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How can the United States chart a path forward in the war on drugs? This book uncovers the full history of this war that has lasted more than a century. The book provides an essential view of the economic, political, and human impacts of U.S. drug policies. It takes readers from Afghanistan to Colombia, to Peru and Mexico, to Miami International Airport and the border crossing between El Paso and Juarez to trace the complex social networks that make up the drug trade and drug consumption. Through historically driven stories, the book reveals how the war on drugs has evolved to address mass incarceration, the opioid epidemic, the legalization and medical use of marijuana, and America's shifting foreign policy.

Using emergency as a cause for action ultimately leads to an almost unnoticed evolution in the political understanding of presidential powers. The Constitution of the United States, however, was designed to function under “states of exception,” most notably through the separation of powers, and provides ample internal checks on emergency actions taken under claims of necessity. This book urges the United States Congress, the courts, and other bodies to put those checks into practice. The book analyzes the constitutional norms that fail to guide and constrain the choice of action through an analysis of what is appropriate. It explores how constitutional norms always apply as unavoidably normative constitutional questions during an emergency. It explains how necessity can produce dictatorship, because the people are willing to allow whatever it takes to solve their immediate needs, and it looks into the theory that a president might suspend the constitutional order in order to post hoc political accountability. It then talks about necessity that enables presidential discretion, and responds to arguments regarding the president having all the power that necessity confers. The book considers the scope of implied presidential power, arguing that even if there is power to do what is necessary, it is still constrained by conceptions of what is proper. It emphasizes how deference to the president is inconsistent with a constitutional tradition that preciously guards decisions about liberty. The book concludes with a review of the commitment to constitutional values as a constitutive feature of political identity in American constitutionalism.

The author of this book has long been known as a reformist or moderate Islamist thinker. In this book he argues that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—in its broad outlines—meets with wide acceptance among Muslims if their interpretation of Islamic law is correct. Under his theory of the purposes of Shariʻa, justice and human welfare are not exclusive to Islamic governance, and the objectives of Islamic law can be advanced in multiple ways. The book examines the Western concept of freedom and the Islamic perspective on freedom and human rights, basic democratic principles, the basic principles of an Islamic political system, the concept of tyranny across three different schools of thought, and concludes with an examination of the solutions in Islamic thought that can curb state tyranny, for the benefit of freedom, justice, and the human rights of citizens.

Authoritarian nationalist movements labeled “populist” are advancing xenophobic, intolerant “stories of peoplehood” to justify repression and exclusions in many nations today. That Is Not Who We Are! argues that those stories must be met in part by advancing more egalitarian and inclusive national narratives. It provides criteria for developing better stories of peoplehood and explores examples from many nations around the world, including Denmark, India, Israel, and the United States. The book concludes that stories championing democracy; a more perfect union; and the Declaration of Independence’s quest to secure rights for all can help to combat the dangers of Donald Trump’s “America First” nationalist narrative.

Now available in English for the first time, this book was written in immediate response to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 but withheld from publication for fear of reprisals against Jews trapped in Germany. Acclaimed when finally published by Kösel Verlag in 1952, it is a devastatingly prescient exposure, giving special attention to the regime's corruption of language as masterminded by Joseph Goebbels. Bertolt Brecht wrote to the author that, in his indictment of Nazism, “You have disclosed the atrocities of intonation and created an ethics of language.” This masterful translation aims for clarity where the author had good reason to be cautious and obscure.

Social order requires a sovereign: an actor with unlimited, undivided, and unaccountable authority. Or so the classic theory says. But without noticing, we've gutted the theory. Constitutionalism limits state authority. Federalism divides it. The rule of law holds it accountable. In vivid historical detail—with millions tortured and slaughtered in Europe, a king put on trial for his life, journalists groaning at complaints about the League of Nations, and much more—this book charts both the political struggles that forged sovereignty and the ones that undid it. The book argues that it's no longer a helpful guide to our legal and political problems, but a pernicious bit of confusion. It's time to retire sovereignty.

This book explores the impact of Chinese growth on Latin America since the early 2000s. Some twenty years ago, Chinese entrepreneurs headed to the Western Hemisphere in search of profits and commodities, specifically those that China lacked and that some Latin American countries held in abundance—copper, iron ore, crude oil, fishmeal and soybeans. Focusing largely on Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Peru, the book traces the evolution of political and economic ties between China and these countries back to the 1950s and explores how more recent and ongoing interaction with China has shaped the respective political economies of these country cases. Drawing on the development economics literature as an analytical roadmap, the book offers two sets of findings. First, the three small, open economies—Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru—outperformed Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico by a wide margin during the China 2003–2013 boom and thereafter. Second, success in dealing with China has varied by sector, project, and country. The author argues that while opportunities for closer economic integration with China are seemingly infinite, so are the risks. The best outcomes have stemmed from endeavours where the rule of law, regulatory oversight, and a clear strategy exist on the Latin American side.

The inviolability of national borders is an unquestioned pillar of the post-World War II international order. Fixed borders are believed to encourage stability, promote pluralism, and discourage nationalism and intolerance. But do they? What if fixed borders create more problems than they solve, and what if permitting borders to change would create more stability and produce more just societies? This book examines this possibility, showing how we arrived at a system of rigidly bordered states and how the real danger to peace is not the desire of people to form new states but the capacity of existing states to resist that desire, even with violence. The book proposes a practical, democratically legitimate alternative: a right of secession. With crises ongoing in the United Kingdom, Spain, Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, and many other regions, this reassessment of the foundations of our international order is more relevant than ever.

Although the science of climate change is clear, policy decisions about how to respond to its effects remain contentious. Even when such decisions claim to be guided by objective knowledge, they are made and implemented through political institutions and relationships—and all the competing interests and power struggles that this implies. Michael Méndez tells a timely story of people, place, and power in the context of climate change and inequality. He explores the perspectives and influence low-income people of color bring to their advocacy work on climate change. In California, activist groups have galvanized behind issues such as air pollution, poverty alleviation, and green jobs to advance equitable climate solutions at the local, state, and global levels. Arguing that environmental protection and improving public health are inextricably linked, Mendez contends that we must incorporate local knowledge, culture, and history into policymaking to fully address the global complexities of climate change and the real threats facing our local communities.

The Internet has leapt from human-facing display screens into the material objects all around us. In this so-called Internet of Things—connecting everything from cars to cardiac monitors to home appliances—there is no longer a meaningful distinction between physical and virtual worlds. Everything is connected. The social and economic benefits are tremendous, but there is a downside: an outage in cyberspace can result not only in a loss of communication but also potentially a loss of life. Control of this infrastructure has become a proxy for political power, since countries can easily reach across borders to disrupt real-world systems. This book argues that this diffusion of the Internet into the physical world radically escalates governance concerns around privacy, discrimination, human safety, democracy, and national security, and it offers new cyber-policy solutions. The book makes visible the sinews of power already embedded in our technology and explores how hidden technical governance arrangements will become the constitution of our future.