Biodiversity and ecosystem insecurity

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Vishwa Ballabh

"An oft-quoted, modern adage is that the next major global conflict will be over water. In many areas of the world the present is already marked by an uneasy competition among different water users and use sectors, often leading to conflicts. India particularly stands on the brink of an uncertain future, its ever-growing population putting pressure on its increasingly meagre water resources. Governance of Water: Institutional Alternatives and Political Economy is a timely, relevant book that makes a case for reforming water governance in India through not only re-orientating policy priorities and approaches, but also restructuring the institutional framework away from the state and village dichotomy. The book has eminent scholars explore the issue from various angles - neo-classical and institutional economics, deliberative democracy, public administration, collective action and political economy perspectives."--Jacket.

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Con Coughlin

Using his intelligence sources and unique access to top aides in both the Bush and Blair camps, journalist and best-selling author Con Coughlin has written the definitive book on this crucial relationship between Britain and the US and the personalities involved.

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Ignacio Ramonet

"Ramonet offers an analysis of the fundamental global issues of today, carefully dissecting the phenomenon of neoliberal globalization, and the recent U.S.-led wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and elsewhere. Wars of the 21st Century argues that in these times of planetary social war, civil society must reclaim its place as the key protagonist on the international political stage."--Jacket.

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Rebecca MacKinnon

Google has a history of censoring at the behest of Communist China. Research in Motion happily opens up the BlackBerry to such stalwarts of liberty as Saudi Arabia. Yahoo has betrayed the email accounts of dissidents to the PRC. Facebook's obsession with personal transparency has revealed the identities of protestors to governments. For all the overheated rhetoric of liberty and cyber-utopia, it is clear that the corporations that rule cyberspace are making decisions that show little or no concern for their impact on political freedom. In Consent of the Networked, internet policy specialist Rebecca MacKinnon argues that it's time for us to demand that our rights and freedoms are respected and protected before they're sold, legislated, programmed, and engineered away. The challenge is that building accountability into the fabric of cyberspace demands radical thinking in a completely new dimension. The corporations that build and operate the technologies that create and shape our digital world are fundamentally different from the Chevrons, Nikes, and Nabiscos whose behavior and standards can be regulated quite effectively by laws, courts, and bureaucracies answerable to voters. The public revolt against the sovereigns of cyberspace will be useless if it focuses downstream at the point of law and regulation, long after the software code has already been written, shipped, and embedded itself into the lives of millions of people. The revolution must be focused upstream at the source of the problem. Political innovation - the negotiated relationship between people with power and people whose interests and rights are affected by that power - needs to center around the point of technological conception, experimentation, and early implementation. The purpose of technology - and of the corporations that make it - is to serve humanity, not the other way around. It's time to wake up and act before the reversal becomes permanent. -- From publisher description.