The Struggle for Cooperation


Book Description

During World War II, French citizens expressed that the German occupiers behaved more "correctly" than the American combat troops who replaced them. In The Struggle for Cooperation: Liberated France and the American Military, 1944–1946, author Robert L. Fuller presents a unique perspective on the relations between France and the United States during the Second World War. Until the summer of 1944, the German Army made real efforts to fare well with the French to make their occupation duties easier. The Americans also tried to get along with the French; however, American GIs were subjected to looser discipline than German soldiers. Most GIs behaved appropriately, but the small number who did not created an unfavorable impression among the French—which created tension, mutual feelings of suspicion and dislike, and occasional displays of outright hostility. Yet, because the war against the Axis powers was also France's war, most French, especially officials, wanted to work cooperatively with the Americans to play their part in winning it. Fuller reveals how the French handled various issues that demanded cooperation, including the requisition of French property, the treatment of Axis prisoners of war, the utilization of French transportation networks, GI crime, and the effective American takeover of the port of Marseille. Other interactions, such as controlling black markets and caring for displaced persons, fostered both cooperation and friction. Fuller establishes how all of these issues offered the possibility of working together peacefully or in conflict, and how—more often than not—the results ended with positive and amicable actions.




Legacies of Struggle


Book Description

Since the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Koreatown has become increasingly fractured by intergenerational conflict, class polarization, and suburban flight. In the face of these struggles, community organizations can provide centralized resources and infrastructure to foster an ethnic consciousness and political solidarity among Korean Americans. This book analyzes the role of ethnic community-based organizations and the dynamics of contemporary Korean American politics. Drawing on two case studies, the author identifies diverse ways in which community-based organizations negotiate their political agendas and mainstream ties within the traditional ethnic power structures. One organization promotes middle-class ethnic goals through accommodation to immigrant leaders, while the other emphasizes social justice through alliances with outside interest groups. Both cases challenge the traditional assumption that assimilation undermines ethnicity as a meaningful framework for political identity and solidarity in immigrant groups. Legacies of Struggle reveals how community-based organizations create innovative spaces for political participation among new generations of Korean Americans.




Gridlock


Book Description

The issues that increasingly dominate the 21st century cannot be solved by any single country acting alone, no matter how powerful. To manage the global economy, prevent runaway environmental destruction, reign in nuclear proliferation, or confront other global challenges, we must cooperate. But at the same time, our tools for global policymaking - chiefly state-to-state negotiations over treaties and international institutions - have broken down. The result is gridlock, which manifests across areas via a number of common mechanisms. The rise of new powers representing a more diverse array of interests makes agreement more difficult. The problems themselves have also grown harder as global policy issues penetrate ever more deeply into core domestic concerns. Existing institutions, created for a different world, also lock-in pathological decision-making procedures and render the field ever more complex. All of these processes - in part a function of previous, successful efforts at cooperation - have led global cooperation to fail us even as we need it most. Ranging over the main areas of global concern, from security to the global economy and the environment, this book examines these mechanisms of gridlock and pathways beyond them. It is written in a highly accessible way, making it relevant not only to students of politics and international relations but also to a wider general readership.




Collective Courage


Book Description

In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives. Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century. Many of the players are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes’ Co-operative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing. To tell the story, Gordon Nembhard uses a variety of newspapers, period magazines, and journals; co-ops’ articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements; and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. These sources reveal the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic action, and social entrepreneurship. Gordon Nembhard finds that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.




The Struggle for Cooperation


Book Description

During World War II, French citizens expressed that the German occupiers behaved more "correctly" than the American combat troops who replaced them. In The Struggle for Cooperation: Liberated France and the American Military, 1944--1946, author Robert L. Fuller presents a unique perspective on the relations between France and the United States during the Second World War. Until the summer of 1944, the German Army made real efforts to fare well with the French to make their occupation duties easier. The Americans also tried to get along with the French; however, American GIs were subjected to looser discipline than German soldiers. Most GIs behaved appropriately, but the small number who did not created an unfavorable impression among the French -- which created tension, mutual feelings of suspicion and dislike, and occasional displays of outright hostility. Yet, because the war against the Axis powers was also France's war, most French, especially officials, wanted to work cooperatively with the Americans to play their part in winning it. Fuller reveals how the French handled various issues that demanded cooperation, including the requisition of French property, the treatment of Axis prisoners of war, the utilization of French transportation networks, GI crime, and the effective American takeover of the port of Marseille. Other interactions, such as controlling black markets and caring for displaced persons, fostered both cooperation and friction. Fuller establishes how all of these issues offered the possibility of working together peacefully or in conflict, and how -- more often than not -- the results ended with positive and amicable actions.




The Evolution of Cooperation


Book Description

A famed political scientist's classic argument for a more cooperative world We assume that, in a world ruled by natural selection, selfishness pays. So why cooperate? In The Evolution of Cooperation, political scientist Robert Axelrod seeks to answer this question. In 1980, he organized the famed Computer Prisoners Dilemma Tournament, which sought to find the optimal strategy for survival in a particular game. Over and over, the simplest strategy, a cooperative program called Tit for Tat, shut out the competition. In other words, cooperation, not unfettered competition, turns out to be our best chance for survival. A vital book for leaders and decision makers, The Evolution of Cooperation reveals how cooperative principles help us think better about everything from military strategy, to political elections, to family dynamics.




Jackson Rising


Book Description

Jackson Rising is a chronicle of one of the most dynamic experiments in radical social transformation in the United States. The book documents the ongoing organizing and institution building of the political forces concentrated in Jackson, Mississippi dedicated to advancing the "Jackson-Kush Plan".




The War of the Sexes


Book Description

Men and women have long sought different things. The result? Seemingly inevitable conflict. Yet we belong to the most cooperative species on the planet. Isn't there a way we can use this capacity to achieve greater harmony and equality between the sexes? In "The War of the Sexes", Paul Seabright draws on biology, sociology, anthropology, and economics to argue that there is -- but first we must understand how the tension between conflict and cooperation developed in our remote evolutionary past, how it shaped the modern world, and how it still holds us back, both at home and at work. -- From publisher's description.




On War


Book Description




For All the People


Book Description

The survival of indigenous communities and the first European settlers alike depended on a deeply cooperative style of living and working, based around common lands, shared food and labor. Cooperative movements proved integral to the grassroots organizations and struggles challenging the domination of unbridled capitalism in America's formative years. Holding aloft the vision for an alternative economic system based on cooperative industry, they have played a vital, and dynamic role in the struggle to create a better world. Seeking to reclaim a history that has remained largely ignored by most historians, this dramatic and stirring account examines each of the definitive American cooperative movements for social change - farmer, union, consumer, and communalist - that have been all but erased from collective memory. Focusing far beyond one particular era, organization, leader, or form of cooperation, For All the People documents the multigenerational struggle of the American working people for social justice. With an expansive sweep and breathtaking detail, the chronicle follows the American worker from the colonial workshop to the modern mass-assembly line, ultimately painting a vivid panorama of those who built the United States and those who will shape its future. John Curl, with over forty years of experience as both an active member and scholar of cooperatives, masterfully melds theory, practice, knowledge and analysis, to present the definitive history from below of cooperative America.