Free Online Book Extracts

Bjorn Lomborg has ignited a storm of controversy with his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, which criticises the prophets of doom that populate the environment movement. He argues that the global environment is in pretty good shape, and getting better. His web-site, including sample chapters, gives space to his critics.
http://www.lomborg.com/

Chapters 1 and 2 of Justin Rosenberg's provocative The Follies of Globalisation Theory are reproduced at http://www.theglobalsite.ac.uk/press/012rosenberg.htm

The introduction of Governance in a Globalizing World by Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye of the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, asks three fundamental questions: How are patterns of globalization currently evolving? How do these patterns affect governance? And how might globalism itself be governed? It is located at: http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/visions/publication/globalizing.htm

The Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research, has made available the Executive Summary and Concluding Note of Reimagining the Future: Toward Democratic Governance, its project that has identified the challenge of globalisation as crucial to the pursuit of democratic and humane global governance. See it at http://www.toda.org/publications/book_series/reimagining%20_the_future/reimagining.html

Leading theorists Robert O'Brien, Anne Marie Goetz, Jan Aart Scholte, and Marc Williams have made the first chapter of their book Contesting Global Governance, which explores the interrelationship of multilateralism and global social movements, available at http://www.cup.ac.uk

Benjamin Cohen and Robert Lieber argue in the chapter "Containing Backlash: Foreign Economic Policy in an Age of Globalization", prepared for Eagle Rules? Foreign Policy and American Primacy in the 21st Century, that the irreversibility of globalization cannot be taken for granted, and there is no substitute for U.S. leadership. See the chapter at http://www.polsci.ucsb.edu/faculty/cohen/

Globalisation, a site related to Volume 151 of Issues in Society, by Australian Justin Healey, provides an invaluable and comprehensive list of 'starting points' for arguments for and against globalisation. See http://www.spinneypress.com.au/151_book_desc.html

Commentator Keith Suter, author of a new book "In Defence of Globalisation", published by University of New South Wales Press, puts the 'for' case in the August 2001 edition of Oxfam Horizons at http://www.caa.org.au/horizons/august_2001/

Labor think tank the Evatt Foundation has made several chapters of the edited collection Globalisation: Australian impacts, available on the web at http://evatt.labor.net.au/
Chapter Two The Fall and Rise of the Global Economy: Finance, By John Quiggin
Chapter Four Trade Wars in the Information Economy: Telecommunications by Ros Eason
Chaptre thirteen Managing the New Social Risks: Welfare by Deborah Mitchell
Chapter Fourteen It Never Has Been Easy: Democracy By Lionel Orchard

Duncan Kerr of the Australian Labor Party (7 Sep 2001) and Phil Toner of the University of Newcastle Posted (14 November 2001) debate the merits of the globalisation and the 'Third Way' in the journal Drawing Board's digest that is at http://www.econ.usyd.edu.au/drawingboard/

Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, famous for their 1996 book Globalization in Question, a social democratic critique, have released a second edition that is reviewed in the Januray 2002 edition of Executive Digest, published by PriceWaterhouse Coopers at http://www.pwcglobal.com/gx/eng/main/home/index.html

One of Paul Hirst's latest papers - Can the European Welfare State Survive Globalization? Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands in Comparative Perspective - is available at the Centre for European Studies: http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/eur/

Grahame Thompson is developing work on 'networks' as instruments of international governance and recently gave a paper entitled "The Limits to 'Globalization': Taking Economic Borders Seriously" at the Center for Global, International, and Regional Studies that is downloadable from http://www2.ucsc.edu/cgirs/conferences/plg/