No nation was born great. Nations are built by men of passion, vision and wisdom. A poor nation is not necessarily a nation without money, but a nation void of men of ideas. Nation Builders are not necessarily politicians; for a politician to become a Nation Builder, he or she must experience real heart and soul conversion. Most politicians are merely opportunists, clamoring for greater portion of their national cake for self aggrandizement. True Nation Builders are treasures in every nation; and their absence is one of the greatest deprivations a nation can ever experience. Who are Nation Builders? How are they prepared for their mission? History is full of ordinary individuals whose passion, vision and wisdom expressed in the nation building story of their nations was superior to that of their peers. These breed of individuals are the true makers of history in every nation. They have their names written in the hearts of their people and the world. Researching on these special breed of individuals and uncovering the attributes, which made them the builders of their nations is what has made this work possible. In this extraordinary classic on Nation Builders, Dr. Benard Etta shares light on the qualities of Nation Builders. The book 'Nation Builders' provide answers to the question of who Nation Builders are and how they are prepared for their mission. This book takes the subject nation building from the palaces of politics into the streets, prison houses, schools, marketplaces, etc, with the aim of inspiring just everyone to become a nation builder in their respective nations. Dr. Benard Etta believes everyone is supposed to be a nation builder in the best way possible based on each individual's potential. No nation can progressively develop without the contribution of its people in nation building. Serving one's nation and contributing to its development is the greatest achievement of one's citizenship. Citizenship is not just a privilege for one to demand from his or her country, but a responsibility to contribute in making a difference in one's nation. I see this book inspiring a fresh passion and involvement in the hearts and minds of people the world over for the building of their nations.

America’s rise from revolutionary colonies to a world power is often treated as inevitable. But Charles N. Edel’s provocative biography of John Q. Adams argues that he served as the central architect of a grand strategy whose ideas and policies made him a critical link between the founding generation and the Civil War–era nation of Lincoln.

In May 2003, President George W. Bush declared victory in Iraq. But while we won the war, we catastrophically lost the peace. Our failure prompted a fundamental change in our foreign policy. Confronted with the shortcomings of "shock and awe," the U.S. military shifted its focus to "stability operations": counterinsurgency and the rebuilding of failed states. In less than a decade, foreign assistance has become militarized; humanitarianism has been armed. Combining recent history and firsthand reporting, Armed Humanitarians traces how the concepts of nation-building came into vogue, and how, evangelized through think tanks, government seminars, and the press, this new doctrine took root inside the Pentagon and the State Department. Following this extraordinary experiment in armed social work as it plays out from Afghanistan and Iraq to Africa and Haiti, Nathan Hodge exposes the difficulties of translating these ambitious new theories into action. Ultimately seeing this new era in foreign relations as a noble but flawed experiment, he shows how armed humanitarianism strains our resources, deepens our reliance on outsourcing and private contractors, and leads to perceptions of a new imperialism, arguably a major factor in any number of new conflicts around the world. As we attempt to build nations, we may in fact be weakening our own. Nathan Hodge is a Washington, D.C.-based writer who specializes in defense and national security. He has reported from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, and a number of other countries in the Middle East and former Soviet Union. He is the author, with Sharon Weinberger, of A Nuclear Family Vacation, and his work has appeared in Slate, the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, and many other newspapers and magazines.

Who shaped the New Zealand nation in the middle years of the twentieth century? The Nationbuilders is a collection of linked essays on individuals and companies in the years from 1931 to 1984 who contributed in major ways to building a nation. The book captures the intertwining lives of politicians, their advisers and their mentors, as well as the ideas and experiences which drove them. While it focuses on economic strategy, the book also looks at the cultural, social, union, business, and foreign policy strands of nationbuilding. An original and provocative book, the essays cover Gordon Coates, Bernard Ashwin, Peter Fraser, James Fletcher, F. P. Walsh, Douglas Robb, Bill Sutch, Denis Glover, Colin McCahon, Norman Kirk, Sonja Davies, Bryan Philpott, New Zealand Steel, Robert Muldoon, Henry Lang and Bruce Jesson.

A new and comprehensive look at the reasons behind successful or failed nation building Nation Building presents bold new answers to an age-old question. Why is national integration achieved in some diverse countries, while others are destabilized by political inequality between ethnic groups, contentious politics, or even separatism and ethnic war? Traversing centuries and continents from early nineteenth-century Europe and Asia to Africa from the turn of the twenty-first century to today, Andreas Wimmer delves into the slow-moving forces that encourage political alliances to stretch across ethnic divides and build national unity. Using datasets that cover the entire world and three pairs of case studies, Wimmer’s theory of nation building focuses on slow-moving, generational processes: the spread of civil society organizations, linguistic assimilation, and the states’ capacity to provide public goods. Wimmer contrasts Switzerland and Belgium to demonstrate how the early development of voluntary organizations enhanced nation building; he examines Botswana and Somalia to illustrate how providing public goods can bring diverse political constituencies together; and he shows that the differences between China and Russia indicate how a shared linguistic space may help build political alliances across ethnic boundaries. Wimmer then reveals, based on the statistical analysis of large-scale datasets, that these mechanisms are at work around the world and explain nation building better than competing arguments such as democratic governance or colonial legacies. He also shows that when political alliances crosscut ethnic divides and when most ethnic communities are represented at the highest levels of government, the general populace will identify with the nation and its symbols, further deepening national political integration. Offering a long-term historical perspective and global outlook, Nation Building sheds important new light on the challenges of political integration in diverse countries.

Winner of the 2012 George Perkins Marsh Prize for Best Book in Environmental History In the twentieth century, the Mekong Delta has emerged as one of Vietnam’s most important economic regions. Its swamps, marshes, creeks, and canals have played a major role in Vietnam’s turbulent past, from the struggles of colonialism to the Cold War and the present day. Quagmire considers these struggles, their antecedents, and their legacies through the lens of environmental history. Beginning with the French conquest in the 1860s, colonial reclamation schemes and pacification efforts centered on the development of a dense network of new canals to open land for agriculture. These projects helped precipitate economic and environmental crises in the 1930s, and subsequent struggles after 1945 led to the balkanization of the delta into a patchwork of regions controlled by the Viet Minh, paramilitary religious sects, and the struggling Franco-Vietnamese government. After 1954, new settlements were built with American funds and equipment in a crash program intended to solve continuing economic and environmental problems. Finally, the American military collapse in Vietnam is revealed as not simply a failure of policy makers but also a failure to understand the historical, political, and environmental complexity of the spaces American troops attempted to occupy and control. By exploring the delta as a quagmire in both natural and political terms, Biggs shows how engineered transformations of the Mekong Delta landscape - channelized rivers, a complex canal system, hydropower development, deforestation - have interacted with equally complex transformations in the geopolitics of the region. Quagmire delves beyond common stereotypes to present an intricate, rich history that shows how closely political and ecological issues are intertwined in the human interactions with the water environment in the Mekong Delta. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp1-UItZqsk