How did the world’s most warlike continent become its most peaceful one? Mehta argues that the process of political integration through the European Union has eliminated the reasons for conflict, and that this same model can be exported to Africa, The Americas, Asia, Australasia, and the Middle East and North Africa region, providing a promising glimpse of world peace.

"This lucid, thoughtful synthesis makes excellent sense of the dense web that international organizations have spun around the globe over the last two centuries. Above all, by highlighting their role in relation to states and by assessing their performance, this volume provides a welcome introduction to a prime feature of our globalized world."---Michael H. Hunt, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill "The author has written a balanced, fair introduction to the modern history of international organizations. While the survey of the League of Nations is well done, the book really comes alive with its analysis of the United Nations. The final chapter, surveying recent UN operations, is excellent. A World Beyond Borders is an effective resource for undergraduate students of international relations."---George Egerton, University of British Columbia There were only a few international organizations at the start of the twentieth century. By the end of the century, there were thousands at the heart of the international system involved in all aspects of international relations, including peacekeeping, disarmament, peace resolution, human rights, diplomacy, and environmentalism. This short book examines how international organizations became the major legal, moral, and cultural forces that they are today. For easy reference, the appendices consist of the Covenant of the League of Nations, The Charter of the United Nations, and The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The book also includes a list of League of Nations members and United Nations members, diagrams of the structure of the General Assembly and the organs of the UN, and a list of UN peacekeeping missions.

This book asks how we understand the relationship between ethics and power in humanitarian action.

Can moral behavior exist in a world of states? Under what conditions? Where if at all, do norms for moral behavior, considerations of right and wrong, fit int the relations between states? Drawing upon many historical examples, Stanley Hoffmann examines the complex questions of whether or not ethical action is possible in international politics and, if it is, what are the obstacles and constraints? Duties Beyond Borders tries to answer these questions and to suggest a course of “ethical politics” based on a pragmatic, realistic approach to international politics.

This book presents and analyzes artistic interactions both within the Soviet bloc and with the West between 1945 and 1989. During the Cold War the exchange of artistic ideas and products united Europe?s avant-garde in a most remarkable way. Despite the Iron Curtain and national and political borders there existed a constant flow of artists, artworks, artistic ideas and practices. The geographic borders of these exchanges have yet to be clearly defined. How were networks, centers, peripheries (local, national and international), scales, and distances constructed? How did (neo)avant-garde tendencies relate with officially sanctioned socialist realism? The literature on the art of Eastern Europe provides a great deal of factual knowledge about a vast cultural space, but mostly through the prism of stereotypes and national preoccupations. By discussing artworks, studying the writings on art, observing artistic evolution and artists? strategies, as well as the influence of political authorities, art dealers and art critics, the essays in Art beyond Borders compose a transnational history of arts in the Soviet satellite countries in the post war period. ÿ

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was established in 1945 with twin aims: to rebuild various institutions of the world destroyed by war, and to promote international understanding and peaceful cooperation among nations. Based on empirical and historical research and with a particular focus on history teaching, international understanding and peace, UNESCO Without Borders offers a new research trajectory for understanding the roles played by UNESCO and other international organizations, as well as the effects of globalization on education. With fifteen chapters by authors from cross-disciplinary and diverse geographical areas, this book assesses the global implications and results of UNESCO’s educational policies and practices. It explores how UNESCO-approved guidelines of textbook revisions and peace initiatives were implemented in member-states, illustrating the existence of both national confrontations with the new worldview promoted by UNESCO, as well as the constraints of international cooperation. This book provides an insightful analysis of UNESCO’s past challenges and also indicates promising future research directions in support of international understanding for peace and cooperation. As such, it will be of key interest to researchers, postgraduate students, academics in the fields of international and comparative education, education politics and policies, and to those interested in the historical study of international organizations and their global impact. The book will also appeal to practitioners, especially those who conduct research on or work in post-conflict societies.

This book examines the phenomenon of modern memory as a reaction to total war, an aspiration to truth-seeking provoked by the independent forces of modern war and collective violence which is transnational, or postnational, in character. Using examples from prose and poetry, film and theatre, painting and photography, and music and the popular arts, the author traces a narrative path through the events of the twentieth century, defining the tradition of modern memory in terms of its essentially anti-militaristic, anti-war character, as expressed in the manner in which it represents recalled violence and atrocity. Through a series of thematic discussions of two world wars, the Shoah, urbicide and nuclear weapons, Postnational Memory explores the formation of transnational memory, drawing on examples from industrialized societies, with a focus on memory of real events and their reproduction in literature and the arts, often including personal recollections that link the self to the represented past. As such, by asking how the concept of modern memory is constructed through the victims of war and genocide, the book constitutes an alternative to national memories and hegemonic, militarist or ethnocentric histories. Surveying the emergence of new, transnational forms of remembering the past, it will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, memory studies and peace studies, as well as those working in disciplines such as modern and international history, cultural studies and military studies.