Martin Wight (1913-1972) was one of the most original and enigmatic international thinkers of the twentieth century. This new study, drawing upon Wright's published writings and unpublished papers, examines his work on international relations in the light of his wider thought, his religious beliefs, and his understanding of history.

This volume brings together a collection of leading scholars to consider various dimensions of the 'turn' to history in International Relations. The scope of this volume is broad. It includes conventional accounts of the development of the European states system, but is not limited by it. Other essays consider the non-European experience; a number of path-breaking essays on how other cultures and continents have ordered their political communities, in particular, the question how and why a states system triumphed over other forms of political organisation. The theme of the subtitle - great transformations - is pursued by each author. The essays consider one of the biggest questions of our time, namely, how did we arrive at this historical and institutional expression of political community? And what alternative future world orders exist? The volume will be of interest to scholars of International Relations and History interested in great transformations in world politics.

In this major new work of urban geography, Allan Pred interprets the process by which major cities grew and the entire city-system of the United States developed during the antebellum decades. The book focuses on the availability and distribution of crucial economic information. For as cities developed, this information helped determine the new urban areas in which business opportunities could be exploited and productive innovations implemented. Pred places this original approach to urbanization in the context of earlier, more conventional studies, and he supports his view by a wealth of evidence regarding the flow of commodities between major cities. He also draws on an analysis of newspaper circulation, postal services, business travel, and telegraph usage. Pred's book goes far beyond the usual "biographies" of individual cities or the specialized studies of urban life. It offers a large and fascinating view of the way an entire city-system was put together and made to function. Indeed, by providing the first full account of these two decades of American urbanization, Pred has supplied a vital and hitherto missing link in the history of the United States.

Busby explains how climate change can affect security outcomes, including violent conflict and humanitarian emergencies. Through case studies from sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, the book develops a novel argument explaining why climate change leads to especially bad security outcomes in some places but not in others.

This is the second edition of Professor Tushnet's short critical introduction to the history and current meaning of the United States' Constitution. It is organised around wo themes: first, the US Constitution is old, short, and difficult to amend. Second, the Constitution creates a structure of political opportunities that allows political actors, icluding political parties, to pursue the preferred policy goals even to the point of altering the very structure of politics. Deploying these themes to examine the structure f the national government, federalism, judicial review, and individual rights, the book provides basic information about, and deeper insights into, the way he US constitutional system has developed and what it means today.

Introduction -- Defining the public interest in the US and European patent systems -- Confronting the questions of life-form patentability -- Commodification, animal dignity, and patent-system publics -- Forging new patent politics through the human embryonic stem cell debates -- Human genes, plants, and the distributive implications of patents -- Conclusion

“One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review Hailed as “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning” by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastrophically—in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters. “Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker “A tour de force.”— Charles Tilly, Columbia University

This work executes a unique transdisciplinary methodology building on the author’s previous book, A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save it (Pluto, 2010), which was the first peer-reviewed study to establish a social science framework for the integrated analysis of crises across climate, energy, food, economic, terror and the police state. Since the 2008 financial crash, the world has witnessed an unprecedented outbreak of social unrest in every major continent. Beginning with the birth of the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring, the eruption of civil disorder continues to wreak havoc unpredictably from Greece to Ukraine, from China to Thailand, from Brazil to Turkey, and beyond. Yet while policymakers and media observers have raced to keep up with events, they have largely missed the biophysical triggers of this new age of unrest – the end of the age of cheap fossil fuels, and its multiplying consequences for the Earth’s climate, industrial food production, and economic growth. This book for the first time develops an empirically-ground theoretical model of the complex interaction between biophysical processes and geopolitical crises, demonstrated through the analysis of a wide range of detailed case studies of historic, concurrent and probable state failures in the Middle East, Northwest Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Europe and North America. Geopolitical crises across these regions, Ahmed argues, are being driven by the proliferation of climate, food and economic crises which have at their root the common denominator of a fundamental and permanent disruption in the energy basis of industrial civilization. This inevitable energy transition, which will be completed well before the close of this century, entails a paradigm shift in the organization of civilization. Yet for this shift to result in a viable new way of life will require a fundamental epistemological shift recognizing humanity’s embeddedness in the natural world. For this to be achieved, the stranglehold of conventional models achieved through the hegemony of establishment media reporting – dominated by fossil fuel interests – must be broken. While geopolitics cannot be simplistically reduced to the biophysical, this book shows that international relations today can only be understood by recognizing the extent to which the political is embedded in the biophysical. Although the book offers a rigorous scientific analysis, it is written in a clean, journalistic style to ensure readability and accessibility to a general audience. It will contain a large number of graphical illustrations concerning oil production data, population issues, the food price index, economic growth and debt, and other related issues to demonstrate the interconnections and correlations across key sectors.

Governments play a major role in the development process, and constantly introduce reforms and policies to achieve developmental objectives. Many of these interventions have limited impact, however; schools get built but children don't learn, IT systems are introduced but not used, plans are written but not implemented. These achievement deficiencies reveal gaps in capabilities, and weaknesses in the process of building state capability. This book addresses these weaknesses and gaps. It starts by providing evidence of the capability shortfalls that currently exist in many countries, showing that many governments lack basic capacities even after decades of reforms and capacity building efforts. The book then analyses this evidence, identifying capability traps that hold many governments back - particularly related to isomorphic mimicry (where governments copy best practice solutions from other countries that make them look more capable even if they are not more capable) and premature load bearing (where governments adopt new mechanisms that they cannot actually make work, given weak extant capacities). The book then describes a process that governments can use to escape these capability traps. Called PDIA (problem driven iterative adaptation), this process empowers people working in governments to find and fit solutions to the problems they face. The discussion about this process is structured in a practical manner so that readers can actually apply tools and ideas to the capability challenges they face in their own contexts. These applications will help readers devise policies and reforms that have more impact than those of the past.