Contention and Trust in Cities and States explores cities and nation-states throughout history and around the world, bringing together the research of top scholars. It takes as a jumping-off point the work of the late Charles Tilly, but proceeds varied topics ranging from how today’s drug cartels undermine nation-states to how cities, nation-states, and empires treated religious minorities in the middle of the last millennium. Threaded throughout are themes of city-state relations, trust networks and commitment, democracy and inequality, and the importance of historical legacies in shaping state structures, practices, and capacities.

One hundred years after the deportations and mass murder of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and other peoples in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, the history of the Armenian genocide is a victim of historical distortion, state-sponsored falsification, and deep divisions between Armenians and Turks. Working together for the first time, Turkish, Armenian, and other scholars present here a compelling reconstruction of what happened and why.

This volume gathers the most up-to-date scholarship on Armenian genocide, looking at how the event has been written about in Western and Turkish historiographies; what was happening on the eve of the catastrophe; portraits of the perpetrators; detailed accounts of the massacres; how the event has been perceived in both local and international contexts, including World War I; and reflections on the broader implications of what happened then. The result is a comprehensive work that moves beyond nationalist master narratives and offers a more complete understanding of this tragic event.

Charles Perrow is famous worldwide for his ideas about normal accidents, the notion that multiple and unexpected failures--catastrophes waiting to happen--are built into our society's complex systems. In The Next Catastrophe, he offers crucial insights into how to make us safer, proposing a bold new way of thinking about disaster preparedness.

Perrow argues that rather than laying exclusive emphasis on protecting targets, we should reduce their size to minimize damage and diminish their attractiveness to terrorists. He focuses on three causes of disaster--natural, organizational, and deliberate--and shows that our best hope lies in the deconcentration of high-risk populations, corporate power, and critical infrastructures such as electric energy, computer systems, and the chemical and food industries. Perrow reveals how the threat of catastrophe is on the rise, whether from terrorism, natural disasters, or industrial accidents. Along the way, he gives us the first comprehensive history of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security and examines why these agencies are so ill equipped to protect us.

The Next Catastrophe is a penetrating reassessment of the very real dangers we face today and what we must do to confront them. Written in a highly accessible style by a renowned systems-behavior expert, this book is essential reading for the twenty-first century. The events of September 11 and Hurricane Katrina--and the devastating human toll they wrought--were only the beginning. When the next big disaster comes, will we be ready?

The supercommittee's failure to reach an agreement on debt reduction will probably result in unexpected reductions of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. That possibility concerns the defense establishment, but it also presents an opportunity: It might finally be possible to have an honest debate about the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. strategy and the prospect for further arms reductions.

Before moving ahead with this conversation, though, it is critical to review and debunk three misguided ideas about nuclear weapons.

The first is that our nuclear world is safe and stable and that all we need to do now is prevent other nations from acquiring nuclear weapons. Though it is undoubtedly true that the U.S. stockpile is safer than ever, the dangers are far from over. Nuclear terrorism remains a threat. Mistakes are possible, too. In just one example, in August 2007, six nuclear warheads disappeared for two days between North Dakota's Minot and Louisiana's Barksdale Air Force bases.

What's more, unsafe nuclear weapons elsewhere remain a major threat. Tensions between nuclear India and Pakistan, the security of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal and the future of the North Korean nuclear weapons program all suggest that the commitment to making U.S. weapons more reliable and secure will not solve the problem.

The second piece of nuclear mythology is that nuclear disarmament has never taken place and never will. Put slightly differently, it is the idea that nuclear history is proliferation history. But nuclear disarmament is far from unprecedented. South Africa, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan all disarmed. Many nuclear-capable states chose to pursue security without nuclear weapons because policymakers recognized these weapons would endanger rather than protect them. Sweden went down the nuclear path and then decided against it in the late 1960s.

Germany had a nuclear weapons program during World War II but became a law-abiding, non-nuclear member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Japan had two nuclear weapons programs during the war and accumulated a significant quantity of plutonium; since then, its authorities thought about restarting a weapons program four times but decided against it.

In each of those cases, most analysts did not believe that giving up nuclear weapons ambitions was possible. They were wrong, and today we all are glad these countries chose the path they did.

The third misguided concept is that reducing the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal will lead to proliferation. Those who believe this think that countries that no longer feel protected by U.S. nuclear weapons will start building their own to protect themselves. Although this might have some validity, it should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

Historically, many of the states that have disarmed or given up their nuclear-weapon ambitions - including every non-nuclear nation outside of NATO - have done so despite the absence of a nuclear-security guarantee.

On the other hand, states determined to get the bomb, such as the United Kingdom and France, have done so despite security guarantees. Finally, this argument assumes that the role of nuclear weapons in future alliances and geopolitical relationships will be as important as it was in the past. This might be true, but it cannot be considered a fact. It is just a bet on the future and a set of policy priorities.

In 2007, "the four horsemen" - Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, William Perry and George Shultz - wrote a highly influential opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal arguing that relying on nuclear weapons for the purpose of deterrence has become "increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective." Coming from former Cold Warriors from both sides of the political aisle, it legitimized the goal of a world without nuclear weapons and challenged the conventional wisdom.

Now policymakers in Washington and candidates on the electoral trail should embrace the issue, and begin a real conversation with the electorate about the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. policy rather than allowing that policy to be driven by inertia or budget cuts.