Many assume that in international politics, and especially in war, "anything goes." Sherman famously declared war "is all hell." The implication behind the maxim is that in war there is no order, only chaos; no mercy, only cruelty; no restraint, only suffering.Ward Thomas finds that this "anything goes" view is demonstrably wrong. It neither reflects how most people talk about the use of force in international relations nor describes the way national leaders actually use military force. Events such as those in Europe during World War II, in the Persian Gulf War, and in Kosovo cannot be understood, he argues, until we realize that state behavior, even during wartime, is shaped by common understandings about what is ethically acceptable and unacceptable.Thomas makes extensive use of two cases—the assassination of foreign leaders and the aerial bombardment of civilians—to trace the relative influence of norms and interests. His insistence on interconnections between ethical principle and material power leads to a revised understanding of the role of normative factors in foreign policy and the ways in which power and interest shape the international system.

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The director of the famed Bodleian Libraries at Oxford narrates the global history of the willful destruction—and surprising survival—of recorded knowledge over the past three millennia. Libraries and archives have been attacked since ancient times but have been especially threatened in the modern era. Today the knowledge they safeguard faces purposeful destruction and willful neglect; deprived of funding, libraries are fighting for their very existence. Burning the Books recounts the history that brought us to this point. Richard Ovenden describes the deliberate destruction of knowledge held in libraries and archives from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets in Iraq to the destroyed immigration documents of the UK Windrush generation. He examines both the motivations for these acts—political, religious, and cultural—and the broader themes that shape this history. He also looks at attempts to prevent and mitigate attacks on knowledge, exploring the efforts of librarians and archivists to preserve information, often risking their own lives in the process. More than simply repositories for knowledge, libraries and archives inspire and inform citizens. In preserving notions of statehood recorded in such historical documents as the Declaration of Independence, libraries support the state itself. By preserving records of citizenship and records of the rights of citizens as enshrined in legal documents such as the Magna Carta and the decisions of the US Supreme Court, they support the rule of law. In Burning the Books, Ovenden takes a polemical stance on the social and political importance of the conservation and protection of knowledge, challenging governments in particular, but also society as a whole, to improve public policy and funding for these essential institutions.

Presents the story of Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation. This title contains a philosophical and ethical inquiry into a people faced with the end of their way of life.

When applied to social science, psychoanalytic concepts make it possible to analyze totalitarian action and its derivative, authoritarian action, by highlighting what such regimes have in common: the destruction of frames of reference for space and time; their replacement of those reference points with a restrictive “surreality”; and the assignation of individuals in the social space in terms of the love or hatred attributed to them by those in power. Whether in Stalinist Bolshevism, posited here as the matrix of the “totalitarian personality”; in its extreme form of totalitarianism with the Islamic State; or in a more diluted variant in the Polish ruling party ‘Law and Justice’ (PiS), each is characterized by the negation of temporal and spatial distance, and therefore by the negation of causal links, displacement and transformation of experience. These components are specific to the unconscious which, in dreams as Freud considered, acts upon factual datum, denies it, and reproduces it in another way, one that conforms more closely to the dreamer’s desires. For this reason, the politics that arise from these regimes have much in common with a hallucination.

"A former Wall Street quantitative analyst sounds an alarm on mathematical modeling, a pervasive new force in society that threatens to undermine democracy and widen inequality,"--NoveList.

The economist Albert O. Hirschman famously argued that citizens of democracies have only three possible responses to injustice or wrongdoing by their government: we may leave, complain, or comply. But in When All Else Fails, Jason Brennan argues that there is fourth option. When governments violate our rights, we may resist. We may even have a moral duty to do so. For centuries, almost everyone has believed that we must allow the government and its representatives to act without interference, no matter how they behave. We may complain, protest, sue, or vote officials out, but we can't fight back. But Brennan makes the case that we have no duty to allow the state or its agents to commit injustice. We have every right to react with acts of "uncivil disobedience." We may resist arrest for violation of unjust laws. We may disobey orders, sabotage government property, or reveal classified information. We may deceive ignorant, irrational, or malicious voters. We may even use force in self-defense or to defend others. The result is a provocative challenge to long-held beliefs about how citizens may respond when government officials behave unjustly or abuse their power

This study, first published in 2000, examines the cultural and ecological causes of the near-extinction of the bison.

A Frenchman rents a Hollywood movie. A Thai schoolgirl mimics Madonna. Saddam Hussein chooses Frank Sinatra's "My Way" as the theme song for his fifty-fourth birthday. It is a commonplace that globalization is subverting local culture. But is it helping as much as it hurts? In this strikingly original treatment of a fiercely debated issue, Tyler Cowen makes a bold new case for a more sympathetic understanding of cross-cultural trade. Creative Destruction brings not stale suppositions but an economist's eye to bear on an age-old question: Are market exchange and aesthetic quality friends or foes? On the whole, argues Cowen in clear and vigorous prose, they are friends. Cultural "destruction" breeds not artistic demise but diversity. Through an array of colorful examples from the areas where globalization's critics have been most vocal, Cowen asks what happens when cultures collide through trade, whether technology destroys native arts, why (and whether) Hollywood movies rule the world, whether "globalized" culture is dumbing down societies everywhere, and if national cultures matter at all. Scrutinizing such manifestations of "indigenous" culture as the steel band ensembles of Trinidad, Indian handweaving, and music from Zaire, Cowen finds that they are more vibrant than ever--thanks largely to cross-cultural trade. For all the pressures that market forces exert on individual cultures, diversity typically increases within society, even when cultures become more like each other. Trade enhances the range of individual choice, yielding forms of expression within cultures that flower as never before. While some see cultural decline as a half-empty glass, Cowen sees it as a glass half-full with the stirrings of cultural brilliance. Not all readers will agree, but all will want a say in the debate this exceptional book will stir.

While there is a tacit appreciation that freedom from violence will lead to more prosperous relations among peoples, violence continues to be deployed for various political and social ends. Yet the problem of violence still defies neat description, subject to many competing interpretations. Histories of Violence offers an accessible yet compelling examination of the problem of violence as it appears in the corpus of canonical figures – from Hannah Arendt to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault to Slavoj Žižek – who continue to influence and inform contemporary political, philosophical, sociological, cultural, and anthropological study. Written by a team of internationally renowned experts, this is an essential interrogation of post-war critical thought as it relates to violence.