What Freakonomics does for understanding the economy, The J Curve does for better understanding how nations behave. Bremmer's tour of the nations of the world -- our friends, our foes, and others in between -- shows us how to see the world fresh, get rid of shopworn attitudes, and discover a new and useful way of thinking.

In recent years, investors have learned the hard truth that in the international economy, politics often matters at least as much as economic fundamentals for the performance of global markets. Too many companies and investors haven't yet learned to read the warning signs: their expertise lies much more in economics than politics, and the temptation is to hope that highly volatile situations such as the 2008 Georgia-Russia confrontation will be few and far between. But as Ian Bremmer and Preston Keat demonstrate, these scenarios--and their catastrophic effects on business--happen much more...

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. New States, New Politics: Building the Post-Soviet Nations was first published in 1997 and succeeds and replaces the editors' earlier book with a fresh collection of specially commissioned studies from the world's foremost specialists. Far from...

G-Zero JEE-ZEER-oh n
A world order in which no single country or durable alliance of countries can meet the challenges of global leadership. What happens when the G20 doesn t work and the G7 is history.
If the worst threatened a rogue nuclear state, a major health crisis, the collapse of the global financial system where would the world look for leadership?
For the first time in seven decades, there is no single power or alliance of powers ready to take on the challenges of global leadership. A generation ago, the United States, Europe, and Japan were the...