced that any government action on behalf of African Americans will be tainted by racism; the most African Americans can hope for is that white people will get out of their way.

There’s a reason, Robin concludes, why liberals often complain that Thomas doesn’t speak but seldom pay attention when he does. Were they to listen, they’d hear a racial pessimism that often sounds similar to their own. Cutting across the ideological spectrum, this unacknowledged consensus about the impossibility of progress is key to understanding today’s political stalemate.

Co-authored by Rorden Wilkinson

Rethinking Global Governance casts fresh eyes upon a once poignant but now languishing concept. Its purpose is to disrupt the simple association between global governance and the actions and activities of international organizations in the post-Cold War era and to focus instead on a set of questions that probe the intricate and multifaceted manner in which the world is governed. The book moves beyond the ubiquity and imprecision that has plagued the term and offers an intellectual framework with the potential to improve both thinking and practice.

Building on the analytical insights of two of the leading scholars in the field, Rethinking Global Governance provides an antidote to simplistic usage and an authoritative yet readable attempt to grasp the governance of our globe — past, present, and future.

Edited by Alyson Cole and George Shulman

Michael Paul Rogin’s scholarship profoundly altered the scope, content, and disposition of political theory. He reconstituted the field by opening it to an array of texts, performances, and methods previously considered beyond the purview of the discipline. His work addressed the relationship between dimensions of politics typically split apart – institutional power and cultural forms, material interests and symbolic meanings, class projects and identity politics, the public and the private. Rogin’s scholarship enlarges our sense of the borders and genres defining political theory as a field and enriches our capacity to think critically and creatively about the political.

The editors have focused on three categories of substantive innovation:

Demonology and Countersubversion

Rogin used the concepts “countersubversive tradition” and “political demonology” to theorize how constitutive exclusions and charged images of otherness generated imagined national community. He exposed not only the dynamics of suppressing and delegitimizing political opposition, but also how politics itself is devalued and displaced.

The Psychic Life of Liberal Society

Rogin addressed the essential contradiction in liberalism as both an ideology and a regime – how a polity professing equality, liberty, and pluralist toleration engages in genocide, slavery, and imperial war.

Political Mediation: Institutions and Culture

Rogin demonstrated how cultural forms – pervasive myths, literary and cinematic works – mediate political life, and how political institutions mediate cultural energies and aspirations.

The United Nations is hardly a popular pursuit in today’s academic and policy literatures, and so it is unsurprising that an examination of that multilateral structure before 1945 shows an even more egregious absence of analytical attention. Such ignorance conveniently ignores the forgotten genius of 1942–45, namely in the wide substantive and geographic relevance of multilateralism during World War II and in the foundations for the contemporary world order. This collection of papers critically reviews the worlds of 1945 and 2015, of then and now, to determine the role of continuity and change, of the ongoing bases for compromise, and for the clashes between the Global South and Global North.

The Middle East and North Africa have recently experienced one of the highest population growth rates in the world, something which has profoundly affected the wider region and its institutions. In addition, the recent period of unprecedented political turbulence has further complicated the picture, resulting in uprisings and resistance movements that have coincided with intense shifts in socio-cultural norms, as well as economic and political change. Through highlighting the links between population dynamics and the social and political transitions, this book provides a new view of these recent regional changes. The complexity of the changes is further explained in the context of demographic transitions (mortality, fertility, migration) that work hand in hand with development (economic and social modernization) and ultimately, democratization (political modernization). These three Ds (Demographic, Development and Democratic transitions) are central to Elhum Haghighat's analysis of the Middle East and North Africa at this crucial time

By Carisa Showden and Samantha Majic.

When cases of domestic minor sex trafficking (DMST) by predatory men are reported in the media, it is often presented that a young, innocent girl has been abused by bad men with their demand for sex and profit. This narrative has shaped popular understandings of young people in the commercialized sex trades, sparking new policy responses. However, the authors of Youth Who Trade Sex in the U.S. challenge this dominant narrative as incomplete. Carisa Showden and Samantha Majic investigate young people’s engagement in the sex trades through an intersectional lens.

Ben Epstein

Over the course of American political history, political elites and organizations have often updated their political communications strategies in order to achieve longstanding political communication goals in more efficient or effective ways. But why do successful innovations occur when they do, and what motivates political actors to make choices about how to innovate their communication tactics?
 
Covering over 300 years of political communication innovations, Ben Epstein shows how this process of change happens and why. To do this, Epstein, following an interdisciplinary approach, proposes a new model called "the political communication cycle" that accounts for the technological, behavioral, and political factors that lead to revolutionary political communication changes over time. These changes (at least the successful ones) have been far from gradual, as long periods of relatively stable political communication activities have been disrupted by brief periods of dramatic and permanent transformation. These transformations are driven by political actors and organizations, and tend to follow predictable patterns.
 
Epstein moves beyond the technological determinism that characterizes communication history scholarship and the medium-specific focus of much political communication work. The book identifies the political communication revolutions that have, in the United States, led to four, relatively stable political communication orders over history: the elite, mass, broadcast, and (the current) information orders. It identifies and tests three phases of each revolutionary cycle, ultimately sketching possible paths for the future. The Only Constant is Change offers readers and scholars a model and vocabulary to compare political communication changes across time and between different types of political organizations. This provides greater understanding of where we are currently in the recurring political communication cycle, and where we might be headed.

The Graduate Center alumna Epstein (Ph.D. 2011, Political Science)

Do we need the United Nations?  Where would the contemporary world be without its largest intergovernmental organization? And where could it be had the UN’s member states and staff performed better?

These fundamental questions are explored by the leading analyst of UN history and politics, Thomas G. Weiss, in this hard-hitting, authoritative book. While counterfactuals are often dismissed as academic contrivances, they can serve to focus the mind; and here, Weiss uses them to ably demonstrate the pluses and minuses of multilateral cooperation.  He is not shy about UN achievements and failures drawn from its ideas and operations in its three substantive pillars of activities: international peace and security; human rights and humanitarian action; and sustainable development.  But, he argues, the inward-looking and populist movements in electoral politics worldwide make robust multilateralism more not less compelling.  The selection of António Guterres as the ninth UN secretary-general should rekindle critical thinking about the potential for international cooperation. There is a desperate need to reinvigorate and update rather than jettison the United Nations in responding to threats from climate change to pandemics, from proliferation to terrorism. Weiss tells you why and how.

The relationships, past and present, between Jews and the political left remain of abiding interest to both the academic community and the public. Jews and Leftist Politics contains new and insightful chapters from world-renowned scholars and considers such matters as the political implications of Judaism; the relationships of leftists and Jews; the histories of Jews on the left in Europe, the United States, and Israel; contemporary anti-Zionism; the associations between specific Jews and Communist parties; and the importance of gendered perspectives. It also contains fresh studies of canonical figures, including Gershom Scholem, Gustav Landauer, and Martin Buber, and examines the affiliations of Jews to prominent institutions, calling into question previous widely held assumptions. The volume is characterized by judicious appraisals made by respected authorities, and sheds considerable light on contentious themes. 

The Politics of Opera takes readers on a fascinating journey into the entwined development of opera and politics, from the Renaissance through the turn of the nineteenth century. What political backdrops have shaped opera? How has opera conveyed the political ideas of its times? Delving into European history and thought and an array of music by such greats as Lully, Rameau, and Mozart, Mitchell Cohen reveals how politics - through story lines, symbols, harmonies, and musical motifs - has played an operatic role both robust and sotto voce.
 
An engrossing book that will interest all who love opera and are intrigued by politics, The Politics of Opera offers a compelling investigation into the intersections of music and the state. 

Sherrie L. Baver, Angelo Falcon, and Gabriel Haslip-Viera, editors

Significant changes in New York City's Latino community have occurred since the first edition of Latinos in New York: Communities in Transition was published in 1996. The Latino population in metropolitan New York has increased from 1.7 million in the 1990s to over 2.4 million, constituting a third of the population spread over five boroughs. Puerto Ricans remain the largest subgroup, followed by Dominicans and Mexicans; however, Puerto Ricans are no longer the majority of New York's Latinos as they were throughout most of the twentieth century.

