New Books in World Affairs

In his new book International Courts and Mass atrocity: Narratives of War and Justice in Croatia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) Ivor Sokolić explores the effects of international and national transitional justice in Croatia, and in particular the consequences of the work of the United Nations' International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the ICTY. Sokolić casts a critical analytical gaze on how and why universal human rights norms become distorted or undermined when they are filtered through national and local perceptions and narratives. Based on extensive research involving focus groups in Croatia, Sokolić's book marks an innovative approach to exploring the limitations of transitional justice and reconciliation in a post-conflict environment. Ivor Sokolić is a lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom. Christian Axboe Nielsen is associate professor of history and human security at Aarhus University in Denmark. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Why do Southeast Asia specialists get tired of explaining that the politics of the region cannot be reduced to a zero-sum game of Chinese-US great power rivalries? How do relatively small Southeast Asian states negotiate their relations with these major powers in an increasingly antagonistic environment? And why has the idea of the Indo-Pacific become so popular in recent years, and where does that leave the region most of us still call ‘Asia'? Prominent Singaporean political scientist Joseph Liow Chin Yong discusses these and other questions in conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo. Joseph Liow Chin Yong, is the Tan Kah Kee Chair in Comparative and International Politics at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, where he also serves as Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. Joseph is well-known for his work on the politics and international relations of Southeast Asia. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which are Ambivalent Engagement: The United States and Regional Security in Southeast Asia after the Cold War (Brookings 2017) and Religion and Nationalism in Southeast Asia (Cambridge University Press 2016). The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Dr. Erica R. Edwards's The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire (New York University, 2021) reveals the troubling intimacy between Black women and the making of US global power.  The year 1968 marked both the height of the worldwide Black liberation struggle and a turning point for the global reach of American power, which was built on the counterinsurgency honed on Black and other oppressed populations at home. The next five decades saw the consolidation of the culture of the American empire through what Erica R. Edwards calls the “imperial grammars of blackness.” This is a story of state power at its most devious and most absurd, and, at the same time, a literary history of Black feminist radicalism at its most trenchant. Edwards reveals how the long war on terror, beginning with the late–Cold War campaign against organizations like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and the Black Liberation Army, has relied on the labor and the fantasies of Black women to justify the imperial spread of capitalism. Black feminist writers not only understood that this would demand a shift in racial gendered power, but crafted ways of surviving it. The Other Side of Terror offers an interdisciplinary Black feminist analysis of militarism, security, policing, diversity, representation, intersectionality, and resistance, while discussing a wide array of literary and cultural texts, from the unpublished work of Black radical feminist June Jordan to the memoirs of Condoleezza Rice to the television series Scandal. With clear, moving prose, Edwards chronicles Black feminist organizing and writing on “the other side of terror”, which tracked changes in racial power, transformed African American literature and Black studies, and predicted the crises of our current era with unsettling accuracy. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelledmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Interpreting International Politics (Routledge, 2014) is a short and lively account of how international relations was founded and developed as an interpretivist discipline, and why it matters that it was. Its author, Cecelia Lynch, joins this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science to discuss the interplay between interpretivist philosophies and realist, critical and feminist traditions in studies of international politics; the epistemological stakes for IR scholars embarking on new projects; and, the book's location at a nexus between substantive questions, conceptual articulations, and ethical reflections about the role of the researcher in the study of international politics. Rather than a guide for how to interpret international politics and relations, this is a book that encourages researchers who feel a kinship or have an aesthetic inclination towards interpretive methods to identify and work with the rich materials that their discipline offers for robust and trustworthy interpretive social science. This episode is the fourth featuring books in the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods. The others are Interviewing in Social Science Research (Fujii), Elucidating Social Science Concepts (Schaffer), and Interpretive Research Design (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow). Listeners to this episode might be interested to check out the Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa blog, which Cecelia Lynch co-edits. To download or stream episodes in this series, please subscribe to our host channel: New Books in Political Science. Nick Cheesman is a fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, and a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group and convenor of the Interpretation, Method, Critique network. He co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

From Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798 to the foreign interventions in the ongoing civil wars in Syria, Yemen, and Libya today, global empires or the so-called Great Powers have long assumed the responsibility to bring security in the Middle East.  The past two centuries have witnessed their numerous military occupations to 'liberate', 'secure' and 'educate' local populations. They staged first 'humanitarian' interventions in history and established hitherto unseen international and local security institutions.  Consulting fresh primary sources collected from some thirty archives in the Middle East, Russia, the United States, and Western Europe, Dangerous Gifts: : Imperialism, Security, and Civil Wars in the Levant, 1798-1864 (Oxford University Press, 2021) revisits the late eighteenth and nineteenth century origins of these imperial security practices. It explicates how it all began.  Why did Great Power interventions in the Ottoman Levant tend to result in further turmoil and civil wars? Why has the region been embroiled in a paradox-an ever-increasing demand despite the increasing supply of security-ever since?  It embeds this highly pertinent genealogical history into an innovative and captivating narrative around the Eastern Question, emancipating the latter from the monopoly of Great Power politics, and foregrounding the experience of the Levantine actors.  