New Books in Diplomatic History

Nathaniel Greenberg, "The Long War of Ideas: American Public Diplomacy in Arabic After 9/11" (Columbia UP, 2026)

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, US officials identified the so-called battle for hearts and minds as the “second front” in the war on terror. A wave of funding flowed into public diplomacy in the Middle East, seeking to change views of the United States through Arabic-language communications—often while hiding the traces of American origins. To what extent did this vast propaganda apparatus sway Arab public opinion? Which ideas and actors shaped American public diplomacy in this period? What are the lessons for information strategy today?

The Long War of Ideas: American Public Diplomacy in Arabic After 9/11 (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Nathaniel Greenberg tells the story of American propaganda campaigns in the Middle East after 9/11, drawing on in-depth interviews with key players and previously classified documents. Dr. Greenberg shows how the United States tried to control perceptions of its response to 9/11 through news and entertainment, and reveals that Arab governments and unofficial actors were involved—knowingly or not—in distributing US propaganda. He explores the institutions, strategy, and rhetoric deployed in the war on terror, placing them in the context of American and Soviet influence campaigns during the Cold War. Greenberg argues that US government-backed broadcasting laid the groundwork for global information warfare, such as the rise of competing Russian and Chinese state media operations. Shedding light on the ideological underpinnings of American propaganda in Arabic after 9/11, The Long War of Ideas offers new insight into soft power in the twenty-first century.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jane Vaynman, "Enemies in Agreement: Political Volatility and the Design of Arms Control" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Why do adversaries sometimes cooperate to restrain their military competition? Why do they design arms control agreements with intrusive verification in some cases but rely on minimal transparency in others? Amidst ongoing international competition, arms control remains rare despite potential mutual benefits, and agreements vary dramatically in their approaches to monitoring. Enemies in Agreement: Political Volatility and the Design of Arms Control (Cambridge UP, 2026) reveals how uncertainty from domestic political changes, such as leadership transitions or social unrest, can enable arms control.

The book identifies two paths to agreement: during periods of uncertainty, states that previously relied on informal understandings hedge by establishing lightly monitored agreements, while those that anticipated deception take calculated risks through agreements with intensive verification.

Through comprehensive data analysis and rich case studies, Jane Vaynman challenges conventional wisdom about uncertainty in international relations while offering policymakers insights. As states confront challenges from nuclear competition to emerging technologies, understanding when arms control becomes viable is more vital than ever.
Our guest is Professor Jane Vaynman, an Assistant Professor of Strategic Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Myung-jin Han with Nicolas Levi, "I Was a North Korean Diplomat: Inside the Secret World of Pyongyang's Foreign Service" (Independently Published, 2026)

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Nicolas Levi is a researcher at the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He has authored numerous books related to North Korea and is a regular commentator on the country’s elite social and political structures.

I Was a North Korean Diplomat: Inside the Secret World of Pyongyang's Foreign Service (Independently Published, 2026) is Levi’s tenth book, a collaborative work based on extensive dialogues with Han Jin-myung (a pseudonym), a former member of the North Korean elite who served in a specialized military drone unit and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, before defecting in 2015. The book provides a rare, ground-level look at the life of the North Korean upper class, tracing Han’s journey from a privileged childhood in Pyongyang to the high-pressure world of international diplomacy and illicit regime fundraising in Southeast Asia.

Through Han’s testimony, the book explores the psychological realities of loyalty, the "golden cage" of the North Korean elite, and the climate of fear following the 2013 execution of Jang Song-thaek, offering readers a unique perspective on the inner workings of the North Korean state.

Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, and Eater.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matthew Guariglia and Brian Hochman, "The Church Committee Report: Revelations from the Bombshell 1970s Investigation into the National Security State" (W. W. Norton & Co, 2026)

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Fifty years ago, a government investigation led by US senator Frank Church uncovered some of the darkest state secrets of the twentieth century. The Church Committee confirmed the nation's worst fears about the unchecked power of its intelligence agencies: at the FBI, surveillance campaigns against civil rights leaders and clandestine attempts to disrupt antiwar protests; at the CIA, assassination plots against foreign heads of state, experiments with toxic substances and illegal drugs, and covert partnerships with the Mafia. The Church Committee's findings were so explosive that key members found themselves on the watch lists of the very government agencies they were investigating. Three witnesses who cooperated with the inquiry were murdered.

Amid the creep of digital surveillance and the upheavals of social protest, this accessible volume The Church Committee Report: Revelations from the Bombshell 1970s Investigation into the National Security State (W. W. Norton & Co, 2026), containing the most harrowing revelations of the Church Committee investigation, sheds valuable light on some of today's most urgent concerns.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tom Wells, "The Kissinger Tapes: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

A richly detailed collection of transcripts of Henry Kissinger's secretly recorded phone conversations from his time in the Nixon administration that touch on every important issue of Kissinger's day and provide a sweeping view of his era.
Henry Kissinger is unquestionably one of the most consequential foreign policy makers in American history. A remarkably influential academic during his long tenure at Harvard, Kissinger became Richard Nixon's National Security Advisor in 1969 and Secretary of State in 1973.
Like Nixon, Kissinger left a trail of secretly recorded evidence in his wake. Kissinger began taping in 1969, two years before Nixon did in 1971, and he continued taping for over three years after Nixon's recording system was dismantled in 1973. In The Kissinger Tapes: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations" (Oxford UP, 2026), Tom Wells draws on his expertise in the Nixon era to provide carefully selected, edited, and annotated transcripts of Kissinger's phone conversations, which chronologically highlight the most momentous crises and controversies of the era. They not only provide context and many revelations on Kissinger's role in numerous events but also throw his personality, character, and checkered record into sharp relief.
The conversations cover a wide range of issues, including the Vietnam War, the India-Pakistan conflict, the opening to China, the Middle East, the Greek coup in Cyprus, the Nixon administration's illegal wiretapping, and the Watergate scandal. The transcripts reveal Kissinger's opinions and attitudes on important policy matters and his complex relationship with President Nixon, as well as the many battles he fought with other administration officials and his subtle manipulations of well-known journalists.
A richly detailed collection of Kissinger's transcripts and commentary, this book provides a novel window into the Nixon administration and offers a genuinely unique perspective on one of the most important figures in modern American history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jake Nabel, "The Arsacids of Rome: Misunderstanding in Roman-Parthian Relations" (U California Press, 2025)

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

At the beginning of the common era, the two major imperial powers of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East were Rome and Parthia. In this (open access) book The Arsacids of Rome: Misunderstanding in Roman-Parthian Relations (U California Press, 2025), Jake Nabel analyzes Roman-Parthian interstate politics by focusing on a group of princes from the Arsacid family—the ruling dynasty of Parthia—who were sent to live at the Roman court. Although Roman authors called these figures “hostages” and scholars have studied them as such, Nabel draws on Iranian and Armenian sources to argue that the Parthians would have seen them as the emperor’s foster-children. These divergent perspectives allowed each empire to perceive itself as superior to the other, since the two sides interpreted the exchange of royal children through conflicting cultural frameworks. Moving beyond the paradigm of great powers in conflict, The Arsacids of Rome advances a new vision of interstate relations with misunderstanding at its center.

New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review.

Jake Nabel is the Tombros Early Career Professor of Classical Studies and Assistant Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Pennsylvania State University.

Michael Motia teaches Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Aaron Donaghy, "The Second Cold War: Carter, Reagan, and the Politics of Foreign Policy" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Towards the end of the Cold War, the last great struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union marked the end of détente, and escalated into the most dangerous phase of the conflict since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Aaron Donaghy examines the complex history of America's largest peacetime military buildup, which was in turn challenged by the largest peacetime peace movement. Focusing on the critical period between 1977 and 1985, Donaghy shows how domestic politics shaped dramatic foreign policy reversals by Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. These reversals, the book argues, were influenced by president's willingness to take risks, by their perception of credibility, and by the timing of their decision.

Donaghy explains why the Cold War intensified so quickly and how - contrary to all expectations - US-Soviet relations were repaired. Drawing on recently declassified archival material, The Second Cold War: Carter, Reagan, and the Politics of Foreign Policy (Cambridge UP, 2021) traces how each administration evolved in response to crises and events at home and abroad. This compelling and controversial account challenges the accepted notion of how the end of the Cold War began.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marc Mierowsky, "A Spy Amongst Us: Daniel Defoe's Secret Service and the Plot to End Scottish Independence" (Yale UP, 2026)

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In 1706, Edinburgh was on the brink of a popular uprising. Men and women took to the streets to protest the planned union with England, fearing the end of Scottish sovereignty. But unbeknownst to the mob, a spy was in their midst—the English writer Daniel Defoe, now bankrupt and thrice pilloried, had turned a government agent.

In A Spy Amongst Us: Daniel Defoe's Secret Service and the Plot to End Scottish Independence (Yale UP, 2026), Dr. Marc Mierowsky tells the dramatic story of Defoe and his fellow spies as they sabotaged the Scottish independence movement from the inside. Together they disseminated propaganda and built a network of operatives from London to the upper Highlands, providing the English government with up-to-the-minute intelligence and monitoring its adversaries’ every move.

Through the lives of Defoe and his ring, their handlers, and opponents, Mierowsky guides us through this shadowy underworld of espionage and propaganda—revealing a disturbing and distinctly modern political campaign.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Florian Wagner, "Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Florian Wagner about his new book Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982 (Cambridge UP, 2022).

From its founding in 1893, to its decline in the 1970s, the International Colonial Institute (ICI) was one of the most powerful nongovernmental actors on the colonial scene. Styling itself a reformist institution, the ICI applied the tools of transnational scientific exchange to “rationalize” the practice of colonial rule. As part of this reformist project, members of the ICI mobilized progressive ideas in ways that built broad political consensus across Europe while also furthering inequality, exploitation, and segregation in the Global South, even beyond the end of formal empire. Tracing the long history of the ICI reveals fundamental continuities, argues Florian Wagner, that colonialist narratives of change obscure.

Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor in International History at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan Wilson, "The Power and the Glory: The History of the World Cup" (Bold Type Books, 2025)

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

As the world prepares for the 2026 World Cup, Jonathan Wilson’s new book, The Power and the Glory: The History of the World Cup (Bold Type Books, 2025), presents a new history of what has become the greatest celebration of humanity on earth, and reveals how the World Cup has grown hand in hand with the political, economic, and social forces of our time.

Since 1930, the World Cup has become a truly global obsession. It is the most watched sporting event on the planet, and 211 teams competed to make it into the 2022 tournament. From its inception, it has also been a vehicle for far more than soccer. A tool for self-mythologizing and influence-peddling, The World Cup has played a crucial role in nation-building, and continues to, as countries negotiate their positions in a globalized world.
The Power and the Glory is a comprehensive history of the matches and goals, the tales of scandal and triumph, the haggling and skullduggery of the bidding process, and the political and cultural tides behind every tournament. Jonathan Wilson details not merely what happened but why, based on fresh interviews and meticulous research. The book is as much about the legends of the sport, from Pelé to Messi, as it is about the nations that made them, from Mussolini’s Italy to partitioned Germany to controversy-ridden Qatar.
Brimming with politics, heart, and drama, on and off the pitch, The Power and the Glory is the definitive story of the greatest cultural event of our time.

Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on his first book which examines why the United States pursued victory at practically all costs during World War II. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via his website here. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joshua D. Zimmerman, "Jozef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In the 1920s, Józef Piłsudski was a household name not just in Poland, but across Europe and across the Atlantic Ocean as well. Yet this complex and contradictory figure – a socialist and a nationalist, a clandestine agitator and a legendary military strategist, protector of Jews and other national minorities on Polish soil who was nonetheless often accused of imperialism – has eluded serious biographical treatment in English until now. Yeshiva University professor Joshua D. Zimmerman offers a nuanced, readable, and definitive account of the man who re-founded the independent state of Poland in 1918. Jozef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland (Harvard University Press, 2022) could not be more timely, given the lessons to be learned from Piłsudski’s career by today’s opponents of far-right populism in Eastern Europe, and even more urgently – by English-language readers seeking to understand the imperative of preserving an independent Ukrainian state in the face of Russian aggression.

Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gregory T. Chin and Kevin P. Gallagher, "China and the Global Economic Order" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

China and the Global Economic Order (Cambridge University Press, 2026) examines China's evolving relations with the Bretton Woods institutions (BWIs), specifically the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group from the 1980s through 2025. Using a combination of new qualitative findings and quantitative datasets, the authors observe that China has taken an evolving approach to the BWIs in order to achieve its multiple agendas, acting largely as a 'rule-taker' during its first two decades as a member, but, over time, also becoming a 'rule-shaker' inside the BWIs, and ultimately a new 'rule-maker' outside of the BWIs. The analysis highlights China's exercise of 'two-way countervailing power' with one foot inside the BWIs, and another outside, and pushing for changes in both directions. China's interventions have resulted in BWs reforms and the gradual transformation of the global order, while also generating counter-reactions especially from the United States.

Gregory Chin is an Associate Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Politics, and Faculty of Graduate Studies at York University (Canada), with a focus on the political economy of international money and development finance, China, Asia, the BRICS, and global governance.

Nomeh Anthony Kanayo, Ph.D. Candidate in International Relations at Florida International University, with research interest in Africa's diaspora relations, African-China relations, great power rivalry and IR theories.

Check out my new article https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sciaf.2025.e02699

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nicole Wegner, "Martialling Peace: How the Peacekeeper Myth Legitimises Warfare" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Martialling Peace: How the Peacekeeper Myth Legitimises Warfare (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) by Dr. Nicole Wegner is not a book about peacekeeping practices. This is a book about storytelling, fantasies and the ways that people connect emotionally to myths about peacekeeping. The celebration of peacekeeping as a legitimate and desirable use of military force is expressed through the unproblematised acceptance of militarism.

Introducing a novel framework – martial peace – the book offers an in-depth examination of the Canadian Armed Forces missions to Afghanistan and the use of police violence against Indigenous protests in Canada as case examples where military violence has been justified in the name of peace. It critically investigates the peacekeeper myth and challenges the academic, government and popular beliefs that martial violence is required to sustain peace.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Swapna Kona Nayudu, "The Nehru Years: An International History of Indian Non-Alignment" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Scholars of international relations, political thought, and India's international and diplomatic history are increasingly interested in the relevance of non-alignment in Indian foreign policy. The origins of such policies and debates can be traced back to Nehru's conceptualization of non-alignment at the height of the Cold War. In this deeply researched study of his years as Prime Minister, 1947–64, in The Nehru Years: An International History of Indian Non-Alignment (Cambridge UP, 2025) Dr. Swapna Kona Nayudu utilizes archival research in multiple languages to uncover Indian diplomatic influence in four major international events: the Korean War, the Suez Crisis, the Hungarian Revolution, and the Congo Crisis. Through this detailed examination, she explores the contested meaning of non-alignment, a policy almost unique in its ambiguity and its centrality to a nation's political life. The resulting history is a thoughtful critique of India's diplomatic position as the only non-aligned founding member of the UN.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bram de Maeyer, "Building for Belgium: Belgian Embassies in a Globalising World (1945-2020)" (Leuven UP, 2025)

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Embassy buildings are the most tangible evidence of a state’s diplomatic presence abroad. State authorities have invested in the architectural conception of purpose-built embassies to flex their diplomatic muscle and project nationhood on foreign soil. While scholars have primarily focused on purpose-built embassies of (former) world powers, Building for Belgium: Belgian Embassies in a Globalising World (1945-2020) (Leuven UP, 2025) by Dr. Bram de Maeyer shifts the perspective by scrutinising the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ embassy-building programme from 1945 to 2020.

Rather than a conventional political assessment of diplomatic relations, the book foregrounds the often-overlooked architectural lives of embassies and their social, economic, and political entanglements. By examining Belgian embassy projects across all continents, it reveals how the Belgian diplomatic corps has navigated diverse political regimes, geopolitical contexts, cultures, and building codes. More than the outcome of a deliberate policy, the embassy-building programme has been shaped by incidental decisions, private ambitions and personal tastes of Belgian diplomats, ministry officials and politicians.

Building for Belgium not only sheds light on diplomatic architecture but also connects domestic conversations about architecture in Belgium with global state-building projects. Offering fresh insights into the politics of space, it will be of value to scholars and practitioners in architecture, urban studies, international relations, cultural heritage, and Belgian and European studies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anna Reid, "A Nasty Little War: The West's Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution" (Basic Books, 2024)

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In A Nasty Little War: The Western Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution (Basic Books, 2024), award-winning reporter Anna Reid tells the extraordinary story of how the West tried to reverse the Russian Revolution.

In the closing months of the First World War, Britain, America, France and Japan sent arms and 180,000 soldiers to Russia, with the aim of tipping the balance in her post-revolutionary Civil War. From Central Asia to the Arctic and from Poland to the Pacific, they joined anti-Bolshevik forces in trying to overthrow the new men in the Kremlin, in an astonishingly ambitious military adventure known as the Intervention.

Fresh, in the case of the British, from the trenches, they found themselves in a mobile, multi-sided conflict as different as possible from the grim stasis of the Western Front. Criss-crossing the shattered Russian empire in trains, sleds and paddlesteamers, they bivouacked in snowbound cabins and Kirghiz yurts, torpedoed Red battleships from speedboats, improvised new currencies and the world’s first air-dropped chemical weapons, got caught up in mass retreats and a typhus epidemic, organised several coups and at least one assassination. Taking tea with warlords and princesses, they also turned a blind eye to their Russian allies’ numerous atrocities.

Two years later they left again, filing glumly back onto their troopships as port after port fell to the Red Army. Later, American veterans compared the humiliation to Vietnam, and the politicians and generals responsible preferred to trivialise or forget. Drawing on previously unused diaries, letters and memoirs, A Nasty Little War brings an episode with echoes down the century since vividly to life.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joseph Maiolo and Laura Robson, "The League of Nations" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Laura Robson and Joe Maiolo challenge histories of the League of Nations that present it as a meaningful if flawed experiment in global governance in The League of Nations (Cambridge UP, 2025). Such accounts have largely failed to admit its overriding purpose: not to work towards international cooperation among equally sovereign states, but to claim control over the globe's resources, weapons, and populations for its main showrunners (including the United States) – and not through the gentle arts of persuasion and negotiation but through the direct and indirect use of force and the monopolisation of global military and economic power. The League's advocates framed its innovations, from refugee aid to disarmament, as manifestations of its commitment to an obvious universal good and, often, as a series of technocratic, scientific solutions to the problems of global disorder. But its practices shored up the dominance of the western victors and preserved longstanding structures of international power and civilizational-racial hierarchy.

Laura Robson is Elihu Professor of Global Affairs and History at Yale University.

Joe Maiolo is Professor of International History at King's College London.

Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alex Wellerstein, "The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age" (Harper, 2025)

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Dropping the atomic bombs on Japan during World War II was, arguably, the most controversial decision of the 20th century. The responsibility for that “decision” has logically fallen on US President Harry S. Truman. But in The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age (Harper, 2025), Alex Wellerstein argues that Truman's actual decision wasn’t what everyone thinks it was.

The conventional narrative is that American leaders had a choice: Invade Japan, which would have cost millions of Allied and Japanese lives, or instead, use the atom bomb in the hope of convincing Japan to surrender. Truman, the story goes, carefully weighed the pros and cons before deciding that the atomic bomb would be used against Japanese cities, as the lesser of two evils.

But nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein argues that is not what happened.

Not only did Truman not take part in the decision to use the bomb, but the one major decision that he did make was a very different one — one that he himself did not fully understand until after the atomic bomb was used. The weight of that decision, and that misunderstanding, became the major reason that atomic bombs have not been used again since World War II.

Based on a close reading of the historical record, The Most Awful Responsibility shows that, despite his reputation as an ardent defender of the atomic bomb, Truman:

Wanted to avoid the “murder” and “slaughter” of innocent civilians
Believed that the atomic bomb should never be used again
Hoped that nuclear weapons would be outlawed in his lifetime

Wellerstein makes a startling case that Truman was possibly the most anti-nuclear American president of the twentieth century, but his ambitions were strongly constrained by the domestic and international politics of the postwar world and the early Cold War. This book is a must-read for all who want to truly understand not only why the bomb was dropped on Japan but also why it has not been used since.

Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on his first book which examines why the United States pursued victory at practically all costs during World War II. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or here. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard Fine, "The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany" (Cornell, 2023)

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany (Cornell, 2023), Richard Fine recounts the intense drama surrounding the German surrender at the end of World War II and the veteran Associated Press journalist Edward Kennedy’s controversial scoop.

On May 7, 1945, Kennedy bypassed military censorship to be the first to break the news of the Nazi surrender executed in Reims, France. Both the practice and the public perception of wartime reporting would never be the same. While, at the behest of Soviet leaders, Allied authorities prohibited release of the story, Kennedy stuck to his journalistic principles and refused to manage information he believed the world had a right to know. No action by an American correspondent during the war proved more controversial.

The Paris press corps was furious at what it took to be Kennedy’s unethical betrayal; military authorities threatened court-martial before expelling him from Europe. Kennedy defended himself, insisting the news was being withheld for suspect political reasons unrelated to military security. After prolonged national debate, when the dust settled, Kennedy’s career was in ruins.

This story of Kennedy’s surrender dispatch and the meddling by Allied Command, which was already being called a fiasco in May 1945, revises what we know about media-military relations. Discarding “Good War” nostalgia, Fine challenges the accepted view that relations between the media and the military were amicable during World War II and only later ran off the rails during the Vietnam War. The Price of Truth reveals one of the earliest chapters of tension between reporters committed to informing the public and generals tasked with managing a war.

Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on his first book manuscript which explains why the United States pursued victory at practically all costs in World War II. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or here. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amitav Acharya, "The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West" (Hachette UK, 2025)

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the West has been in crisis. Social unrest, political polarization, and the rise of other great powers—especially China—threaten to unravel today’s Western-led world order. Many fear this would lead to global chaos. But the West has never had a monopoly on order.
Surveying five thousand years of global history, political scientist Amitav Acharya reveals that world order—the political architecture enabling cooperation and peace among nations—existed long before the rise of the West. Moving from ancient Sumer, India, Greece, and Mesoamerica, through medieval caliphates and Eurasian empires into the present, Acharya shows that humanitarian values, economic interdependence, and rules of inter-state conduct emerged across the globe over millennia. History suggests order will endure even as the West retreats. In fact, the end of Western dominance offers us the opportunity to build a better world, where non-Western nations find more voice, power, and prosperity. Instead of fearing the future, the West should learn from history and cooperate with the Rest to forge a more equitable order.

Amitav Acharya is the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance and Distinguished Professor at the School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC.

Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rachel Midura, "Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Rachel Midura joins Jana Byars to talk about Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cornell UP, 2025) connects and situates histories of the post and government intelligence alongside print technology and state power in the wider context of the early modern communications revolution. In the sixteenth century, postal services became central to domestic governance and foreign policy enterprises, extended government reach and surveillance, and offered new control over the public sphere. Rachel Midura focuses on the Tassis family, members of which served as official postmasters to the dukes of Milan, the pope, Spanish kings, and Holy Roman emperors. Using administrative records and family correspondence, she follows the Tassis family, their agents, and their rivals as their influence expanded from northern Italy across Europe. Postal Intelligence shows how postmasters and postmistresses were key players in early modern diplomacy, commerce, and journalism, whose ultimate success depended on both administrative ingenuity and strategic ambiguity.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dylan Loh, "China's Rising Foreign Ministry: Practices and Representations of Assertive Diplomacy" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

How has China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs transformed itself into one of the most assertive diplomatic actors on the global stage? What explains the rise of “wolf warrior” practices, and how should we interpret Beijing’s evolving diplomatic identity?

In this episode, Duncan McCargo speaks with Dylan Loh, an Associate Professor in the Public Policy and Global Affairs programme at Nanyang Technological University (Dr. Dylan M.H. Loh - Associate Professor | International Relations Scholar | Chinese Foreign Policy), about his award-winning new book China’s Rising Foreign Ministry: Practices and Representations of Assertive Diplomacy (Stanford University Press, 2024). Dylan Loh unpacks how Chinese diplomats craft narratives and balance assertiveness with professionalism, touching on institutional habitus, ritualised loyalty, and China’s bid for discourse power on platforms like X. This conversation offers timely insights for anyone interested in Chinese foreign policy, diplomacy, and the future of great-power relations.

Host: Duncan McCargo is President’s Chair in Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University.

Podcast Editing: Ishaan Krishnan

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Aaron Bateman. "Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative" (MIT Press, 2024)

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

A new and provocative take on the formerly classified history of accelerating superpower military competition in space in the late Cold War and beyond.

In March 1983, President Ronald Reagan shocked the world when he announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), derisively known as “Star Wars,” a space-based missile defense program aimed at protecting the US from nuclear attack. In Weapons in Space, Aaron Bateman draws on recently declassified American, European, and Soviet documents to provide an insightful account of SDI, situating it within a new phase in the militarization of space following the collapse of superpower détente in the 1970s. In doing so, Bateman reveals the largely secret role of military space technologies in late–Cold War US defense strategy and foreign relations.
In contrast to existing narratives, Weapons in Space shows how tension over the role of military space technologies in American statecraft was a central source of SDI's controversy, even more so than questions of technical feasibility. By detailing the participation of Western European countries in SDI research and development, Bateman reframes the militarization of space in the 1970s and 1980s as an international phenomenon. He further reveals that even though SDI did not come to fruition, it obstructed diplomatic efforts to create new arms control limits in space. Consequently, Weapons in Space carries the legacy of SDI into the post–Cold War era and shows how this controversial program continues to shape the global discourse about instability in space—and the growing anxieties about a twenty-first-century space arms race.

Our guest is Aaron Bateman, an Assistant Professor of History and International Affairs at GWU.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philip J. Stern, "Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Philip Stern places the corporation―more than the Crown―at the heart of British colonialism, arguing that companies built and governed global empire, raising questions about public and private power that were just as troubling four hundred years ago as they are today.

Across four centuries, from Ireland to India, the Americas to Africa and Australia, British colonialism was above all the business of corporations. Corporations conceived, promoted, financed, and governed overseas expansion, making claims over territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial society were invested, quite literally, in their ventures. Colonial companies were also relentlessly controversial, frequently in debt, and prone to failure. The corporation was well-suited to overseas expansion not because it was an inevitable juggernaut but because, like empire itself, it was an elusive contradiction: public and private; person and society; subordinate and autonomous; centralized and diffuse; immortal and precarious; national and cosmopolitan―a legal fiction with very real power.

Breaking from traditional histories in which corporations take a supporting role by doing the dirty work of sovereign states in exchange for commercial monopolies, Stern argues that corporations took the lead in global expansion and administration. Whether in sixteenth-century Ireland and North America or the Falklands in the early 1980s, corporations were key players. And, as Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (Harvard UP, 2023) makes clear, venture colonialism did not cease with the end of empire. Its legacies continue to raise questions about corporate power that are just as relevant today as they were 400 years ago.

Challenging conventional wisdom about where power is held on a global scale, Stern complicates the supposedly firm distinction between private enterprise and the state, offering a new history of the British Empire, as well as a new history of the corporation.

Thomas Kingston is an early career scholar and a voracious reader (183 books in 2021). You can find his website at www.thomasekingston.com or reach him on twitter @thomasekingston

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kerry Brown, "The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power" (Yale UP, 2024)

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I tried to send several letters to her Chinese counterpart, the Wan Li Emperor. The letters tried to ask the Ming emperor to conduct trade relations with faraway England; none of the expeditions carrying the letters ever arrived.

It’s an inauspicious beginning to the four centuries of foreign relations between China and what eventually became Britain, covered by Kerry Brown in his latest book The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power (Yale University Press: 2024) Kerry’s book covers incidents like the MacCartney embassy, the East India Company, the Anglo-Chinese wars, the Communist takeover in 1949, and the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.

Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London. He is the author of over twenty books on modern Chinese politics, history, and society.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Reversal. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joel S. Wit, "Fallout: The Inside Story of America's Failure to Disarm North Korea" (Yale UP, 2025)

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

After nearly four decades of negotiations, sanctions, summits, threats, and backdoor channels, the United States has failed to stop North Korea's nuclear program which now has the capability to strike American cities with weapons of mass destruction. In Fallout: The Inside Story of America's Failure to Disarm North Korea (Yale UP, 2025), Joel S. Wit explains why US efforts to contain North Korea have not worked and gives readers a front-row seat to the policy debates, diplomatic deals, and secret talks between Washington and Pyongyang.

Wit, a former State Department official, takes readers to the front lines of nuclear negotiations and recounts how perilously close the United States and North Korea have come, on various occasions, to nuclear confrontation. Based on more than three hundred interviews with officials in Washington, Beijing, and Seoul, as well as with the author’s contacts in Pyongyang, this book chronicles how six American presidents have approached the problem of North Korea.
Wit points to Barack Obama and Donald Trump as the two presidents most responsible for the failure to halt North Korea’s march to build a nuclear arsenal, since it was under their successive tenures that Pyongyang acquired the ability to threaten every city in North America. Wit also offers an unparalleled portrait of Kim Jong Un that refutes his caricature as impulsive and illogical. Like his father and his grandfather, Kim is a ruthless despot but also a canny and informed negotiator determined to secure his dictatorship’s future by exploring diplomacy or, failing that, by building a nuclear arsenal.

Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on his first book which examines the high price that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were willing to pay in order to achieve total victory in World War II. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via his website. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Samuel Helfont, "The Iraq Wars: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

American wars in Iraq were a defining feature of global politics for almost thirty years. The Gulf War of 1991, the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the campaign against the Islamic State beginning in 2014 each had their own logic. Each occurrence was a distinct conflict; however they must not only be considered in isolation. The United States spent the 1990s trying but failing to implement the Gulf War's cease fire agreement. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, American leaders decided to settle the open-ended aftermath of the Gulf War by launching the Iraq War of 2003. The Iraq War unleashed resistance, civil war, insurgency and eventually the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Thus, following the Gulf War, each war was fought to finish the previous conflict. The Iraq Wars, therefore, are perhaps best understood as a chain of events.
Academics, journalists, statesmen, and soldiers have produced many library shelves of books on the Iraq Wars. Yet, no short, easily digestible volume exists to synthesize this vast literature of both English and Arabic sources. The Iraq Wars: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Dr. Samuel Helfont covers this series of important conflicts as a whole, in a highly succinct and uniquely readable way.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mayu Fujikawa, "Envisioning Diplomacy: Japanese Ambassadors in Early Modern Europe" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2025)

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Japan sent its first diplomatic delegations to visit the popes and dignitaries of Europe. European artists portrayed these historic ambassadors—the Tenshō embassy (1582–90) and the Keichō embassy (1613–20)—in numerous oil paintings, frescoes, drawings, and prints. Envisioning Diplomacy: Japanese Ambassadors in Early Modern Europe (Pennsylvania State UP, 2025) by Dr. Mayu Fujikawa analyzes these images—including newly discovered and lost works—within their cross-cultural and diplomatic contexts.

Drawing on extensive and geographically expansive archival research, art historian Dr. Fujikawa investigates how the embassies were received and either assimilated or differentiated at European courts. She demonstrates how delegates’ gifts to their hosts, their Europeanized kimonos, and the Western clothes they wore while traveling functioned as tools of soft diplomacy. Dr. Fujikawa also shows how printed materials functioned much as news does today, promoting the embassies widely and conveying information about the guests and their striking physical appearance.

Envisioning Diplomacy offers a fascinating look at the political, social, and cultural meanings of visual materials created around the embassies and should be of great interest to scholars, students, and general readers interested in early modern European art and history, costume history, diplomatic history, and Japanese and global studies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thomas Gidney, "An International Anomaly: Colonial Accession to the League of Nations" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

It is often assumed that only sovereign states can join the United Nations. But this was not always the case. At the founding of the United Nations, a loophole drafted by British statesmen in its predecessor organisation, the League of Nations, was carried forward, allowing colonies to accede as member-states. Colonies such as India, Ireland, Egypt, and many more were afforded a tokenistic representation at the League in Geneva during the interwar years, decades before their independence. Thomas Gidney’s An International Anomaly unites three geographically distinct case studies to demonstrate the evolution of Britain's policy from a range of different viewpoints, exploring how this policy came into being, and why it was only exploited by the British Empire. He argues that this membership shaped colonial norms around sovereignty and international recognition in the interwar period and to the present day.

Thomas Gidney is a postdoctoral researcher in international history and politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute.

Lucas Tse is an Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Magda Long et. al., "Covert Action: National Approaches to Unacknowledged Intervention (Georgetown UP, 2025)

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Covert action is generally understood as unacknowledged interference by one state in the affairs of another state or non-state actor to affect change. This definition, inspired from the US approach, dominates the debate in intelligence policy and scholarship and provides a prism through which most observers (mis)understand this form of secret statecraft.

Covert Action: National Approaches to Unacknowledged Intervention (Georgetown UP, 2025) moves the intelligence studies and analysis of covert action beyond the Anglosphere. It provides a truly global analysis of covert operations, comparing different states' histories and approaches, acrid five continents. In doing so, it produces a more holistic understanding of the variation in covert action traditions across states and cultures over time. Several key themes emerge from the book. It pays particular attention to the language of covert operations, to the euphemisms used, and to the efforts (where present) to protect decision-makers. Different states, the book show, adopt covert operations for different reasons. Some do not distinguish between domestic and foreign realms. Signalling, strengthening regimes, eliminating real and perceived threats all feature as rationales for covert operations. Similarly, the methods of covert operations vary, from more direct interventions to creating the conditions for others to act. While making clear that all states (democracies and authoritarian regimes) conduct covert operations, the volume highlights differences in the degree of institutionalisation and legalisation of covert operations. It also highlights how different degrees of risk-aversion and the alertness of public opinion can influence policymakers.

The volume brings together an international group of distinguished scholars to examine the history of covert action in twenty countries. Such a breadth and depth of expertise will serve as a foundational study for scholars, students, and policymakers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yanqiu Zheng, "In Search of Admiration and Respect: Chinese Cultural Diplomacy in the United States, 1875–1974" (U Michigan Press, 2024)

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

What does it mean for a country to seek admiration — and what kinds of institutions try to make that admiration possible?

Yanqiu Zheng’s In Search of Admiration and Respect: Chinese Cultural Diplomacy in the United States, 1875–1974 (U Michigan Press, 2024) traces how China attempted to reshape its international image across a century marked by imperialism, political upheaval, civil war, and Cold War realignments. Beginning in the late Qing, when China’s reputation was battered by foreign domination, Yanqiu examines the painstaking emergence of cultural diplomacy as a long-term pedagogical project, one that sought to teach America about China through art, opera, exhibitions, lectures, and even reconstructed rickshaws. Drawing on archives in the United States, Taiwan, and mainland China, Zheng reconstructs how institutions such as the China Institution navigated competing agendas, the often-chaotic world of philanthropy, and geopolitical crises to present China on a global stage.

Throughout, In Search of Admiration and Respect asks questions that are still relevant today: How do countries cultivate cultural authority? What happens when narratives of refinement collide with Orientalist imaginaries? And how to institutions such as government ministries, nonprofits, and museums shape the ways nations hope to be seen?

This book will interest readers of modern Chinese history, U.S.–China relations, museum and exhibition history, and anyone curious about how culture intertwines with politics of the global stage.

Listeners of the episode might also want to check out an article that Yanqiu mentions over the course of our conversation: "Chinese Tofu in Cold War Taiwan: Gendered Cosmopolitanism and Contested Chineseness," available here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philip Nash, "Clare Boothe Luce: American Renaissance Woman" (Routledge, 2022)

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Philip Nash's book Clare Boothe Luce: American Renaissance Woman (Routledge, 2022) is a concise and highly readable political biography that examines the life of one of the most accomplished American women of the 20th century.

Wife and mother, author, editor, playwright, political activist, war journalist, Congresswoman, ambassador, pundit, and feminist—Luce did it all. Carefully placing Luce in a series of shifting historical contexts, this book offers the reader an insight into mid-century American political, cultural, gender, and foreign relations history. Eleven primary sources follow the text, including excerpts from Luce’s diary, letters, speeches, and published works, as well as a TV talk-show appearance and a critic’s diary entry describing an evening with her, helping readers to understand her fascinating life. Together, the narrative and documents afford readers a brief yet in-depth look at Luce with all her complications: glamorous intellectual, acid-tongued diplomat, and feminist conservative, she was a deeply flawed high-achiever who repeatedly challenged the entrenched sexism of her age to become a significant actor in the rise of the “American Century.”

Addressing the neglect suffered by women in foreign relations history, this will be of interest to students and scholars of US foreign relations, 20th-century US history, and US women’s history.

Victoria Phillips is a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics in the Department of International History.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eric H. Cline, "Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

From the acclaimed author of 1177 B.C., a spellbinding account of the archaeological find that opened a window onto the vibrant diplomatic world of the ancient Near East In 1887, an Egyptian woman made an astonishing discovery among the ruins of the heretic king Akhenaten’s capital city, a site now known as Amarna. She found a cache of cuneiform tablets, nearly four hundred in all, that included correspondence between the pharaohs and the mightiest powers of the day, such as the Hittites, Babylonians, and Assyrians. Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed (Princeton University Press, 2025) tells the story of the Amarna Letters and the dramatic world of the Bronze Age they revealed. Blending scholarly expertise with painstaking detective work, Eric Cline describes the spectacular discovery, the fierce competition among dealers and museums to acquire the tablets, and the race by British and German scholars to translate them. Dating to the middle of the fourteenth century BCE and the time of Tutankhamun’s immediate predecessors, Amenhotep III and his son Akhenaten, the Amarna Letters are the only royal archive from New Kingdom Egypt known to exist. In them, we learn of royal marriages, diplomatic negotiations, gift-giving, intrigue, and declarations of brotherly love between powerful rulers as well as demands made by the petty kings in Canaan who owed allegiance to Egypt’s pharaohs. A monumental achievement, Love, War, and Diplomacy transports readers to the glorious age of the Amarna Letters and the colonial era that brought them to light and reveals how the politics, posturing, and international intrigues of the ancient Near East are not so unlike today’s.

Eric H. Cline is professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ronald Angelo Johnson, "Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Entangled Alliances is a reinterpretation of the American Revolution through analysis of diplomacy in the emerging United States during decades of hemispheric transformation.

Ronald Angelo Johnson brings to light the fascinating story of American patriots and rebels from Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) allying against European tyranny.

The American Revolution occurred between two of the greatest achievements in diplomacy of the eighteenth century: the peace treaties at Paris in 1763 and 1783. In Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution (Cornell UP, 2025), Johnson draws on original multilingual sources to offer readers fresh, lively stories in a timely study. While modern understandings of freedom are often linked to the US Declaration of Independence, Johnson argues that the desire of Black Atlantic inhabitants for liberty and their will to resist slavery predated the fateful standoff between minutemen and redcoats at Lexington and Concord.

Entangled Alliances is a US history of the American Revolution, fusing the search for freedom by Black and white founders in the United States and Saint-Domingue into a coherent story of collective resistance during the most explosive twenty-year period of the eighteenth century.

You can find Dr. Ronald Angelo Johnson at the Baylor University website.

Find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack where she and the author continued their conversation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Aaron Magid, "The Most American King: Abdullah of Jordan" (Universal Publishers, 2025)

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The Most American King: Abdullah of Jordan (Universal Publishers, 2025) is the first comprehensive biography on Jordan’s King Abdullah. Drawing on interviews with over 100 individuals, including Abdullah's classmates, former Jordanian ministers, and CIA directors, The Most American King offers a thorough account of this key Arab leader. Aaron Magid, a former Amman-based journalist, charts Abdullah’s path to power from a Massachusetts prep school to a British military academy to the throne. This book examines how Abdullah has remained in power for over a quarter century, surrounded by wars and refugee crises. While leaders nearby were ousted during the 2011 Arab Spring protests, Abdullah survived the wave of discontent.

The Most American King details Abdullah’s efforts to cement an alliance with Washington. Despite leading a small desert country, the Jordanian king was the first Arab leader to meet US Presidents Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and Barack Obama. The kingdom has received billions in US assistance, and Abdullah’s intelligence services helped the CIA foil Al-Qaeda terror plots against American targets. Abdullah’s personal ties to the United States have strengthened this relationship. Abdullah trained with the US Army in Kentucky, appeared on a Star Trek episode, and interviewed with Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart.

While the Hashemite ruler has frequently been lauded in the West, The Most American King discusses how some of Abdullah’s decisions provoked controversy inside the Hashemite Kingdom. Abdullah approved a $15 billion gas deal with Israel in 2014, but thousands of Jordanians protested the Hashemite Kingdom’s largest-ever deal with the Jewish state. Over a decade earlier, Abdullah agreed to host US troops in Jordan and provide Washington with overflight rights ahead of the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood denounced such military cooperation with the United States as it prepared to topple the government of its neighbor. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Jordanian politics.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kalathmika Natarajan, "Coolie Migrants, Indian Diplomacy: Caste, Class and Indenture Abroad, 1914-67" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Over the centuries, millions of migrant labourers sailed from the Indian subcontinent, across the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean, to shape what is now the world’s largest diaspora. Coolie Migrants, Indian Diplomacy: Caste, Class and Indenture Abroad, 1914-67 (Hearst, 2025 and Oxford UP, 2026) recovers the histories and legacies of those ‘coolie’ migrants, and presents a new paradigm for the diplomatic history of independent India, going beyond high politics to explore how indenture, emigration and international relations became entangled.

Before and after independence, Indian notions of the international realm as a sanctified space were shaped by migrant journeys; this was a space of anxiety in which to negotiate the ‘coolie stain’ on the country’s reputation. Discourse was defined by intersections of caste, class, race and gender—and framed the migrant worker as the quintessential ‘other’ of Indian diplomacy.

Drawing on rich, multi-archival analysis spanning the vast geographies of labour migration, Kalathmika Natarajan pieces together the stories of quarantine camps en route to Ceylon; cultural and educational missions in the Caribbean; discretionary passport policies in India; and the mediation of immigrant life in Britain. The result is a nuanced history from the interwar period to the decades after independence, and a critical analysis centring both caste and the negotiation of ‘undesirable’ mobility as foundational to Indian diplomacy.

About the Author:

Kalathmika Natarajan is Lecturer in Modern South Asian History at the University of Exeter. Her interdisciplinary research combines critical approaches to diplomatic history and South Asian migration. She has worked at the University of Edinburgh, and received her doctoral degree from the University of Copenhagen.

About the Host:

Stuti Roy works at Oxford University Press and is a recent graduate with an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Political Science from the University of Toronto.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yong-Shik Lee, "Sustainable Peace in Northeast Asia" (Anthem Press, 2023)

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In the long run, countries in Northeast Asia will have to see the need for collective defense. Otherwise, you won’t be able to stop rivalry between powers like the U.S. and China. It sounds utopian now, but so did the idea of French and German soldiers serving under the same command a century ago.
– Y.S. Lee, NBN Interview (2025)

Sustainable Peace in Northeast Asia (Anthem Press, 2023) examines the enduring political and military tensions in one of the world’s most dynamic yet unstable regions, from China and the Korean Peninsula to Japan, Mongolia, and Russia’s Far East. Despite its economic vitality, Northeast Asia remains fraught with persistent risks of conflict including North Korea’s nuclear program, and the unresolved disputes over territory, history, and power imbalances fueled in part by China’s rise.

Y.S. Lee traces the political, historical, military, and economic forces behind these tensions and their global implications. Offering a comparative, country-by-country analysis, he also explores the influence of external powers such as the United States and Russia. The book assesses the prospects and consequences of Korean reunification and provides a fresh look at Mongolia’s often-overlooked role in regional stability, suggesting how imagination and diplomacy together might begin to rebuild trust across the region.

In this NBN interview, Professor Lee discusses how history, ideology, and institutional design intersect across the region – from the entanglement of North Korea’s Juche ideology with its nuclear ambitions to Japan’s struggle for reconciliation, and South Korea’s evolving identity as a middle power. He argues that sustainable peace requires economic, political, and even eventual military cooperation akin to Europe’s postwar transformation, which was once unthinkable, but ultimately necessary.

Yong-Shik Lee is Director of the Law and Development Institute and a leading scholar of international economic law and institutional reform. His previous works include Law and Development: Theory and Practice (2011; 2nd ed. 2021), Reclaiming Development in the World Trading System (Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. 2016), and Safeguard Measures in World Trade: The Legal Analysis (Edward Elgar, 3rd ed. 2014). His research bridges economic theory and policy design to advance inclusive development and peace.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ada Ferrer, "Cuba: An American History" (Scribner, 2021)

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

“No country is ever just one thing.” In her new book Cuba: An American History (Scribner, 2021), NYU historian Ada Ferrer shows this again and again. In clear and engaging prose, Ferrer narrates five centuries of history from a decidedly different angle than previous one-volume studies; the main drivers of history in this book are not just familiar political figures and abstract historical forces, but a whole range of typically marginalized historical actors. Ferrer integrates the voices of the enslaved, ordinary Cubans, and her own family to reimagine what it means to tell the history of the island. Part of this reimagining also involves showing the many points of convergence between the history of the United States and Cuba. Ferrer uses many anecdotes—such as the story of the inauguration of a Vice President of the United States on a sugar plantation in Cuba—to suggest how the lines between Cuban and American history were often blurred together. The result is a finely crafted and deeply personal book that encourages readers to recognize Cuba’s contested past and its multiple identities.

Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD Candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. You can reach him at steven.p.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

William Doyle, "Napoleon at Peace: How to End a Revolution" (Reaktion Books, 2022)

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The French Revolution facilitated the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, but after gaining power he knew that his first task was to end it. In this book William Doyle describes how he did so, beginning with the three large issues that had destabilized revolutionary France: war, religion, and monarchy. Doyle shows how, as First Consul of the Republic, Napoleon resolved these issues: first by winning the war, then by forging peace with the Church, and finally by making himself a monarch. Napoleon at Peace: How to End a Revolution (Reaktion Books, 2022) ends by discussing Napoleon's one great failure--his attempt to restore the colonial empire destroyed by war and slave rebellion. By the time this endeavor was abandoned, the fragile peace with Great Britain had broken down, and the Napoleonic wars had begun.

Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow 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

Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds, "Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic" (Yale UP, 2025)

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A vital account of the state of the Arctic today--emphasising the twin dangers of climate change and geopolitical competition Nowhere is the dual threat of climate change and geopolitical contest felt more strongly than in the Arctic. Sea ice is declining rapidly, wildfires are burning, and permafrost is thawing. All the while, global interest is gathering apace as the region transforms from being a frozen desert into an international waterway. Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds examine the state of the Arctic today, showing how the region is becoming a space of experimentation for everything from Indigenous governance to subsea technologies. Growing geopolitical competition is accompanying environmental disruption. Countries including Russia, China, and the United States are investing in the Arctic and consolidating their interests in strategic access, resource exploitation, and alliance-building. The consequences of this emerging Arctic Anthropocene are truly global--from rising sea levels due to melting glaciers to tensions between great powers determined to protect their territory and resources, and the well-being of Indigenous Peoples who have fought for centuries for rights and recognition.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Maria Fedorova, "Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935" (Northern Illinois UP, 2025)

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935 (Northern Illinois UP, 2025) examines the US and Soviet exchange of agricultural knowledge and technology during the interwar period.

Maria Fedorova challenges the perception of the Soviet Union as a passive recipient of American technology and expertise. She reveals the circular nature of this exchange through official government bureaus, amid anxious farmers in crowded auditoriums, in cramped cars across North Dakota and Montana, and by train over the once fertile steppes of the Volga.

Amid the post–World War I food insecurity, Soviet and American agricultural experts relied on transnational networks, bridging ideological differences. As Soviets traveled across the US agricultural regions and Americans plowed steppes in the southern Urals and the lower Volga, both groups believed that innovative solutions could be found beyond their own national borders. Soviets were avidly interested in American technology and American agricultural experts perceived the Soviet Union to be an ideal setting for experimenting with and refining modern farm systems and organizational practices. As Seeds of Exchange shows, agricultural modernization was not the exclusive domain of Western countries.

Guest: Maria Fedorova (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian Studies at Macalester College. She received her PhD in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on the history of agriculture, food insecurity, US-Russia/Soviet relations, and transnational history.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers...

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joshua Eisenman and David H. Shinn, "China's Relations with Africa: A New Era of Strategic Engagement" (Columbia UP, 2023)

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Since Xi Jinping’s accession to power in 2012, nearly every aspect of China’s relations with Africa has grown dramatically. Beijing has increased the share of resources it devotes to African countries, expanding military cooperation, technological investment, and educational and cultural programs as well as extending its political influence.

China's Relations with Africa: A New Era of Strategic Engagement (Columbia University Press, 2023) examines the full scope of contemporary political and security relations between China and Africa. David H. Shinn and Joshua Eisenman not only explain the specific tactics and methods that Beijing uses to build its strategic relations with African political and military elites but also contextualize and interpret them within China’s larger geostrategy. They argue that the priorities of Chinese leaders―including the conflation of threats to the Communist Party with threats to the country, a growing emphasis on relations in the Global South, and a focus on countering U.S. hegemony―have combined to elevate Africa’s importance among policy makers in Beijing.

Ranging from diplomacy and propaganda to arms sales and space cooperation, from increasingly frequent People’s Liberation Army Navy port calls in Africa to the rising number of African students studying in China, this book marshals extensive and compelling qualitative and quantitative evidence of the deepening ties between China and Africa. Drawing on two decades of systematic data and hundreds of surveys and in-person interviews, Shinn and Eisenman shed new light on the state of China-Africa relations today and consider what the future may hold.

Byline

Check out my new article https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sciaf.2025.e02699

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emma Ashford, "First Among Equals: U. S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World" (Yale UP, 2025)

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A fresh, concise roadmap for U.S. grand strategy in a multipolar world For the past thirty years, post-Cold War triumphalism and a desire to reshape the world have defined U.S. foreign policy. But the failures of the global war on terror, the return of conflict to Europe, and growing tensions with China all suggest that this approach to the world is flawed. For the United States--the country that has ruled the international system largely alone since 1991--this moment is particularly perilous. Can policymakers adapt American foreign policy to better fit the twenty-first century, and in doing so avoid the pitfalls and excesses of the past three decades? In this book, Emma Ashford proposes a return to a more pragmatic, realist set of strategic principles, ones better suited for the emerging multipolar world, that would pursue narrower U.S. interests, cultivate the capabilities of friendly states, and emphasize room for maneuver over rigid alliances. In this she provides a valuable counterpoint to today's liberal internationalist consensus, as well as a road map for policymakers who seek to change the course of U.S. foreign policy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Jabara Carley, "Stalin's Gamble: The Search for Allies Against Hitler, 1930-1936" (U Toronto Press, 2023)

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Shedding light on the origins of the Second World War in Europe, Stalin's Gamble: The Search for Allies Against Hitler, 1930-1936 (University of Toronto Press, 2023) aims to create a historical narrative of the relations of the USSR with Britain, France, the United States, Poland, Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Romania during the 1930s. The book explores the Soviet Union's efforts to organize a defensive alliance against Nazi Germany, in effect rebuilding the anti-German Entente of the First World War.

Drawing on extensive research in Soviet as well as Western archives, Michael Jabara Carley offers an in-depth account of the diplomatic manoeuvrings which surrounded the rise of Hitler and Soviet efforts to construct an alliance against future German aggression. Paying close attention to the beliefs and interactions of senior politicians and diplomats, the book seeks to replace one-sided Western histories with records from both sides. The book also offers an inside look at Soviet foreign policy making, with a focus on Stalin as a foreign policy maker as well as his interactions with his colleagues. Told in a fascinating narrative style, Stalin's Gamble attempts to see the European crisis of the 1930s through Soviet eyes.

Michael Jabara Carley is a professor of history at the Université de Montréal.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adam R. C. Humphreys and Hidemi Suganami, "Causal Inquiry in International Relations" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Causal Inquiry in International Relations (Oxford UP, 2024) by Adam R. C. Humphreys and Hidemi Suganami defends a new, philosophically informed account of the principles which must underpin any causal research in a discipline such as International Relations. Its central claim is that there is an underlying logic to all causal inquiry, at the core of which is the search for empirical evidence capable of ruling out competing accounts of how specific events were brought about. Although this crucial fact is obscured by the ‘culture of generalization’ which predominates in contemporary social science, all causal knowledge ultimately depends on the provision of empirical support for concrete claims about specific events, located in space and time.

Causal Inquiry in International Relations not only explores existing philosophical debates around causation; it also provides a detailed study of some of the most fundamental methodological questions which arise in the course of causal inquiry. Using examples drawn from philosophy and from the study of international relations, it demonstrates what is problematic about established ways of thinking, brings new clarity to both philosophical and methodological questions, and seeks to enhance collective understanding of the contribution that causal inquiry can make to empirically rich and critically aware scholarship about world politics. It concludes by situating ‘causal inquiry’ in relation to other forms of inquiry employed in the study of world politics, emphasizing especially the often unnoticed dependence of causal inquiry on precisely the kind of knowledge of specific events which historians are well placed to provide.

Adam Humphreys is Associate Professor and Head of Department in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Reading. He joined the University of Reading in 2013, having previously been a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford (2007-10) and Fellow in Politics at Brasenose College, Oxford (2010-13). His principal research interests are in International Relations theory and meta-theory, especially causation and causal explanation, realism and neo-realism, the English School, and the relationship between theory and history. He also has research interests in British foreign and defence policy, strategy, and the ethics of war.
Hidemi Suganami studied International Relations at Tokyo, Aberystwyth, and London Universities. His first academic appointment was at Keele in 1975, where he later became Professor of the Philosophy of International Relations. In 2004, he moved to Aberystwyth, where currently he is Emeritus Professor of International Politics. His publications include: The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals (1989); On the Causes of War (1996); and, with Andrew Linklater, The English School of International Relations (2006). Over a number of years, he has been studying philosophical issues surrounding causation and explanation in International Relations.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

George Papaconstantinou and Jean Pisani-Ferry, "New World New Rules: Global Cooperation in a World of Geopolitical Rivalries" (Agenda, 2024)

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The need for collective action has never been greater, but geopolitics, structural changes and diverging preferences mean that existing global governance arrangements, devised at Bretton Woods in the 1940s, are either unravelling or outmoded. Reconciling this contradiction is today's pressing global policy challenge.
In New World New Rules: Global Cooperation in a World of Geopolitical Rivalries (Agenda, 2024), two of Europe's most-experienced policymakers and analysts outline a new agenda for global governance. They examine governance practices across several key policy areas - climate, health, trade and competition, banking and finance, taxation, migration and the digital economy - and consider what works and what doesn't, and why. The global governance solutions they put forward are ambitious but pragmatic. They require complexity, flexibility and compromise. Attributes that global governments are demonstrably short of, but today's global crises urgently demand.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Poznansky, "Great Power, Great Responsibility: How the Liberal International Order Shapes US Foreign Policy" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In the wake of World War II, the United States leveraged its hegemonic position in the international political system to gradually build a new global order centered around democracy, the expansion of free market capitalism, and the containment of communism. Named in retrospect the "liberal international order" (LIO), the system took decades to build and is still largely with us today even as the US's relative power within it has diminished.

In Great Power, Great Responsibility: How the Liberal International Order Shapes US Foreign Policy (Oxford UP, 2025), Michael Poznansky explores how the LIO has influenced US foreign policy from its founding to the present. Proponents argue that its impact has been profound, producing a system that has been more rule-bound and beneficial than any previous order. Critics charge that it has failed to prevent the US itself from consistently violating rules and norms. Poznansky contends that the answer lies in between. While rule-breaking has been a constant feature of the postwar order, the nature of violations varies in surprising and poorly understood ways. America's approach to compliance with the LIO, including whether leaders feel the need to conceal rule violations at all, is a function of two primary factors: the intensity of competition over international order, and the burden of complying with the liberal order's core tenets in a given case.

Drawing on nine case studies, including the Korean War and Iraq War, Great Power, Great Responsibility sheds important light on the future of US foreign policy in an era where American unipolarity has ended and great power rivalry has returned.

Our guest is Michael Poznansky, an Associate Professor in the Strategic and Operational Research Department and a core faculty member in the Cyber & Innovation Policy Institute at the U.S. Naval War College.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Zach Fredman and Judd Kinzley eds., "Uneasy Allies: Sino-American Relations at the Grassroots, 1937–1949" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This timely collection of essays examines Sino-American relations during the Second World War, the Chinese Civil War and the opening of the Cold War. Drawing on new sources uncovered in China, Taiwan, the UK and the US, the authors demonstrate how 'grassroots' engagements - not just elite diplomacy - established the trans-Pacific networks that both shaped the postwar order in Asia, and continue to influence Sino-US relations today. In these crucial years, servicemen, scientists, students, businesspeople, activists, bureaucrats and many others travelled between the US and China. In every chapter, this innovative volume's approach uncovers their stories using both Chinese and English language sources. By examining interactions among various Chinese and American actors in the dynamic wartime environment, Uneasy Allies: Sino-American Relations at the Grassroots, 1937–1949 (Cambridge UP, 2024) reveals a new perspective on the foundations of American power, the brittle nature of the Sino-American relationship, and the early formation of the institutions that shaped the Cold War Pacific.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peter Sparding, "No Better Friend? The United States and Germany Since 1945" (Hurst, 2024)

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The German-American relationship is the decisive transatlantic dynamic of our time. Long seen as one of the most stable connections between Europe and America thanks to its well-defined Cold War structure and hierarchy, relations between Washington and Berlin have become much more volatile in the twenty-first century-- and are playing an increasingly pivotal role in determining the degree to which Europe and the United States will be able to shape a rapidly changing world order. Stabilizing this uniquely complicated relationship will be no easy feat. At times more closely aligned politically, and more intertwined economically, than any other transatlantic pair, since the end of the Cold War these republics have seen their relations characterized by frequent diplomatic, cultural and philosophical clashes and misunderstandings, and a trail of disappointed expectations. In No Better Friend? The United States and Germany Since 1945 (Hurst, 2024) Peter Sparding examines the long history between the two countries and their peoples; the narratives and perceptions harbored by each nation concerning the other; and the evolution of diplomatic, economic and security ties. Appraising the complicated interplay between Germany and the United States vis-a-vis a rising China, and the domestic challenges facing both countries, his book offers an outlook on how this all-important relationship might function going forward.

Guest: Peter Sparding (he/him) is the Senior Vice President and Director of Policy at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress (CSPC) in Washington DC. He has written about and analyzed US-Germany relations and transatlantic economic and foreign policy for two decades.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke here

Linktree here

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thomas Graham, "Getting Russia Right" (Polity Press, 2023)

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia,” Winston Churchill once said. “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” That saying sounds as true now as ever in the midst of Russia’s war in Ukraine. In Getting Russia Right (Polity Press, 2023), however, Thomas Graham provides an expert perspective on Russian history and statecraft and offers timely keys to Russian national interests which can help the United States get Russia right.

As US-Russian relations scrape the depths of Cold-War antagonism, the promise of partnership that beguiled American administrations during the first post-Soviet decades increasingly appears to have been false from the start. Why did American leaders persist in pursuing it? Was there another path that would have produced more constructive relations or better prepared Washington to face the challenge Russia poses today?

