Needs Of Strangers

Politics & Social Sciences

Michael Ignatieff

Philosophy

Vintage Books

Asya

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Vintage

In "Empire Lite", Michael Ignatieff explores both sides of what he sees as a new global empire - the imperial and the humanitarian - and argues that the international community has failed to engage intelligently with the problems of nation building in the aftermath of apocalyptic events. The collapse of political order around the world is now seen as a major threat, and a new international order is emerging, one that is crafted to suit American imperial objectives. Western powers, led by the United States, are banding together to rebuild state order in war-torn societies for the sake of global stability and security. This presents humanitarian agencies with the dilemma of how to keep their programs from being suborned to imperial interests. Yet, they know that there are some problems for which there are only imperial solutions - it was American air-power that made an uneasy peace and humanitarian reconstruction possible, first in Bosnia, then in Kosovo, and finally in Afghanistan. This forces them to be unwilling accomplices of America's wider imperial project. This is the new world of geopolitics we live in and must try to grasp. The vivid, cogent essays in this book attempt to understand the phenomenon of state collapse and state failure in the world's zones of danger and the gradual emergence of an American led humanitarian empire. Focusing on nation building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, Ignatieff reveals how American military power, European money and humanitarian motive have combined to produce a form of imperial rule for a post-imperial age. Drawing on his own experiences of war zones, and with an extraordinary account of life in Afghanistan, Ignatieff identifies the illusions that make a genuine act of solidarity so difficult and asks what can be done to help people in war-torn societies enjoy the essential right to rule themselves.

Empire Lite : Nation Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan

History

Charlie Johnson in the Flames

Isaiah Berlin was witness to a century. Born in Riga in the twilight of the Czarist empire, he lived long enough to see the Soviet state collapse. Biographer of Marx, scholar of the Romantic movement, and defer of the liberal idea of freedom against Soviet tyranny, Berlin was the presiding judge of intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic. When he died in 1997, he was hailed as the most important liberal philosopher of his time. But Berlin's life was not only a life of the mind. From Albert Einstein to Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill to Anna Akhmatova, his circle of friends constitutes a veritable who's who of twentieth-century art, politics, and philosophy. In this definitive work, the result of a remarkable ten-year collaboration between biographer and subject, Michael Ignatieff charts the emergence of a unique temperament and a singular vision.

Isaiah Berlin: a life

Biographies & Memoirs

Vintage, UK

The Warrior's Honour : Ethnic War and the Modern Consciousness

Politics & Government

With The Warrior's Honor and Virtual War, Blood & Belonging forms part of the acclaimed trilogy by Michael Ignatieff on the face of modern conflict. 
In 1993 Michael Ignatieff set out on a journey to the former Yugoslavia, the Ukraine, Germany, Quebec, Kurdistan and Northern Ireland in order to explore the many faces of modern nationalism at its worst. 
Modern nationalism is a language of blood: a call to arms that can end in the horror of ethnic cleansing. But it is also a language of belonging: a call to come home. In Blood & Belonging Michael Ignatieff explores both sides of nationalism in a personal odyssey that begins in the nightmare of the former Yugoslavia and ends with his return to his adopted homeland, Great Britain's disunited kingdom.

Blood And Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism

Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan

Penguin Books, Canada

Subtitled "The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850", "A Just Measure of Pain" describes the moment in 18th century England when the modern penitentiary and its ambiguous legacy were born. In depicting how the whip, the brand and the gallows - public punishments once meant to cow the unruly poor into passivity - came to be replaced by the "moral management" of the prison and the notion that the criminal poor should be involved in their own rehabilitation. Michael Ignatieff documents the rise of a new conception of class relations and with it a new philosophy of punishment, one directed not at the body but at the mind. "A Just Measure of Pain" is a highly atmospheric and compellingly written work of social history, which has already become a classic study of its subject. For the Penguin edition the author will provide an afterword concerning the polemics which followed the book's first publication in 1978.

A Just Measure of Pain: The penitentiary in the industrial revolution, 1750-1850

Europe

Pantheon Books

The Russian Album

In this work, Michael Ignatieff re-creates the lives of his grandparents before and during the Russian revolution. Through his own trips to modern day Russia and through family documents and journals, he brings together two generations whose times did not connect.

Viking Adult

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Books by Michael Ignatieff