The Best Political Books 2025

1. All Politics Is Global: Explaining International Regulatory Regimes, (Paperback)

Has globalization diluted the power of national governments to regulate their own economies? Are international governmental and nongovernmental organizations weakening the hold of nation-states on global regulatory agendas? Many observers think so. But in All Politics Is Global, Daniel Drezner argues that this view is wrong. Despite globalization, states--especially the great powers--still dominate international regulatory regimes, and the regulatory goals of states are driven by their domestic interests. As Drezner shows, state size still matters. The great powers--the United States and the European Union--remain the key players in writing global regulations, and their power is due to the size of their internal economic markets. If they agree, there will be effective global governance. If they don't agree, governance will be fragmented or ineffective. And, paradoxically, the most powerful sources of great-power preferences are the least globalized elements of their economies. Testing this revisionist model of global regulatory governance on an unusually wide variety of cases, including the Internet, finance, genetically modified organisms, and intellectual property rights, Drezner shows why there is such disparity in the strength of international regulations.

All Politics Is Global: Explaining International Regulatory Regimes, (Paperback) Author: Princeton University Press ISBN: 9780691096421 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 2008-09-07 Page Count: 256

2. The Next Great Globalization: How Disadvantaged Nations Can Harness Their Financial Systems to Get Rich, (Paperback)

Many prominent critics regard the international financial system as the dark side of globalization, threatening disadvantaged nations near and far. But in The Next Great Globalization, eminent economist Frederic Mishkin argues the opposite: that financial globalization today is essential for poor nations to become rich. Mishkin argues that an effectively managed financial globalization promises benefits on the scale of the hugely successful trade and information globalizations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This financial revolution can lift developing nations out of squalor and increase the wealth and stability of emerging and industrialized nations alike. By presenting an unprecedented picture of the potential benefits of financial globalization, and by showing in clear and hard-headed terms how these gains can be realized, Mishkin provides a hopeful vision of the next phase of globalization. Mishkin draws on historical examples to caution that mismanagement of financial globalization, often aided and abetted by rich elites, can wreak havoc in developing countries, but he uses these examples to demonstrate how better policies can help poor nations to open up their economies to the benefits of global investment. According to Mishkin, the international community must provide incentives for developing countries to establish effective property rights, banking regulations, accounting practices, and corporate governance--the institutions necessary to attract and manage global investment. And the West must be a partner in integrating the financial systems of rich and poor countries--to the benefit of both. The Next Great Globalization makes the case that finance will be a driving force in the twenty-first-century economy, and demonstrates how this force can and should be shaped to the benefit of all, especially the disadvantaged nations most in need of growth and prosperity.

The Next Great Globalization: How Disadvantaged Nations Can Harness Their Financial Systems to Get Rich, (Paperback) Author: Princeton University Press ISBN: 9780691136417 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 2008-01-23 Page Count: 320

3. The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence, (Paperback)

As the world prepared for war in the 1930s, the United States discovered that it faced the real threat of foreign spies stealing military and industrial secrets-and that it had no established means to combat them. Into that breach stepped J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Although the FBI's expanded role in World War II has been well documented, few have examined the crucial period before Pearl Harbor when the Bureau's powers secretly expanded to face the developing international emergency. Former FBI agent Raymond Batvinis now tells how the Bureau grew from a small law enforcement unit into America's first organized counterespionage and counterintelligence service. Batvinis examines the FBI's emerging new roles during the two decades leading up to America's entry into World War II to show how it cooperated and competed with other federal agencies. He takes readers behind the scenes, as the State Department and Hoover fought fiercely over the control of counterintelligence, and tells how the agency combined its crime-fighting expertise with its new wiretapping authority to spy on foreign agents. Based on newly declassified documents and interviews with former agents, Batvinis's account reconstructs and greatly expands our understanding of the FBI's achievements and failures during this period. Among these were the Bureau's mishandling of the 1938 Rumrich/Griebl spy case, which Hoover slyly used to broaden his agency's powers; its cracking of the Duquesne Espionage Case in 1941, which enabled Hoover to boost public and congressional support to new heights; and its failure to understand the value of Soviet agent Walter Krivitsky, which slowed Bureau efforts to combat Soviet espionage in America. In addition, Batvinis offers a new view of the relationship between the FBI and the military, cites the crucial contributions of British intelligence to the FBI's counterintelligence education, and reveals the agency's ultra-secret role in mining financial records for the Treasury Department. He also reviews the early days of the top-secret Special Intelligence Service, which quietly dispatched FBI agents posing as businessmen to South America to spy on their governments. With an insider's knowledge and a storyteller's skill, Batvinis provides a page-turning history narrative that greatly revises our views of the FBI--and also resonates powerfully with our own post-9/11 world.

The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence, (Paperback) Author: University Press of Kansas ISBN: 9780700616534 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 2007-03-02 Page Count: 344

4. Women and War (Paperback)

Jean Elshtain examines how the myths of Man as "Just Warrior" and Woman as "Beautiful Soul" serve to recreate and secure women's social position as noncombatants and men's identity as warriors. Elshtain demonstrates how these myths are undermined by the reality of female bellicosity and sacrificial male love, as well as the moral imperatives of just wars.

Jean Elshtain examines how the myths of Man as "Just Warrior" and Woman as "Beautiful Soul" serve to recreate and secure women's social position as noncombatants and men's identity as warriors. Elshtain demonstrates how these myths are undermined by the reality of female bellicosity and sacrificial male love, as well as the moral imperatives of just wars.