Chronicle Of A Failure Foretold

Chronicle of a Failure Foretold charts the progress and failure of Colombian President Andrés Pastrana's efforts to bring an end to sixty years of civil war.

NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • From the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude comes the gripping story of the murder of a young aristocrat that puts an entire society—not just a pair of murderers—on trial. A man returns to the town where a baffling murder took place 27 years earlier, determined to get to the bottom of the story. Just hours after marrying the beautiful Angela Vicario, everyone agrees, Bayardo San Roman returned his bride in disgrace to her parents. Her distraught family forced her to name her first lover; and her twin brothers announced their intention to murder Santiago Nasar for dishonoring their sister. Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to stop it? The more that is learned, the less is understood, as the story races to its inexplicable conclusion.

Chronicle of a Failure Foretold charts the progress and failure of Colombian President Andrés Pastrana's efforts to bring an end to sixty years of civil war.

A New York Times Notable Book Winner of 2022 Lionel Gelber Prize The first authoritative history of American's longest war by one of the world's leading scholar-practitioners. The American war in Afghanistan, which began in 2001, is now the longest armed conflict in the nation's history. It is currently winding down, and American troops are likely to leave soon but only after a stay of nearly two decades. In The American War in Afghanistan, Carter Malkasian provides the first comprehensive history of the entire conflict. Malkasian is both a leading academic authority on the subject and an experienced practitioner, having spent nearly two years working in the Afghan countryside and going on to serve as the senior advisor to General Joseph Dunford, the US military commander in Afghanistan and later the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Drawing from a deep well of local knowledge, understanding of Pashto, and review of primary source documents, Malkasian moves through the war's multiple phases: the 2001 invasion and after; the light American footprint during the 2003 Iraq invasion; the resurgence of the Taliban in 2006, the Obama-era surge, and the various resets in strategy and force allocations that occurred from 2011 onward, culminating in the 2018-2020 peace talks. Malkasian lived through much of it, and draws from his own experiences to provide a unique vantage point on the war. Today, the Taliban is the most powerful faction, and sees victory as probable. The ultimate outcome after America leaves is inherently unpredictable given the multitude of actors there, but one thing is sure: the war did not go as America had hoped. Although the al-Qa'eda leader Osama bin Laden was killed and no major attack on the American homeland was carried out after 2001, the United States was unable to end the violence or hand off the war to the Afghan authorities, which could not survive without US military backing. The American War in Afghanistan explains why the war had such a disappointing outcome. Wise and all-encompassing, The American War in Afghanistan provides a truly vivid portrait of the conflict in all of its phases that will remain the authoritative account for years to come.

The occupation of Afghanistan is over, and a balance sheet can be drawn. These essays on war and peace in the region reveal Tariq Ali at his sharpest and most prescient. Rarely has there been such an enthusiastic display of international unity as that which greeted the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Compared to Iraq, Afghanistan became the “good war.” But a stalemate ensued, and the Taliban waited out the NATO contingents. Today, with the collapse of the puppet regime in Kabul, what does the future hold for a traumatised Afghan people? Will China become the dominant influence in the country? Tariq Ali has been following the wars in Afghanistan for forty years. He opposed Soviet military interven- tion in 1979, predicting disaster. He was also a fierce critic of its NATO sequel, Operation Enduring Freedom. In a series of trenchant commentaries, he has described the tragedies inflicted on Afghanistan, as well as the semi-Talibanisation and militarisation of neighbouring Pakistan. Most of his predictions have proved accurate. The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan: A Chronicle Foretold brings together the best of his writings and includes a new introduction.

Chronicles the peace process negotiations between Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos and the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia In Between the Sword and the Wall: The Santos Peace Negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Harvey Kline, a noted expert on contemporary Colombian politics, brings to a close his multivolume chronicle of the incessant violence that has devastated Colombia’s population, politics, and military for decades. This, his newest work on the subject, recounts and analyzes the negotiations between Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos and the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which ended with a peace agreement in 2016. The FARC insurgency began in 1964, and every Colombian president after 1980 unsuccessfully tried to negotiate a peace agreement with the group. Kline analyzes how the Santos administration was ultimately able to negotiate peace with the FARC. The agreement failed to receive the approval of the Colombian people in an October 2016 plebiscite, but a renegotiated version was later approved by the congress in the same year. Afterward, more than 7,000 rebels turned over their weapons to the UN mission in Colombia. The former combatants were then to be judged by a special court empowered to punish but not imprison those who had violated human rights. Throughout the book, Kline emphasizes the dual nature of the Santos negotiations, first with the FARC and second with the democratic opposition to the agreement led by former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez. Kline provides readers with a well-researched analysis based on a variety of resources, including media articles and primary documents from the government, international organizations, and the FARC. He also conducted extensive interviews with twenty-eight government officials and Colombian experts from all ideological persuasions.

If one lesson emerges clearly from fifty years of European integration it is that political aims should be pursued by overtly political means, and not by roundabout economic or legal strategies. The functionalist strategy of promoting spillovers from one economic sector to another has failed to achieve a steady progress towards a federal union, as Jean Monnet and other functionalists had hoped. On the other hand, the unanticipated results of 'integration through law' have included over-regulation and an institutional framework which is too rigid to allow significant policy and institutional innovations. Thus, integration by stealth has produced sub-optimal policies and a steady loss of legitimacy by the supranational institutions. Both the functionalist approach and the classic Community Method are becoming obsolete. This major new statement from a leading European scholar provides the most thorough analysis currently available of the pitfalls and ambiguities of 50 years of European integration, without losing sight of its benefits. Majone provides a clear demonstration of how a number of European policies - including environmental protection - lack a logically defensible rationale, while showing how, in other cases, objectives may be better achieved by re-nationalizing the policy in question. He also shows how, in an information-rich environment, co-ordination by mutual adjustment becomes possible, meaning that member states are no longer as dependent on central institutions as in the past. He explains how the challenge for future research is to investigate methods-other than delegation to supranational institutions-by which member states can credibly commit themselves to collective action. Dilemmas of European Integration concludes by explaining exactly why the model of a United States of Europe is bound to fail-not just due to lack of popular support, but because it finds itself unable to deliver the public goods which Europeans expect to receive from a full fledged government. Although failing as a would-be federation, the present Union could become an effective confederation, built on the solid foundation of market integration. The new Constitutional Treaty, Majone argues, seems to point in this direction.

"This book challenges conventional wisdoms about economic performance and possible policies for economic development in African countries. Its starting point is the striking variation in African economic performance. Unevenness and inequalities form a central fact of African economic experiences. The authors highlight not only differences between countries, but also variations within countries, differences often organized around distinctions of gender, class, and ethnic identity. For example, neo-natal mortality and school dropout have been reduced, particularly for some classes of women in some areas of Africa. Horticultural and agribusiness exports have grown far more rapidly in some countries than in others. These variations (and many others) point to opportunities for changing performance, reducing inequalities, learning from other policy experiences, and escaping the ties of structure, and the legacies of a colonial past. The book rejects teleological illusions and Eurocentric prejudice, but it does pay close attention to the results of policy in more industrialized parts of the world. Seeing the contradictions of capitalism for what they are - fundamental and enduring - may help policy officials protect themselves against the misleading idea that development can be expected to be a smooth, linear process, or that it would be were certain impediments suddenly removed. The authors criticize a wide range of orthodox and heterodox economists, especially for their cavalier attitude to evidence. Drawing on their own decades of research and policy experience, they combine careful use of available evidence from a range of African countries with political economy insights (mainly derived from Kalecki, Kaldor and Hischman) to make the policy case for specific types of public sector investment"--