It explores the gradual yet still forceful opening up of the latter's economies to global free trade, the asymmetrical implementation of international law in their perspective, and the secondary importance attached to their threat perceptions in a world where political and economic decisions were ultimately made through the filter of global imperial interests. Available via Open Access here. Ozan Ozavci is Assistant Professor of Transimperial History at Utrecht University, and associate member at the Centre d'Études Turques, Ottomanes, Balkaniques et Centrasiatiques in Paris. Kirk Meighoo is Public Relations Officer for the United National Congress, the Official Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. His career has spanned media, academia, and politics for three decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Genocide denial not only abuses history and insults the victims but paves the way for future atrocities. Yet few, if any, books have offered a comparative overview and analysis of this problem. Denial: The Final Stage of Genocide? (Routledge, 2021) is a resource for understanding and countering denial. Denial spans a broad geographic and thematic range in its explorations of varied forms of denial--which is embedded in each stage of genocide. Ranging far beyond the most well-known cases of denial, this book offers original, pathbreaking arguments and contributions regarding: competition over commemoration and public memory in Ukraine and elsewhere transitional justice in post-conflict societies global violence against transgender people, which genocide scholars have not adequately confronted music as a means to recapture history and combat denial public education's role in erasing Indigenous history and promoting settler-colonial ideology in the U.S. "triumphalism" as a new variant of denial following the Bosnian Genocide denial vis-à-vis Rwanda and neighboring Congo (DRC) With contributions from leading genocide experts as well as emerging scholars, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of history, genocide studies, anthropology, political science, international law, gender studies, and human rights. Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University's School of International Service in Washington, DC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Theosophy across Boundaries: Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Modern Esoteric Movement (SUNY Press, 2020) brings a global history approach to the study of esotericism, highlighting the important role of Theosophy in the general histories of religion, science, philosophy, art, and politics. The first half of the book consists of seven perspectives on the activities of the Theosophical Society in very different regional contexts, ranging from India, Vietnam, China, and Japan to Victorian Britain and Israel, shedding new light on the entanglement of "Western" and "Oriental" ideas around 1900. The second half explores specific cultural influences that Theosophy exerted in the spheres of literature, art, and politics, using case studies from Sri Lanka, Burma, India, Japan, Ireland, Germany, and Russia. The examples clearly show that Theosophy was part of a truly global movement, thus providing an outstanding example of the complex entanglements of the global religious history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hans Martin Kramer is Professor of Japanese Studies at Heidelberg University in Germany. Julian Strube is Assistant Professor in Religious Studies at the University of Vienna. Samee Siddiqui is a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Potatoes are the world's fourth most important food crop, yet they were unknown to most of humanity before 1500. Rebecca Earle, Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato (Cambridge UP, 2020) traces the global journey of this popular foodstuff from the Andes to everywhere. The potato's global history reveals the ways in which our ideas about eating are entangled with the emergence of capitalism and its celebration of the free market. It also reminds us that ordinary people make history in ways that continue to shape our lives. Feeding the People tells the story of how eating became part of statecraft, and provides a new account of the global spread of one of the world's most successful foods. Daniela Gutierrez Flores is a PhD candidate in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies at the University of Chicago Romance Languages and Literatures department. Follow her on Twitter @danielagtz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Harnessing the Sun is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Jenny Nelson, Professor of Physics and Head of the Climate Change mitigation team at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. After inspiring insights about Jenny Nelson's academic journey, the conversation examines different solar energy processes, solar energy conversion technology, novel varieties of material for use in solar cells, and the materials used to build and improve photovoltaic, and other renewable, technologies, which convert energy from the sun into electricity. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The rapprochement between Germany and Israel in the aftermath of the Holocaust is one of the most striking political developments of the twentieth century. German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently referred to it as a 'miracle'. But how did this 'miracle' come about? In this book, Lorena De Vita traces the contradictions and dilemmas that shaped the making of German-Israeli relations at the outset of the global Cold War. Examining well known events like the Suez Crisis, the Eichmann Trial, and the Six-Day War, Lorena De Vita's book Israelpolitik: German-Israeli Relations, 1949-69 (Manchester UP, 2021) adopts a 'pericentric' perspective on the Cold War era, drawing attention to the actions and experiences of minor players within the confrontation and highlighting the consequences of their political calculations. Israelpolitik takes two of the most interesting dimensions of the Cold War - the German problem and the Middle East conflict - and weaves them together, providing a bipolar history of German-Israeli relations in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Drawing upon sources from both sides of the Iron Curtain and of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the book offers new insights not only into the early history of German-Israeli relations, but also into the dynamics of the Cold War competition between the two German states, as each attempted to strengthen its position in the Middle East and in the international arena while struggling with the legacy of the Nazi past. Grant Golub is a PhD candidate in U.S. and international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His research examines the politics of American grand strategy during World War II. Follow him on Twitter @ghgolub. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Revenants of the German Empire: Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations (Oxford UP, 2019) reveals the various ways in which Colonial Germans attempted to cope with the loss of the German colonies after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. These Kolonialdeutsche (Colonial Germans) had invested substantial time and money in German imperialism. German men and women from the former African colonies exploited any opportunities they could to recover, renovate and market their understandings of German and European colonial aims in order to reestablish themselves as "experts" and "fellow civilizers" in European and American discourses on nationalism and imperialism. Colonial officials, settlers, and colonial lobbies made use of the League of Nations framework to influence diplomatic flashpoints including the Naturalization Controversy in South African-administered Southwest Africa, the Locarno Conference, and German participation in the Permanent Mandates Commission from 1927-1933. Sean Wempe revises standard historical portrayals of the League of Nations' form of international governance, German participation in the League, the role of interest groups in international organizations and diplomacy, and liberal imperialism. In analyzing Colonial German investment and participation in interwar liberal internationalism, the project also challenges the idea of a direct continuity between Germany's colonial period and the Nazi era. Jack Guenther is a doctoral candidate in history at Princeton University. His research focuses on modern Germany, global economic history, the history of international order, and the relationship between markets and state power in the 20th century.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Many would rather change worlds than change the world. The settlement of communities in 'empty lands' somewhere else has often been proposed as a solution to growing contradictions. While the lands were never empty, sometimes these communities failed miserably, and sometimes they prospered and grew until they became entire countries.  