In this important and path-breaking book, esteemed scholar and public intellectual Richard Falk explores how we can re-imagine the system of global governance to make it more ethical and humane. Divided into three parts, this book firstly scrutinizes the main aspects of Global Governance including, Geopolitics, The Future of International law, Climate Change and Nuclear weapons, 9/11, Global Democracy and the UN. In the last part, Falk moves the discussion on to the search for Progressive Politics, the Israel/Palestinian conflict and the World Order Models Project. Drawing on, but also rethinking the normative tradition in international relations, he examines the urgent challenges that we must face to counter imperialism, injustice, global poverty, militarism and environmental disaster. In so doing, he outlines the radical reforms that are needed on an institutional level and within global civil society if we are to realize the dream of a world that is more just, equitable and peaceful. This important work will be of interest to all students and scholars of global politics and international relations.
The contributors highlight alternative imaginaries and social forces harnessing new organizational and political forms to counter and displace dominant strategies of rule. They suggest that to address intensifying economic, ecological and ethical crises far more effective, legitimate and far-sighted forms of global governance are required.
Identifies the major weaknesses in the current United Nations system and proposes fundamental reforms to address each. This title is also available as Open Access.
This book contends that the forces of late modernism are being caught between a capital-driven globalization and a territorially rooted revival of tribalism and ultra-nationalism. Its critical focus is on global structures that are producing new patterns of North/South and rich/poor domination, as well as exerting dangerous pressures on the carrying capacities of the planet. Richard Falk argues that any hopeful response to these threatening developments requires the fundamental revision of such basic ideas as sovereignty, democracy, and security. These organizing conceptions of political life are being reshaped during this era of transition from a state-centric world of geopolitics to a more centrally guided world of geogovernance. He contends that geogovernance will have adverse consequences for the human condition unless it can be mainly constructed by transnational democratic forces animated by a vision of humane governance. This volume was written for the Global Civilization Project of the World Order Models Project (WOMP), an international group of scholars formed to think creatively about legal and political structures adequate to the needs of the modern world.
Reimagining Leadership on the Commons examines leadership approaches derived from an, open, whole systems perspective and a more collaborative paradigm that recognizes that rather than being individualist self-maximizers, people prefer to work together to share benefits and found a society based on equality and justice.
New Revised Edition. How can we create a just, healthy, and humane world? What is the path to developing sustainable energy, food, transportation, production, construction, and other systems? What’s the best strategy to end poverty and ensure that everyone has equal rights? How can we slow the rate of extinction and restore ecosystems? How can we learn to resolve conflicts without violence and treat other people and nonhuman animals with respect and compassion? The answer to all these questions lies with one underlying system—schooling. To create a more sustainable, equitable, and peaceful world, we must reimagine education and prepare a generation to be solutionaries—young people with the knowledge, tools, and motivation to create a better future. This book describes how we can (and must) transform education and teaching; create such a generation; and build such a future.
"This intimate and penetrating account of a remarkable life is rich in insights about topics ranging from the academic world to global affairs to prospects for a livable society. A gripping story, with many lessons for a troubled world." NOAM CHOMSKY "Whether you are a peace activist or researcher, or you care about the earth and fellow human beings, Public Intellectual will enrich you intellectually and politically." DR. VANDANA SHIVA "Richard Falk is one of the few great public intellectuals and citizen pilgrims who has preserved his integrity and consistency in our dark and decadent times. This wise and powerful memoir is a gift that bestows us with a tear-soaked truth and blood-stained hope". DR. CORNEL WEST “Richard Falk recounts a life well spent trying to bend the arc of international law toward global justice. A Don Quixote tilting nobly at real dragons. His culminating vision of a better or even livable future—a ‘necessary utopia’—evokes with current urgency the slogan of Paris, May 1968: ‘Be realistic: demand the impossible.’”DANIEL ELLSBERG This political memoir reveals how Richard Falk became prominent in America and internationally as both a public intellectual and citizen pilgrim. Falk built a life of progressive commitment, highlighted by visits to North Vietnam where he met PM Pham Von Dong, to Iran during the Islamic Revolution after meeting Khomeini in Paris, to South Africa where he met with Nelson Mandela at the height of the struggle against apartheid, and frequently to Palestine and Israel. His memoir is studded with encounters with well-known public figures in law, academia, political activism and even Hollywood. Falk mentored the thesis of Robert Mueller, taught David Petraeus. His publications and activism describe various encounters with embedded American militarism, especially as expressed by governmental resistance to responsible efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons, and his United Nations efforts on behalf of the rights of the Palestinian people. In 2010 he was named Outstanding Public Scholar in Political Economy by the International Studies Association. He has been nominated annually for the Nobel Peace Prize since 2009
"[A] brilliant new book . . . Humane provides a powerful intellectual history of the American way of war. It is a bold departure from decades of historiography dominated by interventionist bromides." —Jackson Lears, The New York Review of Books A prominent historian exposes the dark side of making war more humane In the years since 9/11, we have entered an age of endless war. With little debate or discussion, the United States carries out military operations around the globe. It hardly matters who’s president or whether liberals or conservatives operate the levers of power. The United States exercises dominion everywhere. In Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Samuel Moyn asks a troubling but urgent question: What if efforts to make war more ethical—to ban torture and limit civilian casualties—have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier? To advance this case, Moyn looks back at a century and a half of passionate arguments about the ethics of using force. In the nineteenth century, the founders of the Red Cross struggled mightily to make war less lethal even as they acknowledged its inevitability. Leo Tolstoy prominently opposed their efforts, reasoning that war needed to be abolished, not reformed—and over the subsequent century, a popular movement to abolish war flourished on both sides of the Atlantic. Eventually, however, reformers shifted their attention from opposing the crime of war to opposing war crimes, with fateful consequences. The ramifications of this shift became apparent in the post-9/11 era. By that time, the US military had embraced the agenda of humane war, driven both by the availability of precision weaponry and the need to protect its image. The battle shifted from the streets to the courtroom, where the tactics of the war on terror were litigated but its foundational assumptions went without serious challenge. These trends only accelerated during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Even as the two administrations spoke of American power and morality in radically different tones, they ushered in the second decade of the “forever” war. Humane is the story of how America went off to fight and never came back, and how armed combat was transformed from an imperfect tool for resolving disputes into an integral component of the modern condition. As American wars have become more humane, they have also become endless. This provocative book argues that this development might not represent progress at all.
This book develops a fresh and challenging perspective on the city. Drawing on a wide and diverse range of material and texts, it argues that too much contemporary urban theory is based on nostalgia for a humane, face-to-face and bounded city. Amin and Thrift maintain that the traditional divide between the city and the rest of the world has been perforated through urban encroachment, the thickening of the links between the two, and urbanization as a way of life. They outline an innovative sociology of the city that scatters urban life along a series of sites and circulations, reinstating previously suppressed areas of contemporary urban life: from the presence of non-human activity to the centrality of distant connections. The implications of this viewpoint are traced through a series of chapters on power, economy and democracy. This concise and accessible book will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology, geography, urban studies, cultural studies and politics. .
