Fear's Empire: War, Terrorism, and Democracy PDF Download

Author: Benjamin R. Barber
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393070417
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
"Fear's Empire lays the foundation for a principled opposition based on America's truest and best values."--Senator Gary Hart The author of Jihad vs. McWorld analyzes how American foreign policy has gone wrongand how it could go right. In this hard-hitting but pragmatic new critique of the Bush administration's foreign policy, Benjamin R. Barber exposes in detail the folly of an agenda of preventive war, placing it in the context of two hundred years of American strategic doctrine (including the recent history of deterrence and containment). He shows how chosen "rogue states" have been made to stand in for terrorists too difficult to locate and destroy, and how the United States continues to support dictatorship in nations it regards as friends, while still believing we can impose democracy on vanquished enemies at the barrel of a gun. Barber argues for an America that promotes cooperation, multilateralism, international law, and pooled sovereignty. For as law and citizenship alone secure liberty within nations, law and citizenship alone can secure liberty among them, freeing them from fear.

Author: Amitav Acharya
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788129105325
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
The new "post-9/11 era" is an age of fear. International relations is now not just about power politics but also about fear politics. We live in a world where power is no longer an adequate guarantee against fear. The more powerful a nation is, the more fearful it becomes. This book examines how this transformation came about. It looks at three kinds of fear which define international politics today: fear of postmodern terrorism, fear of American unilateralism, and fear of the state apparatus empowered by the war on terror. The legitimacy of the war in Iraq and its implications for international security; and the impact of the war on terror on democracy and human rights are provocatively discussed.

Author: Benjamin Barber
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520242333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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"One of the chosen few: an enduring contribution to democratic thought."—Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science, Yale University

Author: Tom Engelhardt
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608461548
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
In 2008, when the U.S. National Intelligence Council issued its latest report meant for the administration of newly elected President Barack Obama, it predicted that the planet's "sole superpower" would suffer a modest decline and a soft landing fifteen years hence. In his new book The United States of Fear, Tom Engelhardt makes clear that Americans should don their crash helmets and buckle their seat belts, because the United States is on the path to a major decline at a startling speed. Engelhardt offers a savage anatomy of how successive administrations in Washington took the "Soviet path"--pouring American treasure into the military, war, and national security--and so helped drive their country off the nearest cliff. This is the startling tale of how fear was profitably shot into the national bloodstream, how the country--gripped by terror fantasies--was locked down, and how a brain-dead Washington elite fiddled (and profited) while America quietly burned. Think of it as the story of how the Cold War really ended, with the triumphalist "sole superpower" of 1991 heading slowly for the same exit through which the Soviet Union left the stage twenty years earlier.

Author: Noam Chomsky
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317254317
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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The volatile Middle East is the site of vast resources, profound passions, frequent crises, and long-standing conflicts, as well as a major source of international tensions and a key site of direct US intervention. Two of the most astute analysts of this part of the world are Noam Chomsky, the preeminent critic of U.S, foreign policy, and Gilbert Achcar, a leading specialist of the Middle East who lived in that region for many years. In their new book, Chomsky and Achcar bring a keen understanding of the internal dynamics of the Middle East and of the role of the United States, taking up all the key questions of interest to concerned citizens, including such topics as terrorism, fundamentalism, conspiracies, oil, democracy, self-determination, anti-Semitism, and anti-Arab racism, as well as the war in Afghanistan, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the sources of U.S. foreign policy. This book provides the best readable introduction for all who wish to understand the complex issues related to the Middle East from a perspective dedicated to peace and justice.

Author: Benjamin R. Barber
Publisher: Crown
ISBN:
Category : Capitalism
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Barber offers a bold lens through which to understand the chaotic events of the post-Cold War world and, in the tradition of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock and Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, explains the forces at work, why democracy is under siege, and what the consequences are for citizenship.

Author: Geoffrey R. Skoll
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137570342
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Fear and terror have come to drive world politics, and the people who do the driving have shaped and used them to carry out their policies. As the world's political economy devolves into chaos, Globalization of American Fear Culture posits that violence and fear have become the new statecraft.

Author: Robert L. Ivie
Publisher: Rhetoric, Culture, and Social
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Robert Ivie discusses democracy's centrality to the national identity and how prevailing constructions of democracy constitute a republic of fear in which the threat of foreign and domestic "others" is chronically exaggerated through rituals of vilification and victimization.

Author: Benjamin R. Barber
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 080907656X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
In our crowded, noisy world—too many people, too much crime, too many wars, not enough time—it seems almost impossible to locate and preserve the common ground where a civil society might flourish. Whatever happened to the civic virtue and community life that nourished true democracy? In this provocative, hard-hitting book, political scientist Benjamin Barber tackles these questions head-on and, in answering them, retrieves the ideals of "civil society" from the nostalgists who want to re-create old-fashioned (and discriminatory) small communities and from the free-marketeers who associate it with unfettered commercial activity. Commentators have been making a fashion of civil society, but they tend to mean many different things by the phrase: this bracingly clear book shows how diverse the various notions are and how best to think about them. Barber proposes practical strategies for making civil society real, for civilizing public discourse and promoting civic debate, and for affirming values beyond those of work and leisure, commerce and bureaucracy.

Author: Agner Fog
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1783744065
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Are humans violent or peaceful by nature? We are both. In this ambitious and wide-ranging book, Agner Fog presents a ground-breaking new argument that explains the existence of differently organised societies using evolutionary theory. It combines natural sciences and social sciences in a way that is rarely seen. According to a concept called regality theory, people show a preference for authoritarianism and strong leadership in times of war or collective danger, but desire egalitarian political systems in times of peace and safety. These individual impulses shape the way societies develop and organise themselves, and in this book Agner argues that there is an evolutionary mechanism behind this flexible psychology. Incorporating a wide range of ideas including evolutionary theory, game theory, and ecological theory, Agner analyses the conditions that make us either strident or docile. He tests this theory on data from contemporary and ancient societies, and provides a detailed explanation of the applications of regality theory to issues of war and peace, the rise and fall of empires, the mass media, economic instability, ecological crisis, and much more. Warlike and Peaceful Societies: The Interaction of Genes and Culture draws on many different fields of both the social sciences and the natural sciences. It will be of interest to academics and students in these fields, including anthropology, political science, history, conflict and peace research, social psychology, and more, as well as the natural sciences, including human biology, human evolution, and ecology.