Books

In Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World, Ian Bremmer illustrates a historic shift in the world economy and an unprecedented moment of global uncertainty. The G-Zero, a leaderless world of every nation for itself, will undermine our ability to keep the peace, expand opportunity, and feed growing populations. The resulting upheaval will be felt in every region of the world.

As the Cold War stumbled to a close, the belief that governments could effectively micromanage national economies and generate prosperity seemed dead. But public wealth, public investment, and public enterprise have now returned with a vengeance. An era of state capitalism has dawned, one in which the governments of China, Russia, the Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf and others are again directing huge flows of capital—even across the borders of capitalist democracies—with profound implications for free markets and international politics. The national bestseller, The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?, by Ian Bremmer, includes insights for investors, business leaders, policymakers, and anyone who wants to understand important emerging changes in international politics and the global economy.

In The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall, Bremmer turns conventional wisdom on its head and presents a new way of understanding how decision-makers in any given country – including the most dangerous – define their national interests, the sometimes surprising choices they make, and the effects of those choices in a world of fast-paced, high-stakes instability.

The Fat Tail: The Power of Political Knowledge for Strategic Investing is the first book to identify the wide range of political risks that global firms face and show investors how to effectively manage them. The book sheds light on a wide array of political risks - risks that stem from great power rivalries, terrorist groups, government takeover of private property, weak leaders and internal strife, and even the "black swans" that defy prediction. But more importantly, the authors provide a wealth of unique methods, tools, and concepts to help corporations, money managers, and policymakers understand political risk, showing when and how political risk analysis works.

In the last four years, the world has suffered a financial market meltdown and subsequent global recession. The Eurozone crisis looms, the Middle East is in turmoil, and a shifting power balance between emerging markets and developed economies is reordering the global economy as a whole. Political and economic challenges intertwine now more than ever before, as the demands of local politics and global business grow increasingly complex and begin to conflict in new ways. Facing these new challenges, what will the future hold? In What’s Next, Ian Bremmer and Douglas Rediker, together with experts, analysts, and many of their colleagues from the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Geopolitical Risk, analyze these global issues and provide a template to understand how they will change our world in the next few years.

The scope and applicability of risk management have expanded greatly over the past decade. Banks, corporations, and public agencies employ its new technologies both in their daily operations and long-term investments. It would be unimaginable today for a global bank to operate without such systems in place. Similarly, many areas of public management, from NASA to the Centers for Disease Control, have recast their programs using risk management strategies. It is particularly striking, therefore, that such thinking has failed to penetrate the field of national security policy.

New States, New Politics: Building the Post-Soviet Nations was first published in 1997 and succeeds and replaces the editors' earlier book Nations and Politics in the Soviet Successor-States with a fresh collection of specially commissioned studies from the world's foremost specialists. Far from eradicating tensions among the former Soviet peoples, the disintegration of empire saw national minorities rediscovering long-suppressed identities. The contributors to New States, New Politics bring together historical and ethnic backgrounds with penetrating political analysis to offer an intriguing record of the different roads to self-assertion and independence being pursued by these young nations.

Since its publication in 1993, Nations and Politics in the Soviet Successor-States, edited by Ian Bremmer and Ray Taras, has established itself internationally as the genuinely comprehensive, systematic and rigorous analysis of the nation- and state-building processes of the fifteen states that grew out of the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

Soviet Nationalities Problems, edited by Ian Bremmer and Norman M. Naimark, is the edited version of the proceedings of a March 1989 Stanford-Berkeley conference dedicated to the dauntingly complex problems of Soviet nationalities.