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In this important book, pre-eminent economic sociologist Volker Bornschier analyzes growth and development in the Old and New Worlds - the so-called 'developed' countries. He shows how sociological and political factors have a massive impact on economic change in those countries. The book is a significant contribution to the burgeoning literature on social capital, trust and democracy and will be of interest to those in the fields of economics, sociology, politics and development studies.
An enormous acceleration of history has occurred in the current decade, thereby radically changing world society in many respects. The core countries - grouped around the triad formed by the United States, Japan, and the European Union - have experienced successive waves of change marked by phases of ascent, unfolding, and decay of societal models. What seemed stable and predictable in past decades came close to collapse or broke down entirely. As a result, we are now living through a crisis of legitimation characterized by acute contradictions. A new order, with a fresh, basic consensus around an overarching set of norms that allows problems to be solved efficiently, has not yet crystallize...
In this important book, pre-eminent economic sociologist Volker Bornschier analyzes growth and development in the Old and New Worlds - the so-called 'developed' countries. He shows how sociological and political factors have a massive impact on economic change in those countries. The book is a significant contribution to the burgeoning literature on social capital, trust and democracy and will be of interest to those in the fields of economics, sociology, politics and development studies.
This book describes and explains the long-term dynamics of Third World debt during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the various specific historical patterns of foreign loans, financial crises, and debt settlements between 1820 and 1990.
Contrary to other world regions, political regimes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) remain largely authoritarian. While the search for explanations is still ongoing, Christian Neugebauer draws attention to a hitherto underresearched factor: economic liberalization. Being part of a global shift from state-led development towards structural adjustment in the economy, these policies also deeply affected the countries of the MENA region. This makes the resilience of authoritarianism in the region all the more puzzling, as a large part of the scientific community expected economic liberalization to undermine authoritarian regimes. Neugebauer strives to solve the puzzle with a comparative case study that covers four countries (Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, and Morocco) and their political regimes, from independence in the 1950s to the Arab Spring in 2011. He shows that two specific policies of economic liberalization might in fact have been relevant for regime stability: consumer-price liberalization and privatization.
Human rights in peace and development are accepted throughout the Global South as established, normative, and beyond debate. Only in the powerful elite sectors of the Global North have these rights been resisted and refuted. The policies and interests of these global forces are antithetical to advancing human rights, ending global poverty, and respecting the sovereign integrity of States and governments throughout the Global South. The link between poverty, war, and environmental degradation has become evident over the last 60 years, further augmenting international consciousness of these issues as interconnected with the rest of the human rights corpus. This book examines the history of this struggle and outlines practical means to implement these rights through a global framework of constitutional protections. Within this emerging framework, it argues that States will be increasingly obligated to formulate policies and programs to achieve peace and development throughout the global society.
The field of international relations is often stagnated in realism and liberalism. Groundbreaking and guaranteed to stir debate, this work will move the field of international relations beyond its current, and often inadequate, assumptions. The contributors describe how states, ideologies, and other areas of analysis evolve, conquer others, or disappear entirely. Change and the fluid nature of history--though so clearly a part of historical reality--are not so deeply embedded in other paradigms as they are in the variation and selection model of evolutionary international relations. Some contributors lay out the various controversies inherent to the new theory, while others apply the paradigm to specific problems in IR theory. Regardless of the approach, the presentation of this entirely new perspective and method succeeds in forming a new paradigm of international relations. Contributors include: William R. Thompson, George Modelski, Vincent S. E. Falger, David P. Rapkin, Jennifer Sterling-Folker, Hendrik Spruyt, Stewart Patrick, Paul Hensel, Karen Rasler, Craig N. Murphy, Jeffrey A. Hart, Sangbae and Brian Pollins.
At the core of this book is the argument that, though the word "socialism" is widely held in disdain in the current discourse about the world's past and its future, the idea of socialism as collective rationality and popular democracy is far from dead.
This book presents research, analysis, and reflections on the major issues of Guatemalan development and democracy: the role of the military, the involvement of Mayan communities in national development, the possible emergence of more inclusive political institutions and the roles of international forces and agencies in Guatemalan social change. The chapters in this book are written by some of the most prominent scholars and public policy experts from Guatemala and the United States.
This volume offers an historical and comparative overview of the literature, theory, practices and critiques of what has been variously labelled 'global' or 'transnational' civil society, which includes a broad range of non-state actors, political, social and economic. The volume includes an introductory essay that historicizes and problematizes the relationship of society to state and market and contextualizes the pieces in the volume, while locating the literature in relationship to international relations, political science and sociology.