Latinos in New York: Communities in Transition, second edition, is the most comprehensive reader available on the experience of New York City's diverse Latino population. The book brings together leading social analysts and community advocates on the Latino experience to address issues that have been largely neglected in the literature on New York City. These include the role of race, culture and identity, health, the criminal justice system, the media, and higher education, subjects that require greater attention both from academic as well as policy perspectives.

What is humanitarianism? This authoritative book provides a comprehensive analysis of the original idea and its evolution, exploring its triangulation with war and politics. Peter J. Hoffman and Thomas G. Weiss trace the origins of humanitarianism, its social movement, and the institutions (international humanitarian law) and organizations (providers of assistance and protection) that comprise it. They consider the international humanitarian system's ability to regulate the conduct of war, to improve the wellbeing of its victims, and to prosecute war criminals. Probing the profound changes in the culture and capacities that underpin the sector and alter the meaning of humanitarianism, they assess the reinventions that constitute "revolutions in humanitarian affairs."

The book begins with traditions and perspectives -- ranging from classic international relations approaches to "Critical Humanitarian Studies" --and reviews seminal wartime emergencies and the creation and development of humanitarian agencies in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The authors then examine the rise of "new humanitarianisms" after the Cold War's end and contemporary cases after 9/11. The authors continue by unpacking the most recent "revolutions" -- ”the International Criminal Court and the "Responsibility to Protect" -- as well as such core challenges as displacement camps, infectious diseases, eco-refugees, and marketization. They conclude by evaluating the contemporary system and the prospects for further transformations, identifying scholarly puzzles and the acute operational problems faced by practitioners.

Peter Hoffman is a Graduate Center alumnus who currently teaches at The New School.

The post-2015 sustainable development goals and the changing environment for development cooperation requires a renewed and transformed UN system. In line with their increasing significance as economic powers, a growing number of emerging countries will play an expanded role in the UN system, which could take the form of growing financial contributions, greater presence in governance, higher staff representation, a stronger voice in development deliberations, and a greater overall influence on the development agenda.

Emerging Powers and the UN explores in depth the relationship of these countries on the world stage and their role in the future UN development system. Formally, the relationship is through representation as member states (first UN) and also UN staff (second UN). However, the importance of civil society and market actors (third UN) in emerging countries is also growing.

What do we mean when we use the term 'failed states'? This book presents the origins of the term, how it shaped the conceptual framework for international development and security in the post-Cold War era, and why. The book also questions how specific international interventions on both aid and security fronts - greatly varied by actor - based on these outsiders' perceptions of state failure create conditions that fit their characterizations of failed states. Susan L. Woodward offers details of international interventions in peacebuilding, statebuilding, development assistance, and armed conflict by all these specific actors. The book analyzes the failure to re-order the international system after 1991 that the conceptual debate in the early 1990s sought - to the serious detriment of the countries labelled failed or fragile and the concept's packaging of the entire 'third world', despite its growing diversity since the mid-1980s, as one.

Seven decades after its establishment, the United Nations and its system of related organizations and programs are perpetually in crisis. While the twentieth-century’s world wars gave rise to ground-breaking efforts at international organization in 1919 and 1945, today’s UN is ill-equipped to deal with contemporary challenges to world order. Neither the end of the Cold War nor the aftermath of 9/11 has led to the “next generation” of multilateral institutions. But what exactly is wrong with the UN that makes it incapable of confronting contemporary global challenges and, more importantly, can we fix it?

In this revised and updated third edition of his popular text, leading scholar of global governance Thomas G. Weiss takes a diagnose-and-cure approach to the world organization’s inherent difficulties. In the first half of the book, he considers: the problems of international leadership and decision making in a world of self-interested states; the diplomatic complications caused by the artificial divisions between the industrialized North and the global South; the structural problems of managing the UN’s many overlapping jurisdictions, agencies, and bodies; and the challenges of bureaucracy and leadership. The second half shows how to mitigate these maladies and points the way to a world in which the UN’s institutional ills might be “cured.” Weiss’s remedies are not based on pious hopes of a miracle cure for the UN, but rather on specific and encouraging examples that could be replicated. With considered optimism and in contrast to received wisdom, he contends that substantial change is both plausible and possible.

This completely revised and updated eighth edition serves as the definitive text for courses in which the United Nations is either the focus or a central component. Built around three critical themes in international relations—peace and security, human rights and humanitarian affairs, and sustainable human development—the eighth edition of The United Nations and Changing World Politics guides students through the seven turbulent decades of UN politics.

This new edition is fully revised to incorporate recent developments on the international stage, including new peace operations in Mali and the Central African Republic; ongoing UN efforts to manage the crises in Libya, Syria, and Iraq; the Iran Nuclear Deal; and the new Sustainable Development Goals. The authors discuss how international law frames the controversies at the UN and guides how the UN responds to violence and insecurity, gross violations of human rights, poverty, underdevelopment, and environmental degradation. Students of all levels will learn that the UN is a complex organization, comprised of three interactive entities that cooperate and also compete with each other to define and advance the UN’s principles and purposes.

A singular development in the post-Cold War era is the use of military force to protect human beings. From Rwanda to Kosovo, Sierra Leone to East Timor, and Libya to Côte d'Ivoire, soldiers have rescued civilians in some of the world's most notorious war zones. But what about Syria? Why have we observed the Syrian slaughter and done nothing? Is humanitarian intervention in crisis? Is the so-called responsibility to protect dead or alive?

In this fully revised and expanded third edition of his highly accessible and popular text, Thomas Weiss explores these compelling questions. Drawing on a wide range of case studies and providing a persuasive overview of the theory and practice of humanitarian intervention in the modern world, he examines its political, ethical, legal, strategic, economic, and operational dimensions to highlight key debates and controversies. Neither celebratory nor complacent, his analysis is an engaging exploration of the current quandaries and future challenges for robust international humanitarian action in the twenty-first century.

The creation of the United Nations system during World War II is a largely unknown or forgotten story among contemporary decision makers, international relations specialists, and policy analysts. This book aims to recover the wartime history of the UN and explore how the forgotten past can shed light on a possible and more desirable future.

Problems posed by Syria’s chemical weapons attacks, Egypt’s ouster of an elected government, and myriad other global dilemmas beg the question of whether and how the world can be governed. The challenge is addressing what former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called “Problems without Passports”—environmental, economic, humanitarian, and political crises that threaten stability, prosperity, and even human survival. Everything is globalized—everything except politics, which remain imprisoned behind national borders. The world has changed, but our basic way of managing it has not. We pursue fitful, tactical, short-term, and local responses for actual or looming threats that require sustained, strategic, longer-run, and global actions.

With clarity and passion, Thomas G. Weiss argues for a diversity of organizational arrangements—some centralized, some decentralized—and a plurality of problem-solving strategies—some worldwide, some local. He proposes a three-pronged strategy: the expansion of the formidable amount of practical global governance that already exists, the harnessing of political and economic possibilities opened by the communications revolution, and the recommitment by states to a fundamental revamping of the United Nations.

How can we confront the problems of diminished democracy, pervasive economic inequality and persistent global poverty? Is it possible to fulfill the dual aims of deepening democratic participation and achieving economic justice, not only locally but also globally? Carol Gould proposes an integrative and interactive approach to the core values of democracy, justice and human rights, looking beyond traditional politics to the social conditions that would enable us to realize these aims. Her innovative philosophical framework sheds new light on social movements across borders, the prospects for empathy and solidarity with distant others, and the problem of gender inequalities in diverse cultures, and also considers new ways in which democratic deliberation can be enhanced by online networking and extended to the institutions of global governance. Her book will be of great interest to scholars and upper-level students of political philosophy, global justice, social and political science, and gender studies.

