A celebration of Ama Ata Aidoo's work presented as a festschrift with a broad spectrum of articles and personal memoirs from scholars and literary artists. It conveys the full extent of Aidoo's place as a literary innovator and an exponent of radical social and cultural thought in Africa and internationally on account of its self-consciousness and gender equality. Included are a study, by playwright Femi Osofisan, of the Nigerian film industry and its impact on live theatre and negative images in contemporary Ghanaian music.

In his new book, Lessons from a Diplomatic Life: Watching Flowers from Horseback, retired State Department official and career diplomat Marshall P. Adair recounts and reflects on his time in the US Foreign Service. The story of his assignments throughout the world reveals important details about significant foreign policy issues and historic events, including Bosnia, American policy toward Tibet, the 1988 Burmese uprising, and the foundations of the current US-China relationship. It provides the reader with an inside look at the history of the US State Department, US diplomacy, and US foreign policy of recent decades, during what was often an unstable and uncertain time. This first-hand, detailed account of the author’s work with foreign governments and populations provides a unique outlook on US relations around the world that has critical policy implications for the situations we face today. Through this retelling, Adair illuminates how the depth and accuracy needed of diplomats and Foreign Service agents requires a close and intimate understanding of the cultures and governments they work with.

Can John D. Negroponte be described as 'The Last American Diplomat'? In a career spanning 50 years of unprecedented American global power, he was the last of a dying breed of patrician diplomats - devoted to public service, a self-effacing and ultimate insider, whose prime duty was to advise, guide and warn - a bulwark of traditional diplomatic realism against ideologue excess. Negroponte served as US ambassador to Honduras, Mexico, the Philippines and Iraq; he was US Permanent Representative to the UN, Director of National Intelligence and Deputy Secretary of State to George W. Bush. His was a high-flying and seemingly conventional career but one full of surprises. Negroponte opposed Kissinger in Vietnam, supported a 'proxy war' but opposed direct American military action against Marxists in Central America - facing bitter Congress opposition in the process. He swam against the floodtide of George W. Bush's neocon-dominated administration, warning against the Iraq war as a possible new 'Vietnam' and criticising aspects of Bush's 'War on Terror'. He disconcerted the administration by arguing that the re-establishment of Iraq would take as long as five years. And he was influential in international social and economic policy - working for the successful re-settlement of millions of refugees in Southeast Asia following the Vietnam War, issuing early warnings about the scourge of AIDS in Africa and successfully launching the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). George W. Liebmann's incisive account is based on personal and shared experience but it is no hagiography; beyond the author's discussions with Negroponte, this book is deeply researched in US state papers and includes interviews with leading actors. It will provide fascinating reading for anyone interested in the inside-story of American diplomacy, showing personal and policy struggles, and the underlying fissures present even in the world's last remaining superpower.

In a series of short stories that both inform and amuse, this book transports the reader across the windswept shores of the Caspian Sea and provides a provocative view of the wars, peace, intrigues, and betrayals that have shaped the political geography of this important and volatile region. The demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the eclipsing of the old Iranian-Soviet regime of the sea have given rise to new challenges for the regional actors and unprecedented opportunities for international players to tap into the area's enormous oil and gas resources, third in size only behind Siberia and the Persian Gulf. This book explores the historical themes that inform and animate the more immediate and familiar discussions about petroleum, pipelines, and ethnic conflict in the Caspian region.

Taking seriously the critical conception of diplomacy as the mediation of estrangement, Diplomatic Para-citations turns to the politics and laws that tie modern diplomacy to colonial cultures and the ‘genres of Man’ that they privilege. In an attempt to read ‘the diplomatic’ from the African postcolony, the book probes the injunction at the center of the law of genre that states that “genres are not to be mixed.” This enables it to investigate the citational/recitational forms of knowledge and practices of recognition that reproduce the diplomatic and colonial order of things in the African context. Through a reading of literature, philosophy, and a multiplicity of everyday practices in Africa and its diasporas, Sam Okoth Opondo explores amateur diplomatic practices that provide a counterforce to laws that prescribe faithfulness to a norm/form while proscribing the mixing of genres.

As a distinguished and admired American diplomat of the last half century, Burns has played a central role in the most consequential diplomatic episodes of his time: from the bloodless end of the Cold War and post-Cold War relations with Putin's Russia to the secret nuclear talks with Iran. Here he recounts some of the seminal moments of his career, drawing on newly declassified cables and memos to give readers a rare, inside look at American diplomacy in action, and of the people who worked with him. The result is an powerful reminder of the enduring importance of diplomacy. -- adapted from jacket

What can the international community do when countries would rather ignore a thorny problem? Scorecard Diplomacy shows that, despite lacking traditional force, public grades are potent symbols that can evoke countries' concerns about their reputations and motivate them to address the problem. The book develops an unconventional but careful argument about the growing phenomenon of such ratings and rankings. It supports this by examining the United States' foreign policy on human trafficking using a global survey of NGOs, case studies, thousands of diplomatic cables, media stories, 90 interviews worldwide, and other documents. All of this is gathered together in a format that walks the reader through the mechanisms of scorecard diplomacy, including an assessment of the outcomes. Scorecard Diplomacy speaks both to those keen to understand the pros and cons of US policy on human trafficking and to those interested in the central question of influence in international relations. The book's companion website can be found at www.scorecarddiplomacy.org.