(Part 2) Best international & world politics books according to redditors
We found 665 Reddit comments discussing the best international & world politics books. We ranked the 285 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
Why not start with Wikipedia:
"The U.S. is pushing for broad provisions that cover import, export, and in-transit shipments."
"In July 2008, the United States Department of Homeland Security disclosed that its border search policies allow U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents to conduct random searches of electronic devices for "information concerning terrorism, narcotics smuggling, and other national security matters; alien admissibility; contraband including child pornography, monetary instruments, and information in violation of copyright or trademark laws; and evidence of embargo violations or other import or export control laws."[12][13] Senator Russell Feingold called the policies "truly alarming"..."
Now let's head to Slashdot:
"A new leak from the Netherlands fingers who the chief opponents of transparency are: the United States, South Korea, Singapore, and Denmark lead the way, with Belgium, Germany, and Portugal not far behind as problem countries."
Being Slashdot, one always needs to verify the summary, but in this case the summary is correct.
If you look at the timeline, 4 rounds of ACTA negotiations occurred under the Bush administration. The next 3 have already occurred under the Obama administration, with 2 more planned for later this year.
ACTA is a bipartisan venture. The Obama administration has pursued the same policies as the previous administration, which itself pursued the same policies as the Clinton administration. In short:
The federal government's Internet policies in other words are identical in tone and scope to its military policies: pro-corporate wrapped in a rhetorical veneer of "spreading freedom and democracy". This goes back a long way. I'll risk being labeled a conspiracy nut to recommend you read William Blum's Rogue State.
And yet there are already reviews on Amazon. Like this guy named "Seisachtheia58":
"Chomsky is irrelevant to the Left at this point. The book contains no surprises, except as a another reviewer shares, there's more despair than optimism."
With, of course, one star out of 5 stars. I don't remember the saying of haters of Chomsky but it went something like "There are people who hate Chomsky, and then there are people who have read Chomsky". I think it's well suited to this situation.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1118971507
Please send to Mr B Johnson, c/o Houses of Parliment, Westminster, London. SW1A 0AA.
Pierre Bourdieu's The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power, http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=2045
Henry A. Giroux, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/633:higher-education-under-attack-an-interview-with-henry-a-giroux
Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education https://www.amazon.com/Neoliberalisms-Higher-Education-Henry-Giroux/dp/1608463346/ref=pd_sim_14_11?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=296G8BV2FQK2GQNS3SVV
https://www.amazon.com/Theory-Resistance-Education-Pedagogy-Opposition/dp/089789796X/ref=pd_sim_14_10?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=T3QMZTXP4N8FHDNVXMTF
Charles Reitz: http://www.heathwoodpress.com/work-wealth-and-war-recalling-herbert-marcuses-critical-pedagogy/
http://www.heathwoodpress.com/decommodification-liberation-education-commonwealth-as-aesthetic-form-of-an-alienation-free-society/
Hey, I'm just as mad about the 40billion LNG facility. We absolutely shouldn't be building at either. It's hypocritical as hell and I hope Horgan and the NDP gets called out for it, hard.
​
It's sad that Albertans are the ones "taking the hit", but the reality is that they've build their entire economy around the industry that's causing the problem. That's something that's been going on in Alberta for decades, organized by fossil fuel companies that KNEW that this was going to happen, but didn't care what effect it would have on Albertans when this was all going to come crashing down. They were looking out for themselves and their bank accounts, and they've had a great few decades milking Alberta of it's wealth and setting them up for failure.
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Don't be mad at BC. Don't be mad at other Canadians trying to get our country to meet it's climate commitments and responsibilities. Be mad at folks like oil lobbyist Bruce Carson, and the folks at the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, and other big oil lobbyists who caused this problem for Alberta.