With a practitioner's eye honed during decades of work on Russian affairs, Graham, a distinguished fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, deftly traces the evolution of opposing ideas of national purpose that created an inherent tension in relations. Getting Russia Right (Polity Press, 2023) identifies the blind spots that prevented Washington from seeing Russia as it really is and crafting a policy to advance American interests without provoking an aggressive Russian response. Distilling the Putin factor to reveal the contours of the Russia challenge facing the United States whenever he departs the scene, Graham lays out a compelling way to deal with it so that the United States can continue to advance its interests in a rapidly changing world.

Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached by email here or via his website. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joanne Yao, "The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped the International Order" (Manchester UP, 2022)

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Environmental politics has traditionally been a peripheral concern for international relations theory, but increasing alarm over global environmental challenges has elevated international society's relationship with the natural world into the theoretical limelight. IR theory's engagement with environmental politics, however, has largely focused on interstate cooperation in the late twentieth century, with less attention paid to how the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century quest to tame nature came to shape the modern international order.

The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped the International Order (Manchester UP, 2022) examines nineteenth-century efforts to establish international commissions on three transboundary rivers - the Rhine, the Danube, and the Congo. It charts how the Enlightenment ambition to tame the natural world, and human nature itself, became an international standard for rational and civilized authority and informed our geographical imagination of the international. This relationship of domination over nature shaped three core IR concepts central to the emergence of early international order: the territorial sovereign state; imperial hierarchies; and international organizations. The book contributes to environmental politics and international relations by highlighting how the relationship between society and nature is not a peripheral concern, but one at the heart of international politics.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeremy Black, "British Politics and Foreign Policy, 1744-57" (Routledge, 2016)

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The years between 1744 and 1757 were a testing time for the British government as political unrest at home exploded into armed rebellion, whilst on the continent French armies were repeatedly victorious.

Providing an analytical narrative, supported by thematic chapters, this book examines the relationship between Britain's politics and foreign policy in a period not hitherto treated as a unit.

Building upon methods employed in the preceding two books ('Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of George I, 1714-1727' and 'Politics and Foreign Policy, 1727-44'), this volume charts the significant political changes of 1744-57.

It shows how ministerial change and political fortunes were closely linked to foreign policy, with foreign policy affecting, and being affected by, political developments.

In particular, it asks important questions about the politics and foreign policy of these years and thus reconsiders the context of imperial growth, economic development and political stability.

Far from being simply a study of individual episodes, the book outlines the structural aspects of the relationship between foreign policy and politics, examining issues of political stability, motivation and effectiveness.

In particular, the role of monarch, Court and ministers are considered alongside those of Parliament, parliamentary politics, and the public sphere of discussion, notably, but not only, the press.

The book therefore offers a guided narrative that both uses and builds on the analysis offered by contemporary commentators, and provides an informed assessment of the significance of the ideas, terms and language employed in eighteenth-century Britain to discuss foreign policy and politics.

Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Ivermee, "Glorious Failure: The Forgotten History of French Imperialism in India" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This is a powerful new account of a chapter in history that is crucial to understand, yet often overlooked. For 150 years, from the reign of Louis XIV to the downfall of Napoleon, France was an aggressive imperial power in South Asia, driven by the pursuit of greatness and riches. Through their East India company and state, the French established a far-reaching empire in India, only to see their dominant position undermined by conflict with Indian rulers, competition from other European nations, and a series of fatal strategic errors.

Exploding the myth of a benign French presence on the subcontinent, Robert Ivermee's extensive research reveals how France's Indian empire relied on war-making, conquest, opportunistic alliances, regime change and slavery to pursue its ambitions. He considers influential French figures' reactions to the collapse of the imperial project, not least their deployment of new ideas, like freedom and the rights of man, to justify fresh ventures of domination--even as colonial authorities failed to acknowledge the equality of French India's diverse indigenous peoples, both before and after the French Revolution.

From great power rivalry to informal empire and entrenched inequalities, Glorious Failure: The Forgotten History of French Imperialism in India (Oxford UP, 2025) tackles topics that remain vital and urgent in today's world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Olga Touloumi, "Assembly by Design: The United Nations and Its Global Interior" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

For almost seven years after World War II, a small group of architects took on an exciting task: to imagine the spaces of global governance for a new political organization called the United Nations (UN). To create the iconic headquarters of the UN in New York City, these architects experimented with room layouts, media technologies, and design in tribunal courtrooms, assembly halls, and council chambers. The result was the creation of a new type of public space, the global interior.

Assembly by Design: The United Nations and Its Global Interior (U of Minnesota Press, 2024) shows how this space leveraged media to help the UN communicate with the world. With its media infrastructure, symbols, acoustic design, and architecture, the global interior defined political assembly both inside and outside the UN headquarters, serving as the architectural medium to organize multilateral encounters of international publics around the globe. Demonstrating how aesthetics have long held sway over political work, Olga Touloumi posits that the building framed diplomacy on the ground amid a changing political landscape that brought the United States to the forefront of international politics, destabilizing old and establishing new geopolitical alliances.

Uncovering previously closed institutional and family archives, Assembly by Design offers new information about the political and aesthetic decisions that turned the UN headquarters into a communications organism. It looks back at a moment of hope, when politicians, architects, and diplomats—believing that assembly was a matter of design—worked together to deliver platforms for global democracy and governance.

Olga Touloumi is associate professor of architectural history at Bard College. She is coeditor of Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground.

Nushelle de Silva is assistant professor of architectural history at Fordham University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Bosco, "The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World's Oceans" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Oceanic Studies. An interdisciplinary podcast that examines the past, present, and future of ocean governance

In 1609, the Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius rejected the idea that even powerful rulers could own the oceans. "A ship sailing through the sea," he wrote, "leaves behind it no more legal right than it does a track." A philosophical and legal battle ensued, but Grotius's view ultimately prevailed. To this day, "freedom of the seas" remains an important legal principle and a powerful rhetorical tool.
Yet in recent decades, freedom of the seas has eroded in multiple ways and for a variety of reasons. During the world wars of the 20th century, combatants imposed unprecedented restrictions on maritime commerce, leaving international rules in tatters. National governments have steadily expanded their reach into the oceans. More recently, environmental concerns have led to new international restrictions on high seas fishing. Today's most dangerous maritime disputes-including China's push for control of the South China Sea-are occurring against the backdrop of major changes in the way the world treats the oceans.

As David Bosco shows in The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World's Oceans (Oxford UP, 2021), the history of humanity's attempt to create rules for the oceans is alive and relevant. Tracing the roots of the law of the sea and the background to current maritime disputes, he shows that building effective ocean rules while preserving maritime freedoms remains a daunting task. Bosco analyzes how fragile international institutions and determined activists are struggling for relevance in a world still dominated by national governments. As maritime tensions develop, The Poseidon Project will serve as an essential guide to the continuing challenge of ocean governance.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thane Gustafson, "Perfect Storm: Russia's Failed Economic Opening, the Hurricane of War and Sanctions, and the Uncertain Future" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 brought a tragic close to a thirty-year period of history that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reopening of Russia to the West after six decades of Soviet isolation. The opening lasted for three tumultuous decades and ended with a new closing, driven by the Ukrainian war, the imposition of Western sanctions, and the Russian responses to them.

In Perfect Storm: Russia's Failed Economic Opening, the Hurricane of War and Sanctions, and the Uncertain Future (Oxford University Press, 2025), Russia analyst Thane Gustafson reinterprets the story of Russia's failed opening to the West, focusing on its economic, technological, and social aspects, and the role they played in its ultimate failure. These parallel events are essential for understanding what happened and what went wrong. Yet they have received much less attention than the military and geopolitical aspects of the current conflict. Gustafson tells the story of the West's entry into Russia, the arrival of Russians into the West, and the conflicting emotions and responses these aroused on both sides, contributing to the ultimate breakdown of relations and the unprecedented hurricane of Western sanctions. The book concludes with an examination of possible futures under a new generation of leaders.

A measured and nuanced account of the evolution of Russia's economic relations with the world, Perfect Storm illuminates the longer history of Russia's opening to the West, from its achievements and disappointments to the complexity of the post-invasion sanctions regime and Russia's responses to them.

Thane Gustafson is Professor of Government at Georgetown University. He is the author of many books, including Klimat (2021), The Bridge (2020), and Wheel of Fortune (2012).

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mark L. Haas, "The Geriatric Peace: Population Aging and the Decline of War" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The vast majority of the world's countries are experiencing a demographic revolution: dramatic, sustained, and likely irreversible population aging. States' median ages are steadily increasing as the number of people ages 65 and older skyrockets. Analysts and policymakers frequently decry population aging's domestic costs, especially likely slowing economic growth and massive new public expenditures for elderly welfare. But aging has a major yet largely unrecognized international benefit: it significantly reduces the likelihood of international war. Although wars continue to rage in parts of the world, almost none involve aged countries. This book provides a comprehensive and groundbreaking argument why population aging will be a powerful force for peace.

Aging will significantly reduce states' military capabilities available for war while also boosting leaders’ and citizens' preferences for peaceful foreign policies. At the same time, the effects of aging will help prevent the emergence of a power transition between the United States and China, which would be a development that is particularly likely to devolve into armed hostilities. If an aged country does initiate war, the effects of aging will create major barriers to military success. The more aging reduces the probability of victory, the greater the disincentives to aggressing. Detailed case studies show how aging has affected the capabilities and preferences in Japan, China, the United States, and Russia.

Guest: Mark L. Haas is a Professor of Political Science at Duquesne University. He is the author of The Geriatric Peace: Population Aging and the Decline of War (Oxford University Press, 2025); Frenemies: When Ideological Enemies Ally (Cornell University Press, 2022); The Clash of Ideologies: Middle Eastern Politics and American Security (Oxford University Press, 2012); The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics, 1789-1989 (Cornell University Press, 2005), and co-editor of Ideologies and International Relations (Routledge Press); The Middle East and the United States: History, Politics, and Ideologies (Routledge, 2018, sixth edition) and The Arab Spring: The Hope and Reality of the Uprisings (Routledge, 2017).

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jérémy Filet, "The Jacobites and the Grand Tour: Educational Travel and Small-States' Diplomacy" (Manchester UP, 2025)

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Jacobites and the Grand Tour: Educational travel and small-states' diplomacy (Manchester University Press, 2025) by Dr. Jérémy Filet is the first monograph to fully examine the intersecting networks of Jacobites and travellers to the continent. In the book, Dr. Filet considers how small states used official diplomacy and deployed soft power - embodied by educational academies - to achieve foreign policy goals. This work uses little-known archival materials to explain how and why certain small states secretly supported the Jacobite cause during the crucial years surrounding the 1715 rising, while others stayed out of Jacobite affairs.

The book demonstrates how early modern small states sought to cultivate good relations with Britain by attracting travellers as part of a wider trend of ensuring connections with future diplomats or politicians in case a Stuart restoration never came. This publication therefore brings together a study of Britain, small states, Jacobitism, and educational travel, in its nexus at continental academies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gregory A. Daddis, "Faith and Fear: America's Relationship with War Since 1945" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In a groundbreaking reassessment of the long Cold War era, historian Gregory A. Daddis argues that ever since the Second World War's fateful conclusion, faith in and fear of war became central to Americans' thinking about the world around them. With war pervading nearly all aspects of American society, an interplay between blind faith and existential fear framed US policymaking and grand strategy, often with tragic results. A sweeping history, Faith and Fear: America's Relationship with War Since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2025) makes a forceful argument by examining the tensions between Americans' overreaching faith in war as a foreign policy tool and their overwhelming fear of war as a destructive force.

Gregory A. Daddis is Professor of History and holds the Melbern G. Glasscock Endowed Chair in American History at Texas A&M University. A retired US Army colonel, he deployed to both Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephan Kieninger, "Securing Peace in Europe: Strobe Talbott, NATO, and Russia After the Cold War" (Columbia UP, 2025)

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This deeply researched book offers new perspective on the NATO-Russia relationship through the eyes of Strobe Talbott, a deputy secretary of state for seven years under President Bill Clinton and the key US diplomatic broker for the former USSR. Stephan Kieninger traces the Clinton administration’s efforts to engage Russia and enlarge NATO at the same time, as elements of a new European security architecture. Drawing on Talbott’s diaries, as well as US and European archives and extensive interviews with former government officials, he sheds light on NATO’s opening, its missions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and other vexed issues. Kieninger argues that a careful look at Talbott’s statecraft rebuts Putin’s claims that the West exploited Russia’s weakness after the Cold War, demonstrating that the Clinton administration and its NATO allies sought to include Russia at every step. An illuminating and comprehensive account of US diplomacy during the Clinton years, Securing Peace in Europe provides vital insight into the complex relations between Russia and the West.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Raymond Jonas, "Habsburgs on the Rio Grande: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

For a few years in the middle of the nineteenth century, Mexico was ruled by an Austrian and defended by a French army. This often neglected story is more than just historical trivia - it's a way of understanding 19th century imperial politics, and global insurgencies today. In Habsburgs on the Rio Grande: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire (Harvard UP, 2024), University of Washington professor Raymond Jonas explains the genesis, course, and end of this strange twist in the historical record. Jonas argues that, even deep into the nineteenth century, a successful American republic posed an existential threat to European monarchies, so much so that in the early 1860s a combined force of Spain, France, and Britain sent soldiers to North America to impose a monarchy on an unwilling population. The Second Empire under Emperor Maximilian I was short lived, however, and his rule never extended much past the capital city. Yet as Jonas argues, the fact that Mexican anti-monarchist partisans could fight the might of Europe and oust the monarchy has lessons to teach today about autocracy and resistance in the early twenty first century.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

K. Ian Shin, "Imperial Stewards: Chinese Art and the Making of America's Pacific Century" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This episode, which is co-hosted with Delaney Chieyen Holton, features Dr. K. Ian Shin discussing his recently published book, Imperial Stewards: Chinese Art and the Making of America’s Pacific Century (Standford UP, 2025).

Imperial Stewards argues that, beyond aesthetic taste and economics, geopolitics were critical to the United States’ transformation into possessing some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated collections of Chinese art between the Gilded Age and World War II. Collecting and studying Chinese art and antiquities honed Americans' belief that they should dominate Asia and the Pacific Ocean through the ideology of imperial stewardship—a view that encompassed both genuine curiosity and care for Chinese art, and the enduring structures of domination and othering that underpinned the burgeoning transpacific art market.

Tracing networks across both the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, K. Ian Shin uncovers a diverse cast of historical actors that both contributed to US imperial stewardship and also challenged it, including Protestant missionaries, German diplomats, Chinese-Hawaiian merchants, and Chinese overseas students, among others. By examining the development of Chinese art collecting and scholarship in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century, Imperial Stewards reveals both the cultural impetus behind Americans' long-standing aspirations for a Pacific Century and a way to understand—and critique—the duality of US imperial power around the globe.

Ian Shin is Assistant Professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan, where he is also a core faculty member in the Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Program. In addition to Imperial Stewards, his articles and reviews on topics that range from the Boy Scout movement in New York's Chinatown to the role of colleges and universities in 19th-century U.S.-China relations to the history of museums of American art have appeared in Amerasia Journal, Journal of Asian American Studies, Journal of American-East Asian Relations, and Connecticut Historical Review.

Donna Doan Anderson is the Mellon research assistant professor in U.S. Law and Race at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Delaney Chieyen Holton is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at Stanford University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paul Thomas Chamberlin, "Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II" (Basic Books, 2025)

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the triumph of an American-led democratic order. In Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II (Basic Books, 2025), historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin opens a longer and wider aperture on World War II and recasts the war as a brutal conflict for survival and hegemony between declining and ascendant imperial powers.

Scorched Earth dismantles the myth of World War II as a “good war.” Instead, Chamberlin depicts the conflict as a massive battle beset by vicious racial atrocities, fought between rival empires across huge stretches of Asia and Europe. The war was sparked by German and Japanese invasions that threatened the old powers’ dominance, not by Allied opposition to fascism. The Allies achieved victory not through pluck and democratic idealism but through savage firebombing raids on civilian targets and the slaughter of millions of Soviet soldiers. And World War II did not deliver lasting peace: instead, the Soviet Union and United States emerged as hypermilitarized superpowers that would create arsenals of nuclear weapons, resulting in a decades-long Cold War standoff and subsequent violence across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.
Dramatically rendered and persuasively argued, Scorched Earth offers a revisionist history of World War II, revealing it was colonial in its origins, genocidal in its execution, and imperial in its outcomes.

Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via https://www.andrewopace.com/. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reid B. C. Pauly, "The Art of Coercion: Credible Threats and the Assurance Dilemma" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Strong states are surprisingly bad at coercion. History shows they prevail only a third of the time. Dr. Pauly argues that coercion often fails because targets fear punishment even if they comply. In this "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario, targets have little reason to obey. The Art of Coercion: Credible Threats and the Assurance Dilemma (Cornell UP, 2025) by Dr. Reid B. C. Pauly presents a fresh explanation for the success—and failure—of coercive demands in international politics.

Dr. Pauly illustrates this logic in nuclear counterproliferation efforts with South Africa, Iraq, Libya, and Iran. He shows that coercers face an "assurance dilemma": When threats are more credible, assurances not to punish are less so. But without credible assurances, targets may defy threats, bracing for seemingly inevitable punishment. For coercion to work, as such, coercers must not only make targets believe that they will be punished if they do not comply, but also that they will not be if they do.

Packed with insights for any foreign policy challenge involving coercive strategies, The Art of Coercion crucially corrects assumptions that tougher threats alone achieve results.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mary Bridges on US Bankers Abroad and the Making of a Global Superpower

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Mary Bridges, Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, about her book, Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower. Dollars and Dominion takes an infrastructural view of banking institutions and examines how US banks, almost by accident, became a durable part of the global financial system in the first half of the 20th century, supporting the global dominance of the US dollar after World War II. Vinsel and Bridges also discuss the benefits and limitations of using infrastructure as a framework of analysis and the next projects Bridges is working on. Lee wrote a new essay for the Peoples & Things newsletter, “Disinvestment and Decline in Infrastructure Studies,” inspired by a key moment in the discussion.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Georgiy Kasianov et al., "From 'the Ukraine' to Ukraine: A Contemporary History, 1991-2021" (Ibidem Press, 2021)

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In 2021, Ukraine celebrates its thirty-year independence anniversary. During this relatively short period of time—when considered in historical terms—Ukraine underwent a number of drastic changes that have so far shaped the country’s domestic and international environments. From “the Ukraine” to Ukraine: A Contemporary History, 1991-2021 (Ibidem Press, 2021), edited by Georgiy Kasianov, Matthew Rojansky, and Mykhailo Minakov, guides its readers through the labyrinthine developments that provide a wide spectrum of views and approaches that help receive a better understanding of the contemporary history of Ukraine. While detailing how independent Ukraine was taking shape locally, the editors and contributors of the volume simultaneously position Ukraine in the international environment that arouse after the fall of the USSR. Ukraine is thus inscribed into the international political map, which further complicates and advances the surveys presented in the volume. After the collapse of the USSR, the country faced a number of challenges: in addition to learning how to construct and narrate its own history, the new independent state also had to find a way to present itself to the global community. From “the Ukraine” to Ukraine outlines trajectories that illustrate a gradual process of the country’s political awareness, ambitions, and maturity. Thirty years may seem like an inconsiderable amount of time for a new independent state. The material presented in the book proves otherwise. In a concise and yet acute way, the contributors touch upon the most challenging and sensitive issues which have shaped the recent history of Ukraine: ranging from the enthusiastic support of independence to the current Russian-Ukrainian war, the volume constructs a multilayered historical scene which at the same time invites further surveys and elaborations.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD student in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Jabara Carley, "Stalin's Great Game: War and Neutrality, 1939-1941" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The period from September 1939 to early 1942 was crucial for Soviet foreign policy and coincided with the early stages of the Second World War, including the Great Patriotic War. In Stalin's Great Game, Michael Jabara Carley unpacks the complexities of Soviet diplomacy during this time, addressing key issues such as the Soviet-Finnish Winter War, Soviet views on the fall of France and the Battle of Britain, efforts to remain neutral in Europe, Soviet relations with both Britain and Nazi Germany, and the formation of the Grand Alliance against the Axis powers.

Drawing on extensive research from multilingual archives in France, Britain, the United States, and the USSR, Carley offers a comprehensive narrative that explores Soviet intelligence activities, especially of the "Cambridge Five" spy ring and Nazi Germany's preparations for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. The book also re-evaluates historiographical debates on Stalin's interpretation of Soviet intelligence and Hitler's intentions towards the USSR. The third volume in Carley's trilogy on the origins and early conduct of the Second World War, Stalin's Great Game provides a fresh re-examination of key events and interpretations by both Western and Soviet historians, introducing new ideas and perspectives on this critical period.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Edward Luce, "Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Zbigniew Brzezinski was a key architect of the Soviet Union’s demise, which ended the Cold War. A child of Warsaw—the heart of central Europe’s bloodlands—Brzezinski turned his fierce resentment at his homeland’s razing by Nazi Germany and the Red Army into a lifelong quest for liberty. Born the year that Joseph Stalin consolidated power, and dying a few months into Donald Trump’s first presidency, Brzezinski was shaped by and in turn shaped the global power struggles of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As counsel to US presidents from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama, and chief foreign policy figure of the late 1970s under Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski converted his acclaim as a Sovietologist into Washington power. With Henry Kissinger, his lifelong rival with whom he had a fraught on-off relationship, he personified the new breed of foreign-born scholar who thrived in America’s “Cold War University”—and who ousted Washington’s gentlemanly class of WASPs who had run US foreign policy for so long.
Brzezinski’s impact, aided by his unusual friendship with the Polish-born John Paul II, sprang from his knowledge of Moscow’s “Achilles heel”—the fact that its nationalities, such as the Ukrainians, and satellite states, including Poland, yearned to shake off Moscow’s grip. Neither a hawk nor a dove, Brzezinski was a biting critic of George W. Bush’s Iraq War and an early endorser of Obama. Because he went against the DC grain of joining factions, and was on occasion willing to drop Democrats for Republicans, Brzezinski is something of history’s orphan. His historic role has been greatly underweighted. In the almost cinematic arc of his life can be found the grand narrative of the American century and great power struggle that followed.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rita Kiki Edozie and Moses Khisa, "Africa's New Global Politics: Regionalism in International Relations" (Lynne Rienner, 2022)

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The African Union's threat to lead African states' mass withdrawal from the International Criminal Court in 2008 marked just one of many encounters that demonstrate African leaders' growing confidence and activism in international relations. Rita Kiki Edozie and Moses Khisa explore the myriad ways in which the continent’s diplomatic engagement and influence in the global arena has been expanding in recent decades.

Focusing in particular on collective action through the institutional platform of the AU―while acknowledging the internal challenges involved―the authors show how Africa's role as a dynamic world region is both shaping and being shaped by current trends in global development and geopolitics.

Check out my new article https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sciaf.2025.e02699

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alan McPherson, "Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet's Terror State to Justice" (UNC Press, 2019)

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

On September 21, 1976, a car bomb exploded in Washington DC, killing a former Chilean diplomat named Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt. The assassination was a cruel and brazen attempt by the Chilean government to silence a critic of the Pinochet regime. And it proved to be a major strategic error––Pinochet himself used the language of “banana peel”––as the legal action that followed helped unravel US-Chile relations and provided a template for other human-rights victims to pursue justice in post-Pinochet Chile.

Alan McPherson, a professor of history at Temple University, investigates this event in his new book Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet's Terror State to Justice (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). With the perspicuous eye of a detective, McPherson puts all the pieces together to explain how Pinochet and his secret service organized the murder, before following Orlando Letelier’s wife Isabel’s decades-long struggle to hold the assassins and the Chilean government accountable. It’s a harrowing but hopeful tale. And McPherson tells it masterfully.

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

Grace C. Huang, "Chiang Kai-Shek's Politics of Shame: Leadership, Legacy, and National Identity in China" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Once a powerful figure who reversed the disintegration of China and steered the country to Allied victory in World War II, Chiang Kai-shek fled into exile following his 1949 defeat in the Chinese civil war. As attention pivoted to Mao Zedong’s communist experiment, Chiang was relegated to the dustbin of history.

In Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Shame, Grace Huang reconsiders Chiang’s leadership and legacy by drawing on an extraordinary and uncensored collection of his diaries, telegrams, and speeches stitched together by his secretaries. She paints a new, intriguing portrait of this twentieth-century leader who advanced a Confucian politics of shame to confront Japanese incursion into China and urge unity among his people. In also comparing Chiang’s response to imperialism to those of Mao, Yuan Shikai, and Mahatma Gandhi, Grace widens the implications of her findings to explore alternatives to Western expressions of nationalism and modernity and reveal how leaders of vulnerable states can use potent cultural tools to inspire their country and contribute to an enduring national identity.

Grace Huang is professor of government at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY. She likes to tackle a range of intellectual questions, including: what are the conditions in leadership that promote collective inspiration versus collective hysteria or violence? How do talented subordinates weigh their ability to modify a leader’s deleterious actions against their moral culpability of participating in those policies? How does a particular democratic ideology and culture shape the choices of working mothers, and how do such mothers make decisions about care, family, and work? Her research interests include political leadership, the political uses of shame in Chinese leadership, and gender, labor, and the family. She can be reached at ghuang@stlawu.edu.

Dong Wang is distinguished professor of history and director of the Wellington Koo Institute for Modern China in World History at Shanghai University (since 2016), a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Megan Brown, "The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community (Harvard University Press, 2022), Dr. Megan Brown details the surprising story of how Algeria joined and then left the postwar European Economic Community and what its past inclusion means for extracontinental membership in today’s European Union.

On their face, the mid-1950s negotiations over European integration were aimed at securing unity in order to prevent violent conflict and boost economies emerging from the disaster of World War II. But French diplomats had other motives, too. From Africa to Southeast Asia, France’s empire was unraveling. France insisted that Algeria—the crown jewel of the empire and home to a nationalist movement then pleading its case to the United Nations—be included in the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community. The French hoped that Algeria’s involvement in the EEC would quell colonial unrest and confirm international agreement that Algeria was indeed French.

French authorities harnessed Algeria’s legal status as an official département within the empire to claim that European trade regulations and labor rights should traverse the Mediterranean. Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany conceded in order to move forward with the treaty, and Algeria entered a rights regime that allowed free movement of labor and guaranteed security for the families of migrant workers. Even after independence in 1962, Algeria remained part of the community, although its ongoing inclusion was a matter of debate. Still, Algeria’s membership continued until 1976, when a formal treaty removed it from the European community.

In this book, Dr. Brown combats understandings of Europe’s “natural” borders by emphasizing the extracontinental contours of the early union. The unification vision was never spatially limited, suggesting that contemporary arguments for geographic boundaries excluding Turkey and areas of Eastern Europe from the European Union must be seen as ahistorical.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan Fisher and Nina Wilén, "African Peacekeeping" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In African Peacekeeping (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Dr. Jonathan Fisher and Dr. Nina Wilén explore the story of Africa's contemporary history and politics through the lens of peacekeeping. This concise and accessible book, based on over a decade of research across ten countries, focuses not on peacekeeping in Africa but, rather, peacekeeping by Africans. The book argues that “African peacekeeping should be understood not as simply an adjunct, technical activity but as a complex set of practices deeply embedded within - and entangled with - Africa’s contemporary political economy.”

Dr. Fisher and Dr. Wilén demonstrate how peacekeeping is – and has been – weaved into Africa's national, regional and international politics more broadly, as well as what implications this has for how we should understand the continent, its history and its politics. In doing so, and drawing on fieldwork undertaken in every region of the continent, Dr. Fisher and Dr. Wilén explain how profoundly this involvement in peacekeeping has shaped contemporary Africa.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Zack Cooper, "Tides of Fortune: The Rise and Decline of Great Militaries" (Yale UP, 2025)

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

An ambitious look at how the twentieth century's great powers devised their military strategies and what their implications mean for military competition between the United States and China.

How will the United States and China evolve militarily in the years ahead? Many experts believe the answer to this question is largely unknowable. But Zack Cooper argues that the American and Chinese militaries are following a well-trodden path. For centuries, the world's most powerful militaries have adhered to a remarkably consistent pattern of behavior, determined largely by their leaders' perceptions of relative power shifts. By uncovering these trends, this book places the evolving military competition between the United States and China in historical context.

Drawing on a decade of research and on his experience at the White House and the Pentagon, Cooper outlines a novel explanation for how militaries change as they rise and decline. Tides of Fortune examines the paths of six great powers of the twentieth century, tracking how national leaders adjusted their defense objectives, strategies, and investments in response to perceived shifts in relative power. All these militaries followed a common pattern, and their experiences shed new light on both China's recent military modernization and America's potential responses.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Giles Tremlett, "The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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

Dan Reiter, "Untied Hands: How States Avoid the Wrong Wars" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

How do states advance their national security interests? Conventional wisdom holds that states must court the risk of catastrophic war by “tying their hands” to credibly protect their interests. Dan Reiter overturns this perspective with the compelling argument that states craft flexible foreign policies to avoid unwanted wars. Through a comprehensive analysis of key international crises, including the Berlin, Taiwan Straits, and Cuban Missile Crises, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars, Reiter provides new perspectives on the causes of wars, the role of international alliances, foreign troop deployments, leader madness, and the impact of AI on international relations. With critical insights into contemporary foreign policy challenges, such as America’s role in NATO, the risks of war with China, containing a resurgent Russia, and the dangers of nuclear war, Untied Hands: How States Avoid the Wrong Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2025) is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how states can effectively manage international crises while avoiding the wrong wars.

Dan Reiter is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Political Science at Emory University.

