Publications by Type: Book

This report summarizes a workshop organized by the National Academies Roundtable on Science and Technology for Sustainability. The workshop brought together a select group of program managers from the public and private sectors to discuss specific cases of linking knowledge to action in a diverse set of integrated observation, assessment, and decision support systems. Workshop discussions explored a wide variety of experiments in harnessing science and technology to goals of promoting development and conserving the environment. Participants reflected on the most significant challenges that they have faced when trying to implement their programs and the strategies that they have used to address them successfully. The report summarizes discussions at the workshop, including common themes about the process of linking knowledge with actions for sustainable development that emerged across a wide range of cases, sectors, and regions.

From the conflicts that presaged the First World War to the aftershocks of the Cold War, the twentieth century was the bloodiest in human history. This was an age when multicultural communities were torn apart by the irregularities of economic boom and bust. It was also an age poisoned by an idea: the idea of irrevocable racial differences. Above all it was an age of struggle between decaying old empires and predatory new ‘empire-states’. Who won the war of the world? We tend to assume it was ‘the West’. Some even talk of ‘the American century’. But for Niall Ferguson the biggest upheaval of the twentieth century was the decline of Western dominance over Asia. Drawing on history, economics and evolutionary theory, The War of the World is a revolutionary new interpretation of the modern era.

Contemporary America, with its unparalleled armaments and ambition, seems to many commentators a new empire. Others angrily reject the designation. What stakes would being an empire have for our identity at home and our role abroad? In Among Empires, a preeminent American historian addresses these issues in light of the history of empires since antiquity. Gathering a remarkable array of evidence—from Roman, Ottoman, Moghul, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and British experience—Maier outlines the essentials of empire throughout history. He then explores the exercise of U.S. power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, carefully analyzing its economic and strategic sources and the nation's relationship to predecessors and rivals.

World mass migration began in the early nineteenth century, when advances in transportation technology and industrial revolutions at home enabled increasing numbers of people to set off for other parts of the globe in search of a better life. Two centuries later, there is no distant African, Asian, or Latin American village that is not within reach of some high-wage OECD labor market. This book is the first comprehensive economic assessment of world mass migration taking a long-run historical perspective, including north-north, south-south, and south-north migrations. Timothy Hatton and Jeffrey Williamson, both economists and economic historians, consider two centuries of global mobility, assessing its impact on the migrants themselves as well as on the sending and receiving countries.

Global Migration and the World Economy covers two great migration waves: the first, from the 1820s to the beginning of World War I, when immigration was largely unrestricted; the second, beginning in 1950, when mass migration continued to grow despite policy restrictions. The book also explores the period between these two global centuries when world migration shrank sharply because of two world wars, immigration quotas, and the Great Depression. The authors assess the economic performance of these world migrations, the policy reactions to deal with them, and the political economy that connected one with the other. The last third of Global Migration and the World Economy focuses on modern experience and shows how contemporary debates about migration performance and policy can be informed by a comprehensive historical perspective.

Dozens of states have long been capable of acquiring nuclear weapons, yet only a few have actually done so. Jacques E.C. Hymans finds that the key to this surprising historical pattern lies not in externally imposed constraints, but rather in state leaders' conceptions of the national identity. Synthesizing a wide range of scholarship from the humanities and social sciences to experimental psychology and neuroscience, Hymans builds a rigorous model of decisionmaking that links identity to emotions and ultimately to nuclear policy choices. Exhaustively researched case studies of France, India, Argentina, and Australia—two that got the bomb and two that abstained—demonstrate the value of this model while debunking common myths.

This book will be invaluable to policymakers and concerned citizens who are frustrated with the frequent misjudgments of states' nuclear ambitions, and to scholars who seek a better understanding of how leaders make big foreign policy decisions.

• Undermines the current proliferation paranoia. Argues that most leaders do not want the bomb
• Provides a rigorous model of foreign policy decision-making
• Exhaustively researched case studies on countries other than the usual suspects

The United States currently wields unprecedented global power. Americans often assume that their global role is benevolent and their dominant position unchallenged, but other states are increasingly worried about U.S. dominance and are beginning to turn their concerns into action.

In this elegant and provocative new book, Kennedy School professor and renowned scholar Stephen M. Walt analyzes the different strategies that states employ to counter U.S. power or to harness it for their own ends. These responses threaten America's ability to achieve its foreign policy goals and may eventually undermine its dominant position. To prevent this, Walt argues, the United States must adopt a foreign policy that other states welcome, rather than one that reinforces their fear of American power.

Renowned for his compassionate and balanced thinking on international affairs, Hoffmann reflects here on the proper place of the United States in the world. From the September 11th attacks to the war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq, Hoffman studies the global events confronted—and shaped—by United States foreign policy-makers.