​
If you're interested in seeing how brutally the oil industry has fucked up the prosperity of Albertans, and drained the province of it's wealth and set it up for failure, check out:
​
Oil's Deep State by the former Alberta Liberal leader Kevin Taft
After the Sands by Gordon Laxer, founder of the Parkland Institute in Alberta
The Big Stall by Donald Gutstein, SFU Professor, teaching issues of news media and propaganda analysis
What is Andrews thinking? He's either incredibly naive or complicit in Australia's continuing slide into rule by a foreign authoritarian enemy. Surely our security agencies can weigh in on this.
Silent Invasion: https://www.amazon.com/Silent-Invasion-Clive-Hamilton-ebook/dp/B079WWT29L
The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower: https://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Year-Marathon-Strategy-Replace-Superpower-ebook/dp/B00IWUI7B4/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1540554195&sr=1-1&keywords=the+hundred+year+marathon
If you're willing to skip your fast food for a day, you can read his book. It's less than 150 pages. You can complete it in 3-4 hours or so.
To know how AAP is different from Congress and BJP, read this.
Some General Advice Here:
Career Diplomacy
Inside a US Embassy
*Look into Fellowships
Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship
Charles B. Rangel International Affairs Program
Donald M. Payne International Development Fellowship
Payne is for the FS with USAID
I hope that helps!
>The last one had far less controversies than the current administration.
By what objective standard do you make that assertion?
> Russia collusion, pornstar relations, controversial statements regarding ethnicities, xenophobic groups, and other countries only start the laundry list of controversy surrounding the administratio
As opposed to destroying libya for no good reason, fast and furious, the affordable care act's many debacles, the IRS targeting conservative groups...... I could on on, but you get the point. just listing scandals tells you nothing unless you make a rigorous effort to actually compare and contrast.
>. Somewhat unprecedented amounts of high level officials have resigned from the administration within the first two years which leads others to believe that Trump may not have the most sound leadership and control in his own White House.
"which leads others to believe" talk about weasel wording. that's a vague, meaningless phrase. I could just as easily say that the Obama administration's refusal to replace people at senior cabinet posts despite their abject failure leads others to believe that obama isn't in charge of his own white house.
>contrasting economy and energy policies refer to Trumps stance on NAFTA and the Paris Climate Agreement.
>The US doesn't have ambassadors who ultimately make the calls for foreign policy missions and meet with the heads of countries regularly in these countries. Having no official ambassador is unprecedented and a real issue.
It is neither.
>The chief of mission is second to the ambassador. Any simple google search or history textbook can tell you that.
When there's an ambassador he is. When there isn't he's effectively the ambassador. I'm a published expert on the state department, lacking an ambassador changes nothing. but if you don't believe me, try actually reading about subject you're opining on
>China's clearly stepping up in the face of doubts regarding US leadership around the globe.
Yes. that's why, for example vietnam just refused to allow a US carrier to visit! Or why north korea just announced it was refusing to give up nuclear weapons! Or NATO countries are refusing to increase their military spending!
Oh, wait......
It is going to depend upon definition. Within political science, neoliberalism absolutely exists as one of the major branches of IR theory. For the philosophical origins, read Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace, as many of the ideas that Kant discusses helped to form a foundation for later authors. To dig into Neoliberalism itself, the best place to start is with Keohane and Nye's Power & Interdependence and After Hegemony by just Keohane. In the first, they argue effectively that the 9/11 problem (the situation whereby states do not have any higher authority beyond themselves to police one another) is solved by strong international institutions that can take the form of a peacekeeping apparatus, the spread of democracy as democracies don't seem to fight one another, and expanding trade as increased trade between states causes an increased cost going to war (namely, the loss of that trade). These things create structures which allow state behavior to be seen as more consistent and therefore, more easy to calculate and expect behavior. In such a system, states do not have to be as concerned with their survival as Realists would argue. In the second, he argues that these international institutions can eventually take on a life of their own after a hegemon has set them up, as there would be sufficient interest of all states involved in the system to keep it going.