Building on a growing body of transnational and interdisciplinary research on the political imaginaries of settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination, Lorenzo Veracini's The World Turned Inside Out: Settler Colonialism As a Political Idea (Verso, 2021) uncovers and critiques an autonomous, influential, and coherent political tradition - a tradition still relevant today. It follows the ideas and the projects (and the failures) of those who left or planned to leave growing and chaotic cities and challenging and confusing new economic circumstances, those who wanted to protect endangered nationalities, and those who intended to pre-empt forthcoming revolutions of all sorts, including civil and social wars. They displaced, and moved to other islands and continents, beyond the settled regions, to rural districts and to secluded suburbs, to communes and intentional communities, and to cyberspace. This book outlines the global history of a resilient political idea: to seek change somewhere else as an alternative to embracing (or resisting) transformation where one is. Lorenzo Veracini teaches history and politics at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. He has authored Israel and Settler Society, Settler Colonialism, The Settler Colonial Present (2015), and co-edited The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism. He is Founding Editor of Settler Colonial Studies Thomas Kingston is currently a Huayu Enrichment Scholar, studying Mandarin Chinese at National Taiwan University, as he finds himself in post MPhil and pre PhD limbo. He holds an MA in Pacific Asian Studies from SOAS, University of London and an MPhil in Philosophy from Renmin University of China. His research interests focus on the political and intellectual histories of nationalism(s), imaginaries and colonialism in the East and Southeast Asian context.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Embracing the Anthropocene: Managing Human Impact is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Mark Maslin, Professor of Geography at University College London. This wide-ranging conversation explores Prof. Maslin's research on the Anthropocene which according to his definition began when human impacts on the planet irrevocably started to change the course of the Earth's biological and geographical trajectory, leading to climate change, loss of biodiversity, deforestation, and more. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

How can we create a healthier world and prevent the crisis next time? In a few short months, COVID-19 devastated the world and, in particular, the United States. It infected millions, killed hundreds of thousands, and effectively made the earth stand still. Yet America was already in poor health before COVID-19 appeared. Racism, marginalization, socioeconomic inequality--our failure to address these forces left us vulnerable to COVID-19 and the ensuing global health crisis it became. Had we tackled these challenges twenty years ago, after the outbreak of SARS, perhaps COVID-19 could have been quickly contained. Instead, we allowed our systems to deteriorate.  Following on the themes of his award-winning publication Well, Sandro Galea's The Contagion Next Time (Oxford UP, 2021) articulates the foundational forces shaping health in our society and how we can strengthen them to prevent the next outbreak from becoming a pandemic. Because while no one could have predicted that a pandemic would strike when it did, we did know that a pandemic would strike, sooner or later. We're still not ready for the next pandemic. But we can be--we must be. In lyrical prose, The Contagion Next Time challenges all of us to tackle the deep-rooted obstacles preventing us from becoming a truly vibrant and equitable nation, reminding us of what we've seemed to have forgotten: that our health is a public good worth protecting. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky's College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

"One of the most enduring myths of history writing about Europe in the 20th century is that the century can be neatly divided into a tale of two halves, with the first half made up of episodes of war, revolution and mass violence while the second is a tale of relative peace and prosperity”. In Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe After the Second World War (Basic Books, 2021), Paul Betts challenges this two-halves historical narrative. This modern political history of the use of the concept of “civilisation" confronts the self-image of the European Union with lessons for core debates about democracy and the rule of law today. Paul Betts is a professor of European history at Saint Antony's College, Oxford, whose work centres on modern cultural history with a special focus on 20th century Germany. His Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (OUP Oxford, 2010) received the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History awarded by the Wiener Library. *The author's own book recommendations are: Project Europe: A History by Kiran Klaus Patel (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi (Allen Lane, 2021). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley advisors (a division of Energy Aspects). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Unnatural Disasters: Why Most Responses to Risk and Climate Change Fail But Some Succeed (Columbia UP, 2021) offers a new perspective on our most pressing environmental and social challenges, revealing the gaps between abstract concepts like sustainability, resilience, and innovation and the real-world experiences of people living at risk. Gonzalo Lizarralde explains how the causes of disasters are not natural but all too human: inequality, segregation, marginalization, colonialism, neoliberalism, racism, and unrestrained capitalism. He tells the stories of Latin American migrants, Haitian earthquake survivors, Canadian climate activists, African slum dwellers, and other people resisting social and environmental injustices around the world. Lizarralde shows that most reconstruction and risk-reduction efforts exacerbate social inequalities. Some responses do produce meaningful changes, but they are rarely the ones powerful leaders have in mind. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Western Jihadism: A Thirty Year History (Oxford University Press, 2021) tells the story of how Al Qaeda grew in the West. In forensic and compelling detail, Jytte Klausen traces how Islamist revolutionaries exiled in Europe and North America in the 1990s helped create and control one of the world's most impactful terrorist movements--and how, after the near-obliteration of the organization during the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, they helped build it again. She shows how the diffusion of Islamist terrorism to Europe and North America has been driven, not by local grievances of Western Muslims, but by the strategic priorities of the international Salafi-jihadist revolutionary movement. That movement has adapted to Western repertoires of protest: agitating for armed insurrection and religious revivalism in the name of a warped version of Islam. The jihadists-Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, and their many affiliates and associates--also proved to be amazingly resilient. Again and again, the movement recovered from major setbacks. Appealing to disaffected Muslims of immigrant origin and alienated converts to Islam, Jihadist groups continue to recruit new adherents in Europe and North America, street-side in neighborhoods, in jails, and online through increasingly clandestine platforms. Taking a comparative and historical approach, deploying cutting-edge analytical tools, and drawing on her unparalleled database of up to 6,500 Western jihadist extremists and their networks, Klausen has produced the most comprehensive account yet of the origins of Western jihadism and its role in the global movement. Jytte Klausen is the Lawrence A. Wien Professor of International Cooperation at Brandeis University and an Affiliate at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. Kirk Meighoo is Public Relations Officer for the United National Congress, the Official Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. His career has spanned media, academia, and politics for three decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Often seen as an outlier in science, Gaia has run a long and varied course since its formulation in the 1970s by atmospheric chemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis. Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene (U Minnesota Press, 2020) is a pioneering exploration of the dynamic and complex evolution of Gaia's many variants, with special attention to Margulis's foundational role in these developments. Bruce Clarke assesses the different dialects of systems theory brought to bear on Gaia discourse. Focusing in particular on Margulis's work--including multiple pieces of her unpublished Gaia correspondence--he shows how her research and that of Lovelock was concurrent and conceptually parallel with the new discourse of self-referential systems that emerged within neocybernetic systems theory. The recent Gaia writings of Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, and Bruno Latour contest its cybernetic status. Clarke engages Latour on the issue of Gaia's systems description and extends his own systems-theoretical synthesis under what he terms "metabiotic Gaia." This study illuminates current issues in neighboring theoretical conversations--from biopolitics and the immunitary paradigm to NASA astrobiology and the Anthropocene. Along the way, he points to science fiction as a vehicle of Gaian thought. Delving into many issues not previously treated in accounts of Gaia, Gaian Systems describes the history of a theory that has the potential to help us survive an environmental crisis of our own making. Tom Scholte is a Professor of Directing and Acting in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia located on the unceded, ancestral, and traditional territory of the Musqueam people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The Picky Eagle: How Democracy and Xenophobia Limited U. S. Territorial Expansion (Cornell UP, 2020) explains why the United States stopped annexing territory by focusing on annexation's domestic consequences, both political and normative. It describes how the U.S. rejection of further annexations, despite its rising power, set the stage for twentieth-century efforts to outlaw conquest. In contrast to conventional accounts of a nineteenth-century shift from territorial expansion to commercial expansion, Richard W. Maass argues that U.S. ambitions were selective from the start. By presenting twenty-three case studies, Maass examines the decision-making of U.S. leaders facing opportunities to pursue annexation between 1775 and 1898. U.S. presidents, secretaries, and congressmen consistently worried about how absorbing new territories would affect their domestic political influence and their goals for their country. These leaders were particularly sensitive to annexation's domestic costs where xenophobia interacted with their commitment to democracy: rather than grant political representation to a large alien population or subject it to a long-term imperial regime, they regularly avoided both of these perceived bad options by rejecting annexation. As a result, U.S. leaders often declined even profitable opportunities for territorial expansion, and they renounced the practice entirely once no desirable targets remained. In addition to offering an updated history of the foundations of U.S. territorial expansion, The Picky Eagle adds important nuance to previous theories of great-power expansion, with implications for our understanding of U.S. foreign policy and international relations. Grant Golub is a PhD candidate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the politics of American grand strategy during World War II. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

When civil war broke out in Spain in 1936, tens of thousands of young men and women from across the world flocked there to fight against the Nationalist uprising. Though their history has been told before, Giles Tremlett's The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War (Bloomsbury, 2021) draws upon previously unavailable materials to tell the stories of the war they fought. Though these people came from a variety of backgrounds and held a range of different left-wing political views, what united them was their opposition to fascism. Despite their disorganization and lack of training, they made an impact on the battlefield soon after their deployment, and became a highly visible presence in the war against Francisco Franco's Nationalist forces. While the Spanish Republic they fought for was ultimately defeated, Tremlett explains how many of those who served in the Brigades continued their struggle against fascism during the Second World War, reflecting the lasting legacy of their service for their cause. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

What does citizenship—an institution that has historically linked identity to place—mean in an age of globalization? This is the question that Atossa Araxia Abrahamian investigates in her planet-sprawling book The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen (Columbia Global Reports, 2015). One way Abrahamian answers that question is by examining elites shopping for passports in a global marketplace. But the question also pulls her deep into a grim passports-in-bulk scheme that offloaded stateless people in the oil-rich Persian Gulf to an impoverished island-state off the coast of East Africa (not every cosmopolite was so by choice). Abrahamian also finds an answer in the various ways activists have chipped away at the exclusions of citizenship and have striven for a more egalitarian, connected world. The Cosmopolites is an astute inquiry into how the rules of the interstate system—the assignment of citizenship by place of birth; border regimes that restrict the movement of people—produce strange, sometimes Kafkaesque realities and how different actors have tried to bend those rules. And Abrahamian, a journalist and senior editor at The Nation whose beat is truly global, is well-suited for this endeavor. We talk about the book, her case for studying small states as a way to understanding the world order, and her methodology. I hope you enjoy our interview! Dexter Fergie is a doctoral student in US and global history at Northwestern University. His research examines the history of ideas, infrastructure, and international organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In 1974, the International Congress on World Evangelization met in Lausanne, Switzerland. Gathering together nearly 2,500 Protestant evangelical leaders from more than 150 countries and 135 denominations, it rivaled Vatican II in terms of its influence. But as David C. Kirkpatrick argues in A Gospel for the Poor: Global Social Christianity and the Latin American Evangelical Left (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019), the Lausanne Congress was most influential because, for the first time, theologians from the Global South gained a place at the table of the world's evangelical leadership—bringing their nascent brand of social Christianity with them. Leading up to this momentous occasion, after World War II, there emerged in various parts of the world an embryonic yet discernible progressive coalition of thinkers who were embedded in global evangelical organizations and educational institutions such as the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, and the International Fellowship of Evangelical Mission Theologians.  