A comparative, interdisciplinary volume on the robustness and fragility of political orders that focuses on leader understandings and their consequences. It includes studies of failed orders, like the Weimar Republic and the Soviet Union, current orders, like the United States, regional orders, such as the European Union, and international orders.

This book asks if it is time to “reboot” the fundamental institutions of global international society. The volume revisits Hedley Bull’s seminal contribution The Anarchical Society by exploring the interconnected nature of change, contestation and resilience for maintaining order in today’s uncertain and complex environment. The volume adds to Bull’s theorizing by recognizing that order demands change, that contestation should be welcomed, and that resilience is anchored in local and agent-led forms of ordering. The contributors to Part One of the book focus on theoretical and conceptual issues related to order in the global international society, whilst the contributors to Part Two of the book focus on the primary institutions as listed by Hedley Bull with the addition of a chapter on the market adding a distinctive commentary on new and important dynamics of change, contestation and resilience of the existing institutions.

Introduction -- Part 1. Principles of Justice in the West -- Justice in Confucianism -- Justice in Mohism, Legalism, Daoism -- Comparing East and West -- Part 2. International "Order" -- Justice and Order Between America and China -- Reimagining World Order -- Conclusion -- Smart Power and Great Learning.

The crises of the European Union extend beyond the challenges of Covid-19, Brexit, the Eurozone, and mass migration, cutting to the core of the EU itself. Taking a structural rather than event-based approach, this text unpacks all aspects of the EU in crisis and analyses the implications of these crises for the EU and its member states. This edition argues that crises and challenges are no longer unique and discreet events facing the EU, but rather, they are better understood as sustained conditions that have changed the relationships between member states, the functioning of institutions, the nature of public engagement and the prospects for integration. Chapters broach institutional issues as well as specific policy challenges, covering questions of legitimacy and leadership and offering a full chapter on democracy and Euroscepticism. Working within both historical and theoretical frameworks, this is the perfect companion for those studying and researching contemporary challenges facing the EU, European integration, political crisis management and transboundary crises more broadly.

Global history records an astonishing variety of forms of social organization. Yet almost universally, males subordinate females. How does the relationship between men and women shape the wider political order? The First Political Order is a groundbreaking demonstration that the persistent and systematic subordination of women underlies all other institutions, with wide-ranging implications for global security and development. Incorporating research findings spanning a variety of social science disciplines and comprehensive empirical data detailing the status of women around the globe, the book shows that female subordination functions almost as a curse upon nations. A society’s choice to subjugate women has significant negative consequences: worse governance, worse conflict, worse stability, worse economic performance, worse food security, worse health, worse demographic problems, worse environmental protection, and worse social progress. Yet despite the pervasive power of social and political structures that subordinate women, history—and the data—reveal possibilities for progress. The First Political Order shows that when steps are taken to reduce the hold of inequitable laws, customs, and practices, outcomes for all improve. It offers a new paradigm for understanding insecurity, instability, autocracy, and violence, explaining what the international community can do now to promote more equitable relations between men and women and, thereby, security and peace. With comprehensive empirical evidence of the wide-ranging harm of subjugating women, it is an important book for security scholars, social scientists, policy makers, historians, and advocates for women worldwide.

This book charts the evolution of clientelist practices in several western European countries. Through the historical and comparative analysis of countries as diverse as Sweden and Greece, England and Spain, France and Italy, Iceland and the Netherlands, the authors study both the "supply-side" and the "demand-side" of clientelism. This approach contends that clientelism is a particular mix of particularism and universalism, in which interests are aggregated at the level of the individual and his family "particularism," but in which all interests can potentially find expression and accommodation in "universalism."

What is it like to live in an illiberal regime? Ethical life in totalitarian regimes is easy to critique because it deviates from everything we think morally acceptable. But illiberal regimes are similar enough to liberal democracies to make addressing the experience of living there strikingly difficult. Political ethics in illiberal regimes argues that the common language of normative political theory is simply not up to the task of capturing this experience. On the one hand, we do not really need political theory to know why illiberal regimes are dangerous and undesirable. On the other, we do need political theory – at least of a certain realist kind – to understand why millions of reasonable people come to terms with living in such regimes. The book presents a novel theoretical language – Williamsian, liberal and realist – to articulate this experience. Part I lays out the theoretical framework, while Part II examines how politicians, experts and citizens in illiberal regimes are confronted with role-specific, political-ethical challenges and how the various normative contexts of their roles shape their agency.

Successful eastward enlargement of the EU will be critical to ensuring stability and prosperity for post-Cold War Europe. But enlargement raises difficult issues for the EU and the applicant countries of central and eastern Europe. Is the EU capable of reforming its institutions and policies to cope with 25 or more members? Which central and east Europeans will join, and when? How can we ensure that enlargement brings the economic and security benefits expected of it?This comprehensive study examines in detail the political, economic and security implications of eastward enlargement for both East and West. The authors present new analyses of the policy issues including the EU budget and pre-accession strategy and of the economic integration likely before and after accession.Based on an extensive series of interviews with key ministers, diplomats, policy-makers, academics and journalists across Europe, this study also provides an informed overview of expectations and attitudes towards enlargement within the EU and in the applicant countries.

Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world. Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In Antifragile, Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. Furthermore, the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and protected from adverse events. Why is the city-state better than the nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is what we call “efficient” not efficient at all? Why do government responses and social policies protect the strong and hurt the weak? Why should you write your resignation letter before even starting on the job? How did the sinking of the Titanic save lives? The book spans innovation by trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems, and medicine. And throughout, in addition to the street wisdom of Fat Tony of Brooklyn, the voices and recipes of ancient wisdom, from Roman, Greek, Semitic, and medieval sources, are loud and clear. Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb’s message is revolutionary: The antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it. Praise for Antifragile “Ambitious and thought-provoking . . . highly entertaining.”—The Economist “A bold book explaining how and why we should embrace uncertainty, randomness, and error . . . It may just change our lives.”—Newsweek

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) is the most famous and controversial figure in the history of political thought and one of the iconic names of the Renaissance. The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli brings together sixteen original essays by leading experts, covering his life, his career in Florentine government, his reaction to the dramatic changes that affected Florence and Italy in his lifetime, and the most prominent themes of his thought, including the founding, evolution, and corruption of republics and principalities, class conflict, liberty, arms, religion, ethics, rhetoric, gender, and the Renaissance dialogue with antiquity. In his own time Machiavelli was recognized as an original thinker who provocatively challenged conventional wisdom. With penetrating analyses of The Prince, Discourses on Livy, Art of War, Florentine Histories, and his plays and poetry, this book offers a vivid portrait of this extraordinary thinker as well as assessments of his place in Western thought since the Renaissance.