This textbook provides students with a series of challenging and revealing perspectives on the trends, trajectories and ideas of the 1990s. Twenty geographers from all over the world have been especially commissioned to address the questions of how and why the world has changed, is changing, and will continue to change. After an editorial introduction on the nature of global and local change, the book is divided into five parts, concerned with geoeconomic change, geopolitical change, geosocial change, geocultural change, and geoenvironmental change. The editors have provided contextual introductions to each part and a conclusion stressing the links between these aspects of change. Among the issues the authors consider are the collapse of socialism, the reconfiguration of North Atlantic capitalism, the hypermobility of capital, the rise of ferocious nationalisms, global environmental change, the power of international media, the social movements associated with environmentalism and feminism, and the new fervour of old religions. Taken as a whole, this book provides the student with a series of critical insights into the economic, political, social, cultural and ecological dimensions of change at every geographical scale from the global to the local. R.J. Johston is the editor of "The Dictionary of Human Geography" and Peter J. Taylor is the author of "Political Geography".