Wars Crises And Transformation

The acclaimed historian demonstrates a link between climate change and social unrest across the globe during the mid-17th century. Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides, government collapses—the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were unprecedented in both frequency and severity. The effects of what historians call the "General Crisis" extended from England to Japan and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. In this meticulously researched volume, historian Geoffrey Parker presents the firsthand testimony of men and women who experienced the many political, economic, and social crises that occurred between 1618 to the late 1680s. He also incorporates the scientific evidence of climate change during this period into the narrative, offering a strikingly new understanding of the General Crisis. Changes in weather patterns, especially longer winters and cooler and wetter summers, disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests. This in turn brought hunger, malnutrition, and disease; and as material conditions worsened, wars, rebellions, and revolutions rocked the world.

Examinies possible futures which is very rare in International Relations, Global Political Economy or Conflict and Peace Research The book makes a case for a novel vision of future global governance One of the first books to systematically provide a political economy analysis of security and securitisation

This volume analyzes crises in International Relations (IR) in an innovative way. Rather than conceptualizing a crisis as something unexpected that has to be managed, the contributors argue that a crisis needs to be analyzed within a wider context of change: when new discourses are formed, communities are (re)built, and new identities emerge. Focusing on Ukraine, the book explore various questions related to crisis and change, including: How are crises culturally and socially constructed? How do issues of agency and structure come into play in Ukraine? Which subjectivities were brought into existence by Ukraine crisis discourses? Chapters explore the participation of women in Euromaidan, identity shifts in the Crimean Tatar community and diaspora politics, discourses related to corruption, anti-Soviet partisan warfare, and the annexation of Crimea, as well as long distance impacts of the crisis.

Uncertainty is the watchword of contemporary world politics. Monumental changes are occurring throughout the international system and statespeople are wrestling with peaceful solutions to the transformation in relative power of the USA, Soviet Union and China, Japan and in Europe. In this book, Charles Doran proposes a managed solution to peaceful change. He presents a bold, original and wide-ranging analysis of the present balance of power, of future prospects for the international system and of the problems involved in this transformation. Professor Doran demonstrates why such change has often been accompanied by world war, providing new insights into the causes of the First World War. But, he argues, systems change can be both peaceful and secure. Developing a theory of the power cycle, the author reveals the structural bounds on statecraft and shows how the tides of history can suddenly and unexpectedly shift against the state.

With the end of the Cold War, the nations of the world were forced to rethink their strategies of development. Disintegration or Transformation? looks at eight of the world's most highly industrialized nations, the decisions they made, and continue to make, and the reaction of the society which they govern in the face of a constantly-changing international scene. The end of the Cold War signalled the victory of liberal democracy over competing forms of government, most notably communism. Nevertheless, victory has given way to change and not to the celebration one might have expected. National publics, unsatisfied with being simply among the "best", ask why their lives are not better, why their economies are not more competitive, and why their governments are not more responsive. McCarthy and Jones analyze this problem by treating the state as a building block for advanced industrial society, emphasizing national state traditions and the distinction between national time and world time. Disintegration or Transformation? is an important and timely collection of articles that will be essential reading for anyone interested in the development of states and their place in the world economy.

The third century AD was a turbulent and testing time for the Roman Empire. A new and powerful foe in the east had risen up to challenge Rome directly. Barbarians on the northern frontiers were now more aggressive and more numerous than before and internally the population of the empire had to contend with rampant inflation and a series of terrible plagues. Unfortunately, the chaos became magnified by a lack of continuity on the imperial throne. The army had real political power in the third century, making and unmaking emperors as it saw fit. It had been aided in this by Septimius Severus, the African emperor who had won out in the civil wars following Commodus' assassination. He increased the army's pay and granted other privileges. While the army gained rapidly in size, stature and political savvy during the reign of Septimius Severus, it also accelerated a material transformation. Armour, shields, helmets, swords and javelins all began to be replaced with new styles. Legions in Crisis looks closely at the new styles of arms and armour, comparing their construction, use and effectiveness to the more familiar types of Roman kit used by soldiers fighting the earlier Dacian and Marcomannic Wars. What did this transformation in military technology mean for the tactical choices used on the battlefield? Although the outcome had looked in doubt, the army and the empire it protected weathered the storm to emerge into the fourth century fully able to tackle the challenges of a new age.

WINNER OF THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' TOP BOOK "An intelligent explanation of the mechanisms that produced the crisis and the response to it...One of the great strengths of Tooze's book is to demonstrate the deeply intertwined nature of the European and American financial systems."--The New York Times Book Review From the prizewinning economic historian and author of Shutdown and The Deluge, an eye-opening reinterpretation of the 2008 economic crisis (and its ten-year aftermath) as a global event that directly led to the shockwaves being felt around the world today. We live in a world where dramatic shifts in the domestic and global economy command the headlines, from rollbacks in US banking regulations to tariffs that may ignite international trade wars. But current events have deep roots, and the key to navigating today’s roiling policies lies in the events that started it all—the 2008 economic crisis and its aftermath. Despite initial attempts to downplay the crisis as a local incident, what happened on Wall Street beginning in 2008 was, in fact, a dramatic caesura of global significance that spiraled around the world, from the financial markets of the UK and Europe to the factories and dockyards of Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, forcing a rearrangement of global governance. With a historian’s eye for detail, connection, and consequence, Adam Tooze brings the story right up to today’s negotiations, actions, and threats—a much-needed perspective on a global catastrophe and its long-term consequences.

International Political Earthquakes is the masterwork of the preeminent scholar Michael Brecher. Brecher, who came of age before World War II, has witnessed more than seven decades of conflict and has spent his career studying the dynamics of relations among nations throughout the world. When terrorism, ethnic conflict, military buildup, or other local tensions spark an international crisis, Brecher argues that the structure of global politics determines its potential to develop into open conflict. That conflict, in turn, may then generate worldwide political upheaval. Comparing international crises to earthquakes, Brecher proposes a scale analogous to the Richter scale to measure the severity and scope of the impact of a crisis on the landscape of international politics. Brecher's conclusions about the causes of international conflict and its consequences for global stability make a convincing case for gradual, nonviolent approaches to crisis resolution. Michael Brecher is R. B. Angus Professor of Political Science at McGill University.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the United States engaged in the most ambitious and far-reaching liberal order building the world had yet seen. This liberal international order has been one of the most successful in providing security and prosperity to more people, but in the last decade the American-led order has been troubled. Some argue that the Bush administration undermined it. Others argue that we are witnessing he end of the American era. In Liberal Leviathan G. John Ikenberry argues that the crisis that besets the American-led order is a crisis of authority. The forces that have triggered this crisis have resulted from the successful functioning and expansion of the postwar liberal order, not its breakdown.