A true global citizen, Hoffmann offers an analysis that is uniquely informed by his place as a public intellectual with one foot in Europe, the other in America. In this brilliant collection of essays, many previously unpublished, he considers the ethics of intervention, the morality of human rights, how to repair our relationship with Europe, and the pitfalls of American unilateralism.

Mi obra, incluyendo este libro, no es Castrocéntrica, al menos en comparación con una buena parte de los libros y artículos publicados sobre Cuba. El nombre de Fidel Castro no aparece en los títulos de mis libros, y, con una sola excepción, tampoco en los títulos de los artículos reproducidos en este libro. Es, por supuesto, imposible escribir sobre la historia política contemporánea de Cuba ignorando la figura central de Fidel Castro, pero considero que es un error escribir sobre política en Cuba como si no hubiera otra cosa más que decir que lo que tenga que ver directamente con su persona. Es cierto que Fidel Castro ha gobernado a su manera, pero no es menos importante insistir que no lo ha hecho sólo. Hasta el artículo sobre la sucesión política de Cuba en este libro se resiste a discutir exclusivamente los temas individuales e insiste en considerar elementos institucionales y colectivos más allá de personas con nombre y apellido, más allá de la mortalidad de Fidel Castro. Son muchos los funcionarios, no una sola persona, que gobiernan Cuba día a día. Y son muchos los cubanos, no solamente Fidel Castro, que construyeron la Revolución.

This volume analyzes the function of informal institutions in Latin America and how they support or weaken democratic governance. Drawing from a wide range of examples—including the Mexican dedazo, clientelism in Brazil, legislative &"ghost coalitions" in Ecuador, and elite power-sharing in Chile—the contributors examine how informal rules shape the performance of state and democratic institutions, offering fresh and timely insights into contemporary problems of governability, "unrule of law," and the absence of effective representation, participation, and accountability in Latin America. The editors present this analysis within a fourfold conceptual framework: complementary institutions, which fill gaps in formal rules or enhance their efficacy; accommodative informal institutions, which blunt the effects of dysfunctional formal institutions; competing informal institutions, which directly subvert the formal rules; and substitutive informal institutions, which replace ineffective formal institutions.

In this book O'Dwyer introduces the phenomenon of runaway state-building as a consequence of patronage politics in underdeveloped, noncompetitive party systems. Analyzing the cases of three newly democratized nations in Eastern Europe—Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia—O'Dwyer argues that competition among political parties constrains patronage-led state expansion.

O'Dwyer uses democratization as a starting point, examining its effects on other aspects of political development. Focusing on the link between electoral competition and state-building, he is able to draw parallels between the problems faced by these three nations and broader historical and contemporary problems of patronage politics—such as urban machines in nineteenth-century America and the Philippines after Marcos. This timely study provides political scientists and political reformers with insights into points in the democratization process where appropriate intervention can minimize runaway state-building and cultivate efficient bureaucracy within a robust and competitive democratic system.

Even before George W. Bush gained reelection by wooing religiously devout "values voters," it was clear that church-state matters in the United States had reached a crisis. With Divided by God, Noah Feldman shows that the crisis is as old as this country - and looks to our nation's past to show how it might be resolved.

Today more than ever, ours is a religiously diverse society: Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist as well as Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish. And yet more than ever, committed Christians are making themselves felt in politics and culture.

What are the implications of this paradox? To answer this question, Feldman makes clear that again and again in our nation's history diversity has forced us to redraw the lines in the church-state divide. In vivid, dramatic chapters, he describes how we as a people have resolved conflicts over the Bible, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the teaching of evolution through appeals to shared values of liberty, equality, and freedom of conscience. And he proposes a brilliant solution to our current crisis, one that honors our religious diversity while respecting the long-held conviction that religion and state should not mix.

Divided by God speaks to the headlines, even as it tells the story of a long-running conflict that has made the American people who we are.

Arguing that the Christian doctrine of revelation is necessary for understanding the prevenience of God's grace, Ronald Thiemann defends the doctrine of revelation by focusing on the identity and reality of the promising God depicted in the biblical narrative.

According to Thiemann, "The crisis of revelation has occurred within a cultural context decisively marked by radical pluralism. The modern defender of God's reality must seek to show how God is, both in relation and prior to those human concepts by which we seek to grasp his reality. He or she must do so by an argument which resists the reduction of theology to anthropology."