The history of the Frankfurt School cannot be fully told without examining the relationships of Critical Theorists to their Jewish family backgrounds, Jacobs asserts in his latest book. Jewish matters had significant effects on key figures in the Frankfurt School, he writes, among them Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, and Herbert Marcuse. At some points, their Jewish family backgrounds clarify their life paths; at others, these backgrounds help to explain why the leaders of the School stressed the significance of antisemitism, according to the author. This book investigates how the Jewish backgrounds of major Critical Theorists, and the ways in which they related to their origins, impacted upon their work, the history of the Frankfurt School, and differences that emerged among them over time. 

In 2000, at the United Nations Millennium Summit, world leaders agreed to the Millennium Declaration. The Declaration included development targets to be reached by 2015, which were to become known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Progress has been made towards the achievement of the MDGs, but poverty remains widespread.

With the terminal year approaching, the international community has begun the process of determining the goals which might follow the MDGs. While the UN is driving the process, there has been very little introspection on its own organizational capacity to help countries to meet the goals and is being increasingly sidelined by other more effective development organizations and initiatives. Based on extensive original research that has critically examined the role and functions of the organizations of the UN development system, this book seeks to capture in a single volume a comprehensive review of the UN’s performance and prospects for development. The contributors each offer extensive experience and familiarity—as practitioners and researchers—with the UN and development; and the book will contribute to the urgently needed debate on the reform of the UN development system at a critical juncture.

The main rationale for this book, and its timing, is the unusual opportunity provided by the 2015 threshold to re-think the UN development system and to empower it to support a new development agenda and will be of interest to students, scholars of International Organizations and development studies.

Illustrates how the politics surrounding sex work shape individual and collective agency. Negotiating Sex Work rejects the divided framework that the selling of sexual acts is either legitimate work or a form of exploitation, instead offering diverse and compelling contributions that reframe these viewpoints. A timely and necessary intervention into sex work debates, this volume challenges how policy makers and the broader public regard sex workers’ capacity to advocate for their own interests.

This book provides a cross-regional investigation of the role of citizenship and ethnicity in migration, political incorporation, and political transnationalism in the age of globalization, exploring the political realities of Dutch Antilleans in the Netherlands and Latin American Nikkeijin in Japan.

In San Francisco, the St. James Infirmary (SJI) and the California Prostitutes Education Project (CAL-PEP) provide free, nonjudgmental medical care, counseling, and other health and social services by and for sex workers—a radical political commitment at odds with government policies that criminalize prostitution. To maintain and expand these much-needed services and to qualify for funding from state, federal, and local authorities, such organizations must comply with federal and state regulations for nonprofits. In Sex Work Politics, Samantha Majic investigates the way nonprofit organizations negotiate their governmental obligations while maintaining their commitment to outreach and advocacy for sex workers’ rights as well as broader sociopolitical change.

Nancy Foner, Jan Rath, Jan Willem Duyvendak, Rogier van Reekum (Editors).

This volume brings together a distinguished and interdisciplinary group of American and Dutch scholars to examine and compare the impact of immigration on two of the world's largest urban centers. The original essays discuss how immigration has affected social, political, and economic structures, cultural patterns, and intergroup relations in the two cities, investigating how their particular, and changing, urban contexts have shaped immigrant and second generation experiences. Despite many parallels between New York City and Amsterdam, the differences stand out; juxtaposing essays on immigration in the two cities helps to illuminate the essential issues that todays immigrants and their children confront. 

The responsibility to protect (R2P) is at a crossroads, the latest in a journey that is only ten years old. This book present debates on the prevention of mass atrocities to R2P’s normative prospects. The book addresses key questions as a way to inform and drive on-going conversations about R2P. Moving beyond well-rehearsed debates about the tensions and meanings around sovereignty in R2P practice, the book focuses on advancing the credibility of the preventive dimensions of R2P, whilst simultaneously examining the extent of R2P’s current value-added in state decision making—especially for the 2011 actions in Libya and Côte d’Ivoire.

THOMAS G. WEISS AND RORDEN WILKINSON, EDS.

This comprehensive volume is a self-contained resource on the role of myriad actors in the governance of global life. It offers in-depth and accessible coverage of the history and theories of international organization and global governance; discussions of the full range of state, intergovernmental, and nonstate actors; and examinations of key issues in all aspects of contemporary global governance. Written by a diverse array of authors, the book's fifty chapters are woven together by a comprehensive introduction to the field, separate section introductions designed to guide students and faculty, and helpful pointers to further reading.

Janet Gornick and MARKUS JÄNTTI

This state-of-the-art volume presents comparative, empirical research on a topic that has long preoccupied scholars, politicians, and everyday citizens: economic inequality. While income and wealth inequality across all populations is the primary focus, the contributions to this book pay special attention to the middle class, a segment often not addressed in inequality literature.

Written by leading scholars in the field of economic inequality, all 17 chapters draw on microdata from the databases of LIS, an esteemed cross-national data center based in Luxembourg. Using LIS data to structure a comparative approach, the contributors paint a complex portrait of inequality across affluent countries at the beginning of the 21st century. The volume also trail-blazes new research into inequality in countries newly entering the LIS databases, including Japan, Iceland, India, and South Africa.

THOMAS G. WEISS, DAVID P. FORSYTHE, ROGER A. COATE, AND KELLY-KATE PEASE

This completely revised and updated edition is built around three critical themes in international relations—peace and security, human rights, and humanitarian affairs. Students of all levels will learn what the UN is, how it operates, and what its relationships are with the universe of external actors and institutions, from sovereign states to the plethora of nongovernmental and intergovernmental organizations now playing important roles in world politics. This new edition is fully revised to take into account recent events, including the UN's actions in Libya and Syria, the tenure of Ban Ki-moon, the global economic and financial meltdown, and efforts to confront nuclear proliferation and climate change. 

There is no magic formula for successfully designing a teacher evaluation system. However there is abundant evidence that suggests involving teachers in the process will reduce the likelihood of opposition, gridlock, and reform failure. Everyone at the Table provides materials to genuinely engage teachers in the evaluation process. The book is a research-based and field-tested practical guide for school leaders. With this resource, educators will have the tools they need to develop meaningful teacher evaluations.

This probing yet accessible book examines "global governance," or the sum of the informal and formal values, norms, procedures, and institutions that help states, intergovernmental organizations, civil society, and transnational corporations identify, understand, and address trans-boundary problems. The book illuminates the chasm between the magnitude of a growing number of global threats-climate change, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, financial instabilities, pandemics-and the feeble contemporary political structures for international problem-solving. Can the framework of global governance help us to better understand the reasons behind this fundamental disconnect as well as possible ways to attenuate its worst aspects? The author offers a guardedly sanguine 'yes.' 

Feared by conservatives and embraced by liberals when he entered the White House, Barack Obama has since been battered by criticism from both sides. In Out of Many, One, O'Brien explains why. We are accustomed to seeing politicians supporting either a minimalist state characterized by unfettered capitalism and individual rights or a relatively strong welfare state and regulatory capitalism. Obama, O'Brien argues, represents the values of a lesser-known third tradition in American political thought that defies the usual left-right categorization. Analyzing Obama's major legislative victories-financial regulation, health care, and the stimulus package-the author shows how they reflect a stakeholder society that neither regulates in the manner of the New Deal nor deregulates. By establishing Obama within the context of a much longer and broader political tradition, this book sheds critical light on both the political and philosophical underpinnings of his presidency and a fundamental shift in American political thought. 

This fascinating study of six wartime presidents provides lessons about the limits of the power of the White House during armed conflict. Polsky examines Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, showing how each gravely overestimated his power as commander-in-chief. With insight and clarity, he identifies overarching issues that will inform current and future policymakers. The single most important dynamic, he writes, is the erosion of a president's freedom of action: each decision propels him down a path from which he cannot turn back. In the final chapter, Polsky examines Obama's options in light of these conclusions, and considers how the experiences of the past might inform the world we face now. 

Six decades after its establishment, the United Nations and its system of related agencies and programs are perpetually in crisis. While the twentieth-century’s world wars gave rise to ground-breaking efforts at international organization in 1919 and 1945, today’s UN is ill-equipped to deal with contemporary challenges to world order. Neither the end of the Cold War nor the aftermath of 9/11 has led to the “next generation” of multilateral institutions.

