This book, with its evidence and case studies from a wide variety of countries in both the Third World and the transitional economies of Eastern Europe, examines the World Bank's new energy policies. Written by well informed analysts in leading NGOs concerned with energy questions, this book seeks to add to the pressure on the Bank to shift its capital lending and policy advice in favour of sustainable energy, including serious investment in energy efficiency, renewable energy sources and energy provision for the rural poor. The Bank has traditionally been the leading multilateral financier of energy provision. Since 1992, it has begun to implement a reform programme based on privatization of the energy sector. This book explains the historical development of the Bank's energy policies. It outlines promising initiatives within the Bank for sustainable energy and explains why these are having little impact on mainstream energy lending. It describes how and why the Bank's energy polices have actually led to an increase in fossil fuel power plants in the top-ten low income countries, while continuing to marginalize renewable energy. While not wishing to launch an ideological attack on privatization, the authors are concerned with how the Bank has allowed regulatory processes to be highjacked by vested interests. Another problem is institutional barriers within the Bank itself. While a minority of staff are genuinely concerned to implement its excellent rhetoric about sustainable development, too many retain their market-fixated approach and do not support investments oriented to renewable energy sources, energy provision in rural areas or even energy efficient technologies. This book constitutes a powerful, policy-oriented critique of the Bank which often gives an impression of talking too much and changing its behaviour too little.

This book presents the first in-depth assessment of France's policies towards NATO between 1981 and 1997. It also provides a critical assessment of these policies. It argues that France's arms-length relationship with NATO's integrated military structure served its purpose during the Cold War, but increasingly came to impose high costs thereafter.

NATO's war on Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 was unleashed in the name of democracy and human rights. This view was challenged by the world's three largest countries, India, China and Russia, who saw the bombing of Serbia and Kosovo as a naked attempt to assert US dominance in an unstable world. In the West, media networks were joined by substantial sectors of left/liberal opinion in supporting the war. Nonetheless, a wide variety of figures emerged to challenge the prevailing consensus. Their work, gathered here for the first time, forms a collection of key statements and anti-war writings from some of democracy's most eloquent dissidents-Noam Chomsky, Harold Pinter, Edward Said and many others-who provide carefully researched examinations of the real motives for the US action, dissections and critiques of the ideology of 'humanitarian warfare', and chartings of the unnecessary tragedy of a region laid to waste in the pursuance of Great Power politics. This reader presents some of the most important texts on NATO's Balkan crusade and forms a major intervention in the debate on global geo-political strategy after the Cold War.

How did Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic become the newest members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization? Based on interviews conducted with more than 75 individuals --from Cabinet officials to desk officers --James M. Goldgeier tells the inside story of this controversial Clinton administration initiative. Analyzing the earliest internal deliberations, as well as administration discussions with allies, the Russians, and the United States Senate, Goldgeier demonstrates how a handful of committed policymakers outmaneuvered overwhelming bureaucratic opposition. He shows the role of domestic politics in shaping the evolution of this policy and dissects the national campaign waged by the administration's specially created NATO enlargement ratification office and its outside supporters. Weaving together insights about bureaucratic politics, policy entrepreneurship, and domestic politics, this book provides fresh insights into the American foreign policymaking process.

At the turn of the century, the United States is on the verge of losing its vote in the General Assembly for non-payment of its arrears. There are eerie parallels between the domestic debate over the United Nations in 1999 and the struggles over the League of Nations in 1919. Why, many ask, are Americans the first to create international organizations and the first to abandon them? What is it about the American political culture that breeds both the most ardent supporters and the most vocal detractors of international organization? And why can't they find any common ground? In seeking to uncover the roots of American ambivalence toward international organization, this political history presents the first major analysis of U.S. attitudes toward both the United Nations and the League of Nations. It traces eight themes that have resurfaced again and again in congressional and public debates over the course of this century: exceptionalism, sovereignty, nativism and racism, unilateralism, security, commitments, reform, and burden-sharing. It assesses recent domestic political trends and calls for the development of two interactive political compacts--one domestic and one international--to place U.S.-UN relations on a new footing. A Century Foundation Book

An in-depth examination of the evolving peace and security activities of the United Nations Secretary-General in the context of developments in international politics. The constraints and opportunities which the Office has experienced under Perez de Cuellar and Boutros-Ghali in the transition to the post-Cold War world and the controversy which has surrounded the Office reflects the volatility and uncertainty of the UN in a changing environment. It is argued that the Secretary-General's activities in the 1990s reflect a development of the international civil service beyond the classical model.

