Recommending Books for Purchase (Bulletin 23 - May 2018): Politics

Publisher : Lannoo Publishers/Racine

In his years as president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy met with an impressive series of leading thinkers to discuss the future of Europe. He set the bar high by asking them to tell him something he had not heard before. The philosophers, economists, political scientists and legal experts who took up his invitation met the challenge brilliantly. In openhearted and stimulating discussion, they expressed both fears and hopes for the European project at a point when Europe, with the euro crisis, found itself in a ranging storm. At the request of the president, some of these thinkers have now put their ideas and solutions on paper. Herman Van Rompuy has Written the introductory essay. The central, topical theme of this collection is the democratic legitimacy of Europe and its institutions. Where one sees too little European democracy, another sees too much Brussels presumption. The euro crisis exploded the tension between democracy and a currency union, and between the nation states of the EU. The nationalist reflexes that accompany these tensions are visible today in a new and dangerous storm that is indirectly addressed in the book: the migration crisis. All this makes After the Storm indispensable reading for anyone concerned about Europe. Book jacket.

Publisher : Touchstone

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan

A political and managerial brief on Chinese global power, this new book puts into a modern context the Chinese opportunities created by the West's chaotic and destructive capitalism. It examines China's attitudes towards the West, its capacity for strategic change and its plans for expanding its global influence.

Publisher : American Bar Association

Written by a highly respected panel of experts, this book examines the difficult and nuanced questions associated with corporate accountability from all sides. This book contributes unique and thoughtful perspectives, legally grounded and passionately contended, to the ongoing dialogue about the intersection of human rights and corporate responsibility. Corporate Responsibility for Human Rights Impacts focuses mainly on developments in the United States and the United Kingdom, although examples of legal developments in corporate accountability for human rights in developing countries are discussed in many chapters. This book considers the question: how will lawyers and courts deal with the thorny issue of extraterritoriality in transnational litigation brought against companies for human rights abuses abroad?

Publisher : Verso Books

Publisher : Granta

Publisher : Harvard Business Review Press

Fundamental frameworks for emotional intelligence and how to apply them every day. According to research by Daniel Goleman, emotional intelligence has proved to be twice as important as other competencies in determining outstanding leadership. It is now one of the crucial criteria in hiring and promotion processes, performance evaluations, and professional development courses. And it's not innate--it's a skill that all of us can improve. With this double volume you'll get HBR's 10 Must Reads on Emotional Intelligence and the HBR Guide to Emotional Intelligence. That's 10 definitive HBR articles on emotional intelligence by Goleman and other leaders in the field, curated by our editors--paired with smart, focused advice from HBR experts about how to implement those ideas in your daily work life. With Everyday Emotional Intelligence, you'll learn how to: Recognize your own EQ strengths and weaknesses Regulate your emotions in tough situations Manage difficult people Build the social awareness of your team Motivate yourself through ups and downs Write forceful emails people won't misinterpret Make better, less emotionally biased decisions Help an employee develop emotional intelligence Handle specific situations like crying at work and tense communications across different cultures

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Historically, states have appeared nervous of too much concentration of power. At the same time, they have accepted that the great powers must play a special role in maintaining international order. Can both of these tendencies be reconciled? This book argues that hegemony is one way of framing this relationship. On the basis of historical examples, the author presents an innovative scheme for rethinking hegemony, and applies it to the US role in internationalorganizations, in East Asia, and in the policy on climate change. Its urgent advice is that we must live creatively with the balance of power we now face, until such time as it is replaced by something new.

Publisher : Macmillan

Publisher : Simon & Schuster

A bold and provocative history of the men who fought to outlaw war and how an often overlooked treaty signed in 1928 was among the most transformative events in modern history. On a hot summer afternoon in 1928, the leaders of the world assembled in Paris to outlaw war. Within the year, the treaty signed that day, known as the Peace Pact, had been ratified by nearly every state in the world. War, for the first time in history, had become illegal the world over. But the promise of that summer day was fleeting. Within a decade of its signing, each state that had gathered in Paris to renounce war was at war. And in the century that followed, the Peace Pact was dismissed as an act of folly and an unmistakable failure. This book argues that that understanding is inaccurate, and that the Peace Pact ushered in a sustained march toward peace that lasts to this day. The Internationalists tells the story of the Peace Pact by placing it in the long history of international law from the seventeenth century through the present, tracing this rich history through a fascinating and diverse array of lawyers, politicians and intellectuals--Hugo Grotius, Nishi Amane, Salmon Levinson, James Shotwell, Sumner Welles, Carl Schmitt, Hersch Lauterpacht, and Sayyid Qutb. It tells of a centuries-long struggle of ideas over the role of war in a just world order. It details the brutal world of conflict the Peace Pact helped extinguish, and the subsequent era where tariffs and sanctions take the place of tanks and gunships. The Internationalists examines with renewed appreciation an international system that has outlawed wars of aggression and brought unprecedented stability to the world map. Accessible and gripping, this book will change the way we view the history of the twentieth century--and how we must work together to protect the global order the internationalists fought to make possible.

