Os Dez Piores Livros de Relacoes Internacionais (sempre vistos dos EUA...)

Depois dos dez melhores, agora os dez piores, por um outro scholar. Até abril de 2009; depois disso, outros piores foram publicados, como provavelmente as memórias de George Bush e de seu inefável Secretário "da guerra" (ele merece o título Donald Rumsfeld).
Dá, portanto, para aumentar a lista, e muito, mas a escolha seria muito grande...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

The ten worst books in international relations
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Foreign Policy, Friday, April 10, 2009

It's "top ten" week here at Foreign Policy, and the powers that be have asked me to chip in with a list of my own.

The thing is, Steve Walt poached a lot of the books I would have named on my own list of top ten international relations books (if there's real demand for a "top 10" books in international political economy specifically, let me know in the comments and I'll put one up next week).

So, rather than replicate Steve, let's have some fun -- what are the ten worst books in international relations?

In one sense, this question is difficult to answer, in that truly bad books are never read. Smply putting down books by bad people -- Mein Kampf, etc. -- is kind of superfluous. The books matter less than the person.

So, let's be clear on the criteria: to earn a place on this list, we're talking about:

Books by prominent international policymakers that put you to sleep;
Books that were influential in some way but also spectacularly wrong, leading to malign consequences.
In chronological order:

1. Norman Angell, The Great Illusion
This book has been widely misinterpreted, so let's be clear about what Angell got right and got wrong. He argued that the benefits from international trade vastly exceeded the economic benefits of empire, and therefore the economic motive for empire no longer existed. He was mostly right about that. He then argued that an enlightened citizenry would glom onto this fact and render war obsolete. Writing this in 1908, he was historically, spectacularly wrong.

2. E.H. Carr, Nationalism and After
Carr's Twenty Years' Crisis is one of the best books about international relations ever written. This is not that book. Here, Carr argues that nationalism is a passing fad and that eventually the number of nation-states in the world will be reduced to less than twenty. Since this book was published, U.N. membership has at least tripled.

3. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb
The first of many, many, many books in which Ehrlich argued that the world's population was growing at an unsustainable rate, outstripping global resources and leading to inevitable mass starvation. Ehrlich's book committed a triple sin. First, he was wrong on the specifics. Second, by garnering so much attention by being wrong, he contributed to the belief that alarmism was the best way to get people to pay attention to the environment. Third, by crying wolf so many times, Ehrlich numbed many into not buying actual, real environmental threats.

4. Shintaro Ishihara, The Japan That Can Say No: Why Japan Will Be First Among Equals
Written at the peak of Japan's property bubble, Shintaro argued that Japan was destined to become the next great superpower. Whoops.

5. Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies. Plenty of management consultants have tried to write the Very Big Book. And plenty of authors have predicted the demise of the nation-state in their books. Ohmae encapsulates both of these trends. Still, there's something extra that puts him on this list -- over 90% of the footnotes in this book are to... other works by Kenichi Ohmae. It's the most blatant use of the footnote as a marketing strategy that I have ever seen.

6. Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts
Kaplan argued that "ancient hatreds" guaranteed perpetual conflict in the Balkans. According to his aides, this book heavily influenced Bill Clinton's reluctance to intervene in the Balkans for the first two years of his presidency.

7. Caspar Weinberger, Fighting for Peace: Seven Critical Years in the Pentagon
Back when I was a grad student, I needed to check out the memoirs of Reagan cabinet officials to see if there was anything that could e gleaned about a particular case. George Shultz's memoirs were chock-full of useful bits of information. This book, on the other hand, was a vast wasteland of barren prose.

8. Warren Christopher, In the Stream of History: Shaping Foreign Policy for a New Era
Makes Weinberger's memoirs seem exciting by comparison. ZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

9. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire
Ordinarily, this massive exercise in generating non-falsifiable arguments about an actorless empire would have slipped into obscurity a few months after publication. In this case, however, Emily Eakin claimed in the New York Times that it was the "next big thing" in international relations. Which meant this book was inflicted on a whole generation of poor, unsuspecting IR grad students.

10. Kenneth Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case For Invading Iraq
In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Pollack's book became the intellectual justification for Democrats to support the invasion. And we now know that result.

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O mesmo estudioso tratou, poucos meses depois, de um concurso sobre o melhor da década. Confesso que não fui ver o resultado:


What is the best international relations book of the decade?
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Foreign Policy, Wednesday, July 1, 2009

The International Studies Association announces a book contest:

The International Studies Best Book of the Decade Award honors the best book published in international studies over the last decade. In order to be selected, the winning book must be a single book (edited volumes will not be considered) that has already had or shows the greatest promise of having a broad impact on the field of international studies over many years. Only books of this broad scope, originality, and interdisciplinary significance should be nominated.