Leo Bader is a senior at Wesleyan University studying political theory and history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah E. K. Smith, "Trading on Art: Cultural Diplomacy and Free Trade in North America" (UBC Press, 2025)

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 08:05:00 -0000

hat is the relationship between culture and trade? In Trading on Art: Cultural Diplomacy and Free Trade in North America Sarah E. K. Smith, an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University and the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Art, Culture and Global Relations, examines the history of cultural relations between Canada, the USA and Mexico at the turn of the twenty-first century. The book considers how North America was conceptualised by cultural practices such as art and video, as well as how the arts engaged and responded to free trade agreements in that period. As the world confronts a very different trading and cultural context, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the future, as well as the past, of cross-national cultural exchange. The book will also be available open access in 2026

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sasha D. Pack, "The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border" (Stanford UP, 2019)

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between space—from “shatter zone” to borderland. Far from the centers of authority of contending empires, the North African and Southern Iberian coast was a place where imperial, colonial, private, and piratical agents competed for local advantage. Sometimes they outmaneuvered each other; sometimes they cooperated.

Gibraltar entered European politics in the Middle Ages, and became a symbol of the Atlantic Empire in the Early Modern period (the Pillars of Hercules of Emperor Charles V are featured on the Spanish flag to this day), but Pack’s study focuses on the nineteenth century. Europe’s new imperialism, Britannic naval supremacy, the age of steam, the ever-present danger of cholera, all mark the change of a Spanish-Moorish border into a multilateral one. So too does the multicultural mix of Europeans and North Africans, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants who brought a spirit of convivencia (mutual toleration) into the region, unlike the nineteenth- and twentieth- century homogenizing nationalism that was at play elsewhere.

In the middle of this theater, Dr. Pack follows the careers of adventuresome entrepreneurs, who manipulated the weak enforcement of conflicting laws in overlapping jurisdictions for their own gain. He calls these characters “slipstream potentates” because they maneuvered creatively in the wakes of great ships of state on their courses in the seas of international politics. (Other historians have called them “the last Barbary pirates.”) They bring color and detail to this already gripping narrative of international politics in Spain and North Africa in the century between Napoleon and Franco.

Sasha D. Pack is Associate Professor of History at the University of Buffalo. He studies Modern Europe, Spain and Portugal, and the Mediterranean, focusing on transnational and political history.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Vorenberg, "Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War" (Random House, 2023)

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

More than a century and a half after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, historians are still searching for exactly when the U.S. Civil War ended. Was it ten weeks afterward, in Galveston, where a federal commander proclaimed Juneteenth the end of slavery? Or perhaps in August of 1866, when President Andrew Johnson simply declared “the insurrection is at an end”?

That the answer was elusive was baffling even to a historian of the stature of Michael Vorenberg, whose previous work served as a key source of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. Vorenberg was inspired to write this groundbreaking book, finding its title, Lincoln's Peace, in the peace Lincoln hoped for but could not make before his assassination. A peace that required not one but many endings, as Vorenberg reveals in these pages, the most important of which came well more than a year after Lincoln’s untimely death. To say how a war ends is to suggest how it should be remembered, and Vorenberg’s search is not just for the Civil War’s endpoint but for its true nature and legacy, so essential to the American identity. It’s also a quest, in our age of “forever wars,” to understand whether the United States’s interminable conflicts of the current era have a precedent in the Civil War—and whether, in a sense, wars ever end at all, or merely wax and wane.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Julian Jackson, "De Gaulle" (Harvard UP, 2018)

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Charles de Gaulle is one of the greatest figures of twentieth century history. If Sir Winston Churchill was (in the words of Harold Macmillan) the "greatest Englishman In history", then Charles de Gaulle was without a doubt, the greatest Frenchman since Napoleon Bonaparte. Why so? In the early summer of 1940, when France was overrun by German troops, one junior general who had fought in the trenches in Verdun refused to accept defeat. He fled to London, where he took to the radio to address his compatriots back home. “Whatever happens,” he said, “the flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.” At that moment, Charles de Gaulle entered history.

For the rest of the war, de Gaulle insisted he and his Free French movement were the true embodiment of France. Through sheer force of his personality and the grandeur of his vision of France, he inspired French men and women to risk their lives to resist the Nazi occupation. Usually proud and aloof, but almost always confident in his own leadership, he quarreled violently with Churchill, Roosevelt and many of his own countrymen. Yet they knew they would need his help to rebuild a shattered France. Thanks to de Gaulle, France was recognized as one of the victorious Allies when Germany was finally defeated. Then, as President of the Fifth Republic, he brought France back from the brink of a civil war over the war in Algeria. And, made the difficult decision to end the self-same war. Thereafter he challenged American hegemony, took France out of NATO, and twice vetoed British entry into the European Community in his pursuit of what he called “a certain idea of France.”

Julian Jackson, Professor of History at Queen Mary College, University of London, past winner of the Wolfson History Prize and the winner in 2018 of the Paris Book Award for his book on De Gaulle--De Gaulle (Harvard University Press, 2018)--has written a magnificent biography, the first major reconsideration in over twenty years. Drawing on the extensive resources of the recently opened de Gaulle archives, Jackson reveals the conservative roots of de Gaulle’s intellectual formation and upbringing, sheds new light on his relationship with Churchill, and shows how de Gaulle confronted riots at home and violent independence movements abroad from the Middle East to Vietnam. No previous biography has so vividly depicted this towering figure whose legacy remains evident in present-day France. In short Professor Jackson has written a superb book, which in every way possible is a glittering ornament in the biographical art.

Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Agathe Demarais, "Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests" (Columbia UP, 2022)

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Sanctions have become the go-to foreign policy tool for the United States. Coercive economic measures such as trade tariffs, financial penalties, and export controls affect large numbers of companies and states across the globe. Some of these penalties target nonstate actors, such as Colombian drug cartels and Islamist terror groups; others apply to entire countries, including North Korea, Iran, and Russia. U.S. policy makers see sanctions as a low-cost tactic, but in reality these measures often fail to achieve their intended goals--and their potent side effects can even harm American interests.

Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests (Columbia UP, 2022) explores the surprising ways sanctions affect multinational companies, governments, and ultimately millions of people around the world. Drawing on interviews with experts, policy makers, and people in sanctioned countries, Agathe Demarais examines the unintended consequences of the use of sanctions as a diplomatic weapon. The proliferation of sanctions spurs efforts to evade them, as states and firms seek ways to circumvent U.S. penalties. This is only part of the story. Sanctions also reshape relations between countries, pushing governments that are at odds with the U.S. closer to each other--or, increasingly, to Russia and China.

Full of counterintuitive insights spanning a wide range of topics, from commodities markets in Russia to Iran's COVID response and China's cryptocurrency ambitions, Backfire reveals how sanctions are transforming geopolitics and the global economy--as well as diminishing U.S. influence. This insider's account is an eye-opening, accessible, and timely book that sheds light on the future of sanctions in an increasingly multipolar world.

Mathias Fuelling is a doctoral candidate in History at Temple University, working on a political history of Czechoslovakia in the immediate post-WWII years. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/bucephalus424

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Luke A. Nichter, "The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election Of 1968" (Yale UP, 2024)

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A sitting Democratic president who chooses not to run for re-election, a vice president running out of the president’s shadow, and a Republican nominee trying to make a political comeback amidst accusations of collusion – welcome to the 2024 1968 presidential election. What we think we know about the election has been challenged, however, by a new book by Luke A. Nichter, a professor of history and presidential studies at Chapman University. In The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968 (Yale UP, 2024) Nichter reexamines the campaign and shows how the ‘68 election foreshadowed our current political landscape.

The 1968 presidential race was a contentious battle between vice president Hubert Humphrey, Republican Richard Nixon, and former Alabama governor George Wallace. The United States was reeling from the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy and was bitterly divided on the Vietnam War and domestic issues, including civil rights and rising crime. Drawing on previously unexamined archives and numerous interviews, Luke A. Nichter upends the conventional understanding of the campaign.

Nichter chronicles how the evangelist Billy Graham met with Johnson after the president’s attempt to reenter the race was stymied by his own party, and offered him a deal: Nixon, if elected, would continue Johnson’s Vietnam War policy and also not oppose his Great Society, if Johnson would soften his support for Humphrey. Johnson agreed.

Nichter also shows that Johnson was far more active in the campaign than has previously been described; that Humphrey’s resurgence in October had nothing to do with his changing his position on the war; that Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” has been misunderstood, since he hardly even campaigned there; and that Wallace’s appeal went far beyond the South and anticipated today’s Republican populism. This eye-opening account of the political calculations and maneuvering that decided this fiercely fought election reshapes our understanding of a key moment in twentieth-century American history.

Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via https://www.andrewopace.com/. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ketian Zhang, "China's Gambit: The Calculus of Coercion" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 04:00:00 -0000

Emerging from an award-winning article in International Security, China's Gambit examines when, why, and how China attempts to coerce states over perceived threats to its national security. Since 1990, China has used coercion for territorial disputes and issues related to Taiwan and Tibet, yet China is curiously selective in the timing, target, and tools of coercion. This book offers a new and generalizable cost-balancing theory to explain states' coercion decisions. It demonstrates that China does not coerce frequently and uses military coercion less when it becomes stronger, resorting primarily to non-militarized tools. Leveraging rich empirical evidence, including primary Chinese documents and interviews with Chinese and foreign officials, this book explains how contemporary rising powers translate their power into influence and offers a new framework for explaining states' coercion decisions in an era of economic interdependence, particularly how contemporary global economic interdependence affects rising powers' foreign security policies.

Check out my new article https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sciaf.2025.e02699

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Frank L. Jones, "Sam Nunn: Statesman of the Nuclear Age" (UP Kansas, 2020)

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In a 2012 opinion piece bemoaning the state of the US Senate, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank cited a “leading theory: There are no giants in the chamber today.” Among the respected members who once walked the Senate floor, admired for their expertise and with a stature that went beyond party, Milbank counted Sam Nunn (D-GA).

Nunn served in the Senate for four terms beginning in 1972, at a moment when domestic politics and foreign policy were undergoing far-reaching changes. As a member and then chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he had a vital impact on most of the crucial national security and defense issues of the Cold War era and the “new world order” that followed—issues that included the revitalization of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's military capability, US-Soviet relations, national defense reorganization and reform, the Persian Gulf conflict, and nuclear arms control. In this first full account of Nunn’s senatorial career, Frank Leith Jones reveals how, as a congressional leader and “shadow secretary of defense,” Nunn helped win the Cold War, constructing the foundation for the defense and foreign policies of the 1970s and 1980s that secured the United States and its allies from the Soviet threat.

At a time of bitter political polarization and partisanship, Nunn’s reputation remains that of a statesman with a record of bipartisanship and a dedication to US national interests above all. His career, as recounted in Sam Nunn: Statesman of the Nuclear Age (University Press of Kansas, 2020), provides both a valuable lesson in the relationships among the US government, foreign powers, and societies and a welcome reminder of the capacity of Congress, even a lone senator, to promote and enact policies that can make the country, and the world, a better and safer place.

Frank Leith Jones is professor of security studies and the General C. Marshall Chair of Military Studies in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. His published work includes Blowtorch: Robert Komer, Vietnam, and American Cold War Strategy.

Arya Hariharan is a lawyer in politics. She spends much of her time working on congressional investigations and addressing challenges to the rule of law. You can reach her at arya.hariharan@gmail.com or Twitter.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sean McMeekin, "Stalin's War: A New History of World War II" (Basic Books, 2021)

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. The Second World War was not Hitler’s war; it was Stalin’s war.

Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin's War: A New History of World War II (Basic Books, 2021) by award winning historian, Sean McMeekin, Professor of History at Bard College, revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler’s genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, did the Pacific war of 1941–1945 fulfill Stalin’s goal of unleashing a devastating war of attrition between Japan and the “Anglo-Saxon” capitalist powers he viewed as his ultimate adversary.

McMeekin also reveals the extent to which Soviet Communism was rescued by the US and Britain’s self-defeating strategic moves, beginning with Lend-Lease aid, as American and British supply boards agreed almost blindly to every Soviet demand. Stalin’s war machine, McMeekin shows, was substantially reliant on American materiél from warplanes, tanks, trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, fuel, ammunition, and explosives, to industrial inputs and technology transfer, to the foodstuffs which fed the Red Army.

This unreciprocated American generosity gave Stalin’s armies the mobile striking power to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism.

A groundbreaking reassessment of the Second World War, Stalin’s War is revisionist history at its very best: breaking down old paradigms and narratives and bringing to the fore new understandings of the historical process. All from a historian who has the best claim to be the closest, modern-day American equivalent of A. J. P. Taylor.

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

How ClioVis is Transforming Education and Historical Research

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today I’m speaking with Marcus Golding, historian and Director of Educational Operations at ClioVis. ClioVis is an incredible software and learning tool that allows educators and studies to create digital timelines, network visualizations, and interactive presentations. Founded by UT Austin history professor Erika Bsumek, ClioVis is made for professors and teachers by current professors and scholars. I’m thrilled to get the chance today to speak with Marcus about this software to share with our listeners how they can enhance their own work and teaching.

Visit ClioVis' website to learn more: Click Here

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman, "Hitler's American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany's March to Global War" (Basic Books, 2021)

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A riveting account of the five most crucial days in twentieth-century diplomatic history: from Pearl Harbor to Hitler's declaration of war on the United States.

By early December 1941, war had changed much of the world beyond recognition. Nazi Germany occupied most of the European continent, while in Asia, the Second Sino-Japanese War had turned China into a battleground. But these conflicts were not yet inextricably linked--and the United States remained at peace.

Hitler's American Gamble recounts the five days that upended everything: December 7 to 11. Tracing developments in real time and backed by deep archival research, historians Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman show how Hitler's intervention was not the inexplicable decision of a man so bloodthirsty that he forgot all strategy, but a calculated risk that can only be understood in a truly global context. This book reveals how December 11, not Pearl Harbor, was the real watershed that created a world war and transformed international history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paul Tucker, "Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

How to sustain an international system of cooperation in the midst of geopolitical struggle? Can the international economic and legal system survive today’s fractured geopolitics? Democracies are facing a drawn-out contest with authoritarian states that is entangling much of public policy with global security issues. In Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order (Princeton University Press, 2024), Paul Tucker lays out principles for a sustainable system of international cooperation, showing how democracies can deal with China and other illiberal states without sacrificing their deepest political values. Drawing on three decades as a central banker and regulator, Tucker applies these principles to the international monetary order, including the role of the U.S. dollar, trade and investment regimes, and the financial system. Combining history, economics, and political and legal philosophy, Tucker offers a new account of international relations. Rejecting intellectual traditions that go back to Hobbes, Kant, and Grotius, and deploying instead ideas from David Hume, Bernard Williams, and modern mechanism-design economists, Tucker describes a new kind of political realism that emphasizes power and interests without sidelining morality. Incentives must be aligned with values if institutions are to endure. The connecting tissue for a system of international cooperation, he writes, should be legitimacy, creating a world of concentric circles in which we cooperate more with those with whom we share the most and whom we fear the least.

Paul Tucker is a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and the author of Unelected Power (Princeton). He is a former central banker and regulator at the Bank of England, and a former director at Basel's Bank for International Settlements, where he chaired some of the groups designing reforms of the international financial system after the Global Financial Crisis.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sam Dalrymple, "Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia" (HarperCollins UK, 2025)

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

As recently as 1928, a vast swathe of Asia – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait – were bound together under a single imperial banner, an entity known officially as the ‘Indian Empire’, or more simply as the Raj.

It was the British Empire’s crown jewel, a vast dominion stretching from the Red Sea to the jungles of Southeast Asia, home to a quarter of the world’s population and encompassing the largest Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Zoroastrian communities on the planet. Its people used the Indian rupee, were issued passports stamped ‘Indian Empire’, and were guarded by armies garrisoned in forts from the Bab el-Mandeb to the Himalayas.

And then, in the space of just fifty years, the Indian Empire shattered. Five partitions tore it apart, carving out new nations, redrawing maps, and leaving behind a legacy of war, exile and division.

Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (William Collins and HarperCollins India, 2025) by Sam Dalrymple, for the first time, presents the whole story of how the Indian Empire was unmade. How a single, sprawling dominion became twelve modern nations. How maps were redrawn in boardrooms and on battlefields, by politicians in London and revolutionaries in Delhi, by kings in remote palaces and soldiers in trenches.

Its legacies include civil war in Burma and ongoing insurgencies in Kashmir, Baluchistan and Northeast India, and the Rohingya genocide. It is a history of ambition and betrayal, of forgotten wars and unlikely alliances, of borders carved with ink and fire. And, above all, it is the story of how the map of modern Asia was made.

Dalrymple’s stunning history is based on deep archival research, previously untranslated private memoirs, and interviews in English, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Konyak, Arabic and Burmese. From portraits of the key political players to accounts of those swept up in these wars and mass migrations, Shattered Lands is vivid, compelling, thought-provoking history at its best.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sven Saaler, Kudō Akira, and Tajima Nobuo eds., "Mutual Perceptions and Images in Japanese-German Relations, 1860-2010" (Brill, 2017)

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Mutual Perceptions and Images in Japanese-German Relations, 1860-2010 (Brill, 2017) examines the mutual images formed between Japan and Germany from the mid-nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, and the influence of these images on the development of bilateral relations. Unlike earlier research on Japanese-German relations, which focused on the similarity of these countries' historical trajectories, this publication presents a more nuanced picture. It relativizes perceptions of a special "spiritual relationship" between Japan and Germany as well as their commonalities of "national character" through an exploration of previously untapped historical visual and textual sources. With essays by sixteen leading scholars in the field, this collection is an invaluable contribution to the historiography of modern Japan and Germany, and to the field of international relations.

Contributors are: Hans-Joachim Bieber, Fukuoka Mariko, Hakoishi Hiroshi, Iwasa Takurō, Katō Yōko, Kawakita Atsuko, Gerhard Krebs, Kudō Akira, Heinrich Menkhaus, Danny Orbach, Peter Pantzer, Sven Saaler, Satō Takumi, Volker Stanzel, Suzuki Naoko, Tajima Nobuo, Tano Daisuke, and Rolf-Harald Wippich.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jack Snyder, "Human Rights for Pragmatists: Social Power in Modern Times" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Human rights are among our most pressing issues today. But rights promoters have reached an impasse in their effort to achieve rights for all. Human Rights for Pragmatists (Princeton University Press, 2022) explains why: activists prioritize universal legal and moral norms, backed by the public shaming of violators, but in fact, rights prevail only when they serve the interests of powerful local constituencies. Jack Snyder demonstrates that where local power and politics lead, rights follow. He presents an innovative roadmap for addressing a broad agenda of human rights concerns: impunity for atrocities, dilemmas of free speech in the age of social media, entrenched abuses of women’s rights, and more.
Exploring the historical development of human rights around the globe, Snyder shows that liberal rights–based states have experienced a competitive edge over authoritarian regimes in the modern era. He focuses on the role of power, the interests of individuals and the groups they form, and the dynamics of bargaining and coalitions among those groups. The path to human rights entails transitioning from a social order grounded in patronage and favoritism to one dedicated to equal treatment under impersonal rules. Rights flourish when they benefit dominant local actors with the clout to persuade ambivalent peers. Activists, policymakers, and others attempting to advance rights should embrace a tailored strategy, one that acknowledges local power structures and cultural practices.
Constructively turning the mainstream framework of human rights advocacy on its head, Human Rights for Pragmatists offers tangible steps that all advocates can take to move the rights project forward.

Our guest is Jack Snyder, the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science and the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ross A. Kennedy, "The United States and the Origins of World War II in Europe" (Taylor & Francis, 2025)

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The United States and the Origins of World War II in Europe (Taylor & Francis, 2025), spans 1914–1939 to provide a concise interpretation of the role the United States played in the origins of the Second World War. It synthesizes recent scholarship about interwar international politics while also presenting an original interpretation of the sources of American policy.

The book shows how the drive for international reform, beginning with Woodrow Wilson, reflected both America’s unusual power and its fears about maintaining its domestic freedoms in a world dominated by arms races and the threat of war. The American desire to reform or to escape from the existing international system reshaped Europe’s balance of power from 1914 to 1929, leaving it precarious and unlikely to produce lasting stability. America’s power continued to loom globally in the 1930s, as first its isolationism and, after 1938, its open hostility toward Germany and Japan influenced the policies of the West and of Hitler. The coda at the end of the volume analyzes how the United States affected the strategic choices made by Great Britain, Nazi Germany, and Japan from 1939 to 1941 that globalized the conflict.

This book will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students in history and political science, especially courses focused on World War II and the history of U.S. foreign relations.

Guest: Ross A. Kennedy (he/him), is a Professor of History and Chair at Illinois State University. He is the author of The Will to Believe: Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and America’s Strategy for Peace and Security (2009) as well as numerous other publications on the First World War.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers...

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yaroslav Hrytsak, "Ukraine: The Forging of a Nation" (PublicAffairs, 2024)

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the world witnessed the “creative, freewheeling, darkly humorous, and deeply resilient society” that is contemporary Ukraine. In this timely and original history, a bestseller in Ukraine, the historian Yaroslav Hrytsak tells the sweeping story of his nation through a meticulous examination of the major events, conflicts, and developments that have shaped it over the course of centuries.

Hrytsak, is a Ukrainian historian and public intellectual. Professor of the Ukrainian Catholic University and Honorary Professor of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Hrytsak has taught at Columbia and Harvard Universities and was a guest lecturer at the Central European University in Budapest. He is the author of many historical books, including several bestsellers and the recipient of numerous national and international awards. weaves a rich and detailed tapestry of a country in continual transformation.

Ukraine: The Forging of a Nation (PublicAffairs, 2024) is essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand Ukraine’s dramatic past and its global significance--from the 17th-century Cossack uprising to the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and Ukrainian independence, and from the evolution of the Ukrainian language to the warning signs that anticipated Russia’s 2022 invasion. This book is the definitive story of Ukraine and its people, as told by one of its most celebrated voices.

Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephan Kieninger, "The Diplomacy of Détente: Cooperative Security Policies from Helmut Schmidt to George Shultz" (Routledge, 2018)

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Diplomacy of Détente: Cooperative Security Policies from Helmut Schmidt to George Shultz (Routledge, 2020) investigates the underlying reasons for the longevity of détente and its impact on East–West relations. The volume examines the relevance of trade across the Iron Curtain as a means to facilitate mutual trust, as well as the emergence of new habits of transparency regardless of recurring military crises. A major theme of the book concerns Helmut Schmidt’s foreign policy and his contribution to the resilience of cooperative security policies in East–West relations. It examines Schmidt’s crucial role in the Euromissile crisis, his Ostpolitik diplomacy and his pan-European trade initiatives to engage the Soviet Union in a joint perspective of trade, industry and technology. Another key theme concerns the crisis in US–Soviet relations and the challenges of meaningful leadership communication between Washington and Moscow in the absence of backchannel diplomacy during the Carter years. The book depicts the freeze in US–Soviet relations after the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan, the declaration of martial law in Poland, and Helmut Schmidt’s efforts to serve as a mediator and interpreter working for a relaunch of US–Soviet dialogue. Eventually, the book highlights George Shultz’s pivotal role in the Reagan Administration’s efforts to improve US-Soviet relations, well before Mikhail Gorbachev’s arrival. This book will be of interest to students of Cold War studies, diplomatic history, foreign policy and international relations.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James D. Brown, "Cracking the Crab: Russian Espionage Against Japan, from Peter the Great to Richard Sorge" (Hurst, 2025)

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Richard Sorge is one of history’s most famous spies. This hard-drinking, womanising, motorcycle-crashing Soviet officer penetrated the German embassy in Tokyo during the 1930s and gathered intelligence credited with changing the course of the Second World War. It is an intriguing tale; but Sorge’s spy ring was just one chapter in a much longer history of Russian and Soviet espionage in and against Japan.

Cracking the Crab: Russian Espionage Against Japan, from Peter the Great to Richard Sorge (Hurst, 2025) by Dr. James D Brown tells the extraordinary full story of Russian intrigue targeting Japan, from first encounters in the eighteenth century to the Soviet declaration of war in August 1945. Colourful episodes include Gojong, King of Korea, being smuggled into the Russian legation dressed as a woman in 1896; the 1927 ‘Tanaka Memorial’, an infamous forgery purporting to be Japan’s hidden plan for world domination; and the secret intelligence of ‘Nero’, a Soviet agent supplying invaluable insight into Japanese strategy during the Second World War.

From Russians murdered in broad daylight in Meiji Tokyo to Soviet honey traps and ‘white magic’ at the Battle of Nomonhan, this is a landmark history of the covert struggle between two great powers of the modern age.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

NATO, the Indo-Pacific, and the Future of Burden-Sharing: A Conversation with Brian Blankenship

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Professor Brian Blankenship comes back to the New Books Network to talk about what his book, The Burden-Sharing Dilemma: Coercive Diplomacy in US Alliance Politics (Cornell University Press, 2023), might be able to tell us about the quickly changing nature of US military alliances across the globe. We discuss the implications of Europe's burgeoning rearmament, the prospect of a collective defense pact in the Indo-Pacific, and how changing technologies and threats might affect burden-sharing in future alliances.

Brian D. Blankenship is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephan Kieninger, "Dynamic Détente: The United States and Europe, 1964-1975" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016)

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This book examines the dynamic evolution of Western détente policies which sought to transform Europe and overcome its Cold War division through more communication and engagement. Kieninger challenges the traditional Cold War narrative that détente prolonged the division of Europe and precipitated America’s decline in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Rather, he argues that policymakers in the U.S. Department of State and in Western Europe envisaged the stability enabled by détente as a precondition for change, as Communist regimes saw a sense of security as a prerequisite for opening up their societies to Western influence over time. Kieninger identifies the Helsinki Accords, Lyndon Johnson’s bridge building, and Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik as efforts aimed at constructive changes in Eastern Europe through a multiplication of contacts, communication, and cooperation on all societal levels. This study also illuminates the longevity of America’s policy of peaceful change against the background of the nuclear stalemate and the military status quo.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jill Kastner and William C. Wohlforth, "A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In 2016 the United States was stunned by evidence of Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election. But it shouldn’t have been. Subversion—domestic interference to undermine or manipulate a rival—is as old as statecraft itself. In A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion (Oxford UP, 2025) Jill Kastner and William C. Wohlforth provide a compelling ride through the history of subversion. They examine subversion’s allure, its operational possibilities, and argue that, in our high stakes, changing technological landscape, a clear-eyed understanding of the history and parameters of subversion can help polities defend against it.

Jill Kastner is a scholar in the Department of War Studies at Kings College London. She has a doctorate in History from Harvard University. She specializes in Cold War crises in Berlin and the Middle East. Her work has appeared in The Nation and Foreign Affairs.

William C Wohlforth is the Daniel Webster Professor of Government at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. His most recent books are America Abroad: The United States’ Global Role in the 21st Century (2018), Written with Stephen G Brooks, and The History of International Relations and Russian Foreign Policy in the 20th century (2020), co edited with Anatoly V. Torkunov and Boris F Martynov.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Geoffrey Wawro, "The Vietnam War: A Military History" (Basic Books, 2024)

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Vietnam War cast a shadow over the American psyche from the moment it began. In its time it sparked budget deficits, campus protests, and an erosion of US influence around the world. Long after the last helicopter evacuated Saigon, Americans have continued to battle over whether it was ever a winnable war.

Based on thousands of pages of military, diplomatic, and intelligence documents, Geoffrey Wawro's The Vietnam War offers a definitive account of a war of choice that was doomed from its inception. In devastating detail, Wawro narrates campaigns where US troops struggled even to find the enemy in the South Vietnamese wilderness, let alone kill sufficient numbers to turn the tide in their favor. Yet the war dragged on, prolonged by presidents and military leaders who feared the political consequences of accepting defeat. In the end, no number of young lives lost or bombs dropped could prevent America's ally, the corrupt South Vietnamese regime, from collapsing the moment US troops retreated.

Broad, definitive, and illuminating, The Vietnam War: A Military History offers an unsettling, resonant story of the limitations of American power.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vappala Balachandran, "India and China at Odds in the Asian Century: A Diplomatic and Strategic History" (Hurst, 2025)

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

China and India have had a tense relationship, disagreeing over territory, support for each other’s rivals, and even, at times, leadership of the “Global South.” But there were periods where things seemed a bit rosier. For about a decade, between 1988 and 1998, relations between India and China thawed—and prompted heady predictions of an Asian century.

Vappala Balachandran, who was part of those off-line discussions with China, writes about the ups and downs of China-India relations in his latest book India and China at Odds in the Asian Century: A Diplomatic and Strategic History (Hurst: 2025)

Vappala Balachandran is a columnist, former special secretary for the Indian Cabinet Secretariat, and author of four books on Indian security, strategy and intelligence.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of India and China at Odds in the Asian Century. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Talin Suciyan, "Armenians in Turkey after the Second World War: An Archival Reader of USSR Consular Documents" (I. B. Tauris & Company, 2025)

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This reader brings to light newly discovered archival material compiled by the Soviet Consulate in Istanbul. The book reveals the lives and experience of Armenians in Turkey in the 1940s, with a particular focus on the process of emigration to Soviet Armenia. The accounts, translated for the first time into English, are comprised of Soviet officials' reports and first-hand testimony by survivors of their lives during the post-genocide period, making this an invaluable new contribution to the existing collections of Armenian survival testimonies. Placing the archival records on emigration in the context of both life in post-genocide Turkey and the 'repatriation' (nergakht) project in the Armenian Diaspora, this book, which also includes the original Russian documents, will be a useful resource for researchers and students of Armenian and Turkish history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

When World War II ended, about one million people whom the Soviet Union claimed as its citizens were outside the borders of the USSR, mostly in the Western-occupied zones of Germany and Austria. These “displaced persons,” or DPs—Russians, prewar Soviet citizens, and people from West Ukraine and the Baltic states forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1939—refused to repatriate to the Soviet Union despite its demands. Thus began one of the first big conflicts of the Cold War. In Lost Souls, Sheila Fitzpatrick draws on new archival research, including Soviet interviews with hundreds of DPs, to offer a vivid account of this crisis, from the competitive maneuverings of politicians and diplomats to the everyday lives of DPs.
American enthusiasm for funding the refugee organizations taking care of DPs quickly waned after the war. It was only after DPs were redefined—from “victims of war and Nazism” to “victims of Communism”—in 1947 that a solution was found: the United States would pay for the mass resettlement of DPs in America, Australia, and other countries outside Europe. The Soviet Union protested this “theft” of its citizens. But it was a coup for the United States. The choice of DPs to live a free life in the West, and the West’s welcome of them, became an important theme in America’s Cold War propaganda battle with the Soviet Union.