Within these groups, Latin Americans had an especially strong voice, for they had honed their theology as a religious minority, having defined it against two perceived ideological excesses: Marxist-inflected Catholic liberation theology and the conservative political loyalties of the U.S. Religious Right. In this context, transnational conversations provoked the rise of progressive evangelical politics, the explosion of Christian mission and relief organizations, and the infusion of social justice into the very mission of evangelicals around the world and across a broad spectrum of denominations. Drawing upon bilingual interviews and archives and personal papers from three continents, Kirkpatrick adopts a transnational perspective to tell the story of how a Cold War generation of progressive Latin Americans, including seminal figures such as Ecuadorian René Padilla and Peruvian Samuel Escobar, developed, named, and exported their version of social Christianity to an evolving coalition of global evangelicals. Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History & Ecumenics, focusing on World Christianity and history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary. His research interest lies in Indonesia and the Muslim dominant regions of Southeast Asia, from the postcolonial approach to Christianity and the coexistence of various religions, including the study of Christianity and the Islamic faith in a Muslim dominant society that includes challenges of ethnic diversity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Big cats—tigers, leopards, and lions—that make prey of humans are commonly known as “man-eaters.” Anthropologist Nayanika Mathur reconceptualizes them as cats that have gone off the straight path to become “crooked.” Building upon fifteen years of research in India, this groundbreaking work moves beyond both colonial and conservationist accounts to place crooked cats at the center of the question of how we are to comprehend a planet in crisis. There are many theories on why and how a big cat comes to prey on humans, with the ecological collapse emerging as a central explanatory factor. Yet, uncertainty over the precise cause of crookedness persists.  Nayanika Mathur's book Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene (U Chicago Press, 2021) explores in vivid detail the many lived complexities that arise from this absence of certain knowledge to offer startling new insights into both the governance of nonhuman animals and their intimate entanglements with humans. Through creative ethnographic storytelling, Crooked Cats illuminates the Anthropocene in three critical ways: as method, as a way of reframing human-nonhuman relations on the planet, and as a political tool indicating the urgency of academic engagement. Weaving together “beastly tales” spun from encounters with big cats, Mathur deepens our understanding of the causes, consequences, and conceptualization of the climate crisis. Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. To know more about Sneha's work, please visit www.snehanna.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Child sponsorship, originally a project of nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries, has become one of today's most profitable private fund-raising tools for global organizations, including World Vision, Compassion International, and ChildFund. Christian Globalism at Home: Child Sponsorship in the United States (Princeton UP, 2020) is an investigation of two centuries of sponsorship and its related practices in American living rooms, churches, and shopping malls, that reveals the myriad ways that Christians who don't travel outside of the United States cultivate global sensibilities. Hilary Kaell traces the movement of money, letters, and images, along with a wide array of sponsorship's lesser-known embodied and aesthetic techniques, such as playacting, hymn singing, eating, and fasting. She shows how, through this process, U.S. Christians attempt to hone globalism of a particular sort by oscillating between the sensory experiences of a God's eye view and the intimacy of human relatedness. These global aspirations are buoyed by grand hopes and subject to intractable limitations, since they so often rely on the very inequities they claim to redress. Based on extensive interviews, archival research, and fieldwork, Christian Globalism at Home explores how U.S. Christians imagine and experience the world without ever leaving home. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network's Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Solar Impact: Climate and the Sun is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Joanna Haigh, Professor Emerita of Atmospheric Physics at Imperial College London and Co-Director of the Grantham Institute until her retirement in 2019. After inspiring details about how she got into her field of study and how we can encourage more girls to get more interested in science, the conversation examines her research of the influence of the sun and solar variability on our climate, how energy emitted by the sun in the form of heat, light and ultraviolet radiation warms the earth and drives our climate, how data from satellites and modelling the processes helps us distinguish the warming effects of greenhouse gases from those of natural variations in solar energy, and more. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Improving Human Rights is based on an in-depth, filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Emilie Hafner-Burton, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of International Justice and Human Rights at UC San Diego and co-director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at the School. This extensive conversation covers topics such international law, when and why international laws work and don't work, the international human rights system and concrete measures that could be taken to improve it, the International Criminal Court, and the role of states in the protection of human rights. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

How can consumers, nations, and international organizations work together to improve food systems before our planet loses its ability to sustain itself and its people? Do we have the right to eat wrongly? As the world's agricultural, environmental, and nutritional needs intersect—and often collide—how can consumers, nations, and international organizations work together to reverse the damage by changing how we make, distribute, and purchase food? Can such changes in practice and policy reverse the trajectories of the biggest global crises impacting our world: the burden of chronic diseases, the consequences of climate change, and the systemic economic and social inequities that exist within and among nations? Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet? (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021) is a clarion call for both individual consumers and those who shape our planet's food and environmental policies that: • describes the often destructive path that foods take from farms and seas through their processing, distribution, marketing, purchasing and waste management sites • explores the complex web of factors impacting our ability to simultaneously meet nutritional needs, sustain biodiversity and protect the environment • raises readers' food and environmental literacy through an engaging narrative about Fanzo's research on five continents along with the work of other inspiring global experts who are providing solutions to these crises • empowers readers to contribute to immediate and long-term changes by informing their decisions in restaurants, grocery stores, farmers markets, and kitchens. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In the late nineteenth century, as much of the world adopted some variant of the gold standard, China remained the most populous country still using silver. Yet China had no unified national currency; there was not one monetary standard but many. Silver coins circulated alongside chunks of silver and every transaction became an "encounter of wits." China and the End of Global Silver, 1873–1937 (Cornell UP, 2020) focuses on how officials, policy makers, bankers, merchants, academics, and journalists in China and around the world answered a simple question: how should China change its monetary system? Far from a narrow, technical issue, Chinese monetary reform is a dramatic story full of political revolutions, economic depressions, chance, and contingency. As different governments in China attempted to create a unified monetary standard in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the United States, England, and Japan tried to shape the direction of Chinese monetary reform for their own benefit.  