The book discusses five examples of NGO action in four countries - Indonesia, Philippines, South Africa and Sri Lanka - with authoritarian regimes. It poses the question of whose interest was served by these activities, the beneficiary group or the NGOs and argues that where these coincided, identifiable benefits accrued to beneficiary groups. This underlines the importance of ensuring that NGOs are accountable to the communities with which they seek to work.

At a time of fundamental changes in international health strategies, this is the first book to provide a comprehensive account of the international agencies involved -- notably the World Health Organisation, the World Bank, UNICEF, UNFPA and UNDP. Succinctly covering their organisation, finances, policies and practice, and paying due attention to the increasingly dominant role in health policymaking being played by the World Bank, this book also devotes attention to other actors in the health field, notably non-governmental organisations. It also examines in depth the main areas of international health policy, including the Health for All and Primary Health Care strategies, the current preoccupation with health care reform and service delivery, the future of essential drugs policies and the issues surrounding reproductive health and population.
What makes this book of outstanding usefulness is not simply its rich combination of institutional and policy information and analysis, but the particular stance of its authors - namely their principled assertion of the universal right of people to have access to much needed health services as the essential basis for any health policy.

Tracing the transformation of NATO in the aftermath of the Cold War, this volume assesses NATO's current accomplishments, continuing challenges and political pitfalls. International scholars and policy-makers explore three key themes influencing NATO's future: transatlantic relations, the debate over enlargement and the organization's new functions. Weighing the fate of an alliance poised for renewal or decline, the contributors offer analysis and discussion of an organization that has changed profoundly over the past five years and continues to evolve in the face of an uncertain global environment.

This survey of a career overseeing cultural relations on behalf on the British Council provides an insight into the practical business of building cultural bridges and supplying philanthropic assistance. Bruce Nightingale joined the British Council in 1965, but had spent the previous nine years gaining overseas experience, including a period as a district officer in the Colonial Service in Nigeria. His postings abroad included Malawi during the first six years of independence, Japan in the year of "Expo '70", Malaysia in its new industrializing phase, and Romania during its rapid decline. Service in London, in charge of the Council's film and video operations, was followed by Finland, and finally, by Ethiopia during the climax of the civil war and its aftermath. He retired in 1992.

This book addresses the isssue of NATO's role in today's world. It explores how changes in international political structures have influenced NATO's position and policies, as well as our view of its capacities. The essays in this book look at a variety of controversial issues, paying particular attention to debates over seeing NATO as a modern structure or as an obsolete organization. Contents: Foreword: A New NATO for a New Era, Manfred W'mer; Preface, Kenneth W. Thompson; Introduction, Kenneth W. Thompson; THE UNITED STATES, NATO, AND EUROPE: Post-Cold War American Leadership in NATO, S. Nelson Drew; Partnership for Peace and the Future of European Security, Joseph J. Kruzel; Structure for Security in Europe, John R. Galvin; IS NATO OBSOLETE?: Is NATO Obsolete?, James Chace; Is NATO Obsolete?, Richard L. Kugler; Why NATO Persists, John S. Duffield; THE ENLARGEMENT OF NATO: CHANGING FACES: The Changing Faces of Nato; Partnership for Peace and the Combined Joint Task Force, Doug K. Bereuter; Russia in NATO: The Fourth Generation of the Atlantic Alliance, Ira L. Straus; NATO, East Asia, and Japan, Alan Tonelson; THE FUTURE OF NATO: The Future of NATO, David C. Acheson; NATO's Prospects, John Woodworth; The Future of NATO, Andrew J. Pierre.

The emerging threat of a militarily powerful Soviet Union after the Second World War caused the United States to rearm and look to the defence of its northern approaches against a possible Soviet bomber attack. The Canadian government, although less apprehensive about thios military threat than the American, realized the necessity of accommodating its neighbour's urgent desire for security and ought to avoid a US-Canada bilateral pact by a multilateral defence treaty and organization linking the democracies of Western Europe and North America.

The fourth volume of James Earys' highly acclaimed history of Canadian defence and external affairs studies the government's role in forming the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; its attempts, partly successful, to give the alliance the functions and authority it considered suited to Canadian interests and those of the Western democracies; and the problems it tried to deal with as a member of the Alliance - problems mobilizing the deterrent, of sharing the burden, and of explanding membership to include Greece, Turkey, and Western Germany. These decision, made some thirty years ago, have shaped the course of Canadian foreign policy ever since, and continue to have ramifications for Canadian life today.

In the 2000s, Laos was treated as a model country for the efficacy of privatized, "sustainable" hydropower projects as viable options for World Bank-led development. By viewing hydropower as a process that creates ecologically uncertain environments, Jerome Whitington reveals how new forms of managerial care have emerged in the context of a privatized dam project successfully targeted by transnational activists. Based on ethnographic work inside the hydropower company, as well as with Laotians affected by the dam, he investigates how managers, technicians and consultants grapple with unfamiliar environmental obligations through new infrastructural configurations, locally-inscribed ethical practices, and forms of flexible experimentation informed by American management theory. Far from the authoritative expertise that characterized classical modernist hydropower, sustainable development in Laos has been characterized by a shift from the risk politics of the 1990s to an ontological politics in which the institutional conditions of infrastructure investment are pervasively undermined by sophisticated 'hactivism.' Whitington demonstrates how late industrial environments are infused with uncertainty inherent in the anthropogenic ecologies themselves. Whereas 'anthropogenic' usually describes human-induced environmental change, it can also show how new capacities for being human are generated when people live in ecologies shot through with uncertainty. Implementing what Foucault called a "historical ontology of ourselves," Anthropogenic Rivers formulates a new materialist critique of the dirty ecologies of late industrialism by pinpointing the opportunistic, ambitious and speculative ontology of capitalist natures.

It was long assumed that the Soviet Union dictated Warsaw Pact policy in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America (known as the 'Third World' during the Cold War). Although the post-1991 opening of archives has demonstrated this to be untrue, there has still been no holistic volume examining the topic in detail. Such a comprehensive and nuanced treatment is virtually impossible for the individual scholar thanks to the linguistic and practical difficulties in satisfactorily covering all of the so-called 'junior members' of the Warsaw Pact. This important book fills that void and examines the agency of these states - Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania - and their international interactions during the 'discovery' of the 'Third World' from the 1950s to the 1970s. Building upon recent scholarship and working from a diverse range of new archival sources, contributors study the diplomacy of the eastern and central European communist states to reveal their myriad motivations and goals (importantly often in direct conflict with Soviet directives). This work, the first revisionist review of the role of the junior members as a whole, will be of interest to all scholars of the Cold War, whatever their geographical focus.

Globally renowned for its accuracy, consistency and reliability, the Europa World Year Book 2017 is your source for detailed country surveys containing the latest analytical, statistical and directory information for over 250 countries and territories. For ninety years since its first publication, the Europa World Year Book has been the premier source of contemporary political and socio-economic analysis for library reference shelves, offering timely information with a global reach. The Europa World Year Book 2017 is also available online as an authoritative and regularly-updated digital resource. For more information, please visit: www.europaworld.com.

Globally renowned for its accuracy, consistency and reliability, the Europa World Year Book 2016 is your source for detailed country surveys containing the latest analytical, statistical and directory information for over 250 countries and territories. For ninety years since its first publication, the Europa World Year Book has been the premier source of contemporary political and socio-economic analysis for library reference shelves, offering timely information with a global reach. The Europa World Year Book 2016 is also available online as an authoritative and regularly-updated digital resource. For more information, please visit: www.europaworld.com.

German troops fighting the Taliban in the Hindu Kush; EU judges sitting in courts in the Balkans; UN viceroys governing parts of Oceania; American occupation of the Middle East. Amid the myriad political experiences of the post-Cold War era, the historians of the future are likely to pay particular attention to attempts by outsiders to administer a host of post-conflict societies, to perform physical and social reconstruction, to establish functioning institutions, to open economies and, ultimately, to transform the 'maladjusted' political cultures of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Few developments in the two decades after 1989 were as revealing of the character of the international system, of the gaps between liberal discourse and practice, and of the fleeting nature of the Western hegemonic moment. What made the new protectorates possible? What were they like as an actual political experience? How contradictory was its reception? Why was the process of governing others for their own good so flawed and the outcomes so disappointing? These are among the questions addressed by some of the leading authorities in the field, including Stefan Halper, Christopher Clapham, Mats Berdal and Richard Caplan. The book is divided into two parts. The first examines the historical background from which the new protectorates (Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan) emerged and the dissonant reactions to their creation; the second analyses the experience of governance in the protectorates along several dimensions, ranging from United Nations involvement through problems of policing, civil-military relations, coordination between international forces and the local state to the sometimes perverse consequences of economic policy.

The last few years have witnessed several significant developments in respect of international organizations, most of which are best encapsulated in the word "change". In particular, international organizations have moved from their traditional role of facilitator of the activities of their members, to that of director of their own activities. As a result, there is increased scrutiny over issues relating to the governance, control, accountability and the privileges and immunities of international organizations. These subjects are all the focus of this book. Edward Kwakwa has collected together the best published work by leading authorities in the field on subjects of crucial importance and relevance to international organizations, particularly in the context of today's ever-increasing globalization. This book is of interest to scholars and students of law, as well as government and non-government practitioners and international civil servants.

While military intervention in Iraq was being planned, humanitarian organizations were offered US government funds to join the Coalition and operate under the umbrella of "Operation Iraqi Freedom". In Kosavo, Timor, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, NGOs had previously been asked to join in "just" wars. Indeed many aid agencies cooperated eagerly, subordinating their specific aims to the greater goal of "peace, democracy and human rights". Few Afghans or Sierra Leoneans regret the interventions. However, the inconvenient victims of these triumphs, those from the "wrong" side, are quickly forgotten. These are individuals whom humanitarian organizations have the duty to save, yet in doing so they must remain independent of the warring parties, and refrain from joining in the "struggle against evil" or any other political agenda. Then there are places where the pretence of providing assistance allows donor governments to disguise their backing of local political powers. Lastly there are those whose sacrifice is politically irrelevant in the wider scope of international relations. In circumstances such as these, what little international aid is available collides head-on with the mutal desire of the adversaries to wage "total" war that may lead to the extermination of entire populations. In this book, international experts and members of the MSF analyse the way these issues have crystallized over the five years spanning the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. The authors make the case for a renewed commitment to an old idea: a humanitarianism that defies the politics of sacrifice.

The World Trade Organization was established in the 1990s, superseding the GATT and providing a stronger institutional foundation for international trading arrangement among countries. As an international organization it faces a number of challenges, including achieving agreement over trade in services, bringing in new members from the economies in transition and developing countries, making the strengthened dispute settlement mechanism effective, and bringing about an increasingly open multilateral trading system. This volume analyzes the challenges and opportunities confronting the WTO. Several chapters address the WTO's institutional capacity directly, through such issues as the way national policies may influence or constrain the WTO, the difficulties of achieving coherence with the World Bank and the IMF, and the resources available to the WTO's secretariat in relation to the tasks it faces. Other papers in this volume consider more contemporary policy issues facing the WTO, including how to bring services trade into an open multilateral framework, how dispute settlement mechanisms can be improved, and how other concerns, such as labour standards and environmental issues may be addressed. Two papers focus on the WTO's relationship to developing countries and countries in transition, and an introductory chapter provides an overview of the WTO's operation. The text presumes no technical background in economics.

The Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) is the Muslim world's only intergovernmental body-the largest such system operating outside of the United Nations. Based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the OIC was founded forty years ago to respond to the Palestinian crisis and counts fifty-seven Muslim countries among its members. It has since branched out into the areas of economic development, education, culture, science, technology, conflict resolution, and tackling Islamophobia. Sharing the history of the OIC with Western readers for the first time, this book details the achievements, successes, and failures of this singular political body and demonstrates why modernization is so central to the continued development of Islamic society. In 2005, the OIC elected Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu of Turkey to transform the organisation's platform and intentions. Ihsanoglu has since tackled the difficult problems of illiteracy and poverty, economic underdevelopment, and ethnic and sectarian conflict. In this history he devotes an important chapter to Islamophobia and its impact on relations between Islam and the West. The OIC treats Islamophobia as a form of racism and xenophobia, and Ihsanoglu explains why it is essential for international institutions to work together to combat violent extremism. He also argues that representative government, free speech, and equal rights for all citizens are critical for Muslim societies, and he envisions the need to reform the OIC as a necessary step toward renewing the Muslim world. One of the most important studies of the Muslim world to emerge directly from its participants, The Islamic World in the New Century ushers in a new era of change.