This collection features books and book contributions written by faculty in the Department of Politics at Fairfield University.
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The United States and International Law: Paradoxes of Support across Contemporary Issues
Lucrecia García Iommi and Richard W. Maass
The United States spearheaded the creation of many international organizations and treaties after World War II and maintains a strong record of compliance across several issue areas, yet it also refuses to ratify major international conventions like the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Why does the U.S. often seem to support international law in one way while neglecting or even violating it in another? The United States and International Law: Paradoxes of Support across Contemporary Issues analyzes the seemingly inconsistent U.S. relationship with international law by identifying five types of state support for international law: leadership, consent, internalization, compliance, and enforcement. Each follows different logics and entails unique costs and incentives. Accordingly, the fact that a state engages in one form of support does not presuppose that it will do so across the board. This volume examines how and why the U.S. has engaged in each form of support across twelve issue areas that are central to 20th- and 21st-century U.S. foreign policy: conquest, world courts, war, nuclear proliferation, trade, human rights, war crimes, torture, targeted killing, maritime law, the environment, and cybersecurity. In addition to offering rich substantive discussions of U.S. foreign policy, their findings reveal patterns across the U.S. relationship with international law that shed light on behavior that often seems paradoxical at best, hypocritical at worst. The results help us understand why the United States engages with international law as it does, the legacies of the Trump administration, and what we should expect from the United States under the Biden administration and beyond.
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The Global Environment, 5th Edition
Regina Axelrod, Stacy VanDeveer, and David Leonard Downie
David Downie is a contributing author, "International Law and the Protection of the Global Environment."
Book description: The new edition of this award-winning volume reflects the latest events in the in global environmental politics and sustainable development while providing balanced coverage of the key institutions, environmental issues, treaties, and policies. The book highlights global environmental institutions, major state and non-state actors, and includes a wide range of cases such as climate change, biodiversity, hazardous chemicals, ozone layer depletion, nuclear energy and resource consumption.
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Polarized Families, Polarized Parties Contesting Values and Economics in American Politics
Gwendoline Alphonso
Struggles to define the soul of America roil the nation's politics. Debates over the roles of gays, lesbians, women, immigrants, racial and religious minorities, and disputes over reproductive and abortion rights serve as rallying points for significant electoral groups and their representatives in government. Although the American family lies at the core of these fierce battles, the alignment of family with social or cultural issues is only a partial picture—a manifestation of the new right's late twentieth-century success in elevating "family values" over family economics.
Gwendoline Alphonso makes a significant contribution to the prevailing understanding of party evolution, contemporary political polarization, and the role of the family in American political development by placing family at the center of political and cultural clashes. She demonstrates how regional ideas about family in the twentieth century have continually shaped not only Republican and Democratic policy and ideological positions concerning race and gender but also their ideals concerning the economy and the state. Drawing on extensive data from congressional committee hearings, political party platforms, legislation sponsorship, and demographic data from the Progressive, post-World War II, and late twentieth-century periods in the United States, Polarized Families, Polarized Parties offers an intricate and sophisticated analysis of how deliberations around the ideal family became critical to characterizations of party politics. By revealing the deep historical interconnections between family and the two parties' ideologies and policy preferences, Alphonso reveals that American party development is more than a story of the state and its role in the economy but also, at its core, a debate over the political values of family and the social fabric it embodies.
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Global Environmental Politics: Dilemmas in World Politics, 7th Edition
Pamela S. Chasek, David Leonard Downie, and Janet Welsh Brown
For more than twenty years, Global Environmental Politics has provided an up-to-date, accurate, and unbiased introduction to the world's most pressing environmental issues. This new edition continues this tradition while covering critical new developments in the field. Through case studies on key issues such as climate change, toxic chemicals, and biodiversity loss, the authors detail the development of major environmental regimes. With new material on the adoption of global Sustainable Development Goals and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development; the December 2015 Paris Climate Change conference; and recent meetings of major conventions on desertification, biological diversity, and more; the authors present a comprehensive overview of contemporary international environmental politics. Global Environmental Politics is vital reading for any student wishing to understand the current state of the field and to make informed decisions about which policies might best safeguard our environment for the future.
