Global Issues
>Books on hot topics in the international political economy
Chastening, The
There were a lot of emerging markets crises in the 1990s -- Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, Russia, Turkey, Peru, Argentina, Brazil. Clearly someone's to blame. But who? The Chastening plunges into the fray, with a journalistic account of the...
Commanding Heights, The
It’s no Prize, to be sure. That was Daniel Yergin’s Pulitzer-winning book on the oil industry – such a page-turner that, intending to look up a statistic, I could not put it down and read it in its entirety. The...
Globalization and its Discontents
World Bank = good! IMF = evil! Advancing that thesis with scholarly flair is Joseph Stiglitz, who wades into the emerging-market-crisis blame-game and finds the IMF -- and friends in the US Treasury -- with blood on their hands. It's...
Lexus and the Olive Tree, The
Globalization for beginners. And in the beginning, we were all beginners. Thomas Friedman’s book is full of good stories, folksy wisdom and cute but evocative terms to explain globalization’s new world order (“the electronic herd,” “the golden straitjacket”). Academics are...
Soft Power
Soft power: “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. It arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals and policies. When our policies are seen as legitimate in the eyes of...
Warrior Politics
Robert Kaplan was reportedly profoundly distressed when the Clinton administration took his analysis of the conflicts in Yugoslavia – a conflict fueled by “ancient hatreds” – as an excuse for inaction. If the hate is intractable, Clinton reasoned, then what...