A compelling story of the early Cold War, Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War (Princeton UP, 2024)is also a rare chronicle of a refugee crisis that was solved.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt, "The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq" (Stanford UP, 2021)

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A new history of Middle East oil and the deep roots of American violence in Iraq. Iraq has been the site of some of the United States' longest and most sustained military campaigns since the Vietnam War. Yet the origins of US involvement in the country remain deeply obscured--cloaked behind platitudes about advancing democracy or vague notions of American national interests. Historian Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt's work, The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq (Stanford University Press, 2021) exposes the origins and deep history of U.S. intervention in Iraq. The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy weaves together histories of Arab nationalists, US diplomats, and Western oil execs to tell the parallel stories of the Iraq Petroleum Company and the resilience of Iraqi society. Drawing on new evidence--the private records of the IPC, interviews with key figures in Arab oil politics, and recently declassified US government documents--Wolfe-Hunnicutt covers the arc of the 20th century, from the pre-WWI origins of the IPC consortium and decline of British Empire, to the beginnings of covert US action in the region, and ultimately the nationalization of the Iraqi oil industry and perils of postcolonial politics. American policymakers of the Cold War-era inherited the imperial anxieties of their British forebears and inflated concerns about access to and potential scarcity of oil, giving rise to a "paranoid style" in US foreign policy. Wolfe-Hunnicutt deconstructs these policy practices to reveal how they fueled decades of American interventions in the region and shines a light on those places that America's covert empire-builders might prefer we not look.

Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt is Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History and American Foreign policy at California State University, Stanislaus.

Saman Nasser holds an M.A. in World History from James Madison University, where he currently works as an administrative staff.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Helen Thompson on Disorder and the Analysis of Contemporary Geopolitics

Tue, 20 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Helen Thompson, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University and co-host of the great podcast, These Times, about her approach to geopolitical analysis and the centrality of energy geopolitics in that approach. The pair start by talking about Thompson’s book, Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century (Cambridge UP, 2023), her background and training, and how she came to develop the distinctive style of geopolitical analysis she deploys, including on episodes of These Times. Vinsel and Thompson also discuss a number of topics, including military conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East and the global energy geopolitics of Net Zero, as a way of exploring Thompson’s way of thinking.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alan Strathern, "Converting Rulers: Global Patterns, 1450-1850" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Mon, 19 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Why did so many rulers throughout history risk converting to a new religion brought by outsiders? In his award-winning Unearthly Powers (2019), Dr. Alan Strathern set out a theoretical framework for understanding the relation between religion and political authority based on a distinction between two kinds of religion - immanentism and transcendentalism - and the different ways they made monarchy sacred. Please listen to his interview on that book on the New Books Network!

This ambitious and innovative companion volume Converting Rulers: Global Patterns, 1450–1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) tests and substantiates this approach using case studies from Kongo (1480–1530), Japan (1560–1614), Ayutthaya (Thailand, 1660–1690) and Hawaii (1800–1830). Through in-depth analysis of key turning points in the careers of warlords, chiefs and kings, a tapestry of unique characters and stories is brought to light. However, these examples ultimately demonstrate that global patterns of conversion can be established to illuminate the religious geography of the world today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dennis Ross, "Statecraft 2.0: What America Needs to Survive in a Multipolar World" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Sun, 18 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In a multipolar world where America wields less relative power, the United States can no longer get away with poor statecraft. To understand how the US can approach future national security challenges, I spoke with Dennis Ross, a senior US diplomat and the counselor and William Davidson Distinguished Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. His new book, Statecraft 2.0: What America Needs to Lead in a Multipolar World (Oxford University Press, 2025) offers a revised toolkit for US foreign policy and global leadership.

The United States may still be the world's strongest country, but it now faces real challenges at both a global and regional level. The unipolar world which was dominated by America after the Cold War is gone. Unlike the Soviet Union, China is both a military and economic competitor and it is actively challenging the norms and institutions that the US used to shape an international order during and after the Cold War. Directly and indirectly, it has partners trying to undo the American-dominated order, with Russia seeking to extinguish Ukraine, and Iran trying to undermine American presence, influence, and any set of rules for the Middle East that it does not dominate.

The failures of American policy in Afghanistan and Iraq have weakened the domestic consensus for a US leadership role internationally. Traditions in US foreign policy, especially the American sense of exceptionalism, have at different points justified both withdrawal and international activism. Iraq and Afghanistan fed the instinct to withdraw and to end the “forever wars.” But the folly of these US interventions did not necessarily mean that all use of force to back diplomacy or specific political ends was wrong; rather it meant in these cases, the Bush Administration failed in the most basic task of good statecraft: namely, marrying objectives and means. Nothing more clearly defines effective statecraft than identifying well-considered goals and then knowing how to use all the tools of statecraft—diplomatic, economic, military, intelligence, information, cyber, scientific, education—to achieve them. But all too often American presidents have adopted goals that were poorly defined and not thought through.

In Statecraft 2.0, Dennis Ross explains why failing to marry objectives and means has happened so often in American foreign policy. He uses historical examples to illustrate the factors that account for this, including political pressures, weak understanding of the countries where the US has intervened, changing objectives before achieving those that have been established, relying too much on ourselves and too little on allies and partners. To be fair, there have not only been failures, there have been successes as well. Ross uses case studies to look more closely at the circumstances in which Administrations have succeeded and failed in marrying objectives and means. He distills the lessons from good cases of statecraft—German unification in NATO, the first Gulf War, the surge in Iraq 2007-8—and bad cases of statecraft—going to war in Iraq 2003, and the Obama policy toward Syria. Based on those lessons, he develops a framework for applying today a statecraft approach to our policy toward China, Iran, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The book concludes with how a smart statecraft approach would shape policy toward the new national security challenges of climate, pandemics, and cyber.

Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lines of Control: India’s Foreign Policy and China

Sat, 17 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This podcast episode, hosted by Kikee Doma Bhutia from the University of Tartu, features journalist and analyst Aadil Brar discussing India's foreign policy amidst rising global tensions. The conversation focuses on India’s balancing act between the US, China, and its own strategic autonomy in a contested Indo-Pacific region.

Key topics include India’s evolving role as a middle power, responding to China's assertiveness along the India-China border and in the Indo-Pacific, while maintaining its traditional non-alignment stance. India’s foreign policy is at a crossroads, shaped by five tense years since the Galwan Valley clash with China. Despite rounds of talks, the border remains uneasy and trust is scarce. Today, China’s assertiveness drives nearly every major Indian strategic decision-from military deployments and Quad partnerships to concerns over Beijing’s mega-dams on the Brahmaputra. Meanwhile, the US sees India as a key counterweight to China in the Indo-Pacific, but Delhi is determined to maintain its independence and avoid being boxed into alliances. As India watches China’s moves from the Himalayas to Taiwan, the question is clear: Are we witnessing a true pivot in Indian foreign policy, or simply a sharp recalibration to meet new realities? The answer will shape Asia’s balance of power for years to come.

The podcast was brought to you by host Dr. Kikee Doma Bhutia a Research Fellow and India Coordinator at the Asia Centre, University of Tartu, Estonia. Her current research combines folkloristics, international relations and Asian studies, focusing on the role of religion and culture in times of crisis, national and regional identities, and geopolitics conflict between India and China.

The podcast guest speaker Aadil Brar is a journalist and international affairs analyst based in Taipei, currently a Reporter at TaiwanPlus News. His reporting focuses on international security, U.S.-China relations, and East Asian security. Previously, he was a China news reporter for Newsweek and has contributed to the BBC World Service, The Print India, and National Geographic. In 2023, he was a Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs Fellow and a visiting scholar at National Chengchi University in Taipei. Brar holds a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of British Columbia and an MSc. in International Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stuart Ward, "Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Fri, 16 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

How did Britain cease to be global? In Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Professor Stuart Ward tells the panoramic history of the end of Britain, tracing the ways in which Britishness has been imagined, experienced, disputed and ultimately discarded across the globe since the end of the Second World War. From Indian independence, West Indian immigration and African decolonization to the Suez.

Crisis and the Falklands War, he uncovers the demise of Britishness as a global civic idea and its impact on communities across the globe. He also shows the consequences of this diminished 'global reach' in Britain itself, from the Troubles in Northern Ireland to resurgent Englishness and the startling success of separatist political agendas in Scotland and Wales. Untied Kingdom puts the contemporary travails of the Union for the first time in their full global perspective as part of the much larger story of the progressive rollback of Britain's imaginative frontiers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Charlie English, "The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War" (Random House, 2025)

Sun, 04 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

For nearly five decades after the Second World War, the Iron Curtain divided Europe, forming the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the war was fought psychologically. It was a battle for hearts, minds, and intellects. Few understood this more clearly than George Minden, head of a covert intelligence operation known as the “CIA book program,” which aimed to undermine Soviet censorship and inspire revolt by offering different visions of thought and culture.
From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden’s “book club” secretly sent ten million banned titles into the East. Volumes were smuggled aboard trucks and yachts, dropped from balloons, hidden aboard trains, and stowed in travelers’ luggage. Nowhere were the books welcomed more warmly than in Poland, where the texts would circulate covertly among circles of like-minded readers, quietly making the case against Soviet communism. Such was the demand for Minden’s books that dissidents began to reproduce these works in the underground. By the late 1980s, illicit literature was so pervasive in Poland that censorship broke down: the Iron Curtain soon followed.
Charlie English narrates this tale of Cold War spycraft, smuggling, and secret printing operations for the first time, highlighting the work of a handful of extraordinary people who fought for intellectual freedom—people like Mirosław Chojecki, who suffered beatings, imprisonment, and exile in pursuit of his clandestine mission. The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War (Random House, 2025) is a story about the power of the printed word as a means of resistance and liberation. Books, it shows, can set you free.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeremy Black, "British Politics and Foreign Policy, 1727-44" (Routledge, 2014)

Sat, 03 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Covering the period from the end of the Anglo-French alliance in 1731 to the declaration of war between the two powers in 1744, British Politics and Foreign Policy, 1727-44 (Routledge, 2014) charts a turbulent period in British politics that witnessed the last decade of the Walpole ministry, the attempt to replace it by a Patriot government, and the return of the Old Corps Whigs to a process of dominance. In particular it reveals how ministerial change and political fortunes were closely linked to foreign policy, with foreign policy both affecting, and being affected by, political developments. The book draws upon a great range of foreign and domestic sources, but makes particular use of foreign diplomatic records. These are important as many negotiations were handled, at least in part, through envoys in London. Moreover, these diplomats regularly spoke with George II and his ministers, and some were personal friends of envoys and could be used for secret negotiations outside normal channels.

The range of sources consulted ensures that the book offers more than any previous book to cover the period as a whole, whilst not simply becoming a detailed study of a number of episodes. Instead it retains the strong structural aspects of the relationship between foreign policy and politics necessary to examine questions about political stability, motivation and effectiveness. Following on from Jeremy Black's previous studies on eighteenth-century foreign policy, 'Politics and Foreign Policy under George I' (covering the period 1714-27) this new book takes the story up to 1744 and continues to illuminate the complex and often opaque workings of the British state at a turbulent period of European history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Subho Basu, "Intimation of Revolution: Global Sixties and the Making of Bangladesh" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Fri, 02 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Intimation of Revolution: Global Sixties and the Making of Bangladesh (Cambridge UP, 2023) analyzes the growth of Bengali nationalism in East Pakistan during the 1950s and 60s, highlighting the interplay of global politics and local socio-economic changes. The book posits that the 1969 revolution and the 1971 liberation war were influenced by the "global sixties," which reshaped Pakistan's political environment and paved the way for Bangladesh's creation. It challenges the conventional view of Bangladesh as solely a consequence of the Indo-Pakistani conflict, instead portraying it as a nation forged by Bengali nationalists resisting internal colonization by the Pakistani military-bureaucratic regime. The narrative explores how this resistance and nation-building process was inspired by concurrent decolonization movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, while also being influenced by the Cold War competition between the USA, the USSR, and China.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeremy Black, "Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of George I, 1714-1727" (Routledge, 2016)

Thu, 01 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Through its focus on the relationship between foreign and domestic politics, Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of George I, 1714-1727 (Routledge, 2016) provides a new perspective on the often fractious and tangled events of George I's reign (1714-27). This was a period of transition for Britain, as royal authority gave way to cabinet government, and as the country began to exercise increased influence upon the world stage. It was a reign that witnessed the trauma of the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion, saw Britain fighting Spain as part of the Quadruple Alliance, and in which Britain confronted the rise of Russia under Peter the Great.

There has been relatively little new detailed work on this subject since Hatton's biography of George I appeared in 1978, and that book, while impressive, devoted relatively little attention to the domestic political dimension of foreign policy. In contrast, Black links diplomacy to domestic politics to show that foreign policy was a key aspect of government as well as the leading battleground both for domestic politics and for ministerial rivalries. As a result he demonstrates how party identities in foreign policy were not marginal, to either policy or party, but, instead, central to both. The research is based upon a wealth of both British and foreign archive material, including State Papers Domestic, Scotland, Ireland and Regencies, as well as Foreign. Extensive use is also made of parliamentary and ministerial papers, as well as the private papers of numerous diplomats. Foreign archives consulted include papers from Hanover, Osnabruck, Darmstadt, Marburg, Munich, Paris, The Hague, Vienna and Turin. By drawing upon such a wide ranging array of sources, this book offers a rich and nuanced view of politics and foreign policy under George I.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, "The Battle of Manila: Poisoned Victory in the Pacific War" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In our conversation about The Battle of Manila (Oxford University Press, 2025), Nicholas Evan Sarantakes explains how U.S. forces under General Douglas MacArthur won a climactic battle in the Pacific during World War II, but at a terrible cost.

In 1945 the United States and Japan fought the largest and most devastating land battle of their war in the Pacific, a month-long struggle for the city of Manila. The only urban fighting in the Pacific theater, the Battle of Manila was the third-bloodiest battle of World War II, behind Leningrad and Berlin. It was a key piece of the campaign to retake control of the Philippine Islands, which itself signified the culmination of the war, breaking the back of Japanese strategic power and sealing its outcome.
In The Battle of Manila, Nicholas Sarantakes offers the first in-depth account of this crucial campaign from the American, Japanese, and, significantly, Filipino perspective. Fighting was building by building, with both sides forced to adapt to the new combat environment. None of the U.S. units that entered Manila had any previous training in urban warfare—yet, Sarantakes shows, they learned on the fly how to use tanks, flamethrowers, air, and artillery assets in support of infantry assaults. Their effective use of these weapons was an important factor in limiting U.S. casualties, even as it may also have contributed to a catastrophic loss of civilian lives.
The battle was a strategic U.S. victory, but Sarantakes reveals how closely it hinged upon the interplay between a series of key decisions in both U.S. and Japanese headquarters, and a professional culture in the U.S. military that allowed the Americans to adapt faster and in more ways than their opponents. Among other aspects of the conflict, The Battle of Manila explores the importance of the Filipino guerillas on the ground, the use of irregular warfare, the effective use of intelligence, the impact of military education, and the limits of Japanese resistance.
Ultimately, Sarantakes shows Manila to be a major turning in both World War II and American history. Once the United States regained control of the city, Japan was in a checkmate situation. Their defeat was certain, and it was clear that the United States would be the dominate political power in post-war Asia and the Pacific. This fascinating account shines a light on one of the war's most under-represented and highly significant moments.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brian Masaru Hayashi, "Asian American Spies: How Asian Americans Helped Win the Allied Victory" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Spies deep behind enemy lines; double agents; a Chinese American James Bond; black propaganda radio broadcasters; guerrilla fighters; pirates; smugglers; prostitutes and dancers as spies; and Asian Americans collaborating with Axis Powers.

All these colorful individuals form the story of Asian Americans in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of today's CIA. Brian Masaru Hayashi brings to light for the first time the role played by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Americans in America's first centralized intelligence agency in its fight against the Imperial Japanese forces in east Asia during World War II. They served deep behind enemy lines gathering intelligence for American and Chinese troops locked in a desperate struggle against Imperial Japanese forces on the Asian continent. Other Asian Americans produced and disseminated statements by bogus peace groups inside the Japanese empire to weaken the fighting resolve of the Japanese. Still others served with guerrilla forces attacking enemy supply and communication lines behind enemy lines. Engaged in this deadly conflict, these Asian Americans agents encountered pirates, smugglers, prostitutes, and dancers serving as the enemy's spies, all the while being subverted from within the OSS by a double agent and without by co-ethnic collaborators in wartime Shanghai.

Drawing on recently declassified documents, Asian American Spies: How Asian Americans Helped Win the Allied Victory (Oxford UP, 2021) challenges the romanticized and stereotyped image of these Chinese, Japanese, and Korean American agents--the Model Minority-while offering a fresh perspective on the Allied victory in the Pacific Theater of World War II.

Jessica Moloughney is a public librarian in New York and a recent graduate of Queens College with a Master’s Degree in History and Library Science.

Let's face it, most of the popular podcasts out there are dumb. NBN features scholars (like you!), providing an enriching alternative to students. We partner with presses like Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge to make academic research accessible to all. Please consider sharing the New Books Network with your students. Download this poster here to spread the word.

Please share this interview on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Bluesky. Don't forget to subscribe to our Substack here to receive our weekly newsletter.

150 million lifetime downloads. Advertise on the New Books Network. Watch our promotional video.

Learn how to make the most of our library.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reider Payne, "War and Diplomacy in the Napoleonic Era" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Though Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh remains well known today for his role in shaping the post-Napoleonic peace settlement in Europe, his half-brother Sir Charles Stewart has received far less attention despite his own prominent part in the politics and diplomacy of those years. In War and Diplomacy in the Napoleonic Era: Sir Charles Stewart, Castlereagh and the Balance of Power in Europe (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Reider Payne describes the adventurous life of the third Marquess of Londonderry and the roles he played in the events of his time.

As a young man Charles Stewart initially pursued a career in the military rather than one in politics, and served in the cavalry during Great Britain’s war against revolutionary France in the 1790s. After a brief period in the War Office he resumed his military career and served with the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsular War. His record as an officer and his relationship with his half-brother led to his appointment as an ambassador – first to Prussia, then to Austria – in which roles he represented Britain at the courts of her most prominent allies during the final stages of the Napoleonic Wars. Though Charles was often better known for his social escapades, he served ably as Britain’s ambassador to Austria until his brother’s suicide in 1822, during which time he was active in both post-Napoleonic diplomacy and the efforts to collect incriminating evidence against Princess Caroline of Brunswick in aid of the Prince Regent’s effort to divorce her.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Max Hastings, “Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975” (Harper, 2018)

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

People of various political stripes in many countries (particularly those countries where various political stripes are allowed) have been arguing about the Vietnam War for a long time. The participants in these debates were (and are) always quick to assign blame in what seems to be an endless attempt to justify “their side” and vilify “the other side.”

In this context, Max Hastings’ new book Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 (HarperCollins, 2018) comes as something of a relief, for he essentially says that all the “sides” in the war made a moral mess of things. According to Hastings, the North Vietnamese, the South Vietnamese, the French, and the Americans were all guilty as sin of cynically starting, ruthlessly fighting, and stubbornly continuing a conflict that was, if not “unnecessary,” at least not worth it for any of them. In Hastings’ very readable account, everyone gets their hands very dirty indeed. Listen in.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Maurizio Ferrera, "Politics and Social Visions: Ideology, Conflict, and Solidarity in the EU" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The starting point of this book is the 'civil war' of ideas that broke out during the early 2010s about the purpose and even the desirability of the European Union as a polity, with a number of right-wing populist formations openly advocating for exiting the Union. The sovereign debt crisis triggered a spiral of ideological decommunalization: national leaders seemed to have lost that sense of 'togetherness' and mutual bonds that had been laboriously developed over decades of integration.

Politics and Social Visions: Ideology, Conflict, and Solidarity in the EU (Oxford UP, 2024) explores this politically disruptive process from an ideational perspective, on the assumption that symbols and visions play a crucial role. In processes of polity formation, ideologies offer competing partisan views, but tend to converge along the 'communal' dimension, which defines the nature and boundaries of the emerging polity. This convergence has been a challenge for the EU since its origins, as it has required the construction of a coherent and acceptable image of Europe as a compound polity of nation-states with a divisive past. Maurizio Ferrera offers a reconstruction of how the main ideological currents have struggled - and often failed - to reconfigure their horizontal profiles (i.e. their images of the national within Europe) into a new vertical profile (i.e. an image of the European within the national). The challenge has been especially demanding for European left-wing parties, which have been largely unable to forge a shared and recognizable 'social vision' of the European Union. Only during the COVID pandemic have the seeds of a novel communal consensus emerged that might prove capable of defeating the anti-communal views of Eurosceptic ideologies and free market technocrats.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paul M. McGarr, "Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States, and India's Secret Cold War" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States, and India's Secret Cold War (Cambridge UP, 2024) is the first comprehensive history of India's secret Cold War. It examines interventions made by the intelligence and security services of Britain and the United States in post-colonial India and their strategic, political, and socio-cultural impact on the subcontinent.

It showcases how the interventions of these intelligence agencies have had a significant and enduring impact on the political and social fabric of South Asia. The specter of a 'foreign hand', or external intelligence activity, real and imagined, has occupied a prominent place in India's political discourse, journalism, and cultural production. The book probes the nexus between intelligence and statecraft in South Asia. It analyses how the relationships between agencies and governments helped shaping Indian democracy. Through a lively cast of characters and an analysis of covert operations, the book explores Western (US and UK) as well as Soviet perceptions of India during the Cold War. At the same time, it points to India’s agency in plying the Cold War game. The book also moves beyond the Cold War to explore Indian intelligence in the post-Cold War years and in the aftermath of 9/11.

Looking at the relationship between intelligence, politics, society, and (pop)culture, the book asks why, in contrast to Western assumptions about surveillance, South Asians associate intelligence with covert action, grand conspiracy, and justifications for repression. In doing so, it uncovers a fifty-year battle for hearts and minds in the Indian subcontinent.

Paul McGarr is a lecturer in intelligence studies at King’s College London. He has published over two dozen peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters on South Asian security and intelligence issues

These have appeared in Intelligence & National Security, The Journal of Strategic Studies, Diplomatic History, The International History Review and many other journals and edited collections.

He is also the author of two monographs, The Cold War in South Asia: Britain, the United States and the Indian Subcontinent, 1945-1965 published by Cambridge University Press in 2013 and Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States and India’s Secret Cold War published by Cambridge University Press in 2024.

Mentioned:

The Church Committee Report (Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (1976),
Paul Mc Garr, The Cold War in South Asia (2013)
Luca Trenta, The President’s Kill List (2023)
Hugh Wilford, The CIA: An Imperial History (2024)
JFK Assassination Records

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Serhiy Kudelia, "Seize the City, Undo the State: The Inception of Russia's War on Ukraine" (Oxford UP, 2015)

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

How do separatist conflicts arise and spread? When does separatism become a cover for a foreign aggression? How do local communities respond when state institutions collapse, and militants take over? The armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine, which started eight years before Russia's full-scale invasion, contains unique evidence to address each of these questions.

In Seize the City, Undo the State: The Inception of Russia's War on Ukraine (Oxford UP, 2015), Serhiy Kudelia offers an authoritative study of the conflict at its initial stage--2013-14--based on a meticulous comparison of mobilization dynamics in over dozen towns of Donbas as well as in two major cities outside of it: Kharkiv and Odesa. Through his extensive travels and numerous interviews with conflict witnesses and participants, Kudelia explains how a small group of Russian agents and local militants succeeded in eliminating state control over the largest and most densely urbanized region of Ukraine but failed to do it elsewhere. Kudelia challenges the conventional accounts of the armed conflict in Donbas, which portray it either as an interstate conflict entirely manufactured by Moscow or as a civil war that broke out without any external influence. Instead, he argues that local actors prepared ideological and organizational basis for the uprising, but the successful spread of separatist control resulted from the covert intervention of Russian agents and widespread collaboration with them of town administrators and community activists. His findings also show that when enough members of local communities organized to resist militant takeovers, the separatist challenges there quickly dissipated.

A fine-grained and highly original on-the-ground analysis of the origins of the wider Russian-Ukrainian war that broke out in 2022, this book offers broader insights into the conditions under which external intervention may trigger the rise of an armed insurgency in a society torn apart by political and ideological disagreements.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eric Min, "Words of War: Negotiation as a Tool of Conflict" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Of all interstate conflicts across the last two centuries, two-thirds have ended through negotiated agreement. Wartime diplomacy is thus commonly seen as a costless and mechanical process solely designed to end fighting. But as Dr. Eric Min argues in Words of War: Negotiation as a Tool of Conflict (Cornell University Press, 2025), that wartime negotiations are not just peacemaking tools. They are in fact a highly strategic activity that can also help states manage, fight, and potentially win wars.

To demonstrate that wartime talk does more than simply end hostilities, Dr. Min distinguishes between two kinds of negotiations: sincere and insincere. Whereas sincere negotiations are good faith honest attempts to reach peace, insincere negotiations exploit diplomacy for some other purpose, such as currying gaining political support or remobilizing forces. Two factors determine whether and how belligerents will negotiate: the amount of pressure that outside parties can place on belligerents them to engage in diplomacy, and information obtained from fighting on the battlefield.

Combining statistical and computational text analyses with qualitative case studies ranging from the War of the Roman Republic to the Korean War, Dr. Min shows that negotiations are more likely to occur with strong external pressures. A combination of such pressures and indeterminate battlefield activity, however, will most likely leads to insincere negotiations that may stoke fighting rather than end it. By revealing that diplomacy can sometimes be counterproductive to peace, Words of War compels us to rethink the assumption that it "cannot hurt" to promote diplomacy during war.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kornel Chang, "A Fractured Liberation: Korea Under U.S. Occupation" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Four decades of Japanese colonialism in Korea ended abruptly in August 1945. It took three weeks for U.S. troops to arrive, which started almost three years of U.S. military occupation. By the end of the occupation, Korea was permanently divided into North and South, with Seoul set on an authoritarian path that would persist for decades.

Kornel Chang covers these tumultuous three years in A Fractured Liberation: Korea under U.S. Occupation (Harvard University Press: 2025), and describes how the U.S.’s increased fears of Communism and the Soviet Union ended up puncturing Korean political aspirations.

Kornel Chang is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Rutgers University-Newark. He is a scholar of U.S. immigration and foreign relations, focusing on U.S.-East Asian relations. His first book Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (University of California Press: 2012) is a history of Asian migration to the Pacific Northwest, revealing how their movements sparked some of the first battles over the border in North America. It won the Association for Asian American Studies History Book Prize and was a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Book Prize.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of A Fractured Liberation. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stacie A. Kent, "Coercive Commerce: Global Capital and Imperial Governance at the End of the Qing Empire" (Hong Kong UP, 2024)

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In 1842, the Qing Empire signed a watershed commercial treaty with Great Britain, beginning a century-long period in which geopolitical and global economic entanglements intruded on Qing territory and governance. Previously understood as an era of “semi-colonialism,” Stacie A. Kent reframes this century of intervention by shedding light on the generative force of global capital.

Based on extensive research, conducted with British and Chinese government archives, Coercive Commerce (Hong Kong University Press, 2024) shows how commercial treaties and the regulatory regime that grew out of them catalyzed a revised arts of governance in Qing-administered China. Capital, which had long been present in Chinese merchants’ pocketbooks, came to shape and even govern Chinese statecraft during the “treaty era.” This book contends that Qing administrators alternately resisted and adapted to this new reality through taxation systems such as transit passes and the Imperial Maritime Customs Service by reorganizing Chinese territory into a space where global circuits of capital could circulate and reproduce at an ever greater scale.

Offering a deep dive into the coercive nature of capitalism and the historically specific ways global capital reproduction took root in Qing China, Coercive Commerce will interest historians of capital and modern China alike.

Huiying Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Purdue University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Walls, Warnings, and the War on Fentanyl: Peter Andreas on Trump’s Border Politics

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, Peter Andreas, John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University and author of Border Games: The Politics of Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide, 3rd edition (Cornell UP, 2022) and The Illicit Global Economy (Oxford UP, 2025), joins RBI Director John Torpey to unpack the myths and realities of border control, illicit trade, and tariffs in the era of Trump. Why do Trump’s border policies resonate with so many despite lower deportation numbers than previous administrations? How are fentanyl, tariffs, and military threats shaping U.S. relations with Mexico and Canada? Andreas explains the performative politics of the border, the historical amnesia around immigration enforcement, and why the lines between legal and illegal economies are blurrier than we think.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sinem Arcak Casale, "Gifts in the Age of Empire: Ottoman-Safavid Cultural Exchange, 1500–1639" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

When the Safavid dynasty, founded in 1501, built a state that championed Iranian identity and Twelver Shi’ism, it prompted the more established Ottoman Empire to align itself definitively with Sunni legalism. The political, religious, and military conflicts that arose have since been widely studied, but little attention has been paid to their diplomatic relationship.

In Gifts in the Age of Empire: Ottoman-Safavid Cultural Exchange, 1500–1639 (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Dr. Sinem Arcak Casale sets out to explore these two major Muslim empires through a surprising lens: gifts. Countless treasures—such as intricate carpets, gilded silver cups, and ivory-tusk knives—flowed from the Safavid to the Ottoman Empire throughout the sixteenth century. While only a handful now survive, records of these gifts exist in court chronicles, treasury records, poems, epistolary documents, ambassadorial reports, and travel narratives.