But what exactly is wrong with the UN, and how can we fix it? Is it possible to retrofit the world body? In his succinct and hard-hitting analysis, Thomas G. Weiss takes a diagnose-and-cure approach to the world organization’s inherent difficulties. In the first half of the book, he considers: the problems of international leadership and decision making in a world of self-interested states; the diplomatic difficulties caused by the artificial divisions between the industrialized North and the global South; the structural problems of managing the UN’s many overlapping jurisdictions, agencies, and bodies; and the challenges of bureaucracy and leadership. The second half shows how to mitigate these maladies and points the way to a world in which the UN’s institutional ills might be “cured.” His remedies are not based on pious hopes of a miracle cure for the UN, but rather on specific and encouraging examples that could be replicated. With considered optimism and in contrast to received wisdom, Weiss contends that substantial change in intergovernmental institutions is plausible and possible.

The new and expanded second edition of this well-regarded and indispensable book will continue to spark debate amongst students, scholars, and policymakers concerned with international politics, as well as anyone genuinely interested in the future of the United Nations and multilateral cooperation.

Combining a merciless exposé of left-wing political folly and cross-cultural misunderstanding with a spirited defense of the 1960s, Wolin shows how French students and intellectuals, inspired by their perceptions of China's Cultural Revolution and motivated by utopian hopes, incited grassroots social movements and reinvigorated French civic and cultural life. While the allure of Maoism actually had little to do with a real understanding of Chinese politics, it served as a vehicle for an emancipatory transformation of French society. Wolin examines how Maoism captured the imaginations of France's leading cultural figures, influencing Jean-Paul Sartre's 'perfect Maoist moment'; Michel Foucault's conception of power; Philippe Sollers's chic, leftist intellectual journal Tel Quel; and Julia Kristeva's book on Chinese women, which included a vigorous defense of foot-binding. The paperback edition was named one of the 2012 Best Books in History by the Financial Times.

Tracing conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution, Robin argues that the right is fundamentally inspired by hostility toward emancipating the lower orders. Some conservatives endorse the free market, others oppose it; some criticize the state, others celebrate it; yet underlying these views is the impulse to defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality. Still, suggests Robin, conservatives favor a dynamic conception of politics and society-one that involves self-transformation, violence, and war. They are also highly adaptive. This partiality to violence and capacity for reinvention has been critical to their success. Ranging widely-from Edmund Burke to Antonin Scalia, from John C. Calhoun to Ayn Rand-the author advances the notion that all right-wing ideologies are historical improvisations on a theme: the experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.

One of the more prolific and influential analysts of multilateral approaches to global problem-solving over the last three decades is Thomas G. Weiss. Thinking about Global Governance, Why People and Ideas Matter, assembles key scholarly and policy writing.

This collection organizes his most recent work addressing the core issues of the United Nations, global governance, and humanitarian action. The essays are placed in historical and intellectual context in a substantial new introduction, which contains a healthy dose of the idealism and ethical orientation that invariably characterize his best work. This volume gives the reader a comprehensive understanding of these key topics for a globalizing world and is an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike.

Will Barack Obama come to be seen as a pragmatic centrist, or will America's political divisions prove too wide for him to bridge? How has Obama's uncommonly calm character served him as commander-in-chief? With extensive biographical, psychological, and political research and analysis, Renshon follows Obama's presidency through his first two years in office. He digs into the question of who the real Obama is and assesses the advantages and limitations that he brings to the presidency. These questions cannot be answered without recourse to psychological analysis and psychological knowledge of presidential leadership and the presidency itself. Renshon argues that underlying Obama's ambition lies a need for redemption-of himself, of his parents, and ultimately of America itself. 

The sociologist and political scientist Frances Fox Piven and her late husband Richard Cloward have been famously credited by commentator Glenn Beck with devising the 'Cloward/Piven Strategy,' a world view responsible, according to Beck, for everything from creating a 'culture of poverty' and fomenting 'violent revolution' to causing global warming and the recent financial crisis. Who's Afraid of Frances Fox Piven? is a concise, accessible introduction to Piven's actual thinking, from her early work on welfare rights and 'poor people's movements,' written with Cloward, through her influential examination of American voting habits, and her most recent work on the possibilities for a new movement for progressive reform. 

This work revisits and expands upon Yankelovich¹s seminal 1991 book, Coming to Public Judgment, which argued that people advance through several distinct stages to form politically meaningful judgments about public issues. In particular, citizens must "work through" the temptation to opt for easy answers or engage in wishful thinking, reconcile conflicting values, and come to terms with tough tradeoffs, before they can truly support a new course of action. The present work examines these themes in light of changing societal conditions, from the advent of the Internet and the weakening of traditional media to the proliferation of urgent and complex problems that cannot be put off without courting disaster.

In his lead chapter, Dan Yankelovich urges us to move away from a "misleading model of public opinion" that "dominates the expert culture of our society, including journalists, scientists, business leaders, scholars, professional experts, and political leaders." He and the other contributors (Will Friedman, Keith Melville, Robert Kingston, Alison Kadlec, Steven A. Rosell, and Heidi Gantwerk) describe methods used by organizations like Public Agenda, National Issues Forums, and Viewpoint Learning, Inc., to advance the public's learning curve through various forms of civic engagement, education, dialogue and deliberation.

They provide case studies of education reform in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and math and science initiatives in the Kansas City area, and examples of programs that have focused on issues ranging from energy and health care to US-Muslim relations. One chapter is a dialogue between Yankelovich and Friedman.

While our political culture resonates to the public's desire for a stronger voice, it fails to ensure that this voice reflects anything more than the spin, spectacle, and excessive partisanship that dominate today's public discourse. Toward Wiser Public Judgment offers insights and strategies to counteract these troubling trends.

The authors make an incisive case that the American way of higher education, now a $420 billion-per-year business, has lost sight of its primary mission: the education of young adults. Visiting colleges across the nation, they probe the true performance of the Ivy League, the baleful influence of tenure, an unhealthy reliance on part-time teachers, and the proliferation of essentially vocational training programs. They doubt this truly qualifies as higher education, defined as "a cultural journey, an intellectual expedition, a voyage confronting new ideas and information, together expanding and deepening our understanding of ourselves and the world." But they also reveal those faculties and institutions that are getting it right and proving that teaching and learning can be achieved-and at a much more reasonable price than the $250,000 tab for four years at most top-tier universities. 

THOMAS G. WEISS AND RAMESH THAKUR

In the twenty-first century, the world is faced with threats on a planetary scale that cannot be confronted without collective action. Although global government as such does not exist, formal and informal institutions, practices, and initiatives-together forming a kind of "global governance"-bring a greater measure of predictability, stability, and order to trans-border issues than might be expected. Yet there are significant gaps between many current global problems and available solutions. Weiss and Thakur analyze the United Nations' role in addressing such gaps, using case studies of some of the most burning problems of our age, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, humanitarian crises, development aid, climate change, human rights, and HIV/AIDS. 

This book tackles one of America's most enduring quandaries: the great, unresolved question of how to overcome persistent ghetto poverty. Launched in 1994, the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program took a largely untested approach: helping families move from high-poverty, inner-city public housing to low-poverty neighborhoods, some in the suburbs. The book's innovative methodology emphasizes the voices and choices of the program's participants but also rigorously analyzes the changing structures of regional opportunity and constraint that shaped the fortunes of those who "signed up." It shines a light on the hopes, surprises, achievements, and limitations of a major social experiment. As the authors make clear, for all its ambition, MTO is a uniquely American experiment, and this book brings home its powerful lessons for policymakers and advocates, scholars, students, journalists, and all who share a deep concern for opportunity and inequality in our country. 

This book explores the complexity of women's social status in the Middle East and North African region and fills a gap in the existing literature by providing an up-to-date and comprehensive portrait of women's status from a theoretical and socio-demographic perspective.

Janet Gornick and Marcia C. Meyers

In the labor market and workplace, anti-discrimination rules, affirmative action policies, and pay equity procedures exercise a direct effect on gender relations. But what can be done to influence the ways that men and women allocate tasks and responsibilities at home?

