Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics (American Interest Books)
(
A host of catastrophes, natural and otherwise, as well ...)
A host of catastrophes, natural and otherwise, as well as some pleasant surpriseslike the sudden end of the cold war without a shot being firedhave caught governments and societies unprepared many times in recent decades. September 11 is only the most obvious recent example among many unforeseen events that have changed, even redefined our lives. We have every reason to expect more such events in future. Several kinds of unanticipated scenariosparticularly those of low probability and high impacthave the potential to escalate into systemic crises. Even positive surprises can be major policy challenges. Anticipating and managing low-probability events is a critically important challenge to contemporary policymakers, who increasingly recognize that they lack the analytical tools to do so. Developing such tools is the focus of this insightful and perceptive volume, edited by renowned author Francis Fukuyama and sponsored by The American Interest magazine. Bl indside is organized into four main sections. "Thinking about Strategic Surprise" addresses the psychological and institutional obstacles that prevent leaders from planning for low-probability tragedies and allocating the necessary resources to deal with them. The following two sections pinpoint the failuresinstitutional as well as personalthat allowed key historical events to take leaders by surprise, and examine the philosophies and methodologies of forecasting. In "Pollyana vs. Cassandra," for example, James Kurth and Gregg Easterbrook debate the future state of the world going forward. Mitchell Waldrop explores why technology forecasting is so poor and why that is likely to remain the case. In the book's final section, "What Could Be," internationally renowned authorities discuss low probability, high-impact contingencies in their area of expertise. For example, Scott Barrett looks at emerging infectious diseases, while Gal Luft and Anne Korin discuss energy security. How can we avoid being blindsided by unforeseen events? There is no easy or obvious answer. But it is essential that we understand the obstacles that prevent us first from seeing the future clearly and then from acting appropriately on our insights. This readable and fascinating book is an important step in that direction.
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
(
A New York Times Notable Book for 2011
A Globe and Mai...)
A New York Times Notable Book for 2011
A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2011 Title
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction of 2011 title
Â
Virtually all human societies were once organized tribally, yet over time most developed new political institutions which included a central state that could keep the peace and uniform laws that applied to all citizens. Some went on to create governments that were accountable to their constituents. We take these institutions for granted, but they are absent or are unable to perform in many of todayâs developing countriesâwith often disastrous consequences for the rest of the world.
Francis Fukuyama, author of the bestselling The End of History and the Last Man and one of our most important political thinkers, provides a sweeping account of how todayâs basic political institutions developed. The first of a major two-volume work, The Origins of Political Order begins with politics among our primate ancestors and follows the story through the emergence of tribal societies, the growth of the first modern state in China, the beginning of the rule of law in India and the Middle East, and the development of political accountability in Europe up until the eve of the French Revolution.
Drawing on a vast body of knowledgeâhistory, evolutionary biology, archaeology, and economicsâFukuyama has produced a brilliant, provocative work that offers fresh insights on the origins of democratic societies and raises essential questions about the nature of politics and its discontents.
State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century
(
Francis Fukuyama famously predicted "the end of history...)
Francis Fukuyama famously predicted "the end of history" with the ascendancy of liberal democracy and global capitalism. The topic of his latest book is, therefore, surprising: the building of new nation-states.
The end of history was never an automatic procedure, Fukuyama argues, and the well-governed polity was always its necessary precondition. "Weak or failed states are the source of many of the world's most serious problems," he believes. He traces what we know?and more often don't know?about how to transfer functioning public institutions to developing countries in ways that will leave something of permanent benefit to the citizens of the countries concerned. These are important lessons, especially as the United States wrestles with its responsibilities in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond.
Fukuyama begins State-Building with an account of the broad importance of "stateness." He rejects the notion that there can be a science of public administration, and discusses the causes of contemporary state weakness. He ends the book with a discussion of the consequences of weak states for international order, and the grounds on which the international community may legitimately intervene to prop them up.
Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution
(
A decade after his now-famous pronouncement of â??the e...)
A decade after his now-famous pronouncement of â??the end of history,â? Francis Fukuyama argues that as a result of biomedical advances, we are facing the possibility of a future in which our humanity itself will be altered beyond recognition. Fukuyama sketches a brief history of manâ??s changing understanding of human nature: from Plato and Aristotle to the modernityâ??s utopians and dictators who sought to remake mankind for ideological ends. Fukuyama argues that the ability to manipulate the DNA of all of one personâ??s descendants will have profound, and potentially terrible, consequences for our political order, even if undertaken with the best of intentions. In Our Posthuman Future, one of our greatest social philosophers begins to describe the potential effects of genetic exploration on the foundation of liberal democracy: the belief that human beings are equal by nature.
Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity
(In his bestselling The End of History and the Last Man, F...)
In his bestselling The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama argued that the end of the Cold War would also mean the beginning of a struggle for position in the rapidly emerging order of 21st-century capitalism. In Trust, a penetrating assessment of the emerging global economic order "after History," he explains the social principles of economic life and tells us what we need to know to win the coming struggle for world dominance.
Challenging orthodoxies of both the left and right, Fukuyama examines a wide range of national cultures in order to divine the underlying principles that foster social and economic prosperity. Insisting that we cannot divorce economic life from cultural life, he contends that in an era when social capital may be as important as physical capital, only those societies with a high degree of social trust will be able to create the flexible, large-scale business organizations that are needed to compete in the new global economy.