In analysis of such diverse thinkers as John Locke, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Thomas Torrance, Thiemann criticizes the epistemological foundationalism adopted by theologians to provide theoretical justification for the divine origins of Christian beliefs. He argues that the doctrine of revelation must be seen as an account supporting the intelligibility and truth of a set of Christian convictions. His notion of the "narrated promise" reveals God's prevenience as promiser and humanity as recipient of the promise. In an examination of the Gospel of Matthew, Thiemann shows how the biblical narrative identifies God as the God of promise and invites the reader to participate in God's prevenient reality.

The American public has consistently declared itself less concerned with foreign affairs in the post-Cold War era, even after 9/11, than at any time since World War II. How can it be, then, that public attentiveness to U.S. foreign policy crises has increased? This book represents the first systematic attempt to explain this apparent paradox. Matthew Baum argues that the answer lies in changes to television's presentation of political information. In so doing he develops a compelling "byproduct" theory of information consumption. The information revolution has fundamentally changed the way the mass media, especially television, covers foreign policy. Traditional news has been repackaged into numerous entertainment-oriented news programs and talk shows. By transforming political issues involving scandal or violence (especially attacks against America) into entertainment, the "soft news" media have actually captured more viewers who will now follow news about foreign crises, due to its entertainment value, even if they remain uninterested in foreign policy.

Baum rigorously tests his theory through content analyses of traditional and soft news media coverage of various post-WWII U.S. foreign crises and statistical analyses of public opinion surveys. The results hold key implications for the future of American politics and foreign policy. For instance, watching soft news reinforces isolationism among many inattentive Americans. Scholars, political analysts, and even politicians have tended to ignore the soft news media and politically disengaged citizens. But, as this well-written book cogently demonstrates, soft news viewers represent a largely untapped reservoir of unusually persuadable voters.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Austrian Empire ranked third among the world's oil-producing states (surpassed only by the United States and Russia) and accounted for five percent of global oil production. By 1918, the Central Powers did not have enough oil to maintain a modern military. How and why did the promise of oil fail Galicia (the province producing the oil) and the Empire?

In a brilliantly conceived work, Alison Frank traces the interaction of technology, nationalist rhetoric, social tensions, provincial politics, and entrepreneurial vision in shaping the Galician oil industry. She portrays this often overlooked oil boom's transformation of the environment, and its reorientation of religious and social divisions that had defined a previously agrarian population, as surprising alliances among traditional foes sprang up among workers and entrepreneurs at the workplace and in the pubs and brothels of new oil towns.

Frank sets this complex story in a context of international finance, technological exchange, and Habsburg history as a sobering counterpoint to traditional modernization narratives. As the oil ran out, the economy, the population, and the environment returned largely to their former state, reminding us that there is nothing ineluctable about the consequences of industrial development

After the collapse of communism, some thirty countries scrambled to craft democratic constitutions. Surprisingly, the constitutional model they most often chose was neither the pure parliamentary model found in most of Western Europe at the time, nor the presidential model of the Americas. Rather, it was semi-presidentialism—a rare model known more generally as the "French type." This constitutional model melded elements of pure presidentialism with those of pure parliamentarism. Specifically, semi-presidentialism combined a popularly elected head of state with a head of government responsible to a legislature.

Borrowing Constitutional Designs questions the hasty adoption of semi-presidentialism by new democracies. Drawing on rich case studies of two of the most important countries for European politics in the twentieth century-Weimar Germany and the French Fifth Republic-Cindy Skach offers the first theoretically focused, and historically grounded, analysis of semi-presidentialism and democracy. She demonstrates that constitutional choice matters, because under certain conditions, semi-presidentialism structures incentives that make democratic consolidation difficult or that actually contribute to democratic collapse. She offers a new theory of constitutional design, integrating insights from law and the social sciences. In doing so, Skach challenges both democratic theory and democratic practice. This book will be welcomed not only by scholars and practitioners of constitutional law but also by those in fields such as comparative politics, European politics and history, and international and public affairs.

Over the next few decades, global migration is likely to play an influential role in shaping the nature of politics and economies internationally. This timely study illuminates possible implications of migrant flows from a development perspective. The authors survey the magnitude of the poor to rich-country flows, the rich-country policies that are driving them, and the multiple channels through which skilled migration affects development. They provide a rich discussion of the policy options, as they search for those that avoid the worst losses to poor countries while maintaining the most liberal feasible international migration regime.

This book explores, through the lens of history, the dynamics between the press, politics, and public policy in Uganda. It illuminates and documents the various tensions and struggles for press freedom in the country since the establishment of the first newspaper in 1900. The book demonstrates that, despite Uganda's brush with multiple political systems over the decades—multiparty, one-party politics, military rule and no-party political arrangements—the press has always been at the receiving end of the stick. Consequently, journalists, in their yearnings for a legally unrestrictive media-free environment under a liberal socio-political atmosphere, have had to deploy various methods and approaches in dealing with the various state apparatuses.