Political risk was first introduced as a component for assessing risk not directly linked to economic factors following the flow of capital from the US to Europe after the Second World War. However, the concept has rapidly gained relevance since, with both public and private institutions developing complex methodologies designed to evaluate political risk factors and keep pace with the internationalization of trade and investment. Continued global and regional economic and political instability means a plethora of different actors today conduct a diverse range of political risk analyses and assessments. Starting from the epistemological foundations of political risk, this books bridges the gap between theory and practice, exploring operationalization and measurement issues with the support of an empirical case study on the Arab uprisings, discussing the role of expert judgment in political forecasting, and highlighting the main challenges and opportunities political risk analysts face in the wake of the digital revolution.

Providing a thorough reassessment of our understanding of politics in Third World societies, this book contains some of the liveliest and most original analyses to have been published in recent years. The severity of the political and economic crisis throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America in the 1980s has highlighted the inadequacy of existing political science theories and the urgent need to provide new paradigms for the 1990s.

This book examines the use and abuse of the term 'freedom'. Based on interviews with people concerning the nature of freedom, the author compares what the people he talked with said about freedom with what writers and thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, and Iris Murdoch have to say about freedom. He concludes that the 'political' is not the answer, and that most of the people interviewed for the book and those like them would be better served by learning the political and social skills necessary to carve out small spaces of freedom in a rationalized world.

This book presents a critical analysis of the liberal peace project and offers possible alternatives and models. In the past decade, the model used for reconstructing societies after conflicts has been based on liberal assumptions about the pacifiying effects of 'open markets' and 'open societies'. Yet, despite the vast resources invested in helping establish the precepts of this liberal peace, outcomes have left much to be desired. The book argues that failures in the liberal peace project are not only due to efficiency problems related to its adaptation in adverse local environments, but mostly due to problems of legitimacy of turning an ideal into a doctrine for action. The aim of the book is to scrutinize assumptions about the value of democratization and marketization and realities on the ground by combining theoretical discussions with empirical evidence from key post-conflict settings such as Iraq and Afghanistan. These show the disparities that exist between the ideals and the reality of the liberal peace project, as seen by external peacebuilders and domestic actors. The book then proposes various alternatives and modifications to better accommodate local perspectives, values and agency in attempts to forge a new consensus. This book will be of great interest to students of peacebuilding/peacekeeping, statebuilding, war and conflict studies, international security and IR.

The transformation of British local government into a new and complex system of local governance raises fundamental theoretical questions as well as empirical ones. Rethinking Local Democracy argues that traditional defences of local government are no longer adequate and that the case for local autonomy and local democracy needs to be radically rethought. It brings together a set of specially-commissioned chapters by leading academics designed to stimulate and contribute to debate on these issues.

Rethinking Camelot is a thorough analysis of John F. Kennedy's role in the U/S. invasion of Vietnam and a probing reflection on the elite political culture that allowed and encouraged the Cold War. In it, Chomsky dismisses effort to resurrect Camelot—an attractive American myth portraying JFK as a shining knight promising peace, fooled only by assassins bent on stopping this lone hero who wold have unilaterally withdraws from Vietnam had he lived. Chomsky argues that U.S. institutions and political culture, not individual presidents, are the key to understanding U.S. behavior during Vietnam.

This monograph offers the first systematic overview of the protection of human rights in trade agreements in the Americas. Traditionally, trade agreements in the Americas were concerned with economic questions and paid little attention to human rights. However, in the wake of the 'new regionalism', which emerged at the end of the last century, more clauses addressing social issues such as labour rights and environmental standards were inserted in trade agreements. As economic integration increased, a framework for the protection of human rights evolved. This book argues that this framework allows for human rights protection on a transnational level, while constructing regional identities. Looking at the four key regional integration processes, namely the Caribbean Community, the Central American Integration System, the Andean Community of Nations and the Southern Common Market, and also at the North American Free Trade Agreement, it shows how the integration process has reached a considerable degree of consolidation. Writing on key sources in English for the first time, this book will be essential reading for all free trade and human rights scholars.