In Gender Equality, Volume VI in the Real Utopias series, social scientists Janet C. Gornick and Marcia K. Meyers propose a set of policies—paid family leave provisions, working time regulations, and early childhood education and care—designed to foster more egalitarian family divisions of labor by strengthening men’s ties at home and women’s attachment to paid work. Their policy proposal is followed by a series of commentaries—both critical and supportive—from a group of distinguished scholars, and a concluding essay in which Gornick and Meyers respond to a debate that is a timely and valuable contribution to egalitarian politics.

Though women represent more than half of the world's population, they account for only fifteen percent of its elected officials, and their particular concerns often go unaddressed in the political sphere. This two-volume work explores the role of women in political systems worldwide, and examines how government actions in various countries impact the lives of the female population. The first volume looks at such crucial issues facing women today as health policy, civil rights, and education. The second volume profiles twenty-two countries that represent a broad range of governments, economies, and cultures; reviews the history and current state of women's political and economic participation in each particular country; and includes an in-depth look at a representative policy. The result is a resource unlike any other-one that gives students, researchers, and other interested readers a fresh new way of investigating a truly global issue.

In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation. Winner of the Frantz Fanon Book Award, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic by linking it to the Haitian Revolution. Examining the startling connections between the two, the author challenges us to widen the boundaries of our historical imagination. 

This new work surveys how rapid changes taking place at the start of the twenty-first century in social, cultural, political, and economic domains impact on sexuality, health, and human rights. The relationships between men, women and children are changing quickly, as are traditional family structures and gender norms. What were once viewed as private matters have become public, and an array of new social movements-transgender, intersex, sex worker, people living with HIV-have come into the open. The book is split into three sections: Global 'Sex' Wars, Epistemological Challenges and Research Agendas, and Promises and Limits of Sexual Rights. Set in the context of the major theoretical debates of recent decades, the book offers a unique framework for understanding this new world, and will be of interest to professionals, advocates, and policy researchers. It is suitable for a wide range of courses covering areas such as gender studies, human sexuality, public health, and social policy. 

"Few of the countless real-life stories of workplace discrimination suffered by men and women every day are ever told publicly. This book boldly and eloquently rights that wrong, going where no plaintiff testimony could ever dare because these stories are often too raw, honest, ambiguous, and nuanced to be told in court or reported in a newspaper."—from the Foreword

Telling Stories Out of Court reaches readers on both an intellectual and an emotional level, helping them to think about, feel, and share the experiences of women who have faced sexism and discrimination at work. It focuses on how the federal courts interpreted Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Offering insights that law texts alone cannot, the short stories collected here—all but two written for this volume—help readers concentrate on the emotional content of the experience with less emphasis on the particulars of the law. Grouped into thematic parts titled "In Their Proper Place," "Unfair Treatment," "Sexual Harassment," and "Hidden Obstacles," the narratives are combined with interpretive commentary and legal analysis that anchor the book by revealing the impact this revolutionary law had on women in the workplace.

At the same time, the stories succeed on their own terms as compelling works of fiction, from "LaKeesha's Job Interview," in which a woman's ambition to move from welfare to work faces an ironic obstacle, to "Plato, Again," in which a woman undergoing treatment for cancer finds her career crumble under her, to "Vacation Days," which takes the reader inside the daily routine of a nanny who works at the whim of her employer.

This book observes how the growth of the political authority of the U.N. Security Council challenges the basic idea that states have legal autonomy over their domestic affairs. The individual essays survey the implications that flow from these developments in the crucial policy areas of: terrorism; economic sanctions; the prosecution of war crimes; human rights; humanitarian intervention; and, the use of force. In each of these areas, the evidence shows a complex and fluid relationship between state sovereignty, the power of the U.N., and the politics of international legitimation. Demonstrating how world politics has come to accommodate the contradictory institutions of international authority and international anarchy, this book makes an important contribution to how we understand and study international organizations and international law. Written by leading experts in the field, this volume will be of strong interest to students and scholars of international relations, international organizations, international law, and global governance.

Behind the contentious politics of immigration lies the question of how well new immigrants are becoming part of American society. To address this question, Inheriting the City draws on the results of a ground-breaking study of young adults of immigrant parents in metropolitan New York to provide a comprehensive look at their social, economic, cultural, and political lives. While some experts worry that these young adults would not do as well as previous waves of immigrants due to lack of high-paying manufacturing jobs, poor public schools, and an entrenched racial divide, Inheriting the City finds that the second generation is rapidly moving into the mainstream-speaking English, working in jobs that resemble those held by native New Yorkers their age, and creatively combining their ethnic cultures and norms with American ones.  Mary C. Waters is M.E. Zukerman Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. Jennifer Holdaway is a Program Director at the Social Science Research Council.

Years of tremendous growth in response to complex emergencies have left a mark on the humanitarian sector. Matters that once seemed settled are now subjects of intense debate. What is humanitarianism? Is it limited to the provision of relief to victims of conflict, or does it include broader objectives such as human rights, democracy promotion, development, and peacebuilding? For much of the last century, humanitarianism was guided by the principles of neutrality, impartiality, and independence. More recently, some humanitarian organizations have begun to relax these tenets. The recognition that humanitarian action can lead to negative consequences has forced humanitarian organizations to measure their effectiveness, to reflect on their ethical positions, and to consider the consequences of their actions. This book brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines to address the humanitarian identity crisis, including humanitarianism's relationship to accountability, great powers, privatization and corporate philanthropy, warlords, and the ethical evaluations that inform life-and-death decision making during and after emergencies. 

This book represents an update of a well-received volume published in 1989, Caribbean in World Affairs. Given the broad changes that have occurred in the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and taking into account requests for a second edition from Caribbean scholars and policymakers in recent years, Jaqueline Braveboy-Wagner has written this new edition with the same aim as the original: to provide a comprehensive and theoretically-grounded account of diplomatic developments in these microstates. She provides a lasting analysis of small state behavior, noting the recent renewal of interest in small states in both the global north and south. The new material includes attention to the changed global setting, updated theoretical developments in foreign policy, and the inclusion of Haiti and Suriname, newer members of Caricom. 

Medical devices and medical technology are used for patient care, genetic testing, clinical trials, and experimental clinical investigations. This volume on the regulation of medical devices in the European Union, with a focus on France, will be of interdisciplinary interest and significance for policymakers in countries around the globe. The EU regulatory regime is one of three global regional regimes, and medical products manufactured in EU countries are sold worldwide. As countries confront an aging population on a global scale, there will inevitably be an increase in the demand for health services and, concomitantly, the use of medical devices in medical and surgical procedures. Medical technologies and devices are used ethically most of the time; yet they have the potential for unethical use when scientific medicine is elevated over human life and death. Understanding how to effectively regulate medical devices is essential to people throughout the world. 

Offering an elegant defense of empiricism, the authors explore the roles of geography and political choice in constructing nations and states in Central America-Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica-over the last twenty-five years. Countries are shown to be unique: there are a daunting number of variables. There is causality, but not the kind that can be revealed in the laboratory or on the blackboard. Liberalism—today defined as democracy and unfettered markets—may be in vogue, but it has no inherent determinants. Democracy and market economies, when welded to the messy realities of individual countries, are compatible with many different outcomes. The world is more pluralistic in both causes and effects than either academic theories or political rhetoric suggest. Forrest D. Colburn and Arturo Cruz S. teach at INCAE, the premier graduate school of management in Latin America.  Cruz has been selected by newly elected President Daniel Ortega to serve as Nicaragua's ambassador to the United States.

In the immediate postwar period, West Germany's citizenry was largely passive. In the late 1960s, however, Germany experienced waves of left-wing protest that expanded the political agenda and broadened political participation. After unification, the country was confronted by new challenges from right-wing groups, which often engaged in violence during the early 1990s. Roger Karapin looks at the growth of these protest movements and the reasons why protesters in different conflicts used quite different methods (ranging from conventional participation to nonviolent disruption to violent militancy). His study of nine cases includes leftist opposition to urban-renewal and nuclear-energy policies in the 1970s and 1980s and rightist opposition to immigration policy in the 1990s. Comparisons of contrasting cases reveal the crucial role played by strategic interaction among protesters, party politicians, and government officials-rather than socioeconomic factors or political institutions-in determining the paths that the movements took.