Publisher : Allen Lane

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Ideal as a brief main text for IR Theories courses or as a supplemental text for IR, American Foreign Policy, or Global Studies courses, International Relations Theory: A Primer covers the main definitions, concepts, arguments, and criticisms regarding the five predominant IR theories andapproaches used in the field today: realism, liberalism, constructivism, economic structuralism, and feminism. Bridging the gap between theory and practice, it helps students understand and critique the theories and apply them to real-world issues.

Publisher : Penguin Publishing Group

Featured on NPR, Success.com, Investor Business Daily, Thrive Global, MindBodyGreen, The Chicago Tribune, and more. There's a revolution taking place that most businesses are still unaware of. The understanding of how our brains work has radically shifted, exploding long-held myths about our everyday cognitive performance and fundamentally changing the way we engage and succeed in the workplace. Combining their expertise in both neuropsychology and management consulting, neuropsychologist Friederike Fabritius and leadership expert Dr. Hans W. Hagemann present simple yet powerful strategies for- - Sharpening focus - Achieving the highest performance - Learning and retaining information more efficiently - Improving complex decision-making - Cultivating trust and building strong teams Based on the authors' popular leadership programs, which have been delivered to tens of thousands of leaders all over the world, this clear, insightful, and engaging book will help both individuals and teams perform at their maximum potential, delivering extraordinary results.

Publisher : MIT Press

The authors of this ambitious book address a fundamental political question: why are leaders who produce peace and prosperity turned out of office while those who preside over corruption, war, and misery endure? Considering this political puzzle, they also answer the related economic question of why some countries experience successful economic development and others do not. The authors construct a provocative theory on the selection of leaders and present specific formal models from which their central claims can be deduced. They show how political leaders allocate resources and how institutions for selecting leaders create incentives for leaders to pursue good and bad public policy. They also extend the model to explain the consequences of war on political survival. Throughout the book, they provide illustrations from history, ranging from ancient Sparta to Vichy France, and test the model against statistics gathered from cross-national data. The authors explain the political intuition underlying their theory in nontechnical language, reserving formal proofs for chapter appendixes. They conclude by presenting policy prescriptions based on what has been demonstrated theoretically and empirically.

Publisher : Constable and Robinson

Publisher : Portfolio

Publisher : Haymarket

Publisher : Oxford University Press

A stirring and illuminating call to arms to transform how refugees are treated.Global refugee numbers are at their highest levels since the end of World War II, but the system in place to deal with them, based upon a humanitarian list of imagined "basic needs," has changed little. In Refuge, Paul Collier and Alexander Betts argue that the system fails to provide acomprehensive solution to the fundamental problem, which is how to reintegrate displaced people into society. Western countries deliver food, clothing, and shelter to refugee camps, but these sites, usually located in remote border locations, can make things worse. The numbers are stark: the averagelength of stay in a refugee camp worldwide is 17 years. Into this situation comes the Syria crisis, which has dislocated countless families, bringing them to face an impossible choice: huddle in dangerous urban desolation, rot in dilapidated camps, or flee across the Mediterranean to increasinglyunwelcoming governments.Refuge seeks to restore moral purpose and clarity to refugee policy. Rather than assuming indefinite dependency, Collier-author of The Bottom Billion-and his Oxford colleague Betts propose a humanitarian approach integrated with a new economic agenda that begins with jobs, restores autonomy, andrebuilds people's ability to help themselves and their societies. Timely and urgent, the book goes beyond decrying scenes of desperation to declare what so many people, policymakers and public alike, are anxious to hear: that a long-term solution really is within reach.

