Global Collective Action Book

This book examines how nations and other key participants in the global community address problems requiring coordinated efforts of two or more entities, that is, collective action. The global community has achieved some successes on issues such as eradicating smallpox, but others, such as the reduction of drug trafficking, efforts to coordinate nations' actions have not been sufficient. This book identifies the factors that promote or inhibit successful collective action at the regional and global level for an ever-growing set of challenges stemming from augmented cross-border flows associated with globalization. The author identifies modern principles of collective action and applies them to a host of global challenges, including promoting global health, providing foreign assistantce, controlling rogue nations, limiting transnational terrorism, and intervening in civil wars. Because many of these concerns involve strategic interactions where choices and their consequences are dependent on one's own and others' actions, the book relies, in places, on elementary game theory that is fully introduced for the uninitiated reader.