Coping with the Collapse of the Old Order:


Book Description

On July 4, 2009, the region celebrated thirty-six years as a formal Caribbean Community (CARICOM). The analyses contained in this publication in the The Integrationist Series all tend to suggest that CARICOM now, more than ever, needs to transform its experiences over these years into a more structured foundation for maximising the multiplier effects of collective representation, and for leveraging CARICOMs diplomatic efforts and resources in a more coordinated and integrated manner. This imperative is necessitated by the rapidly changing international environment which has far too often impacted negatively on small developing countries, leaving them increasingly vulnerable and marginalized.




Understanding Collapse


Book Description

In this lively survey, Guy D. Middleton critically examines our ideas about collapse - how we explain it and how we have constructed potentially misleading myths around collapses - showing how and why collapse of societies was a much more complex phenomenon than is often admitted.




The Fall of the Dynasties


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The Collapse of Complex Societies


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Dr Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory.




Collapse


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From the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive is a visionary study of the mysterious downfall of past civilizations. Now in a revised edition with a new afterword, Jared Diamond's Collapse uncovers the secret behind why some societies flourish, while others founder - and what this means for our future. What happened to the people who made the forlorn long-abandoned statues of Easter Island? What happened to the architects of the crumbling Maya pyramids? Will we go the same way, our skyscrapers one day standing derelict and overgrown like the temples at Angkor Wat? Bringing together new evidence from a startling range of sources and piecing together the myriad influences, from climate to culture, that make societies self-destruct, Jared Diamond's Collapse also shows how - unlike our ancestors - we can benefit from our knowledge of the past and learn to be survivors. 'A grand sweep from a master storyteller of the human race' - Daily Mail 'Riveting, superb, terrifying' - Observer 'Gripping ... the book fulfils its huge ambition, and Diamond is the only man who could have written it' - Economis 'This book shines like all Diamond's work' - Sunday Times




Diaspora Lobbies and the US Government


Book Description

As a nation of immigrants, the United States has long accepted that citizens who identify with an ancestral homeland may hold dual loyalties; yet Americans have at times regarded the persistence of foreign ties with suspicion, seeing them as a sign of potential disloyalty and a threat to national security. Diaspora Lobbies and the US Government brings together a group of distinguished scholars of international politics and international migration to examine this contradiction in the realm of American policy making, ultimately concluding that the relationship between diaspora groups and the government can greatly affect foreign policy. This relationship is not unidirectional—as much as immigrants make an effort to shape foreign policy, government legislators and administrators also seek to enlist them in furthering American interests. From Israel to Cuba and from Ireland to Iraq, the case studies in this volume illustrate how potential or ongoing conflicts raise the stakes for successful policy outcomes. Contributors provide historical and sociological context, gauging the influence of diasporas based on population size and length of time settled in the United States, geographic concentration, access to resources from their own members or through other groups, and the nature of their involvement back in their homelands. This collection brings a fresh perspective to a rarely discussed aspect of the design of US foreign policy and offers multiple insights into dynamics that may determine how the United States will engage other nations in future decades.




The Five Stages of Collapse


Book Description

A user’s guide to economic, political, social and cultural collapse. In the face of political impotence, resource depletion, and catastrophic climate change, many of us have become reconciled to an uncertain future. However, popular perception of how this future might actually unfold varies wildly from "a severe and prolonged recession," to James Howard Kunstler's "long emergency," to the complete breakdown of civilization. In The Five Stages of Collapse , Dmitry Orlov posits a taxonomy of collapse, offering a surprisingly optimistic perspective on surviving the sweeping changes of the day with health and sanity intact. Arguing that it is during periods of disruption and extreme uncertainty that broad cultural change becomes possible, Orlov steers the reader through the challenges of financial, commercial, and political collapse. He suggests that if the first three stages are met with the appropriate responses, further breakdown may be arrested before the extremes of social and cultural collapse are reached. Drawing on a detailed examination of post-collapse societies, including the Somali people of Africa, the Pashtuns of Afghanistan, the Roma of Central and Eastern Europe, and even the Russian mafia, The Five Stages of Collapse describes successful adaptations in areas such as finance, self-governance, and social and cultural organization. These fascinating case studies provide a unique perspective on the characteristics that determine highly resilient communities. Shot through with Orlov's trademark dark humor, this is an invaluable toolkit for creating workable post-collapse solutions. Dmitry Orlov was born in Leningrad, Russia, and immigrated to the United States. He is the author of Reinventing Collapse and maintains the phenomenally popular blog Club Orlov.




Coping with Defeat


Book Description

The surprising similarities in the rise and fall of the Sunni Islamic and Roman Catholic empires in the face of the modern state Coping with Defeat presents a historical panorama of the Islamic and Catholic political-religious empires and exposes striking parallels in their relationship with the modern state. Drawing on interviews, site visits, and archival research in Turkey, North Africa, and Western Europe, Jonathan Laurence demonstrates how, over hundreds of years, both Sunni and Catholic authorities experienced three major shocks and displacements—religious reformation, the rise of the nation-state, and mass migration. As a result, Catholic institutions eventually accepted the state’s political jurisdiction and embraced transnational spiritual leadership as their central mission. Laurence reveals an analogous process unfolding across the Sunni Muslim world in the twenty-first century. Identifying institutional patterns before and after political collapse, Laurence shows how centralized religious communities relinquish power at different rates and times. Whereas early Christianity and Islam were characterized by missionary expansion, religious institutions forged in the modern era are primarily defensive in nature. They respond to the simple but overlooked imperative to adapt to political defeat while fighting off ideological challenges to their spiritual authority. Among Laurence’s findings is that the disestablishment of Islam—the doing away with Islamic affairs ministries in the Muslim world—would harm, not help with, reconciliation to the rule of law. Examining upheavals in geography, politics, and demography, Coping with Defeat considers how centralized religions make peace with the loss of prestige.




Holding Up a Mirror


Book Description

The good news is: that faith in material goods really does bring prosperity to society. The bad news is: that self-same commitment to material things leads inexorably to the destruction of the civilizations it builds. Using theatre as a measure society's health, this book shows that Ancient Greece and Rome, Mediaeval Christendom and our own contemporary society all follow the same pattern: prosperity thrives on the conviction that the material world alone constitutes true 'reality'; but that very conviction leads to a rejection of the supernatural, undermines absolute moral standards, and leads to cultural and social disintegration.




Facing Loss and Death


Book Description

Lyric poetry as a temporal art-form makes pervasive use of narrative elements in organizing the progressive course of the poetic text. This observation justifies the application of the advanced methodology of narratology to the systematic analysis of lyric poems. After a concise presentation of this transgeneric approach to poetry, the study sets out to demonstrate its practical fruitfulness in detailed analyses of a large number of English (and some American) poems from the early modern period to the present. The narratological approach proves particularly suited to focus on the hitherto widely neglected dimension of sequentiality, the dynamic progression of the poetic utterance and its eventful turns, which largely constitute the raison d'être of the poem. To facilitate comparisons, the examples chosen share one special thematic complex, the traumatic experience of severe loss: the death of a beloved person, the imminence of one’s own death, the death of a revered fellow-poet and the loss of a fundamental stabilizing order. The function of the poems can be described as facing the traumatic experience in the poetic medium and employing various coping strategies. The poems thus possess a therapeutic impetus.