Austin Dean argues convincingly that the Silver Era in world history ended owing to the interaction of imperial competition in East Asia and the state-building projects of different governments in China. When the Nationalist government of China went off the silver standard in 1935, it marked a key moment not just in Chinese history but in world history. Austin Dean is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His work has appeared in Modern China and the Journal of American-East Asian Relations. He is on twitter @thelicentiate. Ghassan Moazzin is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. He works on the economic and business history of 19th and 20th century China, with a particular focus on the history of foreign banking, international finance and electricity in modern China. His first book, tentatively titled Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870–1919, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The ice sheets and glaciers that cover one-tenth of Earth's land surface are in grave peril. High in the Alps, Andes, and Himalaya, once-indomitable glaciers are retreating, even dying. Meanwhile, in Antarctica, thinning glaciers may be unlocking vast quantities of methane stored for millions of years beneath the ice. In Ice Rivers: A Story of Glaciers, Wilderness, and Humanity (Princeton UP, 2021), renowned glaciologist Jemma Wadham offers a searing personal account of glaciers and the rapidly unfolding crisis that they—and we—face. Taking readers on a personal journey from Europe and Asia to Antarctica and South America, Wadham introduces majestic glaciers around the globe as individuals—even friends—each with their own unique character and place in their community. She challenges their first appearance as silent, passive, and lifeless, and reveals that glaciers are, in fact, as alive as a forest or soil, teeming with microbial life and deeply connected to almost everything we know. They influence crucial systems on which people depend, from lucrative fisheries to fertile croplands, and represent some of the most sensitive and dynamic parts of our world. Their fate is inescapably entwined with our own, and unless we act to abate the greenhouse warming of our planet the potential consequences are almost unfathomable. A riveting blend of cutting-edge research and tales of encounters with polar bears and survival under the midnight sun, Ice Rivers is an unforgettable portrait of—and love letter to—our vanishing icy wildernesses. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The history of international organizations has been an exciting area of research in recent years, with such landmark studies as Stephen Wertheim's Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy and Adom Getachew's Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. From this scholarship, we've learned a lot about, say, the politics of creating new intergovernmental organizations or how they became arenas for interstate competition. But the international bureaucracies themselves remain mysterious, even black-boxed. That's where Organizing the 20th-Century World: International Organizations and the Emergence of International Public Administration, 1920-1960s (Bloomsbury, 2020) comes in. Edited by Karen Gram-Skjoldager (an associate professor at Aarhus University), Haakon Ikonomou (an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen), and Torsten Kahlert (a postdoctoral fellow at the Herzog August Bibliothek), Organizing the 20th-Century World tells the history of international public administration, documenting the arrival of “an entirely new professional figure on the international stage: the international civil servant.” The edited collection's contributors also introduce tools that could aid in study of international administration, including biography (what Haakon Ikonomou calls an “institutional can opener”), prosopography, and relevant datasets. Thanks to both its methodological and historical contributions, this volume will serve as a useful compass for future scholars of international public administration. Dexter Fergie is a doctoral student in US and global history at Northwestern University. His research examines the history of ideas, infrastructure, and international organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The history of international organizations has been an exciting area of research in recent years, with such landmark studies as Stephen Wertheim's Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy and Adom Getachew's Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. From this scholarship, we've learned a lot about, say, the politics of creating new intergovernmental organizations or how they became arenas for interstate competition. But the international bureaucracies themselves remain mysterious, even black-boxed. That's where Organizing the 20th-Century World: International Organizations and the Emergence of International Public Administration, 1920-1960s (Bloomsbury, 2020) comes in. Edited by Karen Gram-Skjoldager (an associate professor at Aarhus University), Haakon Ikonomou (an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen), and Torsten Kahlert (a postdoctoral fellow at the Herzog August Bibliothek), Organizing the 20th-Century World tells the history of international public administration, documenting the arrival of “an entirely new professional figure on the international stage: the international civil servant.” The edited collection's contributors also introduce tools that could aid in study of international administration, including biography (what Haakon Ikonomou calls an “institutional can opener”), prosopography, and relevant datasets. Thanks to both its methodological and historical contributions, this volume will serve as a useful compass for future scholars of international public administration. Dexter Fergie is a doctoral student in US and global history at Northwestern University. His research examines the history of ideas, infrastructure, and international organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

From the Taliban to Hezbollah, armed nonstate actors and civil warfare have dominated the US national security debate for much of the last 20 years. Yet, most analysis shares a critical underlying assumption: that non-state actors fight very differently than states do. In Nonstate Warfare: The Military Methods of Guerillas, Warlords and Militias (Princeton UP, 2021), Dr. Stephen Biddle argues that those ideas are not just misleading but dangerous. Through a careful review of five nonstate actors, Dr. Biddle shows that state and nonstate military methods vary more by degree than by kind. Still, degrees do matter. To predict how “conventionally” or “unconventionally” a nonstate actor will fight, Dr. Biddle develops a theory reliant on two key variables: the stakes leaders perceive in a conflict and the strength of a nonstate actor's institutions. The greater either variable, the more that actor will fight like we expect states to: defending and seizing ground, concentrating forces, employing heavy weapons, and implementing a stratified theater of war. On the episode, we talk about all that and more. I ask Dr. Biddle about the flaws in status quo theories of nonstate military methods, how the lethality of the modern battlefield creates similar tactical incentives for state and nonstate militaries, and what the implications of his theory are for international politics writ large and US defense planning in particular. Note: At the very end, I ask Dr. Biddle, who spent time on Defense Department analytical staffs focused on Afghanistan, for his opinion on the rapid advance of the Taliban. Please note that he is a private citizen and his statements do not represent the official view of the government. The podcast was also recorded on 7/13, two days before the fall of Kabul. Dr. Biddle is a Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, a member of the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, and Adjunct Senior Fellow for Defense Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. In addition to his academic work, Dr. Biddle has served on the Defense Department's Defense Policy Board, on General David Petraeus's Joint Strategic Assessment Team in Baghdad in 2007, as a Senior Advisor to the Central Command Assessment Team in Washington in 2008-9, and as a member of General Stanley McChrystal's Initial Strategic Assessment Team in Kabul in 2009, among other government advisory panels and analytic teams. John Sakellariadis is a 2021-2022 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a Master's degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a Bachelor's degree in History & Literature from Harvard University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

