Riley Quinn

Western thinking about the Middle and Far East has been distorted by stereotype and inaccuracy. This argument lies at the center of Palestinian American literary theorist Edward Said’s groundbreaking book, Orientalism. Originally published in 1978, it...

Published in 1961, the year of Frantz Fanon’s death, The Wretched of the Earth is both a powerful analysis of the psychological effects of colonization and a rallying cry for violent uprising and independence.The book rejects colonial assumptions that...

In his 1997 work Guns, Germs, and Steel, American geography professor and environmental historian Jared Diamond looks to answer the question of why human history unfolded differently on different continents, and why power and wealth became distributed...

John A. Hobson’s 1902 book Imperialism: A Study presents an original and controversial interpretation of the forces that motivated Britain to conquer foreign lands in the eighteenth century. Hobson advances the idea that ultra-wealthy financiers...

Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics created a “scientific revolution” in international relations, starting two major debates. In the 1980s it defined the controversy between the neorealists, who believed that competition between states...

Mahbub ul Haq died in 1998, three years after the publication of his important work, Reflections on Human Development. The book appeared at the end of Haq’s impressive career in international development and described his revolutionary contribution to...

Born in 1945, Paul Kennedy grew up in England, watching the new political realities of the time contribute to the dismantling of the British Empire. He pursued a lifetime of scholarship, predominantly in the US, trying to understand the social,...

In his 1996 book The Clash Of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, American political scientist Samuel Huntington sets out his vision of the post-Cold War world. While the era from 1945 to 1989 was shaped by ideological conflict (communism...

The modern world has been marked by a series of immense social revolutions that have transformed the states where they happened. In 1979, American sociologist Theda Skocpol published States and Social Revolutions and examined three of these uprisings:...