Hot Off the Presses

Post-Kyoto International Climate Policy: Implementing Architectures for Agreement

Editedby Joseph E. Aldy and Robert N. Stavins; Cambridge University Press (January 2010)

The Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements is a global, multi-disciplinary effort intended to help identify the key design elements of a scientifically sound, economically rational, and politically pragmatic post-2012 international policy architecture for addressing the threat of climate change. It has commissioned leading scholars to examine a uniquely wide range of core issues that must be addressed if the world is to reach an effective agreement on a successor regime to the Kyoto Protocol. The purpose of the project is not to become an advocate for any single policy but to present the best possible information and analysis on the full range of options concerning mitigation, adaptation, technology, and finance.

"...[H]ighlights the essential challenges facing global leaders, and outlines possible paths to reach such an agreement."

"The world desperately needs a global climate change agreement, and this impressive collection of scholarly work highlights the essential challenges facing global leaders, and outlines possible paths to reach such an agreement."-Eileen Claussen, President, Pew Center on Global Climate Change

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The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order

By David Ekbladh; Princeton University Press (November 2009)

The Great American Mission traces how America's global modernization efforts during the twentieth century were a means to remake the world in its own image. David Ekbladh shows that the emerging concept of modernization combined existing development ideas from the Depression. He describes how ambitious New Deal programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority became symbols of American liberalism's ability to marshal the social sciences, state planning, civil society, and technology to produce extensive social and economic change. For proponents, it became a valuable weapon to check the influence of menacing ideologies such as Fascism and Communism.

After World War II, modernization remained a means to contain the growing influence of the Soviet Union. However, a close connection to the Vietnam War and the upheavals of the 1960s would discredit modernization. The end of the Cold War further obscured modernization's mission, but many of its assumptions regained prominence after September 11 as the United States moved to contain new threats.

"...[I]lluminates for the first time how the central characteristics of America's modernization project in the Cold War came together in the prewar period.

"The Great American Mission illuminates for the first time how the central characteristics of America's modernization project in the Cold War came together in the prewar period. Carefully tracing ideas, institutions, and individuals from the Depression to the heyday of development, Ekbladh offers new insights into the distinctive components of American modernization efforts abroad."-David C. Engerman, Brandeis University

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Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion, and Foreign Policy

By Kelly M. Greenhill; Cornell Studies in Security Affairs; Cornell University Press (Forthcoming April 2010)

At first glance, the U.S. decision to escalate the war in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, China's position on North Korea's nuclear program in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the EU resolution to lift what remained of the arms embargo against Libya in the mid-2000s would appear to share little in common. Yet each of these seemingly unconnected and far-reaching foreign policy decisions resulted at least in part from the exercise of a unique kind of coercion, one predicated on the intentional creation, manipulation, and exploitation of real or threatened mass population movements. In Weapons of Mass Migration, Kelly M. Greenhill offers the first systematic examination of this widely deployed, but largely unrecognized, instrument of state influence.

"...[W]hy and how do weak states increasingly deploy the threat or reality of ‘strategic engineered migration' to achieve political goals that would otherwise be unattainable."

"This incisive book highlights an unconventional and nonmilitary method of state-to-state coercion-why and how weak states increasingly deploy the threat or reality of ‘strategic engineered migration' to achieve political goals that would otherwise be unattainable." -Michael S. Teitelbaum, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Harvard Law School

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International Perspectives on the Goals of Universal Basic and Secondary Education

Edited by Joel E. Cohen and Martin B. Malin; Routledge Research in Education.  Routledge (December 2009)

Although universal schooling has been adopted as a goal by international organizations, bilateral aid agencies, national governments, and non-profit organizations, little sustained international attention has been devoted to the purposes or goals of universal education. What is universal primary and secondary education intended to accomplish? This book, which grew out of a project of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, offers views from Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, and South America on the purposes of universal education while considering diverse cultures, religions, and professions.

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Delete: the Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

By Viktor Mayer-Schönberger; Princeton University Press (2009)

Delete looks at the surprising phenomenon of perfect remembering in the digital age, and reveals why we must reintroduce our capacity to forget. Digital technology empowers us as never before, yet it has unforeseen consequences as well. Potentially humiliating content on Facebook is enshrined in cyberspace for future employers to see. Google remembers everything we've searched for and when. The digital realm remembers what is sometimes better forgotten, and this has profound implications for us all.

In Delete, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger traces the important role that forgetting has played throughout human history, from the ability to make sound decisions unencumbered by the past to the possibility of second chances. He explains why information privacy rights and other fixes can't help us, and proposes an ingeniously simple solution-expiration dates on information-that may.

"In Delete, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues that we should be less troubled by the fleetingness of our digital records than by the way they can linger."-Adam Keiper, Wall Street Journal