On this episode of the Economic and Business History channel, I spoke with Dr. Victoria Basualdo and Dr. Marcelo Bucheli about their new edited book. Big Business and Dictatorships in Latin America: A Transnational History of Profits and Repression (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) is an edited volume that studies the relationship between big business and the Latin American dictatorial regimes during the Cold War. The first section provides a general background about the contemporary history of business corporations and dictatorships in the twentieth century at the international level. The second section comprises chapters that analyze five national cases (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Peru), as well as a comparative analysis of the banking sector in the Southern Cone (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay). The third section presents six case studies of large companies in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Central America. This book is crucial reading because it provides the first comprehensive analysis of a key yet understudied topic in Cold War history in Latin America. Victoria Basualdo is Researcher at the Argentine National Scientific Council (CONICET) and at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), and Professor in the Political Economy Master's Degree Program at FLACSO, Argentina. She specializes in contemporary economic and labor history, with special focus on structural changes and the transformations of trade-union organizations in Argentina and Latin America. Hartmut Berghoff is Director of the Institute of Economic and Social History at the University of Göttingen, Germany. He was the Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington DC (2008-2015) and held various visiting positions at the Center of Advanced Study, Harvard Business School, the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, and the Henley Business School. He has worked on the history of consumption, business history, immigration history and the history of modern Germany. Marcelo Bucheli is Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. His research focuses on the political economy of multinational corporations in Latin America, theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of the relationship between firms and states in a historical perspective, and business groups. Hosted by Paula De La Cruz-Fernandez, consultant, historian, and digital editor. New Books Network en español editor. Edita CEO. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

When we talk about people crossing borders, policy makers, advocates, journalists, and academics often distinguish between “refugees” and “migrants.” Is this a useful legal fiction? Shorthand for an important distinction? Dr. Rebecca Hamlin argues that employing this binary limits protection for vulnerable people who are not protected by the rarified category of “refugee.”  In Crossing: How We Label and React to People on the Move (Stanford UP, 2021), Dr. Hamlin confronts the binary -- and the effect it has on our study, policy-making, and conversations about border crossers. Her book traces the emergence of the concept of refugee in the context of sovereignty and colonialism, pushing back on notions of essentialism in favor of a constructed binary. The logic of the migrant/refugee binary obscure power imbalances by focusing on internal explanations for why people are leaving countries in the Global South (corruption, war, poverty) rather than externalist forces such as globalization, postcolonialism, and neoliberalism. Using varied data and methods, she provides insight into the scholarly fault lines and the historical and current role of the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees) in perpetuating the binary. Her rich case studies reveal differences in how the binary is deployed in the Global North and South. Beautifully written and carefully argued, Dr. Hamlin challenges scholars and advocates for vulnerable border crossers to move beyond the binary, despite perceived risks. In the podcast (recorded days after the fall of the Afghan government), Dr. Hamlin reflects on the continuing effects of the binary in contemporary events -- and how it limits creative scholarship, policy-making, journalism, and conversation about vulnerable border crossers. She mentions Claudio Saunt's Norton book, Unworthy Republic and also the Hamlin-Abdelaaty Migrants or Refugees? It's the Wrong Question published in the Monkey Cage. New Books in Political Science welcomes Dr. Lamis E. Abdelaaty as a part of this dynamic conversation and we look forward to new podcasts from Dr. Abdelaaty in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Retired from life after 38 years in several roles at IBM, the prolific academic production of James W. Cortada now continues telling his side of the story of his long-term employer. In particular the challenges and tribulations of a unique organizational culture, how it was created, how it led to success, how it resisted a process of reconfiguration. IBM: The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon (MIT Press, 2019) covers a significant time span. The 20 chapters in the book are organised into four sections: origins (1880s-1945), market dominance (1945-1985), crisis (1985-1994), and renewal (1995-2012). Reading this title cover to cover is no small feat and not recommended (or intended) for everyone. In this podcast, Cortada tells us about his trajectory as a writter and how the book was put together.  Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other mussings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

As ongoing controversies over commercial sex attest, the relationship between capitalism and sexuality is deeply contentious. Economic and sexual practices are assumed to be not only separable but antithetical, hence why paid sex is so often criminalized and morally condemned. Yet, while sexuality is highly politicized in moral terms, it has largely been overlooked in the discipline devoted to the study of global capitalism, international political economy (IPE). Likewise, the prevailing field in sexuality studies, queer theory, has frequently sidelined questions of political economy. Nicola J. Smith's Capitalism's Sexual History (Oxford UP, 2020) calls for critical scholarship to challenge the dichotomy as it not only structures disciplinary debates but is part and parcel of capitalism itself. By exposing the historical mechanisms through which the economy/sexuality dichotomy has been constituted, the book opens up new space for critical inquiry into the intersections between sex, work, and economic and sexual injustice. Nicola Smith is senior lecturer at the University of Birmingham, and a political economist working on feminist and queer theory, neoliberalism and austerity, sex work and reproductive labour, and the history of the British body politic. Victoria Holt is a PhD student and a sex worker activist. Her research explores sex workers' experiences of domestic violence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Oil palms are ubiquitous—grown in nearly every tropical country, they supply the world with more edible fat than any other plant and play a role in scores of packaged products, from lipstick and soap to margarine and cookies. And as Jonathan E. Robins shows in Oil Palm: A Global History (UNC Press, 2021), sweeping social transformations carried the plant around the planet. First brought to the global stage in the