So the ideas of Neoliberalism are clearly there and well established. However, it isn't so much whether these exist as much as whether this theoretical framework is better than its competitors at explaining the international system as we observe it unfolding. Other schools of thought would probably say that neoliberalism is insufficient for explaining all of the international system for one reason or another, just as neoliberalism would defend itself as well as say the others are also insufficient.
Which brings us back to the beginning, what is meant by it existing? It at least exists as a major branch of thought in international relations.
Londonistan
AMERICA ALONE: The End of the World As We Know It
I have not read all of these. Hopeful this will be a good excuse to start some of them sooner. Hopefully it is not too late to post in this thread.
It is fascinating.
I think the Sept. 2000 From the Wilderness article and the Sept. 2000 The Media Bypass article are the best places to start. Especially the From the Wilderness article, as the author, Michael C. Ruppert, claims to have personal knowledge of many facts and most of the players (almost all former spooks or military people).
Both of these articles also cite other sources, like Cheri Seymour's 'The Last Circle' and Ari Ben-Menashe's 'Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network'.
Of course there was the Inslaw lawsuit where I imagine one can find good information. And there were press reports about the case, including New York Times articles (the very existence of which makes me suspicious). The publicly filed documents in the case may be easily obtainable but depositions may not be public and/or may be secret.
This is the Congressional report on the Inslaw case. James Norman's article in The Media Bypass magazine also references FBI documents that were "heavily redacted" but I don't know where those can be found. Mike Ruppert's article in From the Wilderness mentions numerous documents that he personally viewed but who knows who has those now or if they are publicly available.
The huge breadth of coverage of these sources is daunting. It will take a lot of work to nail them down and check the facts.
Rogue State - William Blum
I support the development of a fully enforceable rules-based system of international law which would form a proper foundation for the effective eradication of genocide, etc. - but no such system currently exists. Accordingly, at present the best approach is the one very systematically detailed by Hans J. Morgenthau in Politics Among Nations.
You can start here. Then move onto here to address what you just said. For fun you can then move onto here. Once you've got all that under your belt you can learn how politics really works by reading this.
Good luck! But I urge you not make comments like "Nazis were left wing" until you've combated your ignorance with those books! Don't do it for me, do it for yourself and your country!
Alright then, my "standard suggestions":
BJP lost in Karnataka, UP, West Bengal, NE and many other states. There was no AAP to cut votes of BJP. Why BJP lost?
AAP has chance and a very solid chance but only if you give your precious vote to completely clean candidates which you can find only in AAP.
May be I'm not clear enough. Spend Rs. 99 for your country and read this if you care. You'll understand why we should change the present system and root out both Congress and BJP.
I would also recommend The Globalization of World Politics as an introductory text to the field. It's an absolutely phenomenal textbook, while summaries you've posted are indeed comprehensive and succinct.
To elaborate, with more comprehensive texts (should the OP choose to read them), IR is a broad field. But specifically regarding International Politics, I would recommend Nye's The Future of Power, as a current perspective on international power (and the fairly recent differentiation in power resources, eg. "hard" and "soft" power). Focusing specifically on International Politics (as opposed to other IR subfields like development), the seminal works for the current theories on international politics include:
Theory of International Politics by Kenneth N. Waltz (1979), which serves as the foundation for structural realist (or neorealist) school. Neorealists are generally split between offensive realists (like Mearsheimer) and defensive realists (Waltz and Walt) as general categorizations, and you can find related works from these scholars for a focused view from either on the issues they disagree upon.
After Hegemony (1984) by Robert Keohane is the neoliberal institutionalist response to Waltz (Power and Interdependence by Keohane & Nye (1977) is probably its founding text), and one of the leading works of the theoretical field itself.
Finally, Social Theory of International Politics by Alexander Wendt (1999) is the comprehensive overview of the social constructivist school.
