Despite prognostications of the "end of history," the 21st century has posed new challenges and a host of global crises. This book takes up the current global economic crisis in relation to new and changing dynamics of territory, authority, and rights in today's global system. The authors explore long simmering conflicts in comparative perspective, including settler colonialism in South Africa, Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine. They discuss indigenous struggles against environmental land grabs and related destruction of indigenous lands by the US nuclear weapons complex. The book uniquely considers the sacred in the context of the global system, including struggles of Latina/o farm workers in the U.S. for social justice and for change in the Catholic Church. Other chapters examine questions of civilizations and identity in the contemporary global system, as well as the role of world-regions.

The acclaimed historian demonstrates a link between climate change and social unrest across the globe during the mid-17th century. Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides, government collapses—the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were unprecedented in both frequency and severity. The effects of what historians call the "General Crisis" extended from England to Japan and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. In this meticulously researched volume, historian Geoffrey Parker presents the firsthand testimony of men and women who experienced the many political, economic, and social crises that occurred between 1618 to the late 1680s. He also incorporates the scientific evidence of climate change during this period into the narrative, offering a strikingly new understanding of the General Crisis. Changes in weather patterns, especially longer winters and cooler and wetter summers, disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests. This in turn brought hunger, malnutrition, and disease; and as material conditions worsened, wars, rebellions, and revolutions rocked the world.

The global credit crisis of 2008 2009 was the most serious shock to the world economy in fully 80 years. It was for the world as a whole what the Asian crisis of 1997 1998 was for emerging markets: a profoundly alarming wake-up call. By laying bare the fragility of global markets, it raised troubling questions about the operation of our deeply integrated world economy. It cast doubt on the efficacy of the dominant mode of light-touch financial regulation and more generally on the efficacy of the prevailing commitment to economic and financial liberalization. It challenged the managerial capacity of inherited institutions of global governance. And it augured a changing of the guard, pointing to the possibility that the economies that had been the leaders in the "global growth stakes" in the past might no longer be the leaders in the future. What the crisis means for reform, however, is still unclear. This book brings together leading scholars and policy analysts to describe and weigh the options. Successive chapters assess options for the global financial system, the global trading system, the international monetary system, and the Group of 20 and global governance. A final set of chapters contemplates the policy challenges for emerging markets and the advanced economies in the wake of the financial crisis.

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.

Despite prognostications of the "end of history," the 21st century has posed new challenges and a host of global crises. This book takes up the current global economic crisis in relation to new and changing dynamics of territory, authority, and rights in today's global system. The authors explore long simmering conflicts in comparative perspective, including settler colonialism in South Africa, Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine. They discuss indigenous struggles against environmental land grabs and related destruction of indigenous lands by the US nuclear weapons complex. The book uniquely considers the sacred in the context of the global system, including struggles of Latina/o farm workers in the U.S. for social justice and for change in the Catholic Church. Other chapters examine questions of civilizations and identity in the contemporary global system, as well as the role of world-regions.

This book introduces a series of workshops known as the 21st Century Ready workshops specifically crafted for high school and university students. The purpose of these workshops is to motivate and empower these young adult students to be agents of positive societal change by equipping them with the mindset and conceptual tools to tackle the dire global problems of our time. Through these workshops, they will be able to envision the kind of world they want to live in. They will see themselves as important participants in an international community and will recognize and embrace their responsibility as world citizens. In a world buffeted by increasing crises that include climate change, gross human rights atrocities such as genocide, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction including nuclear weapons, global financial crises, terrorism, the threat of global pandemics, territorial aggression, and shortages of food and water, it is easy for this generation of millennials to feel fearful that the world is spinning out of control. Such fear can lead to despair and apathy which lead to a paralysis of action which our world can ill afford at such a critical time in the fortunes of humanity. The 21st Century Ready workshops will motivate the young participants to take ownership of their destiny and exercise their ability to choose new ways of responding to the challenges of our time. They will find creative, practical, principled, high-impact and highly-effective ways of acting to solve the seemingly insuperable global problems we face. Instead of allowing these global challenges to become stumbling blocks that lead to more suffering, they will find themselves empowered to make choices that can turn these challenges into stepping-stones that lead to a more peaceful world and secure world in which their generation can fulfill their individual and collective potential.