Paolo Livorati
From Monday July 5th, the library is back to its normal opening hours for Summer II:
Monday - Friday: 8:00am - 7:45pm
Saturday: CLOSED
Sunday: 12:00pm - 6:45pm
Don't forget to sign into your study spot with EasyDesk! The cleaning/booking schedule for our rooms is as follows:
Giovanna Contigiani
Are you curious about what's new in the Library? Check out the New Acquisitions page! Find out new books, e-books, and videos that are now available in our collections.
Livia Piotto
Image: Francois Polito, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
CIAO Focus highlights a particular topic in the realm of international affairs. This month the focus is on arms control.
Donald Trump was the first US president in half a century to fail to negotiate a nuclear weapons agreement. President Biden, on the other hand, sees arms control as an "important policy tool" and has already extended the New START agreement for five years. Arms control—a key element of global security—aims to limit the number of weapons and to regulate their use through bilateral or multilateral agreements. The three major motives for arms control negotiations are disarmament, advantage, and strategic stability. A recent report from the Congressional Research Service provides a comprehensive overview of this topic. And the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, a CIAO partner, has compiled a convenient list of arms control agreements.
The 20th century saw competition and arms races between great powers. According to the Arctic Institute, the "control of strategic arms and strategic defences sought to re-establish balance to deter either state from the ability to threaten a disarming first strike." But today, as Rebecca Lissner notes for the Council on Foreign Relations, the geopolitical landscape is more complex. Lissner points to the rise of China, ceaseless change in military technology, and growing domestic polarization in the US, as reasons why the "traditional model of bilateral, treaty-based nuclear arms control will prove insufficient."
The Institute for International Science and Technology Policy provides a multi-perspective analysis of the past and potential future of arms control and nuclear weapons proliferation. The creation of arms control policy is challenging because we lack a consensus on which approach is most effective and agreements often serve multiple (and sometimes contradictory) purposes. Furthermore, there are are many meanings and interpretations of 'strategic stability' that have changed over time.
CIAO has numerous resources that explore this topic, including studies by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the Finnish Institute of International Affairs and more, such as:
All the resources available on CIAO can be accessed by the JCU community with the JCU NetID authentication.
For questions about how to use CIAO and other databases, you can contact referenceservices@johncabot.edu.
The Library has recently received copies of Louise Erdrich's The Night Watchman and Natalie Diaz' Postcolonial Love Poem, latest winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and for Poetry respectively.
Both books are now available for lending. And by the way...
... did you know that the Library has a research guide dedicated to all the major prizes in the English-speaking literary world (along with italy's Premio Strega)? Check it out - and for every prize you will also find links to the lists of works that we have been collecting by each and every winner since 2000.