These largely cover all the major theoretical branches of current International Political theory (without diverging too heavily into IR subfields), though I do emphasize that these classifications are fairly fluid, given the readiness of offensive realists like Mearsheimer to look into the "black box" of domestic politics in the (highly controversial) piece, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. Again, these are the main theoretical works in these respective schools, and it is not necessary for you (the OP) to read through all of them to understand the subject.
While not exclusively International Politics focused, World Systems Theory is highly influential critical theory for IR studies, and understanding it (and Marxist-influenced dependency theory) as well as game theory (Nash Equilibrium etc) are both integral to modern IR methodologies and theories. By in large, Hobbes and the Leviathan (and a bit of Rousseau) is the only political theory that you need to start delving into IR theory, so you should be good on that front.
There are also specialized and diversified IR fields such as Development, Peace and Conflict Resolution, and Human Rights, but those are most likely not necessary given the scope of your conference (by the sounds of it, predominantly focused on state-centric International Politics).
That is not correct.
Radio Netherland did an interview with William Blue who wrote Rogue State: A Guide to the world's only superpower They state Osama bin Laddan recommended his followers read this book. It doesn't have a damn thing to do with religion.
Here's a sample of William Blum's book http://www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski.html Everyone should read this if they want to get an idea as to why people would be pissed off enough to attack the US.
The book is not available in English. There's a Wikipedia page describing it, and somebody is selling a crappy auto-translated version on Amazon.
Looking on Amazon, I did find an English-language book about the author of "Foundations of Geopolitics" (not "fundamentals"): ""The American Empire Should Be Destroyed": Alexander Dugin and the Perils of Immanentized Eschatology"
Grandest_Inquisitor: ^^original ^^reddit ^^link
It is fascinating.
I think the Sept. 2000 From the Wilderness article and the Sept. 2000 Bypass Magazine article are the best places to start. Especially the From the Wilderness article, as the author, Michael C. Ruppert, claims to have personal knowledge of many facts and most of the players (almost all former spooks or military people).
Both of these articles also cite other sources, like Cheri Seymour's 'The Last Circle' and Ari Ben-Menache's 'Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network'.
Of course there was the Inslaw lawsuit where I imagine one can find good information. And there were press reports about the case, including New York Times articles (the very existence of which makes me suspicious). The publicly filed documents in the case may be easily obtainable but depositions may not be public and/or may be secret.
This is the Congressional report on the Inslaw case. James Norman's article in Bypass Magazine also references FBI documents that were "heavily redacted" but I don't know where those can be found. Mike Ruppert's article in From the Wilderness mentions numerous documents that he personally viewed but who knows who has those now or if they are publicly available.
The huge breadth of coverage of these sources is daunting. It will take a lot of work to nail them down and check the facts.
For Neo-Eurasianism, there's Dmitry Shlapentokh's Russia Between East and West, Marlene Maruelle's Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire, and lastly, but definitely not the least, James Haiser's "The American Empire Should Be Destroyed": Alexander Dugin and the Perils of Immanentized Eschatology. These are critical works but these describe Eurasianism accurately. Dugin himself released this introductory book, Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism.
For the European New Right, there's Manifesto for a European Renaissance and Beyond Human Rights by Alain de Benoist and Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right and Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age by Tomislav Sunić.
Lastly, heed necommentpas's recommendation. Read any work of Sayyid Qutb.
To be honest with you, these works make me sick. I hope you'll feel the same too.
What do you make of this book?
https://www.amazon.ca/After-Sands-Ecological-Security-Canadians/dp/1771621001
https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Andrew-Heywood/dp/0230363385
Need this testbank please
The Assault on Reason - Al Gore
Al Gore extensively tries to answer this question in his book: The Assault on Reason. Highly recommend it.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Assault-Reason-Al-Gore/dp/0143113623
This is a collection of interviews again but this book is coming out next month
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1608467996/ref=mp_s_a_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1491367905&sr=1-6&refinements=p_27%3ANoam+Chomsky&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65
I watched them a month or so ago. It has not changed my view of Putin, though I will say I totally get why Russians love him. The only other insight I got out of that was just how smart Putin is. If I may suggest a book for you:
Putin's Master Plan
Andrew Heywood's "Politics" and "Ideologies" are great introductions.