Tracing this elaborate archive, Dr. Casale treats gifts as representative of the complicated Ottoman-Safavid coexistence, demonstrating how their rivalry was shaped as much by culture and aesthetics as it was by religious or military conflict. Gifts in the Age of Empire explores how gifts were no mere accessories to diplomacy but functioned as a mechanism of competitive interaction between these early modern Muslim courts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrew Canessa and Manuela Lavinas Picq, "Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State" (U Arizona Press, 2025)

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Although Indigenous peoples are often perceived as standing outside political modernity, Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State (University of Arizona Press, 2025) by Dr. Andrew Canessa & Dr. Manuela Lavinas Picq takes the provocative view that Indigenous people have been fundamental to how contemporary state sovereignty was imagined, theorized, and practiced.

Delving into European political philosophy, comparative politics, and contemporary international law, this open-access book shows how the concept of indigeneity has shaped the development of the modern state. The exclusion of Indigenous people was not a collateral byproduct; it was a political project in its own right. The book argues that indigeneity is a political identity relational to modern nation-states and that Indigenous politics, although marking the boundary of the state, are co-constitutive of colonial processes of state-making. In showing how indigeneity is central to how the international system of states operates, the book forefronts Indigenous peoples as political actors to reject essentializing views that reduce them to cultural “survivors” rooted in the past.

With insights drawn from diverse global contexts and empirical research from Bolivia and Ecuador, this work advocates for the relevance of Indigenous studies within political science and argues for an ethnography of sovereignty in anthropology. Savages and Citizens makes a compelling case for the centrality of Indigenous perspectives to understand the modern state from political theory to international studies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Azmeary Ferdoush, "Sovereign Atonement: Citizenship, Territory, and the State at the Bangladesh-India Border" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The former border enclaves of Bangladesh and India existed as extra-territorial spaces since 1947. They were finally exchanged and merged as host state territories in 2015.

Sovereign Atonement: Citizenship, Territory, and the State at the Bangladesh-India Border (Cambridge UP, 2024) focuses on the protracted territorial exchange and experiences of the newly accepted Bangladeshi citizens. It grapples with one broad question: why did the state assume an active role in smoothing the once excluded population's experiences into their inclusion within the sovereign project? The book dives deep into an ethnographic and historical reading of the everyday state, land and territory, informality, (non)state actors, and performance of sovereignty. Furthermore, it troubles the often taken-for-granted understanding of exception, governance, and citizenship. As such, Ferdoush offers a retake on the two seemingly contradictory concepts -'sovereign' and 'atonement'- to demonstrate that bridged together these concepts as sovereign atonement enables a novel way of appreciating geopolitical narratives, political geographies, and nationalistic discourse in South Asia and beyond.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vuk Vuksanovic, "Serbia’s Balancing Act: Between Russia and the West" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Even before its rebirth as a nation in the 1990s, Serbia had acquired a reputation abroad as Russia’s stalwart Slavic ally in the Western Balkans.

Yet, as Vuk Vuksanović argues in Serbia’s Balancing Act: Between Russia and the West (Bloomsbury, 2025), two centuries of history and the 25 years since the fall of Slobodan Milošević tell a more nuanced story.

"When it comes to Russia's interests,” he writes, “there are no sacred cows in Serbia-Russia relations". Governments in Belgrade will be courted and then discarded depending on Moscow’s needs, and they know it. For their part, the Serbs depend on Russian political support in their campaign for a face-saving settlement of the long-running Kosovo dispute but know their economic success hinges on their ties to the EU and the US. Belgrade must "manipulate the superpower rivalry to secure economic resources from both superpowers and its political strategic autonomy".

Vuk Vuksanović is a foreign policy expert at the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy, an associate of the Central and South-East Europe Programme at LSE IDEAS, and a prominent media commentator on strategy in the Balkans.

*His book recommendations were Rival Power: Russia in Southeast Europe by Dimitar Bechev (Yale University Press, 2017) and Why War? by Christopher Coker (Hurst, 2021).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts on Substack at 242.news.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniela Richterova, "Watching the Jackals: Prague's Covert Liaisons with Cold War Terrorists and Revolutionaries" (Georgetown UP, 2025)

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The untold history of Czechoslovakia's complex relations with Middle Eastern terrorists and revolutionaries during the closing decades of the Cold War

In the 1970s and 1980s, Prague became a favorite destination for the world's most prominent terrorists and revolutionaries. They arrived here to seek refuge, enjoy recreation, or hold secret meetings aimed at securing training, arms, and other forms of support. While some were welcome with open arms, others were closely watched and were eventually ousted.

Daniela Richterova's Watching the Jackals: Prague's Covert Liaisons with Cold War Terrorists and Revolutionaries (Georgetown University Press, 2025) is the untold history of Czechoslovakia's complex relations with Middle Eastern terrorists and revolutionaries during the closing decades of the Cold War. Based on recently declassified intelligence files, Richterova unveils the story of Prague's engagement with various factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization, along with some of the era's most infamous terrorists, including Carlos the Jackal, the Munich Olympics massacre commander Abu Daoud, and the Abu Nidal Organization. In this gripping account, Richterova explains why "Cold War Jackals" gravitated toward Prague and how the country's leaders reacted to their visits, and she uncovers the role Czechoslovakia's security and intelligence apparatus – the StB (Státní bezpečnost) played in these, at times, dangerous liaisons.

Drawing on interviews and remarkably detailed records from the former Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic), Richterova offers readers interested in the intelligence world a fascinating account of how states use their spies to pursue covert policies with violent nonstate actors. The book also introduces new evidence and nuances into old debates about whether the Communist Bloc supported terrorism.

Daniela Richterova is associate professor in the Department of War Studies at King's College London. She is a leading expert among the new generation of intelligence and security scholars, and she specializes in the history of Cold War espionage and state relations with terrorists and revolutionaries. She regularly publishes in leading academic and media outlets, including International Affairs and Foreign Policy

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Luca Trenta, "The President's Kill List: Assassination and Us Foreign Policy Since 1945" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Investigative reporter Bob Woodward once noted that assassination was the Scarlett letter of American politics because targeted killings challenge the image of the United States as a liberal democracy and the driving force behind a rules-based international order. In his new book, Luca Trenta documents how assassination and assassination attempts have been a persistent feature in US foreign policy. The US government has relied on a variety of direct methods as well as more indirectly laying the groundwork for local assassins.

Using primary documents and interviews, The President’s Kill List meticulously documents how policymakers decided on assassination and the level of Presidential control over these decisions. The book analyzes the evolution of assassination policies and reveals how successive administrations - through private justifications and public legitimations - ensured that assassination remained an available tool. The podcast includes insightful comments on assassination and the Trump administration. The paperback is coming out in May 2025.

Dr. Luca Trenta is an Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political and Cultural Studies at Swansea University. His previous publications include an earlier book, Risk and Presidential Decision-making: The Emergence of Foreign Policy Crises (Routledge, 2016) and he hosts Out of the Shadows, interviewing authors and experts in intelligence and covert operations. In his public-facing scholarship, Dr. Trenta has appeared in a History Channel documentary called Secret Wars Uncovered (2020) and he regularly contributes to and collaborates with media outlets such as the BBC.

Mentioned:

Joseph Burkholder Smith, Portrait of a Cold Warrior (1976)
John Frankenheimer, The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
The Ford-Colby-Kissinger meeting is at page 35 here and Luca’s story about the meeting is here
“Family Jewels” document of CIA employee responses to James Schlesinger asking to report activities outside CIA charter (1973)
Rebecca Sanders, Plausible Legality: Legal Culture and Political Imperative in the Global War on Terror (2018)
The Church Committee Report (Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (1976)
Hugh Wilford, The CIA: An Imperial History (2024)
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2008)
Tim Weiner, The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century (2024)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tycho van der Hoog, "Comrades Beyond the Cold War: North Korea and the Liberation of Southern Africa" (Hurst, 2025)

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

North Korea was an important player in the decolonisation of Africa. Freedom fighters across the continent received vital assistance from Pyongyang, and almost all southern African independence leaders travelled to the North Korean capital at some point, in search of support. This alliance has continued into the twenty-first century, with African postcolonial governments throwing a lifeline to Pyongyang’s increasingly isolated economy by hiring North Korean companies, despite United Nations sanctions.

In Comrades Beyond the Cold War: North Korea and the Liberation of Southern Africa (Hurst, 2025), Dr Tycho van der Hoog examines the relations between victorious southern African liberation movements and North Korea, from the 1960s to the present. He explains why African presidents sang and danced at parties in Pyongyang, and why North Korean books were translated into Swahili and Afrikaans. He reveals how African soldiers were trained in guerrilla warfare by North Korean instructors, and how North Korean labourers construct monuments in Africa in the shape of AK-47s. And he explores the question of how revolutionary regimes, motivated by a need for survival, work together to defy the global order.

Based on extensive research across four continents—including recently disclosed African liberation archives and Korean diplomatic cables—this innovative study is the first book on African–North Korean relations.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fractured Alliances: Trump, Ukraine, and Europe's Security Dilemma

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode, RBI director John Torpey speaks with Estonian parliamentarian and defense expert Kalev Stoicescu about the recent tensions between the United States and Ukraine following a contentious meeting between Presidents Trump and Zelensky. Stoicescu critiques Trump's transactional diplomacy, emphasizing the critical role of alliances such as NATO in maintaining international peace and stability. He stresses Europe's need to strengthen its defense capabilities independently, warning that Europe's security depends on sustained and unified support for Ukraine. Stoicescu proposes a structured peace agreement, underscoring the necessity of robust international guarantees for Ukraine’s security. The conversation further explores Europe's shifting perspectives on military engagement in response to ongoing Russian aggression.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matthew Fuhrmann, "Influence without Arms: The New Logic of Nuclear Deterrence" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

How does nuclear technology influence international relations? While many books focus on countries armed with nuclear weapons, this volume puts the spotlight on those who have the technology to build nuclear bombs but choose not to. These weapons-capable countries, such as Brazil, Germany, and Japan, have what is known as nuclear latency, and they shape world politics in important ways.

Matthew Fuhrmann navigates a critical yet poorly understood issue by offering a definitive account of nuclear latency. He identifies global trends, explains why countries obtain nuclear latency and analyzes its consequences for international security. Influence Without Arms presents new statistical and case evidence that nuclear latency enhances deterrence, provides greater influence, and triggers conflict and arms races. The book offers a framework to explain when nuclear latency increases security and, when it incites instability, generates far-reaching implications for deterrence, nuclear proliferation, arms races, preventive war, and disarmament.

Our guest is Matthew Fuhrmann, the Cullen-McFadden Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cotton, Central Asia and the New Great Game

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

On this episode, rural sociologist Dr. Irna Hofman explores how Tajikistan’s cotton fields illuminate shifting power dynamics in Central Asia, historically and in the present. She discusses how the Soviet Union once showcased cotton production to visiting delegations—particularly from Muslim-majority countries—as evidence of its development model. Now, as global powers, including Russia, China, and the EU, vie for influence in the region, cotton has again become a strategic commodity—used to forge political ties, secure resources, and drive infrastructure projects. Hofman highlights local communities’ active role in shaping these developments, emphasizing that rural landscapes are not simply backdrops for a “New Great Game,” but sites where broader geopolitical forces and grassroots agency intersect. Through her long-term fieldwork, she illustrates how Tajik farmers navigate and negotiate these overlapping external interests, and in doing so, reframe Central Asia’s future amidst geopolitical tensions.

Dr. Hofman specializes in agrarian and social change in Central Asia, where she has worked since 2012. She completed post-doctoral research at Oxford's Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies as part of an ERC-funded project "China, law and development." In 2019, she obtained her Ph.D. from Leiden University in the Netherlands with a dissertation focused on the political economy of agrarian transformation in Tajikistan: "Cotton, control, and continuity in disguise: The political economy of agrarian transformation in lowland Tajikistan." Her research interests span political economy, political ecology, and political sociology. In recent years, she has focused on rural labour, gender, and commodity politics. Dr. Hofman is completing a monograph based on her dissertation and post-doctoral research projects. Her research agenda for the coming years centers on the rural everyday of geopolitics, focusing on China's growing assertiveness in the global agrifood regime, shifting geographies of production, and rural labour.

Dr Irna Hofman | School of Geography and the Environment | University of Oxford

@irnahofman

Resources:

Hofman, I. (2024) Seeds of empire or seeds of friendship? The politics of the diffusion of Chinese crop seeds in Tajikistan. Journal of Agrarian Change, 24(2): e12581.
Hofman, I. (2022) Tajikistan. The people's map of global China
Hofman, I. (2021) Migration, crop diversification, and adverse incorporation: Understanding the repertoire of contention in rural Tajikistan. Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 42(4): 499-518.
Hofman, I. (2021). Chinese cotton diplomacy in Tajikistan: greasing the ties by reviving the cotton economy. Research Brief.
Hofman, I. (2018). Politics or profits along the “Silk Road”: What drives Chinese farms in Tajikistan and helps them thrive? In The Geoeconomics and Geopolitics of Chinese Development and Investment in Asia, pp. 183-208. Routledge.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sabrina P. Ramet and Lavinia Stan, "East Central Europe Since 1989" (Routledge, 2025)

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

East Central Europe Since 1989 (Routledge, 2025) examines politics, economics, media, religious institutions, transitional justice, gender inequality, and literature, highlighting the overt functions, latent functions, and side effects associated with each sphere. Communism in East Central Europe had cracks from the beginning, as uprisings in East Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956 demonstrated. But with the establishment of the Independent Trade Union Solidarity in Poland in the Summer of 1980, communism went into steady decline and, between 1988 and 1991, crumbled. What followed has been an unsteady transition to various forms of often corrupt pluralism with democracy doing best in the Czech Republic (with the exception of the years 2017-2021) and Slovenia, and worst in Hungary, Albania, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. This volume will be of interest not only to specialists in East Central Europe but also to graduate and undergraduate students, members of the diplomatic corps, and general readers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kishore Mahbubani, "Living the Asian Century: An Undiplomatic Memoir" (Public Affairs, 2024)

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Kishore Mahbubani, longtime Singaporean diplomat and academic, opens his new memoir with a provocative line: “Blame it on the damn British.” Kishore, who later served as Singapore’s ambassador to the UN and founding dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, was born to poor migrants in Singapore, studied philosophy on a government scholarship—and from there, somehow got roped into the foreign service.

Kishore was one of the first guests on the show when he joined to speak on Has China Won?: The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy (PublicAffiars: 2020) all the way back in October 2020—and he joins us again to talk about his latest book, Living the Asian Century: An Undiplomatic Memoir (PublicAffairs: 2024)

Kishore Mahbubani is a veteran diplomat, student of philosophy, and celebrated author, he is currently a Distinguished Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute. His careers in diplomacy and academia have taken him from Singapore’s Chargé d’Affaires to wartime Cambodia and President of the UN Security Council (Jan 2001, May 2002) to the Founding Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (2004-2017).

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Living in the Asian Century. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Doina Anca Cretu, "Foreign Aid and State Building in Interwar Romania" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The decades following World War I were a period of political, social, and economic transformation for Central and Eastern Europe. Foreign Aid and State Building in Interwar Romania (Stanford UP, 2025) considers the role of foreign aid in Romania between 1918 and 1940, offering a new history of the interrelation between state building and nongovernmental humanitarianism and philanthropy in the interwar period. Doina Anca Cretu argues that Romania was a laboratory for transnational intervention, as various state builders actively pursued, accessed, and often instrumentalized American assistance in order to accelerate reconstructive and modernizing projects after World War I.

At its core, this is a study of how local views, ambitions, and practical agendas framed trajectories of humanitarian and philanthropic endeavors in postimperial Central and Eastern Europe. Conversely, it is a reflection on the ways that architects and practitioners of foreign aid sought to transfer notions of democracy, civilization, and modernity within shifting local and national contexts in the aftermath of the war and after the collapse of European empires. At the intersection of the history of interwar Europe and international philanthropy and humanitarianism, this book's innovative and explicitly transnational approach provides a new framework for understanding the contours of European nationalism in the twentieth century.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marion Laurence, "Intrusive Impartiality: Learning, Contestation, and Practice Change in United Nations Peace Operations" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Impartiality is a guiding principle in United Nations peace operations that has helped legitimize multilateral intervention in dozens of armed conflicts around the world. In practice, it has long been associated with passive monitoring of cease-fires and peace agreements. In the twenty-first century, however, its meaning has been stretched to allow for a range of forceful, intrusive, and ideologically prescriptive practices, all in the name of building durable peace.

In Intrusive Impartiality: Learning, Contestation, and Practice Change in United Nations Peace Operations (Oxford University Press, 2024), Dr. Marion Laurence explains how these new ways of being "impartial" emerge, how they spread within and across missions, and how they become institutionalized across UN peace operations. Dr. Laurence argues that new peacekeeping practices are not only products of top-down pressures from member states or instructions from the UN Secretariat; they often emerge from tacit knowledge and unconscious decisions about how to follow orders or comply with social rules. By foregrounding the creativity and agency of the field staff who are responsible for translating mandates into action, Dr. Laurence shows that new definitions and practices of impartiality are products of contestation, learning, and the interplay between top-down pressures and bottom-up drivers of change in UN peace operations.

Drawing on original data gathered through extensive fieldwork, Dr. Laurence uses evidence from UN missions in Sierra Leone, Côte d'Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and from UN headquarters in New York, to provide an innovative framework for studying authority and change in global governance. In doing so, Intrusive Impartiality sheds light on controversial changes in peacekeeping practice and yields valuable insights about the practical and ethical dilemmas that confront UN peacekeepers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elsa Stamatopoulou, "Indigenous Peoples in the International Arena: The Global Movement for Self-Determination" (Routledge, 2024)

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Elsa Stamatopoulou’s Indigenous Peoples in the International Arena: The Global Movement for Self-Determination (Routledge 2025) provides a definitive account of the creation and rise of the international Indigenous Peoples’ movement.

In the late 1970s, motivated by their dire situation and local struggles, and inspired by worldwide movements for social justice and decolonization, including the American civil rights movement, Indigenous Peoples around the world got together and began to organize at the international level. Although each defined itself by its relation to a unique land, culture, and often language, Indigenous Peoples from around the world made an extraordinary leap, using a common conceptual vocabulary and addressing international bodies that until then had barely recognized their existence. At the intersection of politics, law, and culture, this book documents the visionary emergence of the international Indigenous movement, detailing its challenges and achievements, including the historic recognition of Indigenous rights through the adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. The winning by Indigenous Peoples of an unprecedented kind and degree of international participation – especially at the United Nations, an institution centered on states – meant overcoming enormous institutional and political resistance. The book shows how this participation became an increasingly assertive self-expression and even an exercise of self-determination by which Indigenous Peoples could both benefit from and contribute to the international community overall – now, crucially, by sharing their knowledge about climate change, their approaches to development and well-being, and their struggles against the impact of extractive industries on their lands and resources.

Written by the former Chief of the Secretariat of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, this book will be of interest to researchers, teachers, students, advocates, practitioners, and others with interests in Indigenous legal and political issues.

Elsa Stamatopoulou is Director of the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Program and Adjunct Professor in the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, the Department of Anthropology, and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University, USA. Elsa is also Former (the first) Chief of the Secretariat of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (among other functions at the UN).

Tim Wyman-McCarthy is a Lecturer in the discipline of Human Rights and Associate Director of Graduate Studies at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. He can be reached at tw2468@columbia.edu.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

TrumpWorld: Canada, South Africa, Germany, and the Global Far-Right

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, John Torpey talks with Heribert Adam, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, to unpack the global ripple effects of Donald Trump's return to power. From his startling proposal to make Canada the 51st state to his controversial foreign aid cuts targeting South Africa, Trump's policies are reshaping international dynamics. Meanwhile, Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance have stirred political tensions in Germany by supporting the far-right AfD party. How are these developments impacting global democracy, migration, and racial politics? Adam, a distinguished expert on South Africa and race relations, provides historical context and critical analysis on these pressing issues. Tune in for a deep dive into the international consequences of Trump’s second term.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kathryn Taylor, "Ordering Customs: Ethnographic Thought in Early Modern Venice" (U Delaware Press, 2023)

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Ordering Customs: Ethnographic Thought in Early Modern Venice (University of Delaware Press, 2023) explores how Renaissance Venetians sought to make sense of human difference in a period characterized by increasing global contact and a rapid acceleration of the circulation of information. Venice was at the center of both these developments. The book traces the emergence of a distinctive tradition of ethnographic writing that served as the basis for defining religious and cultural difference in new ways.

Taylor draws on a trove of unpublished sources-diplomatic correspondence, court records, diaries, and inventories-to show that the study of customs, rituals, and ways of life not only became central in how Venetians sought to apprehend other peoples, but also had a very real impact at the level of policy, shaping how the Venetian state governed minority populations in the city and its empire. In contrast with the familiar image of ethnography as the product of overseas imperial and missionary encounters, the book points to a more complicated set of origins.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Samar Al-Bulushi, "War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror" (Stanford UP, 2024)

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Since Kenya's invasion of Somalia in 2011, the Kenyan state has been engaged in direct combat with the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab, conducting airstrikes in southern Somalia and deploying heavy-handed police tactics at home. As the hunt for suspects has expanded within Kenya, Kenyan Muslims have been subject to disappearances and extrajudicial killings at the hands of U.S.-trained Kenyan police.

War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror (Stanford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Samar Al-Bulushi explores the entanglement of militarism, imperialism, and liberal-democratic governance in East Africa today. Dr. Al-Bulushi argues that Kenya's emergence as a key player in the "War on Terror" is closely linked—but not reducible to—the U.S. military's growing proclivity to outsource the labor of war. Attending to the cultural politics of security, Dr. Al-Bulushi illustrates that the war against Al-Shabaab has become a means to produce new fantasies, emotions, and subjectivities about Kenya's place in the world. Meanwhile, Kenya's alignment with the U.S. provides cover for the criminalization and policing of the country's Muslim minority population.

How is life lived in a place that is not understood to be a site of war, yet is often experienced as such by its targets? This book weaves together multiple scales of analysis, asking what a view from East Africa can tell us about the shifting configurations and expansive geographies of post-9/11 imperial warfare.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Patricia Owens, "Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The academic field of international relations presents its own history as largely a project of elite white men. And yet women played a prominent role in the creation of this new cross-disciplinary field. In Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men (Princeton University Press, 2025), Professor Patricia Owens shows that, since its beginnings in the early twentieth century, international relations relied on the intellectual labour of women and their expertise on such subjects as empire and colonial administration, anticolonial organising, non-Western powers, and international organisations. Indeed, women were among the leading international thinkers of the era, shaping the development of the field as scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals—and as heterosexual spouses and intimate same-sex partners.

Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, and weaving together personal, institutional, and intellectual narratives, Dr. Owens documents key moments and locations in the effort to forge international relations as a separate academic discipline in Britain. She finds that women’s ideas and influence were first marginalised and later devalued, ignored, and erased. Examining the roles played by some of the most important women thinkers in the field, including Margery Perham, Merze Tate, Eileen Power, Margaret Cleeve, Coral Bell, and Susan Strange, Dr. Owens traces the intellectual and institutional legacies of misogyny and racism. She argues that the creation of international relations was a highly gendered and racialised project that failed to understand plurality on a worldwide scale. Acknowledging this intellectual failure, and recovering the history of women in the field, points to possible sources for its renewal.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rebecca Davis Gibbons, "The Hegemon's Tool Kit: US Leadership and the Politics of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

At a moment when the nuclear nonproliferation regime is under duress, Rebecca Davis Gibbons provides a trenchant analysis of the international system that has, for more than fifty years, controlled the spread of these catastrophic weapons. The Hegemon's Tool Kit: US Leadership and the Politics of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime (Cornell UP, 2022) details how that regime works and how, disastrously, it might falter.

Experts anticipated that all technologically capable states would build these powerful devices in the early nuclear age. That did not happen. Widespread development of nuclear arms did not occur, in large part, because a global nuclear nonproliferation regime was created. By the late 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union had drafted the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Across decades, the regime has expanded, with more agreements and more nations participating. As a result, in 2022, only nine states possess nuclear weapons.

Why do most international states adhere to the nuclear nonproliferation regime? The answer lies, Gibbons asserts, in decades of painstaking efforts undertaken by the US government. As the most powerful state during the nuclear age, the United States had many tools with which to persuade other states to join or otherwise support nonproliferation agreements.

The waning of US global influence, Gibbons shows in The Hegemon's Tool Kit, is a key threat to the nonproliferation regime. So, too, is the deepening global divide over progress on nuclear disarmament. To date, the Chinese government is not taking significant steps to support the nuclear nonproliferation regime, and as a result, the regime may face a harmful leadership gap.

Our guest is Rebecca Gibbons, an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern Maine.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023), winner of the 2025 ISA-ISSS best book award.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Canada and Eastern Europe, 1945–1991: Meeting in the Middle

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press) sat down with Andrea Chandler to talk about her new book with CEU Press, Canada and Eastern Europe, 1945–1991: Meeting in the Middle. In the podcast we talked about why the relations between Canada and the countries of the Eastern bloc have so far been underreseached, about the large Central and Eastern European diaspora in Canada and their role in shaping foreign policy, and also about Canada’s reaction to the 1956 revolution in Hungary and the 1968 Prague Spring.

You can purchase a physical copy here.

The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and discuss their series or books.

Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more: https://ceupress.com/

Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Finlandization to ‘Finland Boom‘ in Japan: Finland’s Public Diplomacy in Japan

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Finland, a minor player on the international arena and burdened with the tag of ‘Finlandization’ during much of the post-WWII period, has won surprisingly positive visibility and a strong nation brand in the far-off Japan in the 2000’s. How has such a transformation of a small state’s reputation been possible?

In this episode, Dr. Laura Ipatti, Postdoctoral Researcher at the unit of Contemporary History, University of Turku, tackles this question by introducing the findings of her Doctoral Dissertation, titled From Finlandization to Finland Boom. Finland’s Public Diplomacy in Japan, 1962–2003. In her study, Ipatti looks at the actors, means and motives that have participated in ‘making Finland known’ in the economic and cultural powerhouse of post-WWII Japan.

After the lost war against the Soviet Union, Finland was obliged to conclude an agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance with Moscow but, against the odds, stayed a liberal democracy and a market economy that chose neutrality as a foreign policy line. To showcase the willingness and trustworthiness of the Finnish leaders and the society alike to Western cooperation, the Finnish government started an intense image campaigning to secure an access to the Western markets and political dialogue. These efforts at influencing foreign perceptions of Finland targeted even Japan, a member of the US-led bloc in the Cold War.

Today, the legacy of this campaigning is still visible, for example in the Japanese fashion trend called ‘Finland Boom’. But will Finland's appearance at the upcoming Expo 2025 in Osaka this spring build on the old ideals, too?

The episode is hosted by Dr. Outi Luova, Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku, Finland

Laura Ipatti: From Finlandization to Finland Boom. Finland’s Public Diplomacy in Japan, 1962–2003. University of Turku, Dec 2024.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan Haslam, "Hubris: The American Origins of Russia's War against Ukraine" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 should not have taken the world by surprise. The attack escalated a war that began in 2014 with the Russian annexation of Crimea, but its origins are visible as far back as the aftermath of the Cold War, when newly independent Ukraine moved to the center of tense negotiations between Russia and the West. The United States was a leading player in this drama. In fact, Jonathan Haslam argues, it was decades of US foreign policy missteps and miscalculations, unchecked and often reinforced by European allies, that laid the groundwork for the current war.

Isolated, impoverished, and relegated to a second-order power on the world stage, Russia grew increasingly resentful of Western triumphalism in the wake of the Cold War. The United States further provoked Russian ire with a campaign to expand NATO into Eastern Europe--especially Ukraine, the most geopolitically important of the former Soviet republics. Determined to extend its global dominance, the United States repeatedly ignored signs that antagonizing Russia would bring consequences. Meanwhile, convinced that Ukraine was passing into the Western sphere of influence, Putin prepared to shift the European balance of power in Russia's favor.

Timely and incisive, Hubris: The American Origins of Russia's War against Ukraine (Harvard UP, 2025) reveals the assumptions, equivocations, and grievances that have defined the West's relations with Russia since the twilight of the Soviet Union--and ensured that collision was only a matter of time.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Thus began one of the first big conflicts of the Cold War. In Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War (2024), Sheila Fitzpatrick draws on new archival research, including Soviet interviews with hundreds of DPs, to offer a vivid account of this crisis, from the competitive maneuverings of politicians and diplomats to the everyday lives of DPs. American enthusiasm for funding the refugee organizations taking care of DPs quickly waned after the war. It was only after DPs were redefined—from “victims of war and Nazism” to “victims of Communism”—in 1947 that a solution was found: the United States would pay for the mass resettlement of DPs in America, Australia, and other countries outside Europe. The Soviet Union protested this “theft” of its citizens. But it was a coup for the United States. The choice of DPs to live a free life in the West, and the West’s welcome of them, became an important theme in America’s Cold War propaganda battle with the Soviet Union. A compelling story of the early Cold War, Lost Souls is also a rare chronicle of a refugee crisis that was solved.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hal Brands, "The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World" (Norton, 2025)

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

We often think of the modern era as the age of American power. In reality, we’re living in a long, violent Eurasian century. That giant, resource-rich landmass possesses the bulk of the global population, industrial might, and potential military power; it touches all four of the great oceans. Eurasia is a strategic prize without equal―which is why the world has been roiled, reshaped, and nearly destroyed by clashes over the supercontinent.