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Essential Concepts of Global Environmental Governance
Jean Morin Frédéric, Amandine Orsini, and David Leonard Downie
David Downie is a contributing author, “The Ozone Regime".
Book description: The book is comprised of 101 entries, each defining a central concept in global environmental governance, presenting its historical evolution, introducing related debates and including key bibliographical references and further reading. The entries combine analytical rigour with empirical description. This unique work synthesizes writing from an internationally diverse range of well-known experts in the field of global environmental governance. Innovative thinking and high-profile expertise come together to create a volume that is accessible to students, scholars and practitioners alike.
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The Global Environment: Institutions, Law, and Policy, 4th Edition
Regina Axelrod, Stacy VanDeveer, and David Leonard Downie
David Downie is a contributing author, "International Environmental Regimes and the Success of Global Ozone Policy."
Book Description: The new edition of this award-winning volume reflects the latest events in global environmental politics and sustainable development while providing balanced coverage of the key institutions, environmental issues, treaties, and policies. The volume has been reorganized to better highlight global environmental institutions, major state and non-state actors, and includes an expanded set of cases such as climate change, biodiversity, hazardous chemicals, ozone layer depletion, nuclear energy and resource consumption. Based on reviewer feedback from faculty and students, the new edition broadens coverage of the growing global environmental agenda and explores the relationships between states, NGOs, and international organizations.
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Global Environmental Politics: Dilemmas in World Politics, 6th Edition
David Leonard Downie, Pamela Chasek, and Janet Welsh Brown
Although discussions about the global environment are now a daily occurrence—from companies touting energy-saving products to politicians debating how to best address the issue of climate change and other environmental concerns—it remains a topic plagued by misinformation and ideologically skewed arguments. For more than twenty years, Global Environmental Politics has provided an up-to-date, accurate, and unbiased introduction to the world’s most pressing environmental issues, and this new edition continues the tradition.
With new material on the latest international environmental regimes, the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development, the challenges of regime implementation, and the impact of the global economic crises on the global environment, the authors offer a comprehensive overview of the environment and international politics. It is vital reading for anyone wishing to understand the current state of the field and to make informed decisions about which policies might best safeguard our environment for the future.
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Children and Youth during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
James Marten and Gwendoline M. Alphonso
Gwendoline Alphonso is a contributing author, “Of Families or Individuals? Southern Child Workers & the Progressive Crusade for Child Labor Regulation, 1899-1920”, pp.59-80.
Book Description:
In the decades after the Civil War, urbanization, industrialization, and immigration marked the start of the Gilded Age, a period of rapid economic growth but also social upheaval. Reformers responded to the social and economic chaos with a “search for order,” as famously described by historian Robert Wiebe. Most reformers agreed that one of the nation’s top priorities should be its children and youth, who, they believed, suffered more from the disorder plaguing the rapidly growing nation than any other group. Children and Youth during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era explores both nineteenth century conditions that led Progressives to their search for order and some of the solutions applied to children and youth in the context of that search. Edited by renowned scholar of children’s history James Marten, the collection of eleven essays offers case studies relevant to educational reform, child labor laws, underage marriage, and recreation for children, among others. Including important primary documents produced by children themselves, the essays in this volume foreground the role that youth played in exerting agency over their own lives and in contesting the policies that sought to protect and control them.
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Routledge Handbook of Global Environmental Politics
Paul Harris and David Leonard Downie
David Downie is a contributing author, "Stratospheric Ozone Depletion" and "Pesticides and Persistent Organic Pollutants".
Book Description: This handbook provides a comprehensive and authoritative survey of Global Environmental Politics. It brings together leading international academic experts and features 40 chapters that:
- Describe the history of global environmental politics as a discipline and explain the various theories and perspectives used by scholars and students to understand it.