OP isn’t writing the articles. The author of the article is also author of the book Putin’s Master Plan. So clearly he means Democrats should make bipartisan deals to stop Putin.
>Not a single country is threatening to invade Australia.
Yeah because they do it without a word.
Check out Politics Among Nations by Hans Morgenthau for a detailed look at the basics of geopolitics. He was the quintessential father of modern "realism", but he describes the significance of many factors you are thinking of. Somewhere this PDF is available online.
I think he'd really benefit from reading After the Sheikhs more than anything, though of course those are deeper reads that would do pretty well to explain the subject. After the Sheikhs would probably give a basic enough idea of the proposed way that the Gulf States could fall apart, IMO. What do you think?
https://www.amazon.com/Samson-Option-Israels-Nuclear-American/dp/0394570065 is probably not an uncommon idea in nuclear-armed countries though.
We condemn any violence that these people are causing, however, this hasn't erupted to the scale that is equal the force that Brazil is sending. And shows Brazil as a nation of cowards only willing to stamp on the faces of those less powerful than themselves to boost their national ego, rather than working to improve themselves and their national character.
Brazil may be fine with the use of excessive force, accusations of nations of being anti-democratic without proof, and disrupting both global and regional stability, but the rest of the international community likely isn't.
As such to avoid further Brazilian embarrassment we'd recommend the Brazilian government collectively read International Relations, a beginners guide
Found this on Cummings' wish list.
That's probably why he said it in the bag, it's only going to be El Infierno. If you are warned, you will receive a report in the form of the Gulf Monachies](https://www.amazon.com/After-Sheikhs-Coming-Collapse-Monarchies/dp/019024450X).
Heard some rumours about a planned coup or "Palace Coup" in Qatar. Obviously just rumour and speculation at present, but interesting.
Dr Christopher Davidson, is a British expert on the Gulf. He has written several books on the Gulf countries like Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success, Abu Dhabi: Oil and Beyond and After the Sheikhs: The Coming Collapse of the Gulf Monachies
So he knows the region well. He took to Twitter this morning and had this to say.
> Further to this described bout of orchestrated 'Qatar-bashing', I expect Saudi-UAE promised on sidelines of Trump summit that all US....facilities in Qatar would be guaranteed as regime change is carried out (palace coup, or whatever). From the US perspective, this... I think, will help solve current US dilemma on Doha, given Dept Treasury's accumulating evidence on Qatar-linked extremist financing.
>
> In this sense, a new (UAE-managed) guard in Doha is a strategy for White House & DOD to head off growing Congress criticism on Qatar. In this context, there is no doubt this is a well organzied, pre-planned, multi-dimension 'readiness' PR campaign, to prepare ground.
IR graduate student here. There's some fairly important context that surrounds these comments. It looks to me like what he's doing is contrasting power politics with more ideational ones. For a long time, people viewed international politics as fundamentally different from politics within nations. The difference was that politics within the nation could involve concepts like right and wrong, and politics between them were all about power, specifically military power. These people call themselves realists, and they're losing ground in the field of international relations after being the dominant paradigm for decades. For realists, good policies were those that are aimed towards balancing power and bad policies were the ones that ignored the importance of power. He refers to Kissinger's book, and Kissinger was a major proponent of this way of seeing the world. Hans Morgenthau, a predecessor of Kissinger's and a major realist, wrote a book called Politics Among Nations. A professor of mine once referred to it as the "State Department Bible". He spoke to State department officials, and the argument is that the rise of information flows have made traditional approaches to diplomacy and international politics less relevant. It's a common theme in the international relations literature.
I appreciate that you're coming at this with an open mind and asking reasonable questions. That's a great start.