An authoritative, one-volume treatment of sixty years of history of the United Nations written by over forty distinguished scholars, analysts, and practitioners. Citations and suggested readings contain a wealth of primary and secondary references to the history, politics, and law of the world organization. Between two covers, there is a clear and penetrating examination of the UN's development since 1945 and the challenges that it faces in the twenty-first century. This key reference work also contains appendices of the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Statute of the International Court of Justice. This volume is intended to shape the discipline of UN studies, and to establish itself as the essential point of reference for all those working on, in, or around the world organization.

A singular development of the post-Cold War era is the use of military force to protect human beings. From Rwanda to Kosovo, Sierra Leone to East Timor, soldiers have rescued civilians in some of the world's most notorious war zones. Drawing on two decades of research, Thomas G. Weiss provides a persuasive introduction to the theory and practice of humanitarian intervention in the modern world. He examines political, ethical, legal, strategic, economic, and operational dimensions and uses a wide range of cases to highlight key debates and controversies. This succinct and highly accessible survey is neither celebratory nor complacent. The author locates the normative evolution of what is increasingly known as 'the responsibility to protect' in the context of the global war on terror and the 2005 UN World Summit. The result is an engaging exploration of the current dilemmas and future challenges for international humanitarian action in the twenty-first century. 

In Understanding the Bush Doctrine: Psychology and Strategy in the Age of Terrorism, leading scholars of U.S. foreign policy, international relations, and political psychology examine one of the most consequential and controversial statements of national security policy in contemporary American history. Unlike other books which focus only on unilateralism or preventive war, this volume provides a comprehensive framework with which to analyze the Bush Doctrine by identifying five central and interrelated elements of the doctrine-American preeminence, assertive realism, strategic stand-apart alliances, selective multilateralism, and democratic transformation. The essays in the volume examine the Doctrine in terms of these five key elements. Given its centrality to American national security, and the fact that the effects of it are likely to be felt well into the twenty-first century, Understanding the Bush Doctrine will provide a critically balanced and pointed assessment of the Bush Doctrine and its premises, as well as a fair appraisal of its implications and prospects.

This is the fifth edition of a definitive text for courses dealing with the United Nations. Built around three critical themes in international relations-international peace and security, human rights and humanitarian affairs, and building peace through sustainable development—the edition guides students through the complexity of politics and history of the UN. Students of all levels will learn what the UN is, how it operates, and what its relationships are with the universe of external actors and institutions, from sovereign states to the plethora of nongovernmental and intergovernmental organizations now playing important roles in world politics. The edition is fully revised to take into account recent events, including the aftermath of September 11th and the war on terrorism, the war in Iraq, the first deliberations of the International Criminal Court, and the largest-ever world summit on the occasion of the UN's sixtieth anniversary. 

The crisis of internally displaced persons (IDPs) was first confronted in the 1980s, and the problems of those suffering from this type of forced migration has grown continually since then. This volume traces the normative, legal, institutional, and political responses to the challenges of assisting and protecting IDPs. Drawing on official and confidential documents as well as interviews with leading personalities,Internal Displacement provides an unparalleled analysis of this important issue and includes: An exploration of the phenomenon of internal displacement and of policy research about it A review of efforts to increase awareness about the plight of IDPs and the development of a legal framework to protect them A ‘behind-the-scenes’ look at the creation and evolution of the mandate of the Representative of the Secretary-General on IDPs A variety of case studies illustrating the difficulties in overcoming the operational shortcomings within the UN system A foreword by former UN high commissioner for refugees, Sadako Ogata. Internal Displacement is written by two outstanding scholars and will appeal to students, scholars, and practitioners with interests in war and peace, forced migration, human rights and global governance.

Condemnations of "victim politics" are a familiar feature of American public life. Politicians and journalists across the ideological spectrum eagerly denounce "victimism." Accusations of "playing the victim" have become a convenient way to ridicule or condemn. President George W. Bush even blamed an Islamic "culture of victimization" for 9/11.  The Cult of True Victimhoodshows how the panic about domestic and foreign victims has transformed American politics, warping the language we use to talk about suffering and collective responsibility.

With forceful and lively prose, Alyson Cole investigates the ideological underpinnings, cultural manifestations, and political consequences of anti-victimism in an array of contexts, including race relations, the feminist movement, conservative punditry, and the U.S. legal system. Being a victim, she contends, is no longer a matter of injuries or injustices endured, but a stigmatizing judgment of individual character. Those who claim victim status are cast as shamefully passive or cynically manipulative. Even the brutalized Central Park jogger came forth to insist that she is not a victim, but a survivor.

Offering a fresh perspective on major themes in American politics, Cole demonstrates how this new use of "victim" to derogate underlies seemingly disparate social and political debates from the welfare state, criminal justice, and abortion to the war on terror.

Despite the widespread acceptance of human rights at the normative level, actual progress toward the realization of human rights globally has been far from satisfactory. In taking a look at the question, this book departs from those analyses that focus on the role of the state and transcends, as well, the literature on the role of the NGOs. Instead, it urges the study of the entire human rights universe; examines a broad range of non-state actors engaged in various activities that violate, promote, or protect human rights; and stresses the need for mechanisms to curb human rights violations. Among the important issues explored by the contributing authors are bioethics, the genetic revolution, armed conflicts, battered women, the impact of the media, and welfare reform. George Andreopoulos is an associate professor of criminal justice and political science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center.

Arguing forcefully that changing times are a clarion call for new thinking, this book convincingly shows that if humanitarian organizations continue to operate as they have in the past, they will fail to help the very victims whom they try to save. Focusing especially on the emergence of “new wars,” Hoffman and Weiss insist that humanitarian organizations must recognize that they live in a political world and that their actions and goals are invariably affected by military action. The brand of warfare that erupted in the 1990s-marked by civil or transnational armed conflicts featuring potent non-state actors, altered political economies, a high proportion of civilian casualties, and a globalized media-produced horrors that shocked consciences and led humanitarian agencies to question their unyielding stance of neutrality and impartiality. Indeed, in a departure from earlier norms and practices, some have reinvented their policies and tools and created “new humanitarianisms.” This authoritative book traces the evolution of the international humanitarian system from its inception in the 1860s, parses the dynamics of war and emergency response from the 1980s through the current disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq, and provides a strategic roadmap for practitioners. By bringing historical perspective to bear, this volume provides an invaluable analytical framework for grasping the nature of humanitarian crises and how agencies can respond strategically rather than reactively to change. Students will find its blend of clearly presented theory and case studies a powerful tool for understanding the roles of state and non-state actors in international relations. By charting the tides of continuity and change, this book will prepare agencies to dodge both figurative and actual bullets that threaten humanitarian action at the outset of the millennium.

The popular image of the Caribbean's exotic landscape overshadows the rich island cultures that are both linguistically and politically diverse, but trapped in a global economy that offers few options for development. The region is also fraught with environmental problems, including water and air pollution, solid waste mismanagement, destruction of ecosystems, and deforestation. Bringing together ten essays by social scientists and activists, this book provides the most comprehensive exploration to date of the range of environmental issues facing the region and the social movements that have developed to deal with them. The authors consider the role that global and regional political economies play in this process and provide valuable insight into Caribbean environmentalism. Many of the essays by prominent Caribbean analysts are made available for the first time in English. 

UN Voices presents the human and moving life stories of an extraordinary group of individuals who contributed to the economic and social record of the UN’s life and activities. Drawing from extensive oral histories, the book presents in their own words the experiences of seventy-three individuals from around the globe who have spent much of their professional lives engaged in United Nations affairs. Among those interviewed are such noted figures as Kofi Annan, Margaret Anstee, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Noeleen Heyzer, Conor Cruise O’Brien, Javier Perez de Cuellar, Amartya Sen, and Kurt Waldheim, as well as many less well-known UN professional men and women who have made significant contributions to the international struggle for a better world. Their personal accounts bring to life the UN’s contributions in dealing with such events as decolonization, the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, and September 11, 2001, and such issues as human rights, the environment, poverty, and gender.