Since the early twentieth century, autocratic powers―from Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II to the Soviet Union―have aspired for dominance by seizing commanding positions in the world’s strategic heartland. Offshore sea powers, namely the United Kingdom and America, have sought to make the world safe for democracy by keeping Eurasia in balance. America’s rivalries with China, Russia, and Iran are the next round in this geopolitical game. If this new authoritarian axis succeeds in enacting a radically revised international order, America and other democracies will be vulnerable and insecure.

In The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World (W. W. Norton & Company, 2025) Hal Brands, a renowned expert on global affairs, argues that a better understanding of Eurasia’s strategic geography can illuminate the contours of rivalry and conflict in today’s world. The Eurasian Century explains how revolutions in technology and warfare, and the rise of toxic ideologies of conquest, made Eurasia the center of twentieth-century geopolitics―with pressing implications for the struggles that will define the twenty-first.

Hal Brands, coauthor of Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, is the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Trump’s Second Term and Europe: Nationalism, NATO, and the Future of Transatlantic Relations

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Nathalie Tocci, director of the Institute of International Affairs in Rome, about the implications of Donald Trump’s second administration for Europe. The discussion explores how Trump’s approach to foreign policy—characterized by protectionism, nationalism, and disdain for multilateralism—affects European politics, particularly in relation to NATO, trade, and the far-right’s growing influence. Prof. Tocci highlights how Trump’s return emboldens nationalist movements across the continent, especially in countries like Italy, where leaders such as Giorgia Meloni now feel freer to express their ideological stances. The conversation also examines the evolving European response to Trump, from initial panic to a mix of wishful thinking and cautious strategizing, particularly regarding the future of NATO and the war in Ukraine.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adam Chapnick, "Canada First, Not Canada Alone: A History of Canadian Foreign Policy" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The definitive history of Canadian foreign policy since the 1930s, Canada First, Not Canada Alone: A History of Canadian Foreign Policy (Oxford UP, 2024) examines how successive prime ministers have promoted Canada's national interests in a world that has grown increasingly complex and interconnected. Eleven case studies focus on environmental reform, Indigenous peoples, trade, hostage diplomacy, and wartime strategy illustrate the breadth of issues that shape Canada's global realm. In this lively interview, Asa McKercher offers explains the structure of the book, its main take-way and how Canada has positioned itself in the world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Enrico Ciappi, "Building Europe in New York: From the Munich Conference to the European Coal and Steel Community (1938-1952)" (Routledge, 2025)

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Today’s European Union grew out of functional communities set up in the wake of world war in the 1950s.

It would shock the new White House intake to learn that the wartime American political class lobbied hard for a postwar United States of Europe. The role of US officials in building Europe’s first community – one for the coal and steel industries – and their close ties to "founding father" Jean Monnet have long been known. But, in Building Europe in New York: From the Munich Conference to the European Coal and Steel Community (Routledge, 2025), Enrico Ciappi takes things back a step - to the intellectual groundwork done by a network of American, French, and British politicians, diplomats, economists, and strategic thinkers.

"The Schuman Plan arrived at the end of a long intellectual journey," he writes, with the two critical players in that journey being Monnet himself and the renowned New York-based think tank: the Council on Foreign Relations.

Enrico Ciappi is a postdoctoral research fellow in history at the LUISS Guido Carli University of Rome. This is his first book.

*His book recommendations were The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950 by Or Rosenboim (Princeton University Press, 2017) and The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia by Peter Hopkirk (John Murray, 1990 — reprint in 2006).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts on Substack at 242.news.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Benjamin Carter Hett, "The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War" (Henry Holt, 2020)

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Berlin, November 1937. Adolf Hitler meets with his military commanders to impress upon them the urgent necessity for a war of aggression in eastern Europe. Some generals are unnerved by the Führer’s grandiose plan, but these dissenters are silenced one by one, setting in motion events that will culminate in the most calamitous war in history.

Benjamin Carter Hett takes us behind the scenes in Berlin, London, Moscow, and Washington, revealing the unsettled politics within each country in the wake of the German dictator’s growing provocations. He reveals the fitful path by which anti-Nazi forces inside and outside Germany came to understand Hitler’s true menace to European civilization and learned to oppose him, painting a sweeping portrait of governments under siege, as larger-than-life figures struggled to turn events to their advantage.

As in The Death of Democracy, his acclaimed history of the fall of the Weimar Republic, Hett draws on original sources and newly released documents to show how these long-ago conflicts have unexpected resonances in our own time. To read The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War (Henry Holt, 2020) is to see past and present in a new and unnerving light.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peter Harmsen, "Fury and Ice: Greenland, the United States and Germany in World War II" (Casemate, 2024)

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Peter Harmsen about his book Fury and Ice: Greenland, the United States and Germany in World War II (Casemate, 2024).

The wartime interest in Greenland was a direct result of its vital strategic position--if you wanted to predict the weather in Europe, you had to have men in place on the vast, frozen island. The most celebrated example of Greenland's crucial contribution to Allied meteorological services is the correct weather forecast in June 1944 leading to the decision to launch the invasion of Normandy. In addition, both before and after D-Day a stream of weather reports from Greenland was essential for the Allied ability to carry out the bombing offensive against Germany.

The Germans were aware of the value of Greenland from a meteorological point of view, and they repeatedly attempted to establish semi-permanent weather stations along the sparsely populated east coast of the island. This resulted in an epic cat-and-mouse game, in which US Coast Guard personnel assisted by a celebrated sledge patrol manned by Scandinavian adventurers struggled to locate and eliminate German bases before they could make any difference. It's a story seldom told, but the fact remains that Greenland was the only part of the North American continent in which German troops maintained a presence throughout almost the entirety of the war.

At the same time, the US entry into the war triggered an enormous American effort to hastily establish the necessary infrastructure in the form of harbors and air bases that enabled Greenland to form a vital link in the effort to send men and supplies across the North Atlantic in the face of stern opposition from the German Navy. While Allied ships were passing through Greenland waters in massive numbers, planes were plying the so-called Snowball Route from Greenland over Iceland to the British Isles.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Avinash Paliwal, "India's Near East: A New History" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

After student protests toppled Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina last year, New Delhi and Dhaka have been at odds. Indian politicians complain about Hindus being mistreated in the Muslim-majority country; Bangladesh’s interim government fears that Hasina may launch a bid to return to power from India.

It’s the latest development in what’s become an extremely complicated environment in what Avinash Paliwal calls “India’s Near East”: India, Bangladesh (or East Pakistan before the 1970s), and Myanmar (or Burma before the 1980s). As Avinash explains his book India's Near East: A New History (Hurst: 2024), successive Indian leaders tried to get a handle on international tensions and ethnic conflict—and with a major external threat in China looming in the distance.

Avinash Paliwal is Reader in International Relations at SOAS University of London, specialising in South Asian strategic affairs. A former journalist and foreign affairs analyst, he is also the author of My Enemy's Enemy: India in Afghanistan from the Soviet Invasion to the U.S. Withdrawal (Hurst: 2017)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of India’s Near East. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eva Payne, "Empire of Purity: The History of Americans' Global War on Prostitution" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Between the 1870s and 1930s, American social reformers, working closely with the US government, transformed sexual vice into an international political and humanitarian concern. As these activists worked to eradicate prostitution and trafficking, they promoted sexual self-control for both men and women as a cornerstone of civilization and a basis of American exceptionalism. Empire of Purity: The History of Americans' Global War on Prostitution (Princeton University Press, 2024) by Dr. Eva Payne traces the history of these efforts, showing how the policing and penalization of sexuality was used to justify American interventions around the world.

Dr. Eva Payne describes how American reformers successfully pushed for international anti-trafficking agreements that mirrored US laws, calling for states to criminalize prostitution and restrict migration, and harming the very women they claimed to protect. She argues that Americans’ ambitions to reshape global sexual morality and law advanced an ideology of racial hierarchy that viewed women of color, immigrants, and sexual minorities as dangerous vectors of disease. Dr. Payne tells the stories of the sex workers themselves, revealing how these women’s experiences defy the dichotomies that have shaped American cultural and legal conceptions of prostitution and trafficking, such as choice and coercion, free and unfree labor, and white sexual innocence and the assumed depravity of nonwhites.

Drawing on archives in Europe, the United States, and Latin America, Empire of Purity ties the war on sexual vice to American imperial ambitions and a politicization of sexuality that continues to govern both domestic and international policy today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christina L. Davis, "Discriminatory Clubs: The Geopolitics of International Organizations" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Member selection is one of the defining elements of social organization, imposing categories on who we are and what we do. Discriminatory Clubs: The Geopolitics of International Organizations (Princeton UP, 2023) shows how international organizations are like social clubs, ones in which institutional rules and informal practices enable states to favor friends while excluding rivals.

Where race or socioeconomic status may be a basis for discrimination by social clubs, geopolitical alignment determines who gets into the room to make the rules of global governance. Christina Davis brings together a wealth of data on membership provisions for more than three hundred organizations to reveal the prevalence of club-style selection on the world stage. States join organizations to deepen their association with a particular group of states—most often their allies—and for the gains from policy coordination. Even organizations that claim to be universal, to target narrow issues, or to cover geographic regions use club-style admission criteria. Davis demonstrates that when it comes to the most important decision of cooperation—who belongs to the club and who doesn’t—geopolitical alignment can matter more than the merits or policies of potential members.

With illuminating case studies ranging from nineteenth-century Japan to contemporary Palestine and Taiwan, Discriminatory Clubs sheds light on how, for global and regional organizations such as the WTO and the EU, alliance ties and shared foreign-policy positions form the basis of cooperation.

Christina L. Davis is the Edwin O. Reischauer Professor of Japanese Politics in the Department of Government at Harvard University. She is the author of Why Adjudicate? and Food Fights over Free Trade (both Princeton).

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Frank Trentmann, "Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022" (Knopf, 2024)

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Frank Trentmann’s Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022 (Knopf, 2024) traces the moral concerns and clashes of a nation re-building, re-constituting, and re-imagining itself from the depths of World War II to Chancellor Scholz’s Zeitenwende (‘new era’). Key elements of modern German identity, including the memory of the Holocaust, the nature of the Sozialstaat, the tensions between an energy-intensive export nation and a deep-rooted environmental consciousness, and the legacy of the East-West divide are explored through the contemporary experiences of a range of voices and the detailed tracing of trends and events over 80 years. Trentmann invites us to look closer at Germany’s postwar moral landscape and figures through the lens of ‘conscience, compassion and complicity’, the better to understand Europe’s most consequential nation.

Frank Trentmann is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, and an associate at the Centre for Consumer Society Research, Helsinki.

Matt Fraser is a freelance writer and podcaster based in Berlin, Germany.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephen Watt, "From the 'Troubles' to Trumpism: Ireland and America, 1960-2023" (Anthem Press, 2024)

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Stephen Watt is the Provost Professor of English at Indiana University. His research interests include drama and theatre of the 19th and 20th centuries, Irish Studies, and the contemporary university and his recent works include Bernard Shaw’s Fiction, Material Psychology, and Affect: Shaw, Freud, Simmel (2018), “Something Dreadful and Grand”: American Literature and the Irish-Jewish Unconscious (2015), and Beckett and Contemporary Irish Writing (2009).

In this interview he discusses his new book, From the 'Troubles' to Trumpism: Ireland and America, 1960-2023 (Anthem Press, 2024), a personal history of Irish, American and Irish-American politics and culture since the 1960s.

The essays in this book combine historical investigation with cultural criticism to illuminate the present moment, particularly the present American moment. In this regard, the dates 1960 and 2023 in the book’s subtitle are by no means accidental. The first three chapters concern the history of America’s relationship with Ireland during the administrations of the presidents whose terms spanned the immediate pre-history and history of the Troubles. After a glance backward at American and Irish relations in the nineteenth century, the first chapter focuses on the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president in America’s history and the first to visit Ireland during his term of office. It also juxtaposes Kennedy’s jubilant 1963 trip to Ireland with Ronald Reagan’s more complicated homecoming in 1984. From there, the book traces Irish-American connections via the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, as well as Michael D. Higgins.

Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Isaac Stanley-Becker, "Europe Without Borders: A History" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Forty years ago, Schengen - a wine-making village at the tripoint border of Luxembourg, France, and Germany - made European history when diplomats from these countries, Belgium, and the Netherlands struck a deal to scale back their mutual border checks.

"The event at Schengen went unnoticed by much of the European press," writes Isaac Stanley-Becker in Europe Without Borders: A History (Princeton University Press, 2025). Yet, as one of its signatories said much later, the Schengen agreement "changed everything" - accelerating the development of the European single market and currency area.

Today, however, Schengen is under threat as its now-29 members struggle to balance the free movement of people against the demands of cross-border policing, immigration control, and political consent. In September 2024, the German government - rattled by surging support for the nativist AFD in the run-up to a federal election - reinstated border controls with its four Schengen founders, prompting threats of retaliation. Could Schengen face, as Stanley-Becker warns, "death by a thousand cuts"?

Isaac Stanley-Becker is an investigative reporter at the Washington Post - part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2024 for a series exploring the role of the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle in American life. A graduate of Yale, he went on to complete a PhD in History at Oxford in 2019. Europe Without Borders is his first book.

*The author's book recommendations were East West Street: On The Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity by Philippe Sands (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016) and The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton, 2019).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts on Substack at 242.news.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan R. Beloff, "The Strategy to End the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda" (Lexington Books, 2025)

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Utilizing Strategic Theory as a framework for warfare and incorporating the testimonies and experiences of eight genocide survivors as well as military personnel, Jonathan R. Beloff's The Strategy to End the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda: Understanding the War in Kigali (Lexington Books, 2025) examines the various tactics and operations used by the Rwandan Patriotic Army to provide critical insights into decision-making during the Rwandan Civil War and genocide.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sixiang Wang, "Boundless Winds of Empire: Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Chosŏn Diplomacy with Ming China" (Columbia UP, 2023)

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The Chosŏn dynasty of Korea enjoyed generally peaceful and stable relations with Ming China, a relationship that was carefully cultivated and achieved only through the strategic deployment of cultural practices, values, and narratives by Chosŏn political actors. Boundless Winds of Empire: Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Chosŏn Diplomacy with Ming China (Columbia UP 2023) explores this history, rethinking how we understand Sino-Korean relations.

Boundless Winds of Empire is detailed, rich, and filled with a fascinating range of sources, including poetry, travelogues, epistolary writings, and literary anthologies. Sixiang Wang deftly weaves together these sources, highlighting the key role envoys played in shaping diplomatic strategy, the agency of Chosŏn officials, and the contested nature of the Ming empire.

The 2024 winner of the UC Berkeley Hong Yung Lee Book Award in Korean Studies, this book should appeal to those interested in Chinese and Korean studies, international relations, premodern history, and anyone who has ever struggled to understand political rhetoric (this book will show you what can be done if you take it seriously).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jacob Flaws, "Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In our conversation about Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), Dr. Jacob Flaws expands the spatial realities of the Treblinka death camp and what it means to be a witness of the Holocaust.

Spaces of Treblinka utilizes testimonies, oral histories, and recollections from Jewish, German, and Polish witnesses to create a holistic representation of the Treblinka death camp during its operation. This narrative rejects the historical misconception that Treblinka was an isolated Nazi extermination camp with few witnesses and fewer survivors. Rather than the secret, sanitized site of industrial killing Treblinka was intended to be, Flaws argues, Treblinka’s mass murder was well known to the nearby townspeople who experienced the sights, sounds, smells, people, bodies, and train cars the camp ejected into the surrounding world.

Through spatial reality, Flaws portrays the conceptions, fantasies, ideological assumptions, and memories of Treblinka from witnesses in the camp and surrounding towns. To do so he identifies six key spaces that once composed the historical site of Treblinka: the ideological space, the behavioral space, the space of life and death, the interactional space, the sensory space, and the extended space. By examining these spaces Flaws reveals that there were more witnesses to Treblinka than previously realized, as the transnational groups near and within the camp overlapped and interacted. Spaces of Treblinka provides a staggering and profound reassessment of the relationship between knowing and not knowing and asks us to confront the timely warning that we, in our modern, interconnected world, can all become witnesses.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gabriel Gavin, "Ashes of Our Fathers: Inside the Fall of Nagorno-Karabakh" (Hurst, 2025)

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

From the collapse of the Soviet Union until late 2023, Armenia and Azerbaijan were fighting unrelenting hot and cold wars over Nagorno-Karabakh - a tiny 4,400-square-kilometre breakaway republic with a population under 150,000. That 30-year crisis ended within 24 hours in September 2023 when Azerbaijan attacked, Russian peacekeepers withdrew, and the last Karabakh Armenians left the enclave.

While equivalent ethnic cleansings (deliberate or neglectful) have commanded Western diplomatic and media attention for decades, Nagorno-Karabakh has never captured attention outside the region. With Ashes of Our Fathers: Inside the Fall of Nagorno-Karabakh (Hurst, 2025), Gabriel Gavin is determined to redress that imbalance. Mixing history and reportage, Gavin explores this long-simmering ethnic conflict, how it has corrupted the politics and cultures of Armenia and Azerbaijan, and what it tells us about the decline of Russian external power and the failures of the West.

*The author's book recommendations were High Caucasus: A Mountain Quest in Russia’s Haunted Hinterland by Tom Parfitt (Headline, 2023) and Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020 — translated by Elisabeth Jaquette).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts at twenty4two on Substack.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rebecca Charbonneau, "Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain" (Polity, 2024)

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In the shadow of the Cold War, whispers from the cosmos fueled an unlikely alliance between the US and USSR. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or SETI) emerged as a foundational field of radio astronomy characterized by an unusual level of international collaboration—but SETI’s use of signals intelligence technology also served military and governmental purposes.

In this captivating new history of the collaboration between American and Soviet radio astronomers as they sought to detect evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations, historian Dr. Rebecca Charbonneau reveals the triumphs and challenges they faced amidst a hostile political atmosphere. Shedding light on the untold stories from the Soviet side for the first time, she expertly unravels the complex web of military and political interests entangling radio astronomy and the search for alien intelligence, offering a thought-provoking perspective on the evolving relationship between science and power.

Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain (Polity, 2024) is not just a story of radio waves and telescopes; it's a revelation of how scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain navigated the complexities of the Cold War, blurring the lines between espionage and the quest for cosmic community. Filled with tension, contradiction, and the enduring human desire for connection, this is a history that transcends national boundaries and reaches out to the cosmic unknown, ultimately asking: how can we communicate with extraterrestrials when we struggle to communicate amongst ourselves?

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Simon Hall, "Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s" (Faber and Faber, 2020)

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In his new book Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s (Faber, 2020), Simon Hall, a Professor of Modern History at the University of Leeds, colorfully details an extraordinary visit by Fidel Castro to New York in the Autumn of 1960 for the opening of the UN General Assembly.

Holding court from the iconic Hotel Theresa in Harlem, Castro's riotous stay in New York saw him connect with leaders from within the local African American community, as well as political and cultural luminaries such as Gamal Abdel Nasser, Nikita Khrushchev, Kwame Nkrumah and Allen Ginsberg. Through exploring the local and global impact of these ten days, Hall recovers Castro's visit as a critical turning point in the trajectory of the Cold War and the development of the 'The Sixties.'

E. James West is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in American History at Northumbria University. He is the author of Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (Illinois, 2020).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Theresa Keeley, "Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns: The Catholic Conflict Over Cold War Human Rights Policy in Central America" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns: The Catholic Conflict Over Cold War Human Rights Policy in Central America (Cornell UP, 2020), Theresa Keeley analyzes the role of intra-Catholic conflict within the framework of U.S. foreign policy formulation and execution during the Reagan administration. She challenges the preponderance of scholarship on the administration that stresses the influence of evangelical Protestants on foreign policy toward Latin America. Especially in the case of U.S. engagement in El Salvador and Nicaragua, Keeley argues, the bitter debate between the U.S. and Central American Catholics over the direction of the Catholic Church shaped President Reagan’s foreign policy.

The flashpoint for these intra-Catholic disputes was the December 1980 political murder of four American Catholic missionaries in El Salvador. Liberal Catholics described nuns and priests in Central America who worked to combat structural inequality as human rights advocates living out the Gospel’s spirit. Conservative Catholics saw them as agents of class conflict who furthered the so-called Gospel, according to Karl Marx. The debate was an old one among Catholics, but, as Reagan’s Gun-Toting Nuns contends, it intensified as conservative, anticommunist Catholics played instrumental roles in crafting U.S. policy to fund the Salvadoran government and the Nicaraguan Contras.

Reagan’s Gun-Toting Nuns describes the religious actors as human rights advocates and, against prevailing understandings of the fundamentally secular activism related to human rights, highlights religion-inspired activism during the Cold War. In charting the rightward development of American Catholicism, Keeley provides a new chapter in the history of U.S. diplomacy. She shows how domestic issues such as contraception and abortion joined with foreign policy matters to shift Catholic laity toward Republican principles at home and abroad.

Allison Isidore is a graduate of the Religion in Culture Masters program at the University of Alabama. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. Allison is also a Video Editor for The Religious Studies Project, producing videos for the podcast and marketing team. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard, "Reagan, Congress, and Human Rights: Contesting Morality in US Foreign Policy" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Reagan, Congress, and Human Rights: Contesting Morality in US Foreign Policy (Cambridge UP, 2020) traces the role of human rights concerns in US foreign policy during the 1980s, focusing on the struggle among the Reagan administration and members of Congress. It demonstrates how congressional pressure led the administration to reconsider its approach to human rights and craft a conservative human rights policy centered on democracy promotion and anti-communism - a decision which would have profound implications for American attention to human rights. Based on extensive archival research and interviews, Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard combines a comprehensive overview of human rights in American foreign relations with in-depth case studies of how human rights shaped US foreign policy toward Soviet Jewry, South African apartheid, and Nicaragua. Tracing the motivations behind human rights activism, this book demonstrates how liberals, moderates, and conservatives selectively invoked human rights to further their agendas, ultimately contributing to the establishment of human rights as a core moral language in US foreign policy.

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

Simon Miles, "Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In a narrative-redefining approach, Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War (Cornell UP, 2020) dramatically alters how we look at the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Tracking key events in US-Soviet relations across the years between 1980 and 1985, Simon Miles shows that covert engagement gave way to overt conversation as both superpowers determined that open diplomacy was the best means of furthering their own, primarily competitive, goals. Miles narrates the history of these dramatic years, as President Ronald Reagan consistently applied a disciplined carrot-and-stick approach, reaching out to Moscow while at the same time excoriating the Soviet system and building up US military capabilities.

The received wisdom in diplomatic circles is that the beginning of the end of the Cold War came from changing policy preferences and that President Reagan in particular opted for a more conciliatory and less bellicose diplomatic approach. In reality, as Miles vividly demonstrates, Reagan and ranking officials in the National Security Council had determined that the United States enjoyed a strategic margin of error that permitted it to engage Moscow overtly.

As US grand strategy developed, so did that of the Soviet Union. Engaging the Evil Empire covers five critical years of Cold War history when Soviet leaders tried to reduce tensions between the two nations in order to gain economic breathing room and, to ensure domestic political stability, prioritize expenditures on butter over those on guns. Written with style and verve, Miles's bold narrative shifts the focus of Cold War historians away from exclusive attention on Washington by focusing on the years of back-channel communiqués and internal strategy debates in Moscow as well as Budapest, Prague, and East Berlin.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marc Gallicchio, "Unconditional: The Japanese Surrender in World War II" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Signed on September 2, 1945 aboard the American battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay by Japanese and Allied leaders, the instrument of surrender formally ended the war in the Pacific and brought to a close one of the most cataclysmic engagements in history, one that had cost the lives of millions. VJ―Victory over Japan―Day had taken place two weeks or so earlier, in the wake of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the entrance of the Soviet Union into the war. In the end, the surrender itself fulfilled the commitment that Franklin Roosevelt had made that it be "unconditional," as had been the case with Nazi Germany in May, 1945.

Though readily accepted as war policy at the time, after Roosevelt's death in April 1945, popular support for unconditional surrender wavered, particularly when the bloody campaigns on Iwo Jima and Okinawa made clear the cost of military victory against Japan. The ending of the war in Europe spurred calls in Congress, particularly among anti-New Deal Republicans, to shift the American economy to peacetime and bring home troops. Even after the atomic bombs had been dropped, Japan continued to seek a negotiated surrender, further complicating the debate. Though this was the last time Americans would impose surrender unconditionally, questions surrounding it continued at home through the 1950s and 1960s, when liberal and conservative views reversed, and particularly in Vietnam and the definition of "peace with honor." It remained controversial through the ceremonies surrounding the 50th anniversary and the Gulf War, when the subject revived.

In Unconditional: The Japanese Surrender in World War II (Oxford UP, 2020), which publishes in time for the 75th anniversary of the surrender, Bancroft Prize co-winner Marc Gallicchio offers a narrative of the surrender in its historical moment, revealing how and why the event unfolded as it did and the principle figures behind it, including George C. Marshall and Douglas MacArthur, who would effectively become the leader of Japan during the American occupation. It also reveals how the policy underlying it remained controversial at the time and in the decades following, shaping our understanding of World War II.

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

Victor D. Cha, "The Black Box: Demystifying the Study of Korean Unification and North Korea" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

North Korea is, to this day, still one of the world’s most mysterious countries. What little we know about daily life in the country comes from defectors or foreigners who’ve spent time there–some of whom have been on this show. But both camps present narrow, if not slanted, views of what life is like in the country.

Korea expert Victor Cha, along with several other researchers, have put together a collection that tries to tackle the topic of North Korea with a more rigorous approach, in The Black Box: Demystifying the Study of Korean Unification and North Korea (Columbia University Press: 2024)

What do we know about North Korea’s cyberwarfare capability? Do U.S.-South Korea military exercises really cause North Korean belligerence? What do ordinary North Koreans believe? And what do U.S. and South Korean experts think are their “known unknowns” when it comes to North Korea?

Victor D. Cha is Distinguished University Professor, D.S. Song-KF Endowed Chair, and professor of government in the Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of Government at Georgetown University. He serves in senior advisory positions for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Department of Defense Policy Board, and the National Endowment for Democracy. Cha previously served on the National Security Council as director for Asian affairs.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Black Box. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Taomo Zhou, “Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War” (Cornell UP, 2019)

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

If tales of China’s radical ‘opening up’ to the world over the last 30 years imply that the country was somehow ‘closed’ before this, then one need only think of Beijing’s dalliances with various potential socialist allies during the Cold War to dispel this impression. There is, moreover, another equally important case in which people linked to ‘China’ were involved in transnational affairs at this time – namely that of overseas Chinese populations throughout the world. And, as Taomo Zhou’s fascinating Indonesia-centred account shows, in Southeast Asia the Chinese outside China were intimately entangled in a vast among of what was going on at this time on the diplomatic and political level.

Drawing on a trove of archival and fieldwork-derived material from multiple locations, Zhou’s Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2019) presents a rich account of the Indonesian-Chinese population’s involvement in regional and global affairs, mainly between the 1940s and the 1960s but also either side of this tumultuous window of time. As entertaining as it is rich in new insights, the book nimbly moves between China and different parts of Indonesia’s vast archipelago, in doing so painting a picture of the limitless diversity to migrant and diasporic experience and, in the process, helping us see apparently monolithic events like the Cold War in very human terms.

Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Enze Han, "The Ripple Effect: China's Complex Presence in Southeast Asia" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Many studies of China's relations with and influence on Southeast Asia tend to focus on how Beijing has used its power asymmetry to achieve regional influence. Yet, scholars and pundits often fail to appreciate the complexity of the contemporary Chinese state and society, and just how fragmented, decentralized, and internationalized China is today.

In The Ripple Effect: China's Complex Presence in Southeast Asia (Oxford UP, 2024), Enze Han argues that a focus on the Chinese state alone is not sufficient for a comprehensive understanding of China's influence in Southeast Asia. Instead, we must look beyond the Chinese state, to non-state actors from China, such as private businesses and Chinese migrants. These actors affect people's perception of China in a variety of ways, and they often have wide-ranging as well as long-lasting effects on bilateral relations. Looking beyond the Chinese state's intentional influence reveals many situations that result in unanticipated changes in Southeast Asia. Han proposes that to understand this increasingly globalized China, we need more conceptual flexibility regarding which Chinese actors are important to China's relations, and how they wield this influence, whether intentional or not.

The Ripple Effect makes the case that to understand China's relationship with Southeast Asia, it is necessary to move beyond a narrow fixation on the Chinese state by scrutinizing the ordinary manifestations of China's presence in the region and recognizing the multifaceted web of actors and their effects on the dynamics between the two regions.

Enze Han is an associate professor of politics at the University of Hong Kong. He works on the international relations of East Asia, Southeast Asian politics and China-Southeast Asia relations. This is his third single-authored book from Oxford University Press.

Enze is in conversation with Duncan McCargo, President's Chair in Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University and one of the hosts on New Books in Southeast Asian Studies. Duncan's recent co-authored article on the relationship between Thai politics and attitudes to China, mentioned during the podcast, may be found here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily Mitchell-Eaton, "New Destinations of Empire: Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

Sun, 22 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In 1986 the Compact of Free Association marked the formal end of U.S. colonialism in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, while simultaneously re-entrenching imperial power dynamics between the two countries. The U.S.-RMI Compact at once enshrined exclusive U.S. military access to the islands and established the right of “visa-free” migration to the United States for Marshallese citizens, leading to a Marshallese diaspora whose largest population resettled in the seemingly unlikely destination of Springdale, Arkansas.

An “all-white town” by design for much of the twentieth century, Springdale, having nearly quadrupled in population since 1980, has been remade by Marshallese as well as Latinx immigration. Through ethnographic, policy-based, and archival research in Guåhan, Saipan, Hawai’i, Arkansas, and Washington, D.C., New Destinations of Empire: Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States (University of Georgia Press, 2024) by Dr. Emily Mitchell-Eaton tells the story of these place-based transformations, revealing how U.S. empire both causes and constrains mobility for its subjects, shaping migrants’ experiences of racialization, citizenship, and belonging in new destinations of empire.

