Argues that the many world crises, including the financial meltdown, climate change and terrorism, are connected problems of a failing global system.

It often seems that different crises are competing to devastate civilization. This book argues that financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages need to be considered as part of the same ailing system. Most accounts of our contemporary global crises such as climate change, or the threat of terrorism, focus on one area, or another, to the exclusion of others. Nafeez Ahmed argues that the unwillingness of experts to look outside their specialisations explains why there is so much disagreement and misunderstanding about particular crises. This book attempts to investigate all of these crises, not as isolated events, but as trends and processes that belong to a single global system. We are therefore not dealing with a "clash of civilizations," as Huntington argued. Rather, we are dealing with a fundamental crisis of civilization itself. This book provides a stark warning of the consequences of failing to take a broad view of the problems facing the world.

Ian Dunbar was born in Margate, England, in 1936 and educated at Gillingham Grammar School and Aberdeen University. He graduated M.B.Ch.B. in 1961. His clinical interest was in the problems of general medical practice. Investigations took him first to Canada where he practiced in Regina and later to the Distant Early Warning Line in the Arctic. In effect, this was the military front line of the Cold War. After returning to Britain in December 1965 he became a partner in an NHS practice in West London where he witnessed the ferment of the 'swinging sixties'. He later moved to Kent but retired from active clinical practice in 1973 because of the increasing erosion of clinical freedom brought about by the 1969 Health Service reforms. In 1974 he worked on a Middle East oil field becoming acquainted not only with Palestinian refugees but also the clash of Western and Muslim cultures. As an amateur anthropologist, he explored several of the subcultures in contemporary society and in 1976 spent a month in Brazil visiting Sao Paulo, Goiania and Brasilia. An interest in the psychotoxicity of drugs led to his most important discovery. Political abuse of the subtle side-effects of cannabis and the contraceptive pill were being deployed to promote intellectual Socialism and bring about the collapse of capitalism. This created an unrecognised psychological aspect to the Cold War. This monograph outlines how it was done.

This book offers one of the most comprehensive studies of social pathology to date, following a cross-disciplinary and methodologically innovative approach. It is written for anyone concerned with understanding current social conditions, individual health, and how we might begin to collectively conceive of a more reconciled postcapitalist world. Drawing reference from the most up-to-date studies, Smith crosses disciplinary boundaries from cognitive science and anthropology to critical theory, systems theory and psychology. Opening with an empirical account of numerous interlinked carises from mental health to the physiological effects of environmental pollution, Smith argues that mainstream sociological theories of pathology are deeply inadequate. Smith introduces an alternative critical conception of pathology that drills to the core of how and why society is deeply ailing. The book concludes with a detailed account of why a progressive and critical vision of social change requires a “holistic view” of individual and societal transformation. Such a view is grounded in the awareness that a sustainable transition to postcapitalism is ultimately a many-sided (social, individual, and structural) healing process.

The application of the evolutionary approach to the history of nature and society has remained one of the most effective ways to conceptualize and integrate our growing knowledge of the Universe, life, society and human thought. The present volume demonstrates this in a rather convincing way. This is the third issue of the Almanac series titled ‘Evolution’. The first volume came out with the sub-heading ‘Cosmic, Biological, and Social’, the second was entitled ‘Evolution: A Big History Perspective’. The present volume is subtitled Development within Big History, Evolutionary and World-System Paradigms. In addition to the straightforward evolutionary approach, it also reflects such adjacent approaches as Big History, the world-system analysis, as well as globalization paradigm and long wave theory. The volume includes a number of the exciting works in these fields. The Almanac consists of five sections. The first section (Globalization as an Evolutionary Process: Yesterday and Today) contains articles demonstrating that the Evolutionary studies is capable of creating a common platform for the world-system approach, globalization studies, and the economic long-wave theory.The articles of the second section (Society, Energy, and Future) discuss the role of energy in the universal evolution, human history and the future of humankind. The third section (Aspects of Social Development) touches upon four aspects of social evolution – technological, environmental, cultural, and political. The fourth section (The Driving Forces and Patterns of Evolution) deals with various phases of megaevolution. There is also a final sectionwhichis devoted to discussions of contemporary evolutionism. This Almanac will be useful both for those who study interdisciplinary macroproblems and for specialists working in focused directions, as well as for those who are interested in evolutionary issues of Cosmology, Biology, History, Anthropology, Economics and other areas of study. More than that, this edition will challenge and excite your vision of your own life and the new discoveries going on around us!

The End of the Developmental State? brings together leading scholars of development to assess the current status of the "developmental state" in several developing and transitional economies of South Korea, Taiwan, Ireland, the United Kingdom, China, South Africa, Brazil and India. Has the concept of the developmental state become outmoded? These authors would suggest not. However, they do argue that the historical trajectories of developmental states in Asia, Latin America, Africa and Europe suggest all too clearly that the concept must be re-examined critically and creatively. The range and diversity of their positions and their rejection of stale programmatic positions from the past will revitalize the debate on the role of the state in social and economic transformation in the twenty-first century. By bringing together careful comparative analyses of national cases, in both the Global North and South, the volume highlights pivotal conditions – economic restructuring, domestic politics, epistemic shifts and ecological limits – that are forcing revision of the goals and strategies of developmental states and suggests that states that ignore these new conditions will indeed see the "end of the developmental state".

This volume presents a practical demonstration of the relevance of Carl Schmitt's thought to parapolitical studies, arguing that his constitutional theory is the one best suited to investing the ’deep state’ with intellectual and doctrinal coherence. Critiquing Schmitt’s work from a variety of intellectual perspectives, the chapters discuss current parapolitical reality within the domain of criminology, the parapolitical nature of both the dual state and the national security state corporate complex. Using the USA as a prime example of the world’s current dual or ’deep political state’, the criminogenic dimensions of the parapolitical systems of post 9/11 America are discussed. Using case studies, the dual state is examined as the causal factor of inexplicable parapolitical events within both the developed and developing world, including Sweden, Canada, Italy, Turkey, and Africa.