Bodies in Revolt argues that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) could humanize capitalism by turning employers into care-givers, creating an ethic of care in the workplace. Unlike other feminists, Ruth O'Brien bases her ethics not on benevolence, but rather on self-preservation. She relies on Deleuze's and Guttari's interpretation of Spinoza and Foucault's conception of corporeal resistance to show how a workplace ethic that is neither communitarian nor individualistic can be based upon the rallying cry "one for all and all for one."

Is it possible and worthwhile to use the military in conjunction with humanitarian action to thwart violence and mitigate civilian suffering? Military-Civilian Interactions seeks to answer this question by looking at the contemporary context and history of military-civilian interactions, developing a framework for assessing military costs and civilian benefits, and examining in depth seven prominent cases from the 1990s-Northern Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Haiti, East Timor, and Kosovo. In the wake of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq after September 11, the book further examines how multilateral military operations could expand or contract in the future to the benefit or peril of affected populations. 

The attention paid to American imperialism has turned national focus away from a crucial dimension of foreign policy: the domestic politics of war. Frances Fox Piven examines the ways in which the war on terror served to shore up the Bush administration's political base and analyzes the manner in which politicians have used the emotional fog of war to further their social and economic agendas. The War at Home makes sense of these developments by putting the war in the context of history and by turning an unsentimental eye on the domestic motivations of American militarism. 

Stanley Renshon presents a psychological portrait of the current president in In His Father's Shadow. Renshon shows how from his beginnings, as a pampered son who showed little promise, to his successful rise to the presidency, George W. Bush altered himself through acts of will and faith. Bush is examined as a man who battled-and defeated-his own inner demons to become a president determined to battle terrorism and extremism around the world. The book provides a psychological portrait of the president, giving insight into his judgment, policies, and leadership

Almost two-thirds of New Yorkers under the age of 18 are the children of immigrants. In-depth ethnographies in this volume explore the ways in which the new second generation is adapting to, and also changing, the fabric of American culture. Among the ethnographies included are those of Graduate Center alumni Nancy Lopez (on Dominican men's high-school experiences), Dae Young Kim (on the integration of Korean Americans in New York), and Aviva Zeltzer-Zubida (on being a Russian Jewish American). Mary C. Waters is professor of sociology at Harvard University.

Wars on Terrorism and Iraq provides a timely and critical analysis of the impact of the Iraq war and the war on terrorism upon human rights, particularly internationally, as well as an examination of related tensions between unilateralism and multilateralism in U.S. foreign policy. The distinguished contributors examine the consequences for international relations and world order when the traditional standard bearer for human rights and democracy, the United States, apparently fails to champion the rule of law and negotiated conflict resolution. The authors also suggest effective policies to promote greater fulfillment of human rights in order to achieve peaceful accord within nations and stability internationally. 

This volume analyzes how, over the years, the international system has shaped the United Nations role in dealing with terrorism, and how events such as 9/11 and the American intervention in Iraq have reoriented its approach. The first half of the book addresses the international context, including the UN's concern for the rights and security of states relative to those of individuals; the second half of the book focuses more closely on the UN itself, its values, mechanisms, and history, and compares and contrasts the roles of the Security Council and the General Assembly in preventing and reacting to terrorism in the future. A concluding chapter looks at broader strategies for addressing root causes, with an emphasis on social justice as a key to conflict prevention. Thomas G. Weiss is a presidential professor of political science at the Graduate Center and director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies.

The stories in this collection give readers a chance to visualize and perhaps resolve these questions for themselves. Using the techniques of both fiction and creative non-fiction, the contributors bring to life the everyday problems that people with disabilities face. Rather than analyzing the law, the writers dramatize the complex set of issues underlying the ADA as it is practiced and interpreted around the country: at a small Southern college, in the Library of Congress, on a New York City sidewalk. The stories from these local battlegrounds form a unique portrait of a continuing struggle.

Rosalind Pollack Petchesky has written a critical yet optimistic analysis of the role of transnational women's groups in setting the agendas for women's health in international and national settings. In Global Prescriptions, she reviews a decade of women's participation in UN conferences, transnational networks, national advocacy efforts, and sexual and reproductive health provision. In the book, Petchesky critiques the Cairo, Beijing, and Copenhagen UN conference documents; assesses capitalist obstacles to providing essential AIDS drugs; and argues that the power of women's transnational coalitions is only as great as their organic connections with grassroots social movements.

Janet Gornick and Marcia K. Meyers

Parents around the world grapple with the common challenge of balancing work and child care. Despite common problems, the industrialized nations have developed dramatically different social and labor market policies―policies that vary widely in the level of support they provide for parents and the extent to which they encourage an equal division of labor between parents as they balance work and care. In Families That Work, Janet Gornick and Marcia Meyers take a close look at the work-family policies in the United States and abroad and call for a new and expanded role for the U.S. government in order to bring this country up to the standards taken for granted in many other Western nations. In many countries in Europe and in Canada, family leave policies grant parents paid time off to care for their young children, and labor market regulations go a long way toward ensuring that work does not overwhelm family obligations. In addition, early childhood education and care programs guarantee access to high-quality care for their children. In most of these countries, policies encourage gender equality by strengthening mothers' ties to employment and encouraging fathers to spend more time caregiving at home. In sharp contrast, Gornick and Meyers show how in the United States―an economy with high labor force participation among both fathers and mothers―parents are left to craft private solutions to the society-wide dilemma of "who will care for the children?" Parents―overwhelmingly mothers―must loosen their ties to the workplace to care for their children; workers are forced to negotiate with their employers, often unsuccessfully, for family leave and reduced work schedules; and parents must purchase care of dubious quality, at high prices, from consumer markets. By leaving child care solutions up to hard-pressed working parents, these private solutions exact a high price in terms of gender inequality in the workplace and at home, family stress and economic insecurity, and―not least―child well-being. Gornick and Meyers show that it is possible–based on the experiences of other countries―to enhance child well-being and to increase gender equality by promoting more extensive and egalitarian family leave, work-time, and child care policies. Families That Work demonstrates convincingly that the United States has much to learn from policies in Europe and in Canada, and that the often-repeated claim that the United States is simply "too different" to draw lessons from other countries is based largely on misperceptions about policies in other countries and about the possibility of policy expansion in the United States.

Susan Woodward and Stefano Bianchini

In his report to the 2000 Millennium Assembly, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan challenged the intellectual community to forge a consensus about when international humanitarian intervention-such as in Rwanda, when it was much too late, and Kosovo where it was effective-should and should not occur. The Responsibility To Protect is the result of this challenge, and forms a watershed moment for this issue that has taken center-stage in the past months. The first volume, the report proper, is a succinct 70-page outline of the committee's findings, covering such issues as when to act, what part nations take in rebuilding, and the question of authority. The second volume, edited by Thomas G. Weiss (Presidential Professor, The Graduate Center) and Don Hubert (Senior Policy Advisor, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Ottawa) is a comprehensive account of the report's research and background including bibliography.

Crippled Justice, the first comprehensive intellectual history of disability policy in the workplace from World War II to the present, explains why American employers and judges, despite the Americans with Disabilities Act, have been so resistant to accommodating the disabled in the workplace. Ruth O’Brien traces the origins of this resistance to the postwar disability policies inspired by physicians and psychoanalysts that were based on the notion that disabled people should accommodate society rather than having society accommodate them.

O’Brien shows how the remnants of postwar cultural values bogged down the rights-oriented policy in the 1970s and how they continue to permeate judicial interpretations of provisions under the Americans with Disabilities Act. In effect, O’Brien argues, these decisions have created a lose/lose situation for the very people the act was meant to protect. Covering developments up to the present, Crippled Justice is an eye-opening story of government officials and influential experts, and how our legislative and judicial institutions have responded to them.

