This book offers a practical guide for policy advisors and their managers, grounded in the author's extensive experience as a senior policy practitioner in New Zealand's Westminster-style system of government. A key message is that effective policy advising is less about cycles, stages and steps, and more about relationships, integrity and communication. Policy making is incremental social problem solving.

Policy advising is mostly learned on the job, like an apprenticeship. It starts with ca...

Cutting through the jargon of EU politics, the third edition of this engaging and informative textbook examines the history, institutions, processes and politics of the European Union with unprecedented clarity. The EU is a fascinating political experiment in regional integration and it has changed our understanding of Europe, how Europeans relate to one another, the role Europe plays in global politics and has even shifted our understanding of politics itself. Helping to make sense of it all...

Kissinger's six leaders are Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew, and Margaret Thatcher. All of them were formed in a period when established institutions collapsed all over Europe, colonial structures gave way to independent states in Asia and Africa, and a new international order had to be created from the vestiges of the old. Kissinger penetratingly analyses each of these leaders' careers through the highly individual strategies of statecraft which h...

There have been two main traditions of writing on ethics in the Islamic tradition, one philosophical and related to the works of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers, represented by thinkers such as Avicenna, and one theological, represented by such figures as the famous theologian al-Qadi Abd al-Jabbar. Some later scholars attempted to combine those two traditions. For the most part, however, the views of the jurists have been ignored.

Abdulaziz Sachedina herecalls attention to this third ...