Social science.

Today between forty and sixty nations, home to more than one billion people, have either collapsed or are teetering on the brink of failure. The world's worst problems--terrorism, drugs and human trafficking, absolute poverty, ethnic conflict, disease, genocide--originate in such states, and the international community has devoted billions of dollars to solving the problem. Yet by and large the effort has not succeeded. Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart have taken an active part in the effort to save failed states for many years, serving as World Bank officials, as advisers to the UN, and as high-level participants in the new government of Afghanistan. In Fixing Failed States, they describe the issue--vividly and convincingly--offering an on-the-ground picture of why past efforts have not worked and advancing a groundbreaking new solution to this most pressing of global crises. For the paperback edition, they have added a new preface that addresses the continuing crisis in light of ongoing governance problems in weak states like Afghanistan and the global financial recession. As they explain, many of these countries already have the resources they need, if only we knew how to connect them to global knowledge and put them to work in the right way. Their state-building strategy, which assigns responsibility equally among the international community, national leaders, and citizens, maps out a clear path to political and economic stability. The authors provide a practical framework for achieving these ends, supporting their case with first-hand examples of struggling territories such as Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosovo and Nepal as well as the world's success stories--Singapore, Ireland, and even the American South.

Fragile states are a menace. Their lawless environments spread instability across borders, provide havens for terrorists, threaten access to natural resources, and consign millions of people to poverty. But Western attempts to reform these benighted places have rarely made things better. Kaplan argues that to avoid revisiting the carnage and catastrophes seen in places like Iraq, Bosnia, and the Congo, the West needs to rethink its ideas on fragile states and start helping their peoples build governments and states that actually fit the local landscape. Fixing Fragile States lays bare the fatal flaws in current policies and explains why the only way to give these places a chance at peace and prosperity is to rethink how development really works. Flawed governance systems, not corrupt bureaucrats or armed militias, are the cancers that devour weak states. The cure, therefore, is not to send more aid or more peacekeepers but to redesign political, economic, and legal structures-to refashion them so they can leverage local traditions, overcome political fragmentation, expand governance capacities, and catalyze corporate investment. After dissecting the reasons why some states prosper and others sink into poverty and violence, Fixing Fragile States visits seven deeply dysfunctional places—including Pakistan, Bolivia, West Africa, and Syria—and explains how even the most desperate of them can be transformed.

Contests to reorganize the international system after the Cold War agree on the security threat of failed states: this book asks why.

Across the US, cities and metropolitan areas are facing huge economic and competitive challenges that Washington won't, or can't, solve. The good news is that networks of metropolitan leaders – mayors, business and labor leaders, educators, and philanthropists – are stepping up and powering the nation forward. These state and local leaders are doing the hard work to grow more jobs and make their communities more prosperous, and they're investing in infrastructure, making manufacturing a priority, and equipping workers with the skills they need. In The Metropolitan Revolution, Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley highlight success stories and the people behind them. · New York City: Efforts are under way to diversify the city's vast economy · Portland: Is selling the "sustainability" solutions it has perfected to other cities around the world · Northeast Ohio: Groups are using industrial-age skills to invent new twenty-first-century materials, tools, and processes · Houston: Modern settlement house helps immigrants climb the employment ladder · Miami: Innovators are forging strong ties with Brazil and other nations · Denver and Los Angeles: Leaders are breaking political barriers and building world-class metropolises · Boston and Detroit: Innovation districts are hatching ideas to power these economies for the next century The lessons in this book can help other cities meet their challenges. Change is happening, and every community in the country can benefit. Change happens where we live, and if leaders won't do it, citizens should demand it. The Metropolitan Revolution was the 2013 Foreword Reviews Bronze winner for Political Science.

Haiti may well be the only country in the Americas with a last name. References to the land of the "black Jacobins" are almost always followed by the phrase "the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere". To that dubious distinction, on 12 January 2010 Haiti added another, when it was hit by the most devastating natural disaster in the Americas, a 7.0 Richter scale earthquake. More than 220,000 people lost their lives and much of its vibrant capital, Port-au-Prince, was reduced to rubble. Since 2004, the United Nations has been in Haiti through MINUSTAH, in an ambitious attempt to help Haiti raise itself by its bootstraps. This effort has now acquired additional urgency. Is Haiti a failed state? Does it deserve a Marshall-plan-like program? What will it take to address the Haitian predicament? In this book, some of the world's leading experts on Haiti examine the challenges faced by the first black republic, the tasks undertaken by the UN, and the new role of hemispheric players like Argentina, Brazil and Chile, as well as that of Canada, France and the United States.

Despite the increasing volume of research on state building, the use and uptake of findings by those involved in policy-making remains largely under-examined. As such, the main themes running through this book relate to issues of research influence, use and uptake into policy. It grapples with problems associated with decision-making dynamics, knowledge management and the policy process and draws on concepts and analytical models developed within the public policy and research utilization literature, from linear models of instrumental use to the enlightenment function of research.

State failure takes many forms. Somalia offers one extreme. The country's prolonged civil war led to the collapse of central authority, with state control devolving to warlord-led factions that competed for the spoils of local commerce, political power, and international aid. Malawi, on the other hand, is at the other end of the scale. During President Bingu's second term in office, the country's economy collapsed as a result of poor policies and Bingu's brand of personal politics. On the surface, Malawi's economy seemed largely stable; underneath, however, the polity was fractured and the economy broken. In between these two extremes of state failure are all manner of examples, many of which Mills explores in the fascinating and profoundly personal Why States Recover. Throughout he returns to his key questions: how do countries recover? What roles should both insiders and outsiders play to aid that process? Drawing on research in more than thirty countries, and incorporating interviews with a dozen leaders, Mills examines state failure and identifies instances of recovery in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. For anyone interested in the reasons behind states' failure, and remedies to ensure future economic stability, it is important reading.

Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are? Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence? Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Korea, to take just one of their fascinating examples, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The south forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation, and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities. The economic success thus spurred was sustained because the government became accountable and responsive to citizens and the great mass of people. Sadly, the people of the north have endured decades of famine, political repression, and very different economic institutions—with no end in sight. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created these completely different institutional trajectories. Based on fifteen years of original research Acemoglu and Robinson marshall extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, medieval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, including: - China has built an authoritarian growth machine. Will it continue to grow at such high speed and overwhelm the West? - Are America’s best days behind it? Are we moving from a virtuous circle in which efforts by elites to aggrandize power are resisted to a vicious one that enriches and empowers a small minority? - What is the most effective way to help move billions of people from the rut of poverty to prosperity? More philanthropy from the wealthy nations of the West? Or learning the hard-won lessons of Acemoglu and Robinson’s breakthrough ideas on the interplay between inclusive political and economic institutions? Why Nations Fail will change the way you look at—and understand—the world.

René Grotenhuis analyses policies intended to bring stability to fragile states and shows how they ignore the question of what gives people a sense of belonging to a nation-state.