Influxes of immigrants constantly change America's demographic makeup, and as new arrivals from various locations have flooded in, the diversity of co-existing cultures has expanded dramatically. This shifting of the racial map is forcing America to question some of its centuries-old beliefs, with the result that individual and group rights are changing-sometimes being attacked-while political leaders generally refuse to bring this issue to the forefront of their agendas. The contributors to One America? focus on the role of American political leadership in an increasingly fragmented, and frictional, society. Renshon writes in his introduction that this moment in our history is the most challenging in terms of national identity since the Civil War, but rather than pitting commerce against agriculture, urban centers against rural traditions, and North against South," the "new danger lies in conflicts between people of different racial, cultural and ethnic heritages." 

Wallach offers a "critical historicist" interpretation of Plato, showing how Plato's theory, while a radical critique of the conventional ethical and political practice of his own era, has the potential to contribute to democratic discourse about ethics and politics today. He argues that Plato articulates and "solves" his Socratic problem in his various dialogues in different but potentially complementary ways. The book effectively extracts Plato from the straitjacket of Platonism and from the interpretive perspectives of the past fifty years-principally those of Karl Popper, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, M. I. Finley, Jacques Derrida, and Gregory Vlastos. 

With the publication of the first volume in the United Nations Intellectual History Project, a significant lacuna in twentieth-century scholarship and international relations begins to be filled," writes UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in the book's foreword. In Ahead of the Curve?, authors Emmerij, Jolly, and Weiss analyze the evolution of key ideas and concepts about international economic and social development under UN auspices since 1945.

In this book, Thomas G. Weiss and Cindy Collins show how institutional humanitarian challenges and intervention concerns within the international humanitarian system–combined with the domestic context of armed conflicts–often yield policies that do not serve the immediate requirements of victims for relief, protection of rights, stabilization, and reconstruction. Based on compelling, up-to-date case studies of the post-Cold War experience in Central America, northern Iraq, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, and the African Great Lakes, the authors make recommendations for a more effective international humanitarian system.

There are two distinct contemporary challenges to the relief of war-induced human suffering–one within the institutions that make up the international humanitarian system, the other on the ground in war zones. Varied interests, resources, and organizational structures within institutions hamper the effectiveness of efforts on behalf of war victims. And at the same time, on the ground, there are ethical, legal, and operational challenges and dilemmas that require actors continually to choose a course of action with associated necessary evils.

Reinterpreting the roots of twentieth-century American labor law and politics, Ruth O'Brien argues that it was not New Deal Democrats but rather Republicans of an earlier era who developed the fundamental principles underlying modern labor policy. By examining a series of judicial rulings from the first three decades of the century, she demonstrates that the emphasis on establishing the procedural rights of workers that is usually associated with the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 actually emerged over a decade earlier, in the Republican-formulated labor legislation of the 1920s.

O'Brien's findings underscore a paradox within the foundation of labor policy and the development of liberalism in the United States. The leaders of the liberal state created a strict regulatory framework for organized labor only after realizing that the mainstream labor movement's capacity for collective power threatened to undermine individualism and classlessness in American society. In other words, O'Brien argues, the individualism that accounts for the overall weakness of the liberal state also produced America's statist labor policy.

The use of sanctions is increasing in the post-Cold War world. Along with this increase, the international community must ask itself whether sanctions “work,” in the sense that they incite citizens to change or overthrow an offending government, and whether sanctions are really less damaging than the alternative of war. Here for the first time, sanctions and humanitarian aid experts converge on these questions and consider the humanitarian impacts of sanctions along with their potential political benefits. The results show that often the most vulnerable members of targeted societies pay the price of sanctions and that, in addition, the international system is called upon to compensate the victims for the undeniable pain they have suffered.

Human suffering on a large scale is a continuing threat to world peace. Several dozen gruesome civil wars disturb global order and jar our collective conscience each year. The 50 million people displaced by current complex humanitarian emergencies overwhelm the ability of the post-Cold War world to understand and cope with genocide, ethnic cleansing, massacres, and other inhumane acts. Greater public awareness of how much is at stake and how much more costly it is to act later rather than sooner can be a critical element in stemming the proliferation of these tragedies. The media play an increasingly crucial role in publicizing humanitarian crises, and advances in technology have intensified the immediacy of their reports. Because the world is watching as events unfold, policymakers are under great pressure to respond rapidly. Close cooperation between international relief agencies and the media is thus essential to help prevent or contain the humanitarian emergencies that threaten to overwhelm the world’s capacity to care and assist. The authors of this book – all prominent in the fields of disaster relief, journalism, government policymaking, and academia – show how influential well-informed and well-developed media attention has become in forming policies to resolve ethnic and religious conflict and humanitarian crises. The authors argue that the media and humanitarians can collaborate effectively to alter both the attitudes of the public and the actions of policymakers regarding ethnic conflict and humanitarian crises.

In the first political analysis of unemployment in a socialist country, Susan Woodward argues that the bloody conflicts that are destroying Yugoslavia stem not so much from ancient ethnic hatreds as from the political and social divisions created by a failed socialist program to prevent capitalist joblessness. Under Communism the concept of socialist unemployment was considered an oxymoron; when it appeared in postwar Yugoslavia, it was dismissed as illusory or as a transitory consequence of Yugoslavia’s unorthodox experiments with worker-managed firms. In Woodward’s view, however, it was only a matter of time before countries in the former Soviet bloc caught up with Yugoslavia, confronting the same unintended consequences of economic reforms required to bring socialist states into the world economy.


By 1985, Yugoslavia’s unemployment rate had risen to 15 percent. How was it that a labor-oriented government managed to tolerate so clear a violation of the socialist commitment to full employment? Proposing a politically based model to explain this paradox, Woodward analyzes the ideology of economic growth, and shows that international constraints, rather than organized political pressures, defined government policy. She argues that unemployment became politically “invisible,” owing to its redefinition in terms of guaranteed subsistence and political exclusion, with the result that it corrupted and ultimately dissolved the authority of all political institutions. Forced to balance domestic policies aimed at sustaining minimum standards of living and achieving productivity growth against the conflicting demands of the world economy and national security, the leadership inadvertently recreated the social relations of agrarian communities within a postindustrial society.

Yugoslavia was well positioned at the end of the cold war to make a successful transition to a market economy and westernization. Yet two years later, the country had ceased to exist, and devastating local wars were being waged to create new states. Between the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the start of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in March 1992, the country moved toward disintegration at astonishing speed.

The collapse of Yugoslavia into nationalist regimes led not only to horrendous cruelty and destruction, but also to a crisis of Western security regimes. Coming at the height of euphoria over the end of the cold war and the promise of a “new world order,” the conflict presented Western governments and the international community with an unwelcome and unexpected set of tasks. Their initial assessment that the conflict was of little strategic significance or national interest could not be sustained in light of its consequences. By 1994 the conflict had emerged as the most challenging threat to existing norms and institutions that Western leaders faced. And by the end of 1994, more than three years after the international community explicitly intervened to mediate the conflict, there had been no progress on any of the issues raised by the country’s dissolution.

A study commissioned by the World Peace Foundation and the Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies, Brown University. Updates a similar work published in 1991, to account for the increased strength of the United Nations as apparent in the war against Iraq, and the official demise of the Soviet Union.

Evaluates the potential of utilizing the art of peacekeeping in the support of often-beleaguered and frustrated humanitarian relief efforts during armed conflicts, with case studies of peacekeeping operations in the Congo, Chad, and Zimbabwe and of humanitarian efforts in the Sudan, Ethiopia, and Mozambique.

There has been very little critical analysis of the ‘nuts and bolts’ of international economic negotiations. This book therefore fills a yawning gap in the literature. Written by a long-term observer of international organizations and a UN staff member for over ten years, it is nevertheless an unbiased study from personal viewpoint. Neither a history of nor an apology for UNCTAD, it analyzes what happens (and does not happen) during intergovernmental bargaining, giving selected examples. It further puts forward proposals that could change the direction of the secretariat’s work.