The world needs a UN 3.0. The extent and severity of global crises are such that business as usual provides no solution. Roland Rich’s Leviathan describes the necessary next version of the United Nations. It is a confident, competent, and independent organization that incorporates the world of business and global civil society as well as governments. It will certainly not have a monopoly on the use of force, but it will lead the international community through a mix of the principle of subsidiarity placing it at the apex, the application of the process of certification whereby thousands of entities are engaged in problem-solving, and the benefit of legitimacy earned through performance. The result will allow the UN to tackle the climate crisis, broaden the protection of democracy and human rights, govern globalization, and be better prepared for the next pandemic. Leviathan contains a vision but not a blueprint. Yet it does spell out how to achieve the first essential step – to clip the wings of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.

**Winner of the 2019 Sussex International Theory Prize** -- How climate change will affect our political theory - for better and worse Despite the science and the summits, leading capitalist states have not achieved anything close to an adequate level of carbon mitigation. There is now simply no way to prevent the planet breaching the threshold of two degrees Celsius set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. What are the likely political and economic outcomes of this? Where is the overheating world heading? To further the struggle for climate justice, we need to have some idea how the existing global order is likely to adjust to a rapidly changing environment. Climate Leviathan provides a radical way of thinking about the intensifying challenges to the global order. Drawing on a wide range of political thought, Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann argue that rapid climate change will transform the world's political economy and the fundamental political arrangements most people take for granted. The result will be a capitalist planetary sovereignty, a terrifying eventuality that makes the construction of viable, radical alternatives truly imperative.

United Nations: A History begins with its creation in 1945. Although the organization was created to prevent war, many conflicts have arisen, ranging from The Korean War, to The Six Day War, to genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda. Stanley Meisler’s in-depth research examines the crises and many key political leaders. In this second edition, Meisler brings his popular history up to date with accounts of the power struggles of the last fifteen years, specifically spotlighting the terms of secretaries-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon. This is an important, riveting, and impartial guide through the past and recent events of the sixty-five-year history of the United Nations.

Thomas Hobbes laid the theoretical groundwork of the nation-state in Leviathan, his tough-minded treatise of 1651. Leviathan 2.0 updates this classic account to explain how modern statehood took shape between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, before it unraveled into the political uncertainty that persists today. Modern states were far from immune to the modernizing forces of war, technology, and ideology. From 1845 to 1880, the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Argentina were all reconstituted through territorial violence. Europe witnessed the unification of Germany and Italy, while Asian nations such as Japan tried to mitigate foreign incursions through state-building reforms. A global wave of revolution at the turn of the century pushed the modernization process further in China, Russia, Iran, and Ottoman Turkey. By the late 1930s, with the rise of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the momentum of history seemed to shift toward war-glorifying totalitarian states. But several variants of the modern state survived World War II: the welfare states of Western democracies; single-party socialist governments; and governments dominated by the military, especially prevalent in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. Toward the end of the twentieth century, all of these forms stood in growing tension with the transformative influences of globalized capitalism. Modern statehood recreated itself in many ways, Charles S. Maier concludes, but finally had to adopt a precarious equilibrium with ever more powerful economic forces.

The United Nations General Assembly is arguably the most important discussion forum for global politics. This volume examines the history, organization and politics of the institution and assesses its future prospects.

This volume contains the full text of the United Nations Charter and the Statute of the International Court of Justice, as well as related historical documents. They are accompanied by ten original essays on the Charter and its legacy by distinguished scholars and former high-level UN officials. The commentaries illuminate the early and ongoing roles of the United Nations in responding to international crises, debates about the UN’s architecture and its reform, and its role in global governance, climate change, peacekeeping, and development. A concise and accessible introduction to the UN for students, this collection also offers important new scholarship that will be of interest to experts.

Why do some governing parties limit their opportunistic behaviour and constrain the extraction of private gains from the state? This analysis of post-communist state reconstruction provides surprising answers to this fundamental question of party politics. Across the post-communist democracies, governing parties have opportunistically reconstructed the state - simultaneously exploiting it by extracting state resources and building new institutions that further such extraction. They enfeebled or delayed formal state institutions of monitoring and oversight, established new discretionary structures of state administration, and extracted enormous informal profits from the privatization of the communist economy. By examining how post-communist political parties rebuilt the state in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia, Grzymala-Busse explains how even opportunistic political parties will limit their corrupt behaviour and abuse of state resources when faced with strong political competition.

For example, he describes how: --

This work is based on the premise that a national state is a particular type of organization and, at any given time and like any other organization, its performance can be evaluated with reasonable objectivity. The authors, an international team of social scientists, examine the performance of seven states: Bulgaria, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and the United States. These nations pursue similar goals - union, justice, tranquillity, defence, welfare, liberty - which, in one form or another, are common to all democracies. Using these goals as a checklist, the authors found that each of the seven states performs well in some areas and badly in others. They discovered that all states approached these goals in a style shaped by their own history and, in particular, by how they have been affected by the troubles of the 20th century. Their investigations offer an informative way of looking at these nation states and detail the social and political conditions in each state.