Hmmm.... which books published between 2000 and 2009 should be on the short list? This merits some thought, but the again, this is a blog post, so the following choices are the first five books that came to mind:

John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001)
G. John Ikenberry, After Victory (2001).
Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill (2003)
Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales, Savng Capitalism from the Capitalists (2003).
Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms (2007).
I don't agree with everything in these books -- but they linger the most in the cerebral cortex.

So, dear readers, which books do you think are worthy of consideration for this award?

Os Dez Melhores Livros de Relacoes Internacionais (vistos dos EUA, claro...)

Um professor de Harvard, a convite da revista Foreign Policy, fez a sua lista dos dez melhores. Tudo deve ser visto da perspectiva americana, claro. Se fossemos pedir a um acadêmico europeu (francês, alemão, ou inglês), a lista provavelmente seria outra, e recolheria apenas dois ou três desta lista.
Vale pelo que vale, trata-se de um começo...
Relembre-se que a lista é de dois anos atrás...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

My "top ten" books every student of International Relations should read
Posted By Stephen M. Walt
Foreign Policy, Thursday, April 9, 2009

Last week Tom Ricks offered us his "Top Ten list" of books any student of military history should read. The FP staff asked me to follow suit with some of my favorites from the world of international politics and foreign policy. What follows aren't necessarily the books I'd put on a graduate syllabus; instead, here are ten books that either had a big influence on my thinking, were a pleasure to read, or are of enduring value for someone trying to make sense of contemporary world politics. But I've just scratched the surface here, so I invite readers to contribute their own suggestions.

1) Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War
An all-time classic, which I first read as a college sophomore. Not only did M, S & W provide an enduring typology of different theories of war (i.e., locating them either in the nature of man, the characteristics of states, or the anarchic international system), but Waltz offers incisive critiques of these three "images" (aka "levels of analysis.") Finding out that this book began life as Waltz's doctoral dissertation was a humbling moment in my own graduate career.

2) Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel
Combines biology and macro-history in a compelling fashion, explaining why small differences in climate, population, agronomy, and the like turned out to have far-reaching effects on the evolution of human societies and the long-term balance of power. An exhilarating read.

3) Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence
He's a Nobel Prize winner now, so one expects a lot of smart ideas. Some of Schelling's ideas do not seem to have worked well in practice (cf. Robert Pape's Bombing to Win and Wallace Thies's When Governments Collide) but more than anyone else, Schelling taught us all to think about military affairs in a genuinely strategic fashion. (The essays found in Schelling's Strategy of Conflict are more technical but equally insightful). And if only more scholars wrote as well.

4) James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
This isn't really a book about international relations, but it's a fascinating exploration of the origins of great human follies (like Prussian "scientific forestry" or Stalinist collectivized agriculture). Scott pins the blame for these grotesque man-made disasters on centralized political authority (i.e., the absence of dissent) and "totalistic" ideologies that sought to impose uniformity and order in the name of some dubious pseudo-scientific blueprint. And it's a book that aspiring "nation-builders" and liberal interventionists should read as an antidote to their own ambitions. Reading Scott's work (to include his Weapons of the Weak and Domination and the Arts of Resistance) provided the intellectual launching pad for my book Taming American Power).

5) David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest
Stayed up all night reading this compelling account of a great national tragedy, and learned not to assume that the people in charge knew what they were doing. Still relevant today, no?

6) Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics
I read this while tending bar at the Stanford Faculty Club in 1977 (the Stanford faculty weren't big drinkers so I had a lot of free time). Arguably still the best single guide to the ways that psychology can inform our understanding of world politics. Among other things, it convinced that I would never know as much history as Jervis does. I was right.

7) John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
Why do bad things happen to good peoples? Why do "good states" do lots of bad things? Mearsheimer tells you. Clearly written, controversial, and depressingly persuasive.

8) Ernst Gellner, Nations and Nationalism
The state is the dominant political form in the world today, and nationalism remains a powerful political force. This book will help you understand where it came from and why it endures.

9) Henry A. Kissinger, White House Years & Years of Upheaval
Memoirs should always be read with a skeptical eye, and Kissinger's are no exception. But if you want some idea of what it is like to run a great power's foreign policy, this is a powerfully argued and often revealing account. And Kissinger's portraits of his colleagues and counterparts are often candid and full of insights. Just don't take it at face value.

10) Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
Where did the modern world come from, and what are the political, economic, and social changes that it wrought? Polanyi doesn't answer every question, but he's a good place to start.

So that's ten, but I can't resist tossing in a few others in passing: Geoffrey Blainey The Causes of War; Douglas North, Structure and Change in Economic History; Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer, Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population; Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations; Steve Coll, Ghost Wars; T.C.W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars; R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution; Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World; Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War; Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies; Tony Smith, The Problem of Imperlalism; and Philip Knightley's The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth-Maker. And as I said, this just scratches the surface.

So what did I miss? Keep the bar high.

(And for those of you who don't have time to read books, I'll start working on a "top ten" list of articles).