Description:
This book addresses long-term challenges to national and human security. These include unstable governments, ineffective conflict management, uncoordinated global development, tensions in multi-ethnic societies, and the inability to deal with climate change. From his long experience in tracking and mediating conflict and crisis, Jon Wilkenfeld writes about leadership, responsibility, mission, and empowerment in the face of these challenges. Myth and Reality in International Politics is about the transformation of lofty agendas into concrete, measurable progress through collective action.
Review Quotes:
"In his groundbreaking new book, Wilkenfeld brings the research and policy communities together to confront critical global challenges. In addressing climate change, underdevelopment, conflict, and instability, he implores our national leaders to undertake bold steps in a newly collaborative, intentional, and systematic approach. The book offers a blueprint for increased leadership responsibility, clarity of mission, and empowerment of states and individuals. It suggests a way to transform lofty but often vague agendas into concrete, measurable progress."--Henry Waxman, former U.S. Representative (D-CA)
"Jonathan Wilkenfeld, one of the leading scholars in international relations over a period of forty years, has written an extremely important, timely, and thought-provoking book. This work provides a perceptive grasp of the key challenges that face the global community in the coming era; it decouples some of the more prevalent myths of how global turmoil can be managed or mitigated; and it offers an insightful and inspiring vision of how we can effectively confront these global challenges. A key message of this book is that, even if we do not feel immediately affected by such issues as continued domestic instability, underdevelopment and inequality, or climate change, these challenges will come back to bite us if we do not take collective action to confront them head on. This is a must read for students, scholars, practitioners of world politics, as well as by people who care about the future of this planet."--Zeev Maoz, University of California, Davis