- Examine the key actors and institutions in global environmental politics, explaining the role of states, international organizations, regimes, international law, foreign policy institutions, domestic politics, corporations and transnational actors.
- Address the ideas and themes shaping the practice and study of global environmental politics, including sustainability, consumption, expertise, uncertainty, security, diplomacy, North-South relations, globalisation, justice, ethics, participation and citizenship.
- Assess the key issues and policies within global environmental politics, including energy, climate change, ozone depletion, air pollution, acid rain, sustainable transport, persistent organic pollutants, hazardous wastes, water, rivers, wetlands, oceans, fisheries, marine mammals, biodiversity, migratory species, natural heritage, forests, desertification, food and agriculture.
This book is an invaluable resource to students, scholars, researchers and practioners of environmental politics, environmental studies, environmental science and geography.
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The Educational Legacy of Woodrow Wilson: From College to Nation
James Axtell and Mark R. Nemec
Mark R. Nemec is a contributing author, "The Unappreciated Legacy: Wilson, Princeton & the Ideal of the American State," p.185-206.
Book description:
In The Educational Legacy of Woodrow Wilson, James Axtell brings together essays by eight leading historians and one historically minded political scientist to examine the long, formative academic phase of Wilson’s career and its connection to his relatively brief tenure in politics. Together, the essays provide a greatly revised picture of Wilson’s whole career and a deeply nuanced understanding of the evolution of his educational, political, and social philosophy and policies, the ordering of his values and priorities, and the seamless link between his academic and political lives. The contributors shed light on Wilson’s unexpected rise to the governorship of New Jersey and the presidency, and how he prepared for elective office through his long study of government and the practice of academic politics, which he deemed no less fierce than that of Washington. In both spheres he was enormously successful, propelling a string of progressive reforms through faculty and legislative forums. Only after he was beset by health problems and events beyond his control did he fail to push his academic and postwar agendas to their logical, idealistic conclusions.
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Suspect Citizens: Women, Virtue and Vice in Backlash Politics
Jocelyn M. Boryczka
What drives the cycle of backlashes against women's ongoing struggle for equality, freedom, and inclusion in American politics? In her innovative and provocative book, Suspect Citizens, Jocelyn Boryczka presents a feminist conceptual history that shows how American politics have largely defined women in terms of their reproductive and socializing functions. This framework not only denies women full citizenship, but also devalues the active political engagement of all citizens who place each other and their government under suspicion.
Developing the gendered dynamics of virtue and vice, Boryczka exposes the paradox of how women are perceived as both virtuous moral guardians and vice-ridden suspect citizens capable of jeopardizing the entire nation's exceptional future. She uses wide-ranging examples from the Puritans and contemporary debates over sex education to S&M lesbian feminists and the ethics of care to show how to move beyond virtue and vice to a democratic feminist ethics.
Suspect Citizens advances a politics of collective responsibility and belonging.
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Jesuit and Feminist Education: Intersections in Teaching and Learning in the Twenty-First Century
Elizabeth A. Petrino, Jocelyn M. Boryczka, and Jeffrey P. von Arx
In addition to co-editing the book, Elizabeth A. Petrino and Jocelyn M. Boryczka are contributing authors, “’The Personal is Political’: At the Intersections of Feminist and Jesuit Education", pp. 75-85.
***2013 Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award Winner***
Book description: This book explores how the principles and practices of Ignatian pedagogy overlap and intersect with contemporary feminist theory in order to gain deeper insight into the complexities of today's multicultural educational contexts. Drawing on a method of inquiry that locates individual and collective standpoints in relation to social, political, and economic structures, this volume highlights points of convergence and divergence between Ignatian and feminist pedagogies to explore how educators might find strikingly similar methods that advocate common goals--including engaging with issues such as race, gender, diversity, and social justice. The contributors to this volume initiate a dynamic dialogue that will enliven our campuses for years to come.--Publisher description
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The Global Environment: Institutions, Law & Policy, 3rd Edition
Regina Axelrod, Stacy VanDeveer, and David Leonard Downie
In addition to co-editing this monograph, David Downie is a contributing author, “Global Environmental Regimes".
