Bücher von Benjamin Reilly

Natural disasters have played an integral role in human history. Pandemic diseases have affected multiple generations and massive famines have killed or impoverished millions. This book examines the relationship between humanity and the natural environment through the lens of natural disasters, where the interaction comes into sharpest focus.

Examines how Rome's allure to European visitors and its resident malaria species impacted the historical development of Europe. The book covers the environmental and biological factors at play and focuses on two of the periods when malaria potentially had the greatest impact on the continent.

Democracy is inherently difficult in societies divided along deep ethnic cleavages. Elections in such societies will often encourage 'centrifugal' politics which reward extremist ethnic appeals, zero-sum political behaviour and ethnic conflict, and which consequently often lead to the breakdown of democracy. Reilly examines the potential of 'electoral engineering' as a mechanism of conflict management in divided societies. He focuses on the little-known experience of a number of divided societies which have used preferential, vote-pooling electoral systems - such as Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland and Fiji. Examination of these cases shows that electoral systems which encourage bargaining between rival political actors, which promote the development of broad-based, aggregative political parties and which present campaigning politicians with incentives to attract votes from a range of ethnic groups can, under certain conditions, encourage the development of moderate, accommodatory political competition in divided societies.