Global Political Thinkers

This book introduces Ali Mazrui’s delightfully stimulating scholarship about intercultural relations, calling it Postcolonial Constructivism, and shares elements of his intellectual vitality in an original way.  It begins with a chronicle of Mazrui’s eventful, sixty-year journey as a scholar of International Relations. It then proceeds to present some of the most remarkable yet least remarked up on features of his intellectualism, including his paradoxes, his perceptive typologies, his neologisms as well as his interactions with historical figures. The book draws on materials which were either unavailable until now or were found scattered in time and space. Designed as an invitation to a wider audience to the supermarket of Mazrui’s ideas, this book also seeks to underscore the timeliness and possible durability of many of his observations about intercultural relations.Thorough, comprehensive and up-to-date, this book is a concise account of the core of Mazrui’s vast body of work.

This book analyzes seven Latin American thinkers who have contributed to building bridges for reconciliation and peace: Carlos Saavedra Lamas, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Alfonso García Robles, Óscar Arias Sánchez, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Juan Manuel Santos, and Javier Pérez de Cuéllar. Working within an eclectic conceptual approach to systematize the circulation of ideas embraced by each one of the thinkers, the various contributions delve into the current literature of leadership and intellectuals in Politics and Global International Relations (GIR). Overall, the central premises of the analysis are based on three fundamentals of mainstream constructivism: a) change across time and space in the lifetime of each thinker under analysis in this book; b) socialization through changing norms, rules, and language; and c) processes of interaction in which actors make choices in selecting networks and strategies). Coming from different walks of life, the seven thinkers examined in this book have accessed the global public square and discussed ideas to reduce conflicts at different scales. In their respective historical times, they circulated their views and ideas beyond the confines of Latin America to influence global political thought and produce change in favor of peace.