A brilliant study of the interconnectedness of economic life with cultural life, Trust is also an essential antidote to the increasing drift of American culture into extreme forms of individualism, which, if unchecked, will have dire consequences for the nation's economic health.
(Ever since its first publication in 1992, The End of Hist...)
Ever since its first publication in 1992, The End of History and the Last Man has provoked controversy and debate. Francis Fukuyama's prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is as essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists as it was for the end of the Cold War. Now updated with a new afterword, The End of History and the Last Man is a modern classic.
Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama is an American political scientist, political economist, and author.
Background
Francis Fukuyama was born on October 27, 1952, in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. His father, Yoshio Fukuyama, was trained as a minister in the Congregational Church and received a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago. His mother, Toshiko Kawata Fukuyama, was the daughter of Shiro Kawata, founder of the Economics Department of Kyoto University and first president of Osaka Municipal University in Osaka, Japan. Fukuyama's childhood years were spent in New York City.
Education
In 1967 his family moved to State College, Pennsylvania, where he attended high school.
Fukuyama received his B. A. in classics in 1974 from Cornell University where he studied under Allan Bloom. After spending a year in the Yale University Department of Comparative Literature in 1974-1975, he went on to receive his Ph. D. in political science from Harvard University in 1981, writing a dissertation on Soviet foreign policy.
Career
In 1979 he began a long-term association with the research organization RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica, Calif. , and Washington, D. C. He later helped shape foreign policy for the U. S. Department of State (1981–1982), specializing in Middle Eastern affairs and serving as a delegate to an Egyptian-Israeli conference on Palestinian autonomy. In 1987 he coedited The Soviet Union and the Third World: The Last Three Decades, and two years later he rejoined the State Department to focus on European political and military issues. He held a chair as professor at George Mason University, Fairfax, Va. , from 1996 to 2001.
Fukuyama’s first major work, The End of History and the Last Man (1992), earned international acclaim and was widely read by both the mainstream public and academics. His thesis—introduced as a magazine article in 1989, when communism in eastern Europe was collapsing—posited that Western-style liberal democracy not only was the victor of the Cold War but marked the last ideological stage in the long march of history. He traced parallel tracks with his follow-up books: Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995), which was popular in the business market; and The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (1999), a conservative look at American society in the second half of the 20th century. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, critics of his thesis argued that Islamic fundamentalism threatened the hegemony of the West. Fukuyama dismissed them, however, by arguing that the attacks were part of "a series of rearguard actions" against what he believed was the prevailing political philosophy of the new globalism.
In 2001 Fukuyama became a professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, Washington. Shortly thereafter he published Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002), which examines the potential role biotechnology could play in the course of human development. The work reveals the dangers of preselecting human traits, extending average life spans, and an overreliance on mood-altering drugs. As a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics (2001–2005), Fukuyama argued for tight federal regulation of genetic engineering. He later wrote State-Building: Governance and the World Order in the 21st Century (2004), in which he discussed how fledgling democratic nations could be made to succeed.
Although long considered a major figure in neoconservatism, Fukuyama later distanced himself from that political movement. He also became an opponent of the U. S. -led invasion of Iraq, a war he had initially supported. In America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (2006), he criticized neoconservatives and Pres. George W. Bush and his administration’s policies after the September 11 attacks.
At present, Dr. Fukuyama is chairman of the editorial board of The American Interest, which he helped to found in 2005. He is a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins SAIS Foreign Policy Institute, and a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Center for Global Development.
He is a member of the Board of Governors of the Pardee RAND Graduate School, the Board of Directors of the National Endowment for Democracy, and a member of the advisory board for the Journal of Democracy. He is also a member of the American Political Science Association, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Pacific Council for International Affairs.
Achievements
The writer and political theorist, Francis Fukuyama is best known for his belief that the triumph of liberal democracy at the end of the Cold War marked the last ideological stage in the progression of human history.
Quotations:
"The nation will continue to be a central pole of identification, even if more and more nations come to share common economic and political forms of organization. "
"But we forget that government was also created to act and make decisions. "
"National identity is frequently formed in deliberate opposition to other groups and therefore serves to perpetuate conflict. "
Membership
Francis Fukuyama was a member of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2004.
From August 2005, Francis Fukuyama is a member of The American Interest, a quartarly magazine devoted to the broad theme of "America in the World".
He is a member of the Board of Governors of the Pardee RAND Graduate School, the Board of Directors of the National Endowment for Democracy, and a member of the advisory board for the Journal of Democracy.
He is also a member of the American Political Science Association, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Pacific Council for International Affairs.
Fukuyama is a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS).
Fukuyama is a member of the Board of Counselors for the Pyle Center of Northeast Asian Studies at the National Bureau of Asian Research.
Fukuyama is on the board of Global Financial Integrity.
Fukuyama is on the executive board of the Inter-American Dialogue.
Interests
Francis Fukuyama is a part-time photographer. He also has a keen interest in early-American furniture, which he reproduces by hand. He is keenly interested in sound recording and reproduction.
Connections
Francis Fukuyama is married to Laura Holmgren, whom he met when she was a UCLA graduate student after he started working for the RAND Corporation. They have three children.
Father:
Yoshio Fukuyama
Yoshio Fukuyama was a theologian, who held a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago and was a faculty member of the Chicago Theological Seminary.
