Book Excerpts
The book explains the benefits of free trade and globalization for middle-class, Main Street Americans. It offers a spirited defense of free trade and globalization that engages the populists on their own turf. It shows how middle- and low-income families benefit from import competition, and how a more globalized U.S. economy has created better jobs and higher living standards for American workers through the ups and downs of the business cycle.
Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has revolutionized popular expression in China, enabling users to organize, protest, and influence public opinion in unprecedented ways. Guobin Yang's pioneering study maps an innovative range of contentious forms and practices linked to Chinese cyberspace, delineating a nuanced and dynamic image of the Chinese Internet as an arena for creativity, community, conflict, and control. Like many other contemporary protest forms in China and the world, Yang argues, Chinese online activism derives its methods and vitality from multiple and intersecting forces, and state efforts to constrain it have only led to more creative acts of subversion. Transnationalism and the tradition of protest in China's incipient civil society provide cultural and social resources to online activism. Even Internet businesses have encouraged contentious activities, generating an unusual synergy between commerce and activism. Yang's book weaves these strands together to create a vivid story of immense social change, indicating a new era of informational politics.
Asians have absorbed many Western practices in economics, corporate governance, the rule of law and technology. As a result, by 2050, the world's three largest economies will be China, India and Japan. To remain relevant, global groups must graciously welcome and incorporate emerging economic powers, writes Kishore Mahbubani, dean and professor of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. In Chapter 6 of his book, "The New Asian Hemisphere," Mahbubani assesses the role of the United Nations.
Calls for global governance increasingly emerge, as global problems move to the top of national agendas. Those living in powerful nations fear that global government might reduce the power of nations and eliminate freedoms. Strobe Talbott - president of the Brookings Institution, former deputy secretary of state from 1994 to 2001, and founding director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization - has traced what he calls "the great experiment of global governance from the origins of the concept in ancient religion and philosophy through its evolution in the minds of political thinkers and in the strivings of political leaders." Talbot points out that the world's citizens must demonstrate, once again, that they can put the common fate over tribal instincts in order to resolve problems such as climate change and nuclear proliferation.
Laws can include or exclude, protect or harm. Nationalist retentionist cultural-property laws have failed to protect antiquities and the human record, argues James Cuno, president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago. Instead of encouraging the collection of all artifacts and displaying the historical evidence for all to observe and analyze, some nations use their power to control the narrative, selecting pieces that support their claim to power. All global citizens have a right to view ancient artifacts, regardless of where they might have been found, and learn cultural truths.
Imbalanced trade is controversial trade - and imbalances in information, income, substitutes, mobility or access are common between wealthy countries and poor ones. Governments can use trade agreements to advance human rights, directly or indirectly, argue Susan Aaronson and Jamie Zimmerman in their book "Trade Imbalance: The Struggle to Weigh Human Rights Concerns in Trade Policymaking." Aaronson is research associate professor of international affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs and adjunct associate professor at the business school, George Washington University; Zimmerman is associate director of the Global Assets Project, New America Foundation. In this excerpt, Aaronson and Zimmerman explain how agricultural support programs in Europe fail to evolve with changing circumstances.
About one out of every four people in the world practice Islam.Since the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and the US response, the study of "political Islam" has become a "growth industry" in the West, too often narrowly defined as a threat, explains Mohammed Ayoob, professor of international relations, in his book "The Many Faces of Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Muslim World." In reality, Islam and other religious traditions wield similar influence over politics. Ayoob examines the complex interplay between domestic concerns in various Muslim countries with international events. In this excerpt, he explains how some populist political movements thrive on anti-Americanism.
Despite multiple complexities and cultures, Asia is integrating in new ways. "Not for centuries has that region been so fluid, so open, so cosmopolitan," writes Ellen L. Frost in the introduction to her book "Asia's New Regionalism." Connections in the world's largest, most populated and economically dynamic continent are particularly intense and innovative along Asia's coastal areas, notes Frost, a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Rather than stand by as mere onlookers, any nation or individual can encourage the dynamics of economic, social and political regionalism and enjoy the benefits of long-term stability.
During the course of hiring an assistant to write a book about Indonesia torn between two forces, Islmization and globalization, journalist Sadanand Dhume met Herri Nurdi, managing editor of a fundamentalist magazine "Sabili." The book, "My Friend the Fanantic: Travels with an Indonesian Islamist" combines first-person travel narrative and reporting on the world's most populous Muslim nation enduring rapid transition from democratic moderation to rigid intolerance.