The problem is that you've "listening" to the people on the right instead of reading a variety of material. There's way too much background manipulation going on in right-wing media, and what it does is create urgency and rage to open up your limbic brain (the part that controls feelings) to attach emotion to what the speakers are saying to your neocortex (the part that processes reason and language).
This is how marketing works. It's how branding messages bypass our rational thought and make us identify with the brand. It becomes a part of us. It's how commercials are designed to make you want that brand of fast food right now.
By reading, you use your rational brain to decide what you agree or disagree with. I personally feel that if the right had any actual good ideas they wouldn't have to resort to this kind of propaganda technique (Rush Limbaugh's drive-time-rage-show), gerrymandering, vote suppression and election voodoo, and other kinds of dirty tricks.
If they can't compete on a level playing field in the battle of ideas, then their ideas are simply too weak. They had 9 years to replace ObamaCare, so where is it? It doesn't exist because they lied to you. They never wanted a better plan at all.
If you want to understand the reality of what's going on today, stop listening to these talking heads and read Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, Al Gore's The Assault On Reason and Sam Harris's The End Of Faith.
These three books are excellent primers to understand the issues facing us today, how we got here and where we need to go.
https://www.amazon.com/Londonistan-Melanie-Phillips/dp/1594031975
<== has a BA in International Relations
If you really want to get into International Relations, the LKY School of Public Policy isn't very highly-regarded in the field. NTU's RSIS is far more respectable. Main reason is: Kishore Mahbubani of LKYSPP is a prolific huckster who spouts a lot of BS in order to drive sales of his own books.
And then there's the issue of your reason for wanting to pursue this Masters. You need to ask yourself on what you really want to get out of it, because admissions committees are going to pay a lot of attention to your reason for making them bother to read your application in the first place.
There's also the problem where you don't seem to know a lot about IR. If you don't, this beginner's guide is very effective at covering what undergrads usually go through in a semester-long Intro to IR course.
For more detailed reading, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics presents one of the dominant theories of International Relations and according to my very biased opinion, the one which represents what our global order moving towards in the next couple years.
Read those two at the very bare minimum, then you should have a fair idea if you're keen on this path. If reading those two makes you bored, then forget it, because you'll be reading a lot of this kind of material.
I'm not trying to be hyperbolic. See also:
Henry Giroux on Zombie Politics
His website
Public Humanities at Western present: Henry Giroux
Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education Henry Giroux
Links to topics mentioned can be found at Majority Report Geek Wonk
https://www.amazon.co.uk/British-Politics-Dummies-Julian-Knight/dp/1118971507
I didn't call protecting the marginalised as degradation to society.
&#x200B;
My point is that just because you view the controls of free thought and speech as a form of cultural protectionism as a positive i do not. It would not take much to take this type of legislation and control to the next level. To control descent and ideas. To stop or even reverse the progress society has made in the last 100 years. Just because it's used to promote the worthy and good now doesn't mean it always will be.
&#x200B;
Edit:Do yourself a favour and buy a copy of this book. Read the recent history of controlling speech speech and thought. See where it can end up.
> You keep ignoring /u/rn443 's main point
I ignored him because I doubt he'll budge from his position. Therefore, it's a waste of time.
> the international community wouldn't allow Israel to get away with genociding the Palestenians.
Maybe, maybe not. Maybe they can't do it all at once, but they can do it little by little. Keep in mind, Israel controls the media narrative and has powerful allies in the Western gov'ts. In The Host and The Parasite, the author explains how Israel and Western gov't had an agreement if Hamas gets elected they'll label them as a terrorist organization. Therefore, Hamas was doomed to begin with; long before they actually did any terrorist activity. Watch this short documentary on how the European nations control the Palestinian people through donations called the Donor Opium. Not to mention The Samson Option, in it, Israel openly challenged European gov'ts that if Israel goes down, they'll take everyone down with them.
Edit: Lol. Downvote away because you can't rebuttal. That's the only power you have.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Samson-Option-Israels-American/dp/0394570065/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1341194107&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=sampson+option