holds of slave ships, palm oil became a quintessential commodity in the Industrial Revolution. Imperialists hungry for cheap fat subjugated Africa's oil palm landscapes and the people who worked them. In the twentieth century, the World Bank promulgated oil palm agriculture as a panacea to rural development in Southeast Asia. As plantation companies tore into rainforests, evicting farmers in the name of progress, the oil palm continued its rise to dominance, sparking new controversies over trade, land and labor rights, human health, and the environment. By telling the story of the oil palm across multiple centuries and continents, Robins demonstrates how the fruits of an African palm tree became a key commodity in the story of global capitalism, beginning in the eras of slavery and imperialism, persisting through decolonization, and stretching to the present day. Jonathan E. Robins is Associate Professor of Global History at Michigan Technology University. He earned his PhD in history at the University of Rochester in 2010 and taught at Morgan State University before joining the faculty at Michigan Tech in 2012. He studies the histories of commodities and how they've reshaped societies, industries, and our planet. His first book, Cotton and Race Across the Atlantic, was published by the University of Rochester Press in 2016. Kathryn B. Carpenter is a doctoral student in the history of science at Princeton University. She is currently researching the history of tornado science and storm chasing in the twentieth-century United States. You can reach her on twitter, @katebcarp. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The collapse of the Berlin Wall has come to represent the entry of an isolated region onto the global stage. On the contrary, this study argues that communist states had in fact long been shapers of an interconnecting world, with '1989' instead marking a choice by local elites about the form that globalisation should take. Published to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the 1989 revolutions, 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe (Cambridge UP, 2019) draws on material from local archives to international institutions to explore the place of Eastern Europe in the emergence, since the 1970s, of a new world order that combined neoliberal economics and liberal democracy with increasingly bordered civilisational, racial and religious identities. An original and wide-ranging history, it explores the importance of the region's links to the West, East Asia, Africa, and Latin America in this global transformation, reclaiming the era's other visions such as socialist democracy or authoritarian modernisation which had been lost in triumphalist histories of market liberalism. Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II (Princeton UP, 2021), looks at a subject we thought we knew—the roots of the Second World War—and upends our assumptions with a new interpretation. Professor Jonathan Haslam, in the words of historian, Geoffrey Roberts, “the doyen of Soviet Diplomatic History”, looks at the neglected thread connecting them all: the fear of Communism prevalent across continents during the inter-war period. Marshalling an array of archival sources, including records from the Communist International, Professor Haslam seeks to transform our understanding of the deep-seated origins of World War II, its conflicts, and its legacy. In Haslam's interpretation fascism's emergence in conjunction with the impact of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, helped to upend the existing world order. World War I had economically destabilized many nations, and the threat of Communist revolt loomed large in the ensuing social unrest. As Moscow supported Communist efforts in France, Spain, China, and beyond, opponents such as the British feared for the stability of their global empire, and viewed fascism as the only force standing between them and the Communist overthrow of the existing order. The appeasement and political misreading of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy that followed held back the spectre of rebellion—only to usher in the later advent of war. Illuminating ideological differences in the decades before World War II, and the continuous role of pre- and postwar Communism, The Spectre of War provides unprecedented context for one of the most momentous calamities of the twentieth century. While not everyone will agree with his thesis and his overall interpretation of Soviet foreign policy in the inter-war period, Professor Haslam has written a book that will be required reading for anyone seriously interested in the period covered by the book. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House's International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In the mid-1990s, experts predicted that India would face the world's biggest AIDS epidemic by 2000. Though a crisis at this scale never fully materialized, global public health institutions, donors, and the Indian state initiated a massive effort to prevent it. HIV prevention programs channeled billions of dollars toward those groups designated as at-risk—sex workers and men who have sex with men. At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Response (Stanford UP, 2021) captures this unique moment in which these criminalized and marginalized groups reinvented their "at-risk" categorization and became central players in the crisis response. The AIDS crisis created a contradictory, conditional, and temporary opening for sex-worker and LGBTIQ activists to renegotiate citizenship and to make demands on the state. Working across India and Kenya, Gowri Vijayakumar provides a fine-grained account of the political struggles at the heart of the Indian AIDS response. These range from everyday articulations of sexual identity in activist organizations in Bangalore to new approaches to HIV prevention in Nairobi, where prevention strategies first introduced in India are adapted and circulate, as in the global AIDS field more broadly. Vijayakumar illuminates how the politics of gender, sexuality, and nationalism shape global crisis response. In so doing, she considers the precarious potential for social change in and after a crisis. Gowri Vijayakumar is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

For over a century Mexico has been embroiled in a drug war dictated by the demands of their neighbor to the north. In The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade (W. W. Norton, 2021), Benjamin T. Smith offers a history of the trade and its effects upon the people of Mexico. As he reveals, at the start of the 20th century drugs such as marijuana and opium were largely on the margins of Mexican society, used mainly by soldiers, prisoners, and immigrants. The association of marijuana with a bohemian subculture in the early 1920s prompted the first punitive laws against it, while the use of opium by Chinese immigrants led Mexican officials to target the drug as a means to arrest the country's Chinese population. Yet the drug trade thrived thanks to the growing demand for marijuana and heroin in the United States. In response, American officials pressured their Mexican counterparts to end drug production and distribution in their country, even to the point of ending the effort to provide heroin in a regulated way for the country's relatively small population of heroin addicts. Yet these efforts often foundered on the economic factors involved, with many government officials protecting the trade either for personal profit or for the financial benefits the trade provided to their states. This trade only grew in the postwar era, as the explosion of drug use in the 1960s and the crackdown on the European heroin trade made Mexico an increasingly important supplier of narcotics to the United States. The vast profits to be made from this changed the nature of the trade from small-scale family-managed operations to much more complex organizations that increasingly employed violence to ensure their share of it. As Smith details, the consequences of this have proven enormously detrimental both to the Mexican state and to the Mexican people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs