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Jill Hills picks up from her pathbreaking study The Struggle for Control of Global Communication: The Formative Century to continue her examination of the political, technological, and economic forces at work in the global telecommunications market from World War II to the World Trade Organization agreement of 1997. In the late twentieth century, focus shifted from the creation and development of global communication markets to their intense regulation. The historical framework behind this control--where the market was regulated, by what institution, controlled by what power, and to whose benefit--masterfully complements Hills's analysis of power relations within the global communications arena. 

Hills documents attempts by governments to direct, replace, and bypass international telecommunications institutions. As she shows, the results have offered indirect control over foreign domestic markets, government management of private corporations, and government protection of its own domestic communication market. Hills reveals that the motivation behind these powerful, regulatory efforts on person-to-person communication lies in the unmatched importance of communication in the world economy. 

As ownership of communications infrastructure becomes more valuable, governments have scrambled to shape international guidelines. Hills provides insight into struggles between U.S. policymakers and the rest of the world, illustrating the conflict between a growing telecommunications empire and sovereign states that are free to implement policy changes. Freshly detailing the interplay between U.S. federal regulation and economic power, Hills fosters a deep understanding of contemporary systems of power in global communications.

This collection raises timely questions about peace and stability as it interrogates the past and present status of international relations.

The post–World War II liberal international order, upheld by organizations such as the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and similar alliances, aspired to ensure decades of collective security, economic stability, and the rule of law. All of this was a negotiated process that required compromise—and yet it did not make for a peaceful world.

When Winston Churchill referred to the UN framework as “the temple of peace” in his famous 1946 Iron Curtain speech, he maintained that international alliances could help provide necessary stability so free people could prosper, both economically and politically. Though the pillars of international order remain in place today, in a world defined as much by populism as protest, leaders in the United States no longer seem inclined to serve as the indispensable power in an alliance framework that is built on shared values, human rights, and an admixture of hard and soft power.

In this book, nine scholars and practitioners of diplomacy explore both the successes and the flaws of international cooperation over the past seventy years. Collectively, the authors seek to address questions about how the liberal international order was built and what challenges it has faced, as well as to offer perspectives on what could be lost in a post-American world.

For decades, scholars have warned of an impending global environmental crisis. Yet politicians, particularly in the United States, have consistently shown that they are not taking the threat seriously. Initiatives aimed at protecting the planet are commonly seen as belonging to a category unto themselves-the preserve of scientists and environmental enthusiasts.

In this groundbreaking book, Robert L. Nadeau warns that we have moved menacingly close to a global environmental catastrophe and that to evade this fate we must stop drawing a distinction between issues that are "environmental" or "scientific" and those that reside in the sphere of "real life." Although scientists have attempted to bring ecological concerns to the forefront of global issues, problems are rarely communicated in ways that can be readily understood by those outside the scientific community.

Bringing together perspectives from a variety of disciplines, including economics, politics, biology, and the history of science, The Environmental Endgame articulates the concerns of scientists in a way that they become the real-life, tangible concerns of people around the world. Nadeau asserts that we have entered a new phase of human history that cannot be one of separation and division but must be one of cooperation and mutual goals.

Nadeau demonstrates that our current governmental and financial institutions, based on neoclassical economics, lack the mechanisms for implementing viable solutions to large-scale crises. Such steps cannot be taken without moving beyond the power politics of the nation-state system. The book concludes with a call to view the natural world as part of humanity, not separate from it. This unifying worldview would be a catalyst for implementing the international government organizations necessary to resolving the crisis.

The Environmental Endgame is an ambitious and timely book that will change the way we think about our economy, our government, and the environment. It should be read by everyone who cares about the pervasive neglect and abuse of planet Earth and wants to know what can be done about it.

The Game of Conservation is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable examination of nature protection around the world.

Twentieth-century nature conservation treaties often originated as attempts to regulate the pace of killing rather than as attempts to protect animal habitat. Some were prompted by major breakthroughs in firearm techniques, such as the invention of the elephant gun and grenade harpoons, but agricultural development was at least as important as hunting regulations in determining the fate of migratory species. The treaties had many defects, yet they also served the goal of conservation to good effect, often saving key species from complete extermination and sometimes keeping the population numbers at viable levels. It is because of these treaties that Africa is dotted with large national parks, that North America has an extensive network of bird refuges, and that there are any whales left in the oceans. All of these treaties are still in effect today, and all continue to influence nature-protection efforts around the globe.

Drawing on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, Mark Cioc shows that a handful of treaties—all designed to protect the world’s most commercially important migratory species—have largely shaped the contours of global nature conservation over the past century. The scope of the book ranges from the African savannahs and the skies of North America to the frigid waters of the Antarctic.

"Networks" and other artifacts of institutional life--documents, funding proposals, newsletters, organizational charts--are such ubiquitous aspects of the "information age" that they go unnoticed to most observers. In this work, Annelise Riles takes a sophisticated theoretical approach to examine the aesthetics of these artifacts and practices, to learn what their very forms and formats can tell us about knowledge and legality in today's world.
The immediate subject of Riles's ethnographic work was a group of Fijian bureaucrats and activists preparing for and participating in the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. Participants in this meeting and the activities surrounding it understood themselves to be "focal points" in national, regional, and global "networks."
Starting from the premise that anthropologists are "inside" the Network, that is, that they are producers, consumers, and aesthetes, not simply observers, of the artifacts of late modern institutional life, Riles enacts a new ethnographic method for turning the network "inside out." The resulting experiment in the theory and ethnography of transnational institutional practices makes an important contribution to the anthropology of knowledge.
With its focus on developing a method for studying transnational phenomena, The Network Inside Out will appeal not only to anthropologists, but also to legal scholars and political scientists.
Annelise Riles is Assistant Professor, Northwestern University School of Law, Research Fellow, American Bar Foundation.

Experts dominate all facets of global governance, from accounting practices and antitrust regulations to human rights law and environmental conservation. In this study, Ole Jacob Sending encourages a critical interrogation of the role and power of experts by unveiling the politics of the ongoing competition for authority in global governance.

Drawing on insights from sociology, political science, and institutional theory, Sending challenges theories centered on particular actors’ authority, whether it is the authority of so-called epistemic communities, the moral authority of advocacy groups, or the rational-legal authority of international organizations. Using in-depth and historically oriented case studies of population and peacebuilding, he demonstrates that authority is not given nor located in any set of particular actors. Rather, continuous competition for recognition as an authority to determine what is to be governed, by whom, and for what purpose shapes global governance in fundamental ways.

Advancing a field-based approach, Sending highlights the political stakes disguised by the technical language of professionals and thus opens a broader public debate over the key issues of our time.

After the staggering horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, the United Nations resolved to prevent and punish the crime of genocide throughout the world. The resulting UN Genocide Convention treaty, however, was drafted, contested, and weakened in the midst of Cold War tensions and ideological struggles between the Soviet Union and the West.

Based on extensive archival research, Anton Weiss-Wendt reveals in detail how the political aims of the superpowers rendered the convention a weak instrument for addressing abuses against human rights. The Kremlin viewed the genocide treaty as a political document and feared repercussions. What the Soviets wanted most was to keep the subjugation of Eastern Europe and the vast system of forced labor camps out of the genocide discourse. The American Bar Association and Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, in turn, worried that the Convention contained vague formulations that could be used against the United States, especially in relation to the plight of African Americans. Sidelined in the heated discussions, Weiss-Wendt shows, were humanitarian concerns for preventing future genocides.