The new edition of this award-winning volume reflects the latest events in the climate crisis while providing balanced coverage of the key institutions, issues, laws, and policies in global environmental politics. Chapter authors provide crucial historical context while synthesizing the latest scholarship for a student audience. In addition to three entirely new chapters, all of the essays are written specifically for this volume— updated with new case material, maps, figures, examples, and interpretations. Additionally, an updated chronology of global environmental policy and an updated list of acronyms aid students in critical reading, as well as review and study. -- Publisher description.
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Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict
Janie Leatherman
Every year, hundreds of thousands of women become victims of sexual violence in conflict zones around the world; in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone, approximately 1,100 rapes are reported each month. This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the causes, consequences and responses to sexual violence in contemporary armed conflict. It explores the function and effect of wartime sexual violence and examines the conditions that make women and girls most vulnerable to these acts both before, during and after conflict. To understand the motivations of the men (and occasionally women) who perpetrate this violence, the book analyzes the role played by systemic and situational factors such as patriarchy and militarized masculinity. Difficult questions of accountability are tackled; in particular, the case of child soldiers, who often suffer a double victimization when forced to commit sexual atrocities. The book concludes by looking at strategies of prevention and protection as well as new programs being set up on the ground to support the rehabilitation of survivors and their communities. Sexual violence in war has long been a taboo subject but, as this book shows, new and courageous steps are at last being taken Ð at both local and international level - to end what has been called the “greatest silence in history”. – Publisher description.
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Green Energy: An A-to-Z Guide
Dustin Mulvaney, Paul Robbins, and David Leonard Downie
David Downie is a contributing author, "Berlin Mandate."
Book description:
This initial volume in the SAGE Series on Green Society provides an overview of the social and environmental dimensions of our energy system, and the key organizations, policy tools, and technologies that can help shape a green-energy economy. Each entry draws on scholarship from across numerous social sciences, natural and physical sciences, and engineering. The urgency of climate change underscores the importance of getting the right technologies, policies and incentives, and social checks-and-balances in place. This reference resource will prepare those with a sparking interest in the topic to participate in what will hopefully become an equitable and intergenerational conversation about the impacts of our energy consumption and how to make it cleaner and greener. Via its 150 signed entries, Green Energy: An A-to-Z Guide provides students, professors, and researchers an invaluable reference, presented in both print and electronic formats. Its clear and accessible writing style, together with vivid photos, numerous cross-references, extensive resource guide, and other pedagogical tools make it a valuable tool for the classroom as well as for research purposes.
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Green politics: An A-to-Z guide
Dustin Mulvaney, Paul Robbins, and David Leonard Downie
David Downie is a contributing author, "Brundtland commission," p.43-44, and " Stockholm convention," p.376-378.
Book description:
A hallmark of the past 100 years has been the greening of political thought and practice. Today, there are green political parties, green organizations, and green consumer goods, all of which show how our decisions to organize, donate, and consume have been infused with green politics, which in many ways is all about values. Green politics has grown in the popular imagination as well. Every day there are headlines about climate change, impacts of resource extraction, or chemical pollution in poor neighborhoods. Underlying all of these stories are classic political questions about power, representation, and ultimate values.Green Politics: An A-to-Z Guide covers the availability and distribution of such resources as energy and how they impact economic development, domestic politics, and international cooperation and conflict. Other issues of equal importance to be covered include watershed resources (what happens when countries share a river and one country siphons off or pollutes waters before they reach other countries), other natural resources (for instance, industrialized countries attempting to dictate to developing countries about rainforest resources, whaling countries versus those seeking total bans on whaling as an industry), air pollution, global health and epidemiology (e.g., constraining the spread of potential pandemics, radioactive fall-out across countries from nuclear accidents like Chernobyl). From A-to-Z, the politics of these and similar "green" issues are thoroughly explored via 150 signed entries. Vivid photographs, searchable hyperlinks, numerous cross references, an extensive resource guide, and a clear, accessible writing style make the Green Society volumes ideal for classroom use as well as for research.
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Chemicals, Environment, Health: A Global Management Perspective
Philip Wexler, Jan van der Kolk, Asish Mohapatra, Ravi Agarwal, and David Leonard Downie
David Downie is a contributing author, "The Vienna Convention, Montreal Protocol and Global Policy to Protect Stratospheric Ozone”.
Book description: Chemicals, Environment, Health: A Global Management Perspective presents an overview of the noteworthy conferences, organizations, and international treaties that focus on chemicals management and policy. It takes into account special challenges faced by developing countries regarding chemicals safety. From the Stockholm Conference to follow-ups in Rio and Johannesburg, it provides concise coverage of a vast swath of information. It highlights pivotal agreements such as the Basel, Rotterdam, and Stockholm Conventions, the more expansive Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management, as well as key regional agreements such as the European Union’s REACH legislation. The book includes invited essays in areas such as emergencies and financing instruments, and offers a clear look at future challenges and opportunities. Written by a team of authors from all continents, with backgrounds in international organizations, national governments, academia, industry, and NGOs, the book reflects a wide experience from a multitude of perspectives.
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Politics & Society in the Contemporary Middle East
Michel Penner Angrist and Marcie Patton
Marcie Patton is a contributing author, "Turkey," Pp. 425-459.
Book Description: Eight thematic chapters introduce the subject and explore the region-wide dynamics of governments and oppositions, international politics, political economy, civil society, religion and politics, identity politics, and gender and family issues. These themes are then systematically explored with regard to Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, the Palestinian Authority, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, and the UAE. The result is an insightful overview and analysis that both provides a wealth of information and encourages comparative, critical thinking by students at all levels. – Publisher description.
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Global Environmental Politics, 5th Edition
Pamela Chasek, David Leonard Downie, and Janet Welsh Brown
Although discussions about the global environment are now a daily occurrence—from companies touting energy-saving products to politicians debating how to best address the issue of climate change and other environmental concerns—it remains a topic plagued by misinformation and ideologically skewed arguments. For nearly twenty years, Global Environmental Politics has provided an up-to-date, accurate, and unbiased introduction to the world’s most pressing environmental issues, and the fifth edition continues this tradition. Offering a comprehensive yet concise overview of the environment and international politics, this updated edition includes new material on the latest international environmental regimes, climate change, the environmental challenges of free trade and globalization, and the growing role of the environment in global security. It is vital reading for anyone wishing to understand the current state of the field and to make informed decisions about which policies might best safeguard our environment for the future.
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Encyclopedia of Political Science
George Thomas Kurian and Jocelyn M. Boryczka
Jocelyn M. Boryczka is a contributing author, “Feminism.” and “Radical Feminism”.
Book description: Prepared with the assistance of the American Political Science Association (APSA), TEPS brings together a distinguished editorial board and over 600 distinguished and rising scholars to chronicle and assess the core issues that have long concerned students of politics. This comprehensive, multi-volume work traces the evolution of political theories, concepts, research frameworks, and political practices from across the world. As it examines the interplay of political ideas and processes, the encyclopedia also conveys the vitality and excitement of politics in practice. Cognizant of the global nature of political ideas and movements, TEPS reflects a wide range of concepts and frameworks, both Western and non-Western, national and international. An authoritative survey of the state of politics and political science, this five- volume work consists of more than 1,500 A to Z signed entries by contributors from over 30 countries, including 300 overview articles or interpretive essays.
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Climate Change: A Reference Handbook
David Leonard Downie, Kate Brash, and Catherine Vaughan
Climate Change: A Reference Handbook offers readers a way to separate science from politics on this crucial and often contentious issue. It provides a comprehensive introduction to the science and public policy of climate change, including discussion of historical developments, today's key concepts, and the future of climate science and policy. -- Publisher description.
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Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville
Jill Locke, Eileen Hunt-Botting, and Jocelyn M. Boryczka
Jocelyn M. Boryczka is a contributing author, “The Separate Spheres Paradox: Habitual Inattention and Democratic Citizenship", pp. 281-304.
Book description: This book moves beyond traditional readings of Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) and his relevance to contemporary democracy by emphasizing the relationship of his life and work to modern feminist thought. Within the resurgence of political interest in Tocqueville during the past two decades, especially in the United States, there has been significant scholarly attention to the place of gender, race, and colonialism in his work. This is the first edited volume to gather together a range of this creative scholarship. It reveals a tidal shift in the reception history of Tocqueville as a result of his serious engagement by feminist, gender, postcolonial, and critical race theorists.
The volume highlights the expressly normative nature of Tocqueville’s project, thus providing an overdue counterweight to the conventional understanding of Tocquevillean America as an actual place in time and history. By reading Tocqueville alongside the writings of early women’s rights activists, ethnologists, critical race theorists, contemporary feminists, neoconservatives, and his French contemporaries, among others, this book produces a variety of Tocquevilles that unsettles the hegemonic view of his work.
Seen as a philosophical source and a political authority for modern democracies since the publication of the twin volumes of Democracy in America (1835/1840), Tocqueville emerges from this collection as a vital interlocutor for democratic theorists confronting the power relations generated by intersections of gender, sexual, racial, class, ethnic, national, and colonial identities.
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Strangers As Neighbors: Religious Lanugage and the Response to Immigrants in the United States
Richard Ryscavage S.J. and Jocelyn Boryczka Ph.D.
With funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Fairfield University’s conducted its Strangers as Neighbors: Religious Language and the Response to Immigrants pilot project, from August 2008 to July 2009.
The project aimed for faith communities to agree on common language for speaking about migration, drawing upon some of the shared sensibilities of religious language words like “neighbor,” “brother,” “sister,” “pilgrim,” and similar concepts that have more nuanced and welcoming connotation than “migrant” or “newcomer” then to disseminate that common language across different faith communities. The study strongly suggests that a faith-based perspective allows for a more collaborative discursive environment, which could shift us away from the usual “winner-takes-all” atmosphere more commonly found in a highly charged political discourse.
This results of this project led to the next phase, Strangers as Neighbors on Long Island funded by the Hagedorn Foundation, which is helping to develop a model for discussing difficult social issues, such as immigration, within a faith-based framework that will be transferable to other regions around the country.
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Climate Change: Picturing the Science
Gavin Schmidt, Joshua Wolfe, David Leonard Downie, and Lyndon Valicenti
David Downie is a contributing author (with Gavin Schmidt and Lyndon Valicenti), "Preventive Planetary Care".
Book description: An unprecedented union of scientific analysis and stunning photography illustrating the effects of climate change on the global ecosystem. Going beyond the headlines, this work by leading NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt and master photographer Joshua Wolfe illustrates as never before the ramifications of shifting climate. Photographic spreads show retreating glaciers, sinking villages in Alaska's tundra, and drying lakes. The text follows adventurous scientists through the ice caps at the poles to the coral reefs of the tropical seas. Marshaling data spanning centuries and continents, the book sparkles with cutting-edge research and visual records, including contributions from experts on atmospheric science, oceanography, paleoclimatology, technology, politics, and the polar regions. -- Publisher description.
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Discipline and Punishment in Global Politics: Illusions of Control
Janie Leatherman
Global politics is a crowded stage of players competing for power and authority. Who is in charge of what? How do they stay in charge and what are the effects? This volume raises these questions in case studies on regimes of torture and surveillance in women’s rights, border control, media, global capital and religion. In an era of longing for hegemonic control (e.g. the US “war on terror”), the conclusions focus on the dilemmas of democratic accountability and how new spaces of resistance can be created. – Publisher description.