World Politics: Trend and Transformation

Book Description

Charles W. Kegley

WORLD POLITICS: TREND AND TRANSFORMATION is the best selling text in International Relations, because of its trusted balance in coverage and approach, unmatched by any other text for the course. By analyzing both historical and contemporary trends and developments, utilizing theoretical concepts, and weaving in the interactions of global actors, WORLD POLITICS: TREND AND TRANSFORMATION resists the temptation to overly simplify world politics, presenting the material in a thought-provoking yet accessible manner while preparing students to assess the possibilities for the global future and its potential impact on their lives.

The major theories scholars use to explain the dynamics underlying international relations?realism, liberalism, and their variants?frame the text. At the same time, this book incorporates the reconstructed theories newly advanced to interpret contemporary developments (such as constructivism and feminist theory) and resists the temptation to oversimplify world politics with a superficial treatment that would mask complexities and distort realities. In addition, major actors and current issues such as global welfare, international economics, ecology, and the environment are covered, as well as issues of global conflict, including the changing face of terrorism, national security, warfare, and approaches to peace.

Publisher: Wadsworth Publishing; 11 edition (March 8, 2006)
ISBN-10: 0495187062

The Cost of Competence: Why Inequality Causes Depression, Eating Disorders, and Illness in Women

Book Description:

Since the advent of the women's movement, women have made unprecedented gains in almost every field, from politics to the professions. Paradoxically, doctors and mental health professionals have also seen a staggering increase in the numbers of young women suffering from an epidemic of depression, eating disorders, and other physical and psychological problems.

In Dying to Win, authors Brett Silverstein and Deborah Perlick argue that rather than simply labeling individual women as, say, anorexic or depressed, it is time to look harder at the widespread prejudices within our society and child-rearing practices that lead thousands of young women to equate thinness with competence and success, and feminity with failure. They argue that it is wrong to continue to treat depression, anxiety, anorexia and bulimia as separate disorders in young women when they are really part of a single syndrome. Furthermore, their fascinating research into the lives of forty prominent women from Elizabeth I to Eleanor Roosevelt show that these symptoms have been disrupting the lives of bright, ambitious women not for decades, but for centuries. Drawing on all the latest findings, rare historical research, cross-cultural comparisons, and their own study of over 2,000 contemporary women attending high schools and colleges, the authors present powerful new evidence to support the existence of a syndrome they call anxious somatic depression.

Their investigation shows that the first symptoms usually surface in adolescence, most often in young women who aspire to excel academically and professionally. Many of the affected women grew up feeling that their parents valued sons over daughters. They identified intellectually with their successful fathers, not with their traditional homemaker mothers. Disordered eating is one way of rejecting the feminine bodies they perceive as barriers to achievement and recognition. Silverstein and Perlick uncover medical descriptions matching their diagnosis in Hippocratic texts from the fourth century B.C., in anthropological studies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and in case studies of many noted psychologists and psychiatrists, including the "hysteric" patients Freud used to develop his theories on psychoanalysis.

They have also discovered that statistics on disordered eating, depression, and a host of other symptoms soared in eras in which women's opportunites grew--particularly the 1920s, when record numbers of women entered college and the workforce, the boyish silhouette of the flapper became the feminine ideal, and anorexia became epidemic, and again from the 1970s to the present day. The authors show that identifying this devastating syndrome is a first step toward its prevention and cure. Dying to Win presents an urgent message to parents, educators, policymakers, and the medical community on the crucial importance of providing young women with equal opportunity, and equal respect.

About the Authors:

Brett Silverstein is Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, City College of New York, and the author of Fed Up. Deborah Perlick is Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology, Department of Psychiatry, Cornell University Medical College.

The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many. Noam Chomsky

Book Description:

This book was compiled from three interviews I conducted with Noam Chomsky in the Boston area on December 16, 1992 and January 14 and 21, 1993, which were then edited and revised. (A few lines were added in November, 1993.)
My questions appear in boldface. We've tried to define terms or names that may be unfamiliar the first time they occur.These explanations appear [in square brackets].
Tapes and transcripts of hundreds of Chomsky's interviews and talks -- and those of many other interesting speakers -- are also available. For a free catalog, call 303-444-8788 or write to me at 2129 Mapleton, Boulder CO 80304.
David Barsamian


Excerpts from the book.
Divide and conquer


To continue with India: talk about the divide-and-rule policy of the British Raj, playing off Hindus against Muslims. You see the results of that today.

Naturally, any conqueror is going to play one group against another. For example, I think about 90% of the forces that the British used to control India were Indians.

There's that astonishing statistic that at the height of British power in India, they never had more than 150,000 people there.

That was true everywhere. It was true when the American forces conquered the Philippines, killing a couple hundred thousand people. They were being helped by Philippine tribes, exploiting conflicts among local groups. There were plenty who were going to side with the conquerors.

But forget the Third World -- just take a look at the Nazi conquest of nice, civilized Western Europe, places like Belgium and Holland and France. Who was rounding up the Jews? Local people, often. In France they were rounding them up faster than the Nazis could handle them. The Nazis also used Jews to control Jews.

If the United States was conquered by the Russians, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Elliott Abrams and the rest of them would probably be working for the invaders, sending people off to concentration camps. They're the right personality types.

That's the traditional pattern. Invaders quite typically use collaborators to run things for them. They very naturally play upon any existing rivalries and hostilities to get one group to work for them against others.

It's happening right now with the Kurds. The West is trying to mobilize Iraqi Kurds to destroy Turkish Kurds, who are by far the largest group and historically the most oppressed. Apart from what we might think of those guerrillas, there's no doubt that they had substantial popular support in southeastern Turkey.

(Turkey's atrocities against the Kurds haven't been covered much in the West, because Turkey is our ally. But right into the Gulf War they were bombing in Kurdish areas, and tens of thousands of people were were bombing in Kurdish areas, and tens of thousands of people were driven out.)

Now the Western goal is to use the Iraqi Kurds as a weapon to try and restore what's called "stability" -- meaning their own kind of system -- in Iraq. The West is using the Iraqi Kurds to destroy the Turkish Kurds, since that will extend Turkey's power in the region, and the Iraqi Kurds are cooperating.

In October 1992, there was a very ugly incident in which there was a kind of pincers movement between the Turkish army and the Iraqi Kurdish forces to expel and destroy Kurdish guerrillas from Turkey.

Iraqi Kurdish leaders and some sectors of the population cooperated because they thought they could gain something by it. You could understand their position -- not necessarily approve of it, that's another question -- but you could certainly understand it.

These are people who are being crushed and destroyed from every direction. If they grasp at some straw for survival, it's not surprising -- even if grasping at that straw means helping to kill people like their cousins across the border.

That's the way conquerors work. They've always worked that way. They worked that way in India.