Makes correlations between success and geography, explaining how such rising centers of innovation as San Francisco and Austin are likely to offer influential opportunities and shape the national and global economies in positive or detrimental ways.

By intelligence officials for intelligent people

This book develops the idea that since decolonisation, regional patterns of security have become more prominent in international politics. The authors combine an operational theory of regional security with an empirical application across the whole of the international system. Individual chapters cover Africa, the Balkans, CIS Europe, East Asia, EU Europe, the Middle East, North America, South America, and South Asia. The main focus is on the post-Cold War period, but the history of each regional security complex is traced back to its beginnings. By relating the regional dynamics of security to current debates about the global power structure, the authors unfold a distinctive interpretation of post-Cold War international security, avoiding both the extreme oversimplifications of the unipolar view, and the extreme deterritorialisations of many globalist visions of a new world disorder. Their framework brings out the radical diversity of security dynamics in different parts of the world.

There is only one region--the surface of the earth--on which mankind finds its home. Yet, although much effort is devoted by geographers towards the study of this diversified environment as a whole, it has long seemed necessary, by the methods of aespecial' or aeregional geography', to study its component parts. And although nature abhors lines, geographers might appear to adore them, so busily do they engage themselves in delimiting on their maps allegedly significant areas called aeregions'. As a result, every student of geography in school, college of education and university has been taught, read books, and attempted to answer questions on regional geography.The problem of region in geographic thought--how it may be defined, how it has developed, and how it is applied--has been vigorously debated within the discipline. In this incisive examination of the types of regions and regional methods treated in modern geography, Roger Minshull analyzes in detail the concepts of formal, functional, and city regions in an attempt to clarify this vexing problem.In addition to sizes, shapes, boundaries, and organization, the phenomena that usually form the content of regions are delineated in an attempt to define the nature of regional geography. As some regions are seen to be products of geographers' minds, it is suggested that certain influences, especially the methods of mapping the separate topics that form the content of regions, have been exaggerated. Regionalism and possible alternatives to the regional method are treated, and a large section of the book is devoted to the idea of the compage, in which the geographer's choice of topics and method of working is much freer than in more traditional approaches.