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The UN and Development provides the first comprehensive overview of the development policies and activities of the United Nations system from the late 1940s to the present. With an explicit focus on the history of the ideas that have been generated, institutionalized, and implemented by UN organizations, this book examines changing trends in development paradigms from the concept of technical assistance to underdeveloped countries, as they were called in the late 1940s, to development cooperation in the 21st century. Olav Stokke traces this fascinating story and demonstrates the UN's essential role and its future challenges in aiding the least developed countries and the globe's billion poorest inhabitants.
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 p...
The period between 1917 and 1957, starting with the birth of the USSR and the American intervention in the First World War and ending with the Treaty of Rome, is of the utmost importance for contextualizing and understanding the intellectual origins of the European Community. During this time of 'crisis,' many contemporaries, especially intellectuals, felt they faced a momentous decision which could bring about a radically different future. The understanding of what Europe was and what it should be was questioned in a profound way, forcing Europeans to react. The idea of a specifically European unity finally became, at least for some, a feasible project, not only to avoid another war but to avoid the destruction of the idea of European unity. This volume reassesses the relationship between ideas of Europe and the European project and reconsiders the impact of long and short-term political transformations on assumptions about the continent's scope, nature, role and significance.
This book contributes to bridge the gap between different scholarly communities interested in the entanglements of culture and politics in the international arena. It sheds light on existing connections in their parallel evolution with a thorough literature review, complemented by several case studies showing the fruitful character of their interdisciplinary mobilisation. Through the notions of cultural relations, intellectual cooperation and cultural diplomacy, the book draws on a soft power perspective to offer a shared, novel, and interdisciplinary theoretical framework to approach cultural institutions and organisations that have been previously examined as isolated objects: for example, cultural institutes, international organisations, literary magazines, and literary contests. The interdisciplinary nature of this volume justifies the relevance of its content for scholars working in the history of international relations, international cultural relations and intellectual history, comparative literature, sociology of literature and global literary studies.
Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015 Jean-Paul Sartre is often seen as the quintessential public intellectual, but this was not always the case. Until the mid-1940s he was not so well-known, even in France. Then suddenly, in a very short period of time, Sartre became an intellectual celebrity. How can we explain this remarkable transformation? The Existentialist Moment retraces Sartre's career and provides a compelling new explanation of his meteoric rise to fame. Baert takes the reader back to the confusing and traumatic period of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath and shows how the unique political and intellectual landscape in France at this time helped to propel Sartre and existentialist philosophy to the fore. The book also explores why, from the early 1960s onwards, in France and elsewhere, the interest in Sartre and existentialism eventually waned. The Existentialist Moment ends with a bold new theory for the study of intellectuals and a provocative challenge to the widespread belief that the public intellectual is a species now on the brink of extinction.