Fresh from the press, my new copy of Risk Rules: How Local Politics Threaten the Local Economy arrived and it is really a study of unintended consequences. Authors Marvin Zonis, Dan Lefkovitz, Sam Wilkin and Joseph Yackley offer a new way to understand the global political economy. Here are seven questions posed about the current state of affairs and the author’s answers. 1) Obviously, there’s a tremendous amount of unrest and change happening right now in the Middle East. How do the ideas in Risk Rules apply to the situation in that part of the world right now? The uprisings taking place across the Arab world have much in common. They have been populist, leaderless, and driven by widely held frustrations over arbitrary rule, corruption, economic inequality, and a lack of democratic institutions. Yet despite these shared traits, events have unfolded in very different ways in different countries. Tunisia and Egypt saw largely peaceful demonstrations topple long-standing autocrats. Bahrain, Libya, and Syria have been wracked largely by government-sponsored violence. Then there are countries like Kuwait, Morocco, and Lebanon, which have been spared much of the turmoil. These differences are explained by the principle theme of Risk Rules — Local Factors Matter. Many of the individual rules discussed in the book also apply. A number of the states that have experienced turmoil are in the midst of or at the edge of leadership successions. In Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak was in power for 30 years and was 83 years of age.…