Cesare Merlini - Böcker

For every pithy conceptualization of complex events, there are additional lenses through which to examine them. One of the several virtues of this book is precisely that it brings different perspectives to bear on the complexity, diversity, and uncertainty of recent and current events in the Arab world. The thirteen authors concentrate on the critical social forces shaping the region—demography, religion, gender, telecommunication connectivity, and economic structures—and they are painstakingly analyzed and evaluated.—from the foreword by Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings InstitutionThe Arab Spring will be remembered as a period of great change for the Arab states of North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. Facing fundamental transitions in governance, these countries are also undergoing profound social, cultural, and religious changes. The European Union and the United States, caught unprepared by the uprisings, now must address the inescapable challenges of those changes. How will the West respond to these new realities, particularly in light of international economic uncertainty, EU ambivalence toward a ""cohesive foreign policy,"" and declining U.S. influence abroad? Arab Society in Revolt explains and interprets the societal transformations occurring in the Arab Muslim world, their ramifications for the West, and possible policy options for dealing with this new world.Arab Society in Revolt examines areas of change particularly relevant in the southern Mediterranean: demography and migration, Islamic revival and democracy, rapidly changing roles of women in Arab society, the Internet in Arab societies, commercial and social entrepreneurship as change factors, and the economics of Arab transitions. The book then looks at those cultural and religious as well as political and economic factors that have influenced the Western response, or lack of it, to the Arab Spring as well as the policy options that remain open.

Since 1975 the leaders of the major western economies have gathered in annual summit meetings to try to agree a unified response to the main political and economic problems facing them. This book, first published in 1984, traces the development of the summit meetings and tries to assess their impact on western decision-making and international relations in general. The summits arose as the product of a serious crisis that shook the world economy in the early 1970s. They have been sustained because of the waning of the American hegemony that had supported the postwar international economic regime. From this it became vital for the leaders of the major economies to reassert collective leadership in order to try to re-establish a new world economic equilibrium.