Publisher : Harvard Business Review Press

You may not realize it but simple, irrelevant factors can have profound consequences on your decisions and behavior, often diverting you from your original plans and desires. Sidetracked will help you identify and avoid these influences so the decisions you make do stick--and you finally reach your intended goals. Psychologist and Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino has long studied the factors at play when judgment and decision making collide with the results of our choices in real life. In this book she explores inconsistent decisions played out in a wide range of circumstances--from our roles as consumers and employees (what we buy, how we manage others) to the choices that we make more broadly as human beings (who we date, how we deal with friendships). From Gino's research, we see when a mismatch is most likely to occur between what we want and what we end up doing. What factors are likely to sway our decisions in directions we did not initially consider? And what can we do to correct for the subtle influences that derail our decisions? The answers to these and similar questions will help you negotiate similar factors when faced with them in the real world. For fans of Dan Ariely and Daniel Kahneman, this book will help you better understand the nuances of your decisions and how they get derailed--so you have more control over keeping them on track.

Publisher : HarperCollins Publishers

NATIONAL BESTSELLER CNBC and Strategy + Business Best Business Book of 2017 "Steven and Jamie have done a wonderful job of balancing the promises, perils, and how-to prescriptions of engineering peak states such as 'flow.'" --Tim Ferriss, #1 New York Times best-selling author of The 4-Hour Workweek It's the biggest revolution you've never heard of, and it's hiding in plain sight. Over the past decade, Silicon Valley executives like Eric Schmidt and Elon Musk, Special Operators like the Navy SEALs and the Green Berets, and maverick scientists like Sasha Shulgin and Amy Cuddy have turned everything we thought we knew about high performance upside down. Instead of grit, better habits, or 10,000 hours, these trailblazers have found a surprising short cut. They're harnessing rare and controversial states of consciousness to solve critical challenges and outperform the competition. New York Times bestselling author Steven Kotler and high performance expert Jamie Wheal spent four years investigating the leading edges of this revolution--from the home of SEAL Team Six to the Googleplex, the Burning Man festival, Richard Branson's Necker Island, Red Bull's training center, Nike's innovation team, and the United Nations' Headquarters. And what they learned was stunning: In their own ways, with differing languages, techniques, and applications, every one of these groups has been quietly seeking the same thing: the boost in information and inspiration that altered states provide. Today, this revolution is spreading to the mainstream, fueling a trillion dollar underground economy and forcing us to rethink how we can all lead richer, more productive, more satisfying lives. Driven by four accelerating forces--psychology, neurobiology, technology and pharmacology--we are gaining access to and insights about some of the most contested and misunderstood terrain in history. Stealing Fire is a provocative examination of what's actually possible; a guidebook for anyone who wants to radically upgrade their life.

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Our extraordinary capacity to reason and solve problems sets us aside from other animals, but our evolved thinking processes also leave us susceptibile to bias and error. The study of thinking and reasoning goes back to Aristotle, and was one of the first topics to be studied when psychologyseparated from philosophy. In this Very Short Introduction Jonathan Evans explores cognitive psychological approaches to understanding the nature of thinking and reasoning, problem solving, and decision making. He shows how our problem solving capabilities are hugely dependent on also having the imagination to ask the rightquestions, and the ability to see things from a completely new perspective. Beginning by considering the approaches of the behaviourists and the Gestalt psychologists, he moves on to modern explorations of thinking, including hypothetical thinking, conditionals, deduction, rationality, andintuition. Covering the role of past learning, IQ, and cognitive biases, Evans also discusses the idea that there may be two different ways of thinking, arising from our evolutionary history. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, andenthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

War and Change in World Politics introduces the reader to an important new theory of international political change. Arguing that the fundamental nature of international relations has not changed over the millennia, Professor Gilpin uses history, sociology, and economic theory to identify the forces causing change in the world order. The discussion focuses on the differential growth of power in the international system and the result of this unevenness. A shift in the balance of power - economic or military - weakens the foundations of the existing system, because those gaining power see the increasing benefits and the decreasing cost of changing the system. The result, maintains Gilpin, is that actors seek to alter the system through territorial, political, or economic expansion until the marginal costs of continuing change are greater than the marginal benefits. When states develop the power to change the system according to their interests they will strive to do so- either by increasing economic efficiency and maximizing mutual gain, or by redistributing wealth and power in their own favour.