In examining two spatial processes—imperialism and migration—together, Dr. Mitchell-Eaton reveals connections and flows between presumably distant, “remote” sites like Arkansas and the Marshall Islands, showing them to be central to the United States’ most urgent political issues: immigration, racial justice, militarization, and decolonization.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mattias Fibiger, "Suharto's Cold War: Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and the World" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 05:00:00 -0000

Conventional accounts of the Cold War focus on competition between the United States and Soviet Union as key to shaping world events. In focusing on the agency of Indonesia’s Suharto regime during its first decades, Matthias Fibiger casts new light on how the Cold War was experienced elsewhere. Based on extensive analysis of state archival records, Fibiger shows how Suharto navigated risks as he took power, constructed a counterrevolutionary New Order regime with foreign aid and investment, and projected its ideologies in other countries of Southeast Asia. By situating views from Jakarta in the broader context of international relations between superpowers and the non-aligned movement, Suharto’s Cold War: Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and the World (Oxford University Press, 2023) deepens understanding of political and diplomatic history in Southeast Asia and the World.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brian Martin, "From Underground Railroad to Rebel Refuge: Canada and the Civil War" (ECW Press, 2022)

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Despite all we know about the Civil War, its causes, battles, characters, issues, impacts, and legacy, few books have explored Canada’s role in the bloody conflict that claimed more than 600,000 lives. Until From Underground Railroad to Rebel Refuge: Canada and the Civil War (ECW Press, 2022) by Brian Martin.

A surprising 20,000 Canadians went south to take up arms on both sides of the conflict, while thousands of enslaved people, draft dodgers, deserters, recruiters, plotters, and spies fled northward to take shelter in the attic that is Canada. Though many escaped slavery and found safety through the Underground Railroad, they were later joined by KKK members wanted for murder. Confederate President Jefferson Davis along with several of his emissaries and generals found refuge on Canadian soil, and many plantation owners moved north of the border.

Award-winning journalist Brian Martin will open eyes in both Canada and the United States to how the two countries and their citizens interacted during the Civil War and the troubled times that surrounded it.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Azad Essa, "Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel" (Pluto Press, 2023)

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Under Narendra Modi, India has changed dramatically. As the world attempts to grapple with its trajectory towards authoritarianism and a 'Hindu Rashtra' (Hindu State), little attention has been paid to the linkages between Modi's India and the governments from which it has drawn inspiration, as well as military and technical support.

India once called Zionism racism, but, as Azad Essa argues, the state of Israel has increasingly become a cornerstone of India's foreign policy. Looking to replicate the 'ethnic state' in the image of Israel in policy and practice, the annexation of Kashmir increasingly resembles Israel's settler-colonial project of the occupied West Bank. The ideological and political linkages between the two states are alarming; their brands of ethnonationalism deeply intertwined.

Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel (Pluto Press, 2023) puts India's relationship with Israel in its historical context, looking at the origins of Zionism and Hindutva; India's changing position on Palestine; and the countries' growing military-industrial relationship from the 1990s. Lucid and persuasive, Essa demonstrates that the India-Israel alliance spells significant consequences for democracy, the rule of law and justice worldwide.

Azad Essa is an award-winning journalist and author based between Johannesburg and New York City. He is currently a senior reporter for Middle East Eye covering American foreign policy, Islamophobia and race in the US. He is the author of The Moslems are Coming and Zuma's Bastard and has written for Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy and the Guardian.

Stuti Roy has recently graduated with an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tristan A. Volpe, "Leveraging Latency: How the Weak Compel the Strong with Nuclear Technology" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Over the last seven decades, some states successfully leveraged the threat of acquiring atomic weapons to compel concessions from superpowers. For many others, however, this coercive gambit failed to work. When does nuclear latency--the technical capacity to build the bomb--enable states to pursue effective coercion?

In Leveraging Latency: How the Weak Compel the Strong with Nuclear Technology (Oxford UP, 2023), Tristan A. Volpe argues that having greater capacity to build weaponry doesn't translate to greater coercive advantage. Volpe finds that there is a trade-off between threatening proliferation and promising nuclear restraint. States need just enough bomb-making capacity to threaten proliferation but not so much that it becomes too difficult for them to offer nonproliferation assurances. The boundaries of this sweet spot align with the capacity to produce the fissile material at the heart of an atomic weapon.

To test this argument, Volpe includes comparative case studies of four countries that leveraged latency against superpowers: Japan, West Germany, North Korea, and Iran.

Volpe identifies a generalizable mechanism--the threat-assurance trade-off--that explains why more power often makes compellence less likely to work.

Volpe proposes a framework that illuminates how technology shapes broader bargaining dynamics and helps to refine policy options for inhibiting the spread of nuclear weapons. As nuclear technology continues to cast a shadow over the global landscape, Leveraging Latency systematically assesses its coercive utility.

Our guest today is Tristan Volpe, an Assistant Professor in the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School and a nonresident fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pascal Lottaz and Ingemar Ottosson, "Sweden, Japan, and the Long Second World War: 1931-1945" (Routledge, 2021)

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Lottaz and Ottosson explore the intricate relationship between neutral Sweden and Imperial Japan during the latter's 15 years of warfare in Asia and in the Pacific. While Sweden's relationship with European Axis powers took place under the premise of existential security concerns, the case of Japan was altogether different. Japan never was a threat to Sweden, militarily or economically. Nevertheless, Stockholm maintained a close relationship with Tokyo until Japan's surrender in 1945. This book explores the reasons for that and therefore provides a study on the rationale and the value of neutrality in the Long Second World War.

Sweden, Japan, and the Long Second World War: 1931-1945 (Routledge, 2021) is a valuable resource for scholars of the Second World War and of the history of neutrality.

Pascal Lottaz is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Waseda University, Japan.

Ingemar Ottosson is Associate Professor of History at Lund University, Sweden.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Caroline Alexander, "Skies of Thunder: The Deadly World War II Mission Over the Roof of the World" (Viking, 2024)

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

During the Second World War, FDR promised thousands of tons of US material to Chiang Kai Shek in order to keep China in the war and keep Japan distracted. But how would the US get it there? The only land route had been cut off by the Japanese invasion, leaving only one other option: air.

For the next three years, US planes flew “The Hump”: an air route from Assam to Chongqing, over the dangerous Himalayan mountains and Burmese jungles. Countless planes were lost, whether on a Himalayan mountainside or deep in the jungle.

That tale is the subject of Skies of Thunder: The Deadly World War II Mission Over the Roof of the World (Viking: 2024), by Caroline Alexander, who joins us today.

Caroline Alexander is the author of the bestselling The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition (Knopf: 1998), which has been translated into thirteen languages. She writes frequently for The New Yorker and National Geographic, and she is the author of four other books, including Mrs. Chippy’s Last Expedition (Harper Perennial: 1999), the journal of the Endurance ship’s cat.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Skies of Thunder. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cindy Ermus, "The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

This episode features a conversation with Dr. Cindy Ermus on her recently published book, The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Published by Cambridge University Press, The Great Plague Scare of 1720 follows the Plague of Provence from 1720 to 1722 to understand new forms of contagion and its management. As one of the last major epidemics of the plague to strike Western Europe, the Plague of Provence generated a public health crisis that impacted the social, commercial, and diplomatic choices of France, which eventually spread the public health crisis to Italy, Great Britain, Spain, and their overseas colonies. In this transnational, transoceanic study, The Great Plague Scare of 1720 reveals how crisis in one part of the globe transcends geographic boundaries and influences society, politics, and public health policy in regions far from the epicenter of disaster.

Cindy Ermus is the Charles and Linda Wilson Associate Professor in the History of Medicine, and Director of the Humanities in Medicine Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She specializes in the history of medicine and the environment, especially catastrophe and public health crisis management, in eighteenth-century France and the Atlantic World. In addition to The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2023), she is also the author of Urban Disasters (Cambridge UP, 2023). Currently, she is at work on a co-authored global history of epidemics (with Claire Edington). Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Verge, Stat News, and The Miami Herald, and she has been a guest on BBC World News, Univision, Al-Jazeera, and others. She is also co-series editor for France Overseas of the University of Nebraska Press, and co-founder and co-executive editor for the digital, open-access publication AgeofRevolutions.com.

Donna Doan Anderson (she/her) is a research assistant professor in History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Isidro Gonzalez (he/him) is a pre-doctoral fellow of History at Claremont McKenna College.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How Are Southeast Asia’s Toxic Alliances Undermining the Region’s Prospects for Democracy?

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Why are dubious power-sharing deals on the rise across Southeast Asia? What effects do they have on the region’s prospects for democracy? And are they going to be tolerated? Join Petra Alderman as she talks to Duncan McCargo and Rendy Pahrun Wadipalapa about their recent Journal of Democracy article ‘Southeast Asia’s Toxic Alliances.’ They discuss the factors that underpin the rise of these toxic alliances among Southeast Asian elites, their characteristics, and their effects on democracy by focusing on three countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Duncan McCargo is President's Chair in Global Affairs at the Nanyang Technological University. He works mainly on the comparative politics of Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, on which he has published widely. His dozen books include the best-selling The Thaksinization of Thailand (co-authored, NIAS Press 2005), and the award-winning Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand (Cornell 2008); and more recently Fighting for Virtue: Politics and Justice in Thailand (Cornell 2019) and Future Forward: The Rise and Fall of a Thai Political Party (co-authored, NIAS Press 2020).

Rendy Pahrun Wadipalapa is a researcher at National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) in Jakarta, Indonesia. He earned his PhD from the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, UK (2022). His research focuses on Southeast Asian and Indonesian politics.

Petra Alderman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics at the University of Birmingham and Research Fellow at CEDAR.

The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on X (Twitter) at @CEDAR_Bham

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Osamah F. Khalil, "A World of Enemies: America's Wars at Home and Abroad from Kennedy to Biden" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

A sobering account of how the United States trapped itself in endless wars—abroad and at home—and what it might do to break free.

Over the past half-century, Americans have watched their country extend its military power to what seemed the very ends of the earth. America’s might is felt on nearly every continent—and even on its own streets. Decades ago, the Wars on Drugs and Terror broke down the walls separating law enforcement from military operations. A World of Enemies: America's Wars at Home and Abroad from Kennedy to Biden (Harvard UP, 2024) tells the story of how an America plagued by fears of waning power and influence embraced foreign and domestic forever wars.

Osamah Khalil argues that the militarization of US domestic and foreign affairs was the product of America’s failure in Vietnam. Unsettled by their inability to prevail in Southeast Asia, US leaders increasingly came to see a host of problems as immune to political solutions. Rather, crime, drugs, and terrorism were enemies spawned in “badlands”—whether the Middle East or stateside inner cities. Characterized as sites of endemic violence, badlands lay beyond the pale of civilization, their ostensibly racially and culturally alien inhabitants best handled by force.

Yet militarized policy has brought few victories. Its failures—in Iraq, Afghanistan, US cities, and increasingly rural and borderland America—have only served to reinforce fears of weakness. It is time, Khalil argues, for a new approach. Instead of managing never-ending conflicts, we need to reinvest in the tools of traditional politics and diplomacy.

Osamah F. Khalil is an Associate Professor of History at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He is the author of America’s Dream Palace, which was named a Best Book of 2017 by Foreign Affairs. His research on foreign policy, national security, and military affairs has been featured widely, from PBS NewsHour to USA Today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nina Valbousquet, "Lukewarm Souls: The Vatican facing the Shoah" (La Découverte, 2024)

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The exceptional opening of the archives of the pontificate of Pius XII (1939-1958) in 2020 did not end the controversies surrounding the silence of the pope in the face of Nazi atrocities. But, beyond the controversies, what do these new sources reveal? What do they contribute to our understanding of the Shoah, the Second World War and religious power? Do they allow us to grasp more finely the deep ambivalences of the Vatican, between charity and prejudice, in the face of anti-Jewish persecution?

Based on three years of examining these considerable funds in Rome, Lukewarm Souls: The Vatican facing the Shoah (La Découverte, 2024) probes the motivations and dilemmas of the people involved in this story, their voices but also their silences. Going beyond a classic approach focused on the pope and diplomacy, this work sheds light on the political, humanitarian, religious and cultural issues of the Holy See's choices. The book raises this question in the long duration of relations between the Church and the Jews in order to evaluate the weight of a centuries-old culture of hostility in the Vatican's responses to anti-Semitic persecutions, before and during the war, but also after the Shoah. Has this unprecedented level of violence against a minority shaken the old bedrock of Christian anti-Judaism?

Finally, by making the voices of those on the ground and the persecuted heard, in particular those of mixed Judeo-Christian families, this book questions more broadly the resilience of religion in the face of genocide and the capacity of our civil societies to respond to mass violence.

This book was originally published in French as Les âmes tièdes: Le Vatican face à la Shoah (La Découverte, 2024)

Geraldine Gudefin is a French-born modern Jewish historian researching Jewish family life, legal pluralism, and the migration experiences of Jews in France and the United States. She is currently a research fellow at the Hebrew University’s Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Middle East on the Brink: Escalation, Diplomacy, and the Search for Stability

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Recent developments in the Middle East have raised concern about the potential for a wider regional war. What do escalating tensions in Gaza, Lebanon, and beyond mean for the future? Join RBI Director John Torpey as he discusses the complexities of the contemporary Middle East with Win Dayton, a retired senior member of the U.S. Foreign Service and former Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy in Beirut. Mr. Dayton shares insights from his decades of diplomatic experience, exploring the shifting dynamics of U.S. foreign policy, the challenges of intervention, and the prospects for stability amid growing regional and global pressures.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Masha Kirasirova, "The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union's Anticolonial Empire" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In the first few years after the Russian Revolution, an ideological project coalesced to link the development of what Stalin demarcated as the internal "East"—primarily Central Asia and the Caucasus—with nation-building, the overthrow of colonialism, and progress toward socialism in the "foreign East"—the Third World. Support for anti-colonial movements abroad was part of the Communist Party platform and shaped Soviet foreign policy to varying degrees thereafter.

The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union's Anticolonial Empire (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Masha Kirasirova explores how the concept of "the East" was used by the world's first communist state and its mediators to project, channel, and contest power across Eurasia. Dr. Kirasirova traces how this policy was conceptualised and carried out by students, comrades, and activists—Arab, Jewish, and Central Asian. It drew on their personal motivations and gave them considerable access to state authority and agency to shape Soviet ideology, inform concrete decisions, and allocate resources. Contextualising these Eastern mediators within a global frame, this book historicizes the circulation of peoples and ideas between the socialist and decolonizing world and reinscribes Soviet history into postcolonial studies and global history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

D. M. Giangreco, "Truman and the Bomb: The Untold Story" (Potomac Books, 2023)

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Many myths have grown up around President Harry S. Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons against Imperial Japan. In destroying these myths, D. M. Giangreco’s Truman and the Bomb: The Untold Story (Potomac Books, 2023) will discomfort both Truman’s critics and his supporters, and force historians to reexamine what they think they know about the end of the Pacific War.

Myth: Truman didn’t know of the atomic bomb’s development before he became president.

Fact: Truman’s knowledge of the bomb is revealed in his own carefully worded letters to a Senate colleague and specifically discussed in the correspondence between the army officers assigned to his Senate investigating committee.

Myth: The huge casualty estimates cited by Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson were a postwar creation devised to hide their guilt for killing thousands of defenseless civilians.

Fact: The flagrantly misrepresented “low” numbers are based on narrow slices of highly qualified—and limited—U.S. Army projections printed in a variety of briefing documents and are not from the actual invasion planning against Japan.

Myth: Truman wanted to defeat Japan without any assistance from the Soviet Union and to freeze the USSR out of the postwar settlements.

Fact: President Franklin D. Roosevelt and President Truman desperately wanted Stalin’s involvement in the bloody endgame of World War II and worked diligently—and successfully—toward that end.

Using previously unpublished material, D. M. Giangreco busts these myths and more. An award-winning historian and expert on Truman, Giangreco is perfectly situated to debunk the many deep-rooted falsehoods about the roles played by American, Soviet, and Japanese leaders during the end of the World War II in the Pacific. Truman and the Bomb, a concise yet comprehensive study of Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb, will prove to be a classic for studying presidential politics and influence on atomic warfare and its military and diplomatic components.

Making this book particularly valuable for professors and students as well as for military, diplomatic, and presidential historians and history buffs are extensive primary source materials, including the planned U.S. naval and air operations in support of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. These documents support Giangreco’s arguments while enabling the reader to enter the mindsets of Truman and his administration as well as the war’s key Allied participants.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Todd Stern, "Landing the Paris Climate Agreement: How It Happened, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next" (MIT Press, 2024)

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

From the U.S. lead negotiator on climate change, an inside account of the seven-year negotiation that culminated in the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015—and where the international climate effort needs to go from here. The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change was one of the most difficult and hopeful achievements of the twenty-first century: 195 nations finally agreed, after 20 years of trying, to establish an ambitious, operational regime to address one of the greatest civilizational challenges of our time.

In Landing the Paris Climate Agreement: How It Happened, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next (MIT Press, 2024), Todd Stern, the chief US negotiator on climate change, provides an engaging account from inside the rooms where it happened: the full, charged, seven-year story of how the Paris Agreement came to be, following an arc from Copenhagen, to Durban, to the secret U.S.-China climate deal in 2014, to Paris itself. With a storyteller’s gift for character, suspense, and detail, Stern crafts a high-stakes narrative that illuminates the strategy, policy, politics, and diplomacy that made Paris possible. Introducing readers to a vivid cast of characters, including Xie Zenhua, Vice Minister of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, Bo Lidegaard, chief strategist for Denmark’s Prime Minster, and Indian minister Jairam Ramesh, Stern, who worked alongside President Barack Obama and Secretaries of State John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, depicts the pitfalls and challenges overcome, the shifting alliances, the last-minute maneuvering, and the ultimate historic success. The book concludes with a final chapter that describes key developments since 2015 and the author’s reflections on what needs to be done going forward to contain the climate threat. A unique peek behind the curtain of one of the most important international agreements of our time, Landing the Paris Climate Agreement is a vital and fascinating read for anyone who cares about the future of our one shared home.

Todd Stern is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a nonresident distinguished fellow at the Asia Society, concentrating on climate change. He served from January 2009 until April 2016 as the Special Envoy for Climate Change at the Department of State, where he was President Barack Obama's chief climate negotiator.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why Can’t the US Compete with China in Infrastructure?

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode, Dr. Shahar Hameiri and Dr. Lee Jones discuss the political economy and financing behind global infrastructure development, with a focus on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The discussion explores the driving forces behind Chinese infrastructure investment, while addressing the crucial question of why American and European initiatives such as Global Gateway and the Program for Global Infrastructure and Investment struggle to compete with the BRI. We discuss dynamics of public and private finance, the role of public-private partnerships, and the challenges private investors face. Importantly, this episode reveals the U.S. Development Finance Corporation’s increasing reliance on private capital, and the decline of the construction sector in the U.S. economy. This comprehensive view shows how different financing and development models shape the global infrastructure landscape, how infrastructure development has evolved into its current state, and novel fields of competition, such as undersea Internet cables.

Hameiri and Jones are co-authors of Fractured China: How State Transformation is Shaping China's Rise (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Dr. Hameiri is Professor in the School of Political Science and International Relation at The University of Queensland. A political economist with diverse research interests, traversing the fields of security, development and aid, governance, political geography and international relations, he is interested in understanding the evolving nature of statehood and political agency under conditions of globalisation. His books include International Intervention and Local Politics (Cambridge University, 2017), Governing Borderless Threats: Non-Traditional Security and the Politics of State Transformation (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and Regulating Statehood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and he is a co-editor for the fourth edition of The Political Economy of Southeast Asia: Poliltics and Uneven Development Under Hyperglobalisation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). X: @ShaharHameiri.

Dr. Jones is Professor in International Politics at the Queen Mary University of London. Lee specialises in political economy and international relations, focusing on the politics of intervention, security, and governance, with a particular interest in social conflict and the transformation of states. Much of his work focuses on Southeast Asia and China. Lee regularly advises the British and other governments and civil society organisations and has often appeared in the national and international media. A fellow of the Higher Education Academy, he also sits on the board of Palgrave’s series Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy, and the ESRC’s peer review college. For further information see www.leejones.tk.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrea Benvenuti, "Nehru's Bandung: Non-Alignment and Regional Order in Indian Cold War Strategy" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In 1955, the leaders of 29 Asian and African countries flock to the small city of Bandung, Indonesia, for the first-ever Afro-Asian conference. India and its prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru played a key role in organizing the conference, and Bandung is now seen as a part of Nehru’s push to create a non-Western foreign policy that aligned with neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union.

But as Andrea Benvenuti’s Nehru’s Bandung: Non-Alignment and Regional Order in Indian Cold War Strategy (Oxford UP, 2024) points out, Nehru wasn’t actually keen on the idea at all. Nor was Nehru keen on a second summit, feeling that the summit merely highlighted divisions rather than forge consensus. And wrapped up in this whole discussion is Nehru’s attempt to bring China into the fold, perhaps best exemplified by Zhou Enlai, the only leader to emerge as a bigger star from Bandung than Nehru.

Andrea Benvenuti is Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at the University of New South Wales, teaching twentieth-century international history at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Nehru’s Bandung. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alexis Peri, "Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence Between American and Soviet Women" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In the tense years of the early Cold War, American and Soviet women conducted a remarkable pen-pal correspondence that enabled them to see each other as friends rather than enemies.

In a compelling new perspective on the early Cold War, prizewinning historian Alexis Peri explores correspondence between American and Soviet women begun in the last years of World War II and continuing into the 1950s. Previously unexamined, the women's letters movingly demonstrate the power of the personal, as the pen pals engaged in a "diplomacy of the heart" that led them to question why their countries were so divided.

Both Soviet and American women faced a patriarchal backlash after World War II that marginalized them professionally and politically. The pen pals discussed common challenges they faced, such as unequal pay and the difficulties of balancing motherhood with a career. Each side evinced curiosity about the other's world, asking questions about family and marriage, work conditions, educational opportunities, and religion. The women advocated peace and cooperation but at times disagreed strongly over social and economic issues, such as racial segregation in the United States and mandatory labor in the Soviet Union. At first both governments saw no risk in the communications, as women were presumed to have little influence and no knowledge of state secrets, but eventually Cold War paranoia set in. Amid the Red Scare, the House Un-American Activities Committee even accused some of the American women of being communist agents.

A rare and poignant tale, Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence Between American and Soviet Women (Harvard UP, 2024) offers a glimpse of the Cold War through the perspectives of women who tried to move beyond the label of "enemy" and understand, even befriend, people across increasingly bitter political divides.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

India Rising: Navigating the Second Cold War in South Asia from Nepal to the Maldives

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

What is the role of India in the Second Cold War (SCW) in South Asia? How do local histories, internal politics, and subnational dynamics shape relations with India and China? How does connectivity and infrastructure become a tool for geopolitical competition in the region, from China’s BRI to India’s infrastructural collaboration, and the US’s Millennium Challenges Corporation? On this episode we sit down with Dr. Dinesh Paudel and Aaron Magunna to answer these questions and discuss how it unfolds through cases in the Maldives and Nepal. A wide-ranging conversation, we learn about a rising India, India-China tensions, and how local politics shape the regional SCW.

Dr. Dinesh Paudel is a Professor in the Sustainable Development Department at Appalachian State University. His current research focuses on exploring the relationships and entanglements between the rising Asian economies, growing environmental degradations and rapidly expanding infrastructure in the Himalaya. He has written extensively on infrastructure and the Belt and Road Initiative in Nepal.

Aaron Magunna is a PhD student at the University of Queensland in Australia. His research focuses primarily on how countries in Asia, particularly India and Japan, respond to China-US competition by adapting their security, trade, and technology policies.

Resources:

Paudel, Dinesh. 2021. Himalayan BRI: an infrastructural conjuncture and shifting development in Nepal. Area Development and Policy.
Paudel, D., & Rankin, K. (2022). Himalayan geopolitical competition and the agency of the infrastructure state in Nepal. In The Rise of the Infrastructure State (pp. 213-226). Bristol University Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beatrice de Graaf, "Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

After twenty-six years of unprecedented revolutionary upheavals and endless fighting, the victorious powers craved stability after Napoleon's defeat in 1815. With the threat of war and revolutionary terror still looming large, the coalition launched an unprecedented experiment to re-establish European security. With over one million troops remaining in France, they established the Allied Council to mitigate the threat of war and terror and to design and consolidate a system of deterrence. The Council transformed the norm of interstate relations into the first, modern system of collective security in Europe. Drawing on the records of the Council and the correspondence of key figures such as Metternich, Castlereagh, Wellington and Alexander I, Beatrice de Graaf tells the story of Europe's transition from concluding a war to consolidating a new order.

In her new book Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815 (Cambridge UP, 2020), she reveals how, long before commercial interest and economic considerations on scale and productivity dictated and inspired the project of European integration, the common denominator behind this first impulse for a unification of Europe in norms and institutions was the collective fight against terror.

George Giannakopoulos is a historian of Modern Britain and Europe. He has recently guest edited the special issue Britain, European Civilization and the idea of Liberty” for the History of European Ideas (2020)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael J. Alarid, "Hispano Bastion: New Mexican Power in the Age of Manifest Destiny, 1837-1860" (U New Mexico Press, 2022)

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Hispano Bastion: New Mexican Power in the Age of Manifest Destiny, 1837-1860 (University of New Mexico Press, 2023), historian Dr. Michael J. Alarid examines New Mexico's transition from Spanish to Mexican to US control during the nineteenth century and illuminates how emerging class differences played a crucial role in the regime change.

After Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821, trade between Mexico and the United States attracted wealthy Hispanos into a new market economy and increased trade along El Camino Real, turning it into a burgeoning exchange route. As landowning Hispanos benefited from the Santa Fe trade, traditional relationships between wealthy and poor Nuevomexicanos--whom Alarid calls patrónes and vecinos--started to shift. Far from being displaced by US colonialism, wealthy Nuevomexicanos often worked in concert with new American officials after US troops marched into New Mexico in 1846, and in the process, Dr. Alarid argues, the patrónes abandoned their customary obligations to vecinos, who were now evolving into a working class. Wealthy Nuevomexicanos, the book argues, succeeded in preserving New Mexico as a Hispano bastion, but they did so at the expense of poor vecinos.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

E. L. Gaston, "Illusions of Control: Dilemmas in Managing U.S. Proxy Forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Over the last two decades, the United States has supported a range of militias, rebels, and other armed groups in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Critics have argued that such partnerships have many perils, from enabling human rights abuses to seeding future threats. Policy makers, however, have sought to mitigate the risks of partnering with irregular armed groups. Militia group leaders in far-flung corners of these war-torn countries were subjected to background checks and instructed about international law and human rights, and their funding was cut when they crossed red lines. To what extent have such mechanisms curbed the dangers of proxy warfare, and what unforeseen consequences has this approach unleashed?

Drawing on a decade of field research and hundreds of interviews with stakeholders, in Illusions of Control: Dilemmas in Managing U.S. Proxy Forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria (Columbia University Press, 2024), Dr. Erica L. Gaston unpacks the dilemmas of attempting to control proxy forces. She demonstrates that, although the tools U.S. policy makers used to constrain partners’ behavior increased in number and sophistication, they never fully addressed the range of political, security, and legal concerns surrounding these forces. Moreover, by shifting policy makers’ calculations, the use of proxy forces introduced additional moral hazards and may have enabled riskier decision making. Featuring substantial empirical detail and close analysis of key internal debates, Illusions of Control offers new perspectives on some of the most significant and controversial elements of recent U.S. security policy. In addition to nuanced insights about proxy relationships, this book provides a novel analytical toolkit for exploring transnational bargaining and foreign policy deliberations in hybrid political environments.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Donald R. Hickey, "Tecumseh's War: The Epic Conflict for the Heart of America" (Westholme, 2023)

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Shawnee leader Tecumseh came to prominence in a war against the United States waged from 1811 to 1815. In 1805, Tecumseh's younger brother Lalawethika (soon to be known as "the Prophet") had a vision for an Indian revitalization movement that would restore Native culture and resist American expansion. Tecumseh organized the growing support for this movement, which came from Indigenous peoples across the Old Northwest and parts of the Great Plains, into a loose but powerful military alliance.

In late 1811, while Tecumseh was away on a recruiting mission in the South, General William Henry Harrison led an army to the center of Native resistance at Prophetstown in present-day Indiana. In the early morning hours of November 7, in what came to be known as the Battle of Tippecanoe, Harrison's men fought off an Indian attack, which marked the beginning of Tecumseh's War. Seven months later, when the United States declared war on Britain, thus initiating the War of 1812, the British and Tecumseh forged an alliance against the United States. Initially, the Anglo-Indian alliance enjoyed considerable success at Detroit, Chicago, Mackinac, and elsewhere, exposing much of the Old Northwest to border warfare, but the tide turned in 1813 when Harrison invaded Canada. On October 5 the American army defeated a much smaller Anglo-Indian force in the climactic Battle of the Thames. Tecumseh was killed in this battle, and although his confederacy disintegrated, British support ensured that the Indian war would continue for another two years with the Sauk chief Black Hawk now providing the inspiration and leadership. Tecumseh's War ended only in late 1815 after the British made peace with the United States and abandoned their native allies.

Tecumseh's War: The Epic Conflict for the Heart of America (Westholme, 2023) is the first complete story of this major conflict. Distinguished historian Donald R. Hickey detaches it from the War of 1812, moving Tecumseh's confederation to center stage to tell the sweeping and engrossing story of this last great Indian War--the last time that Indigenous Peoples had a powerful European ally to oppose United States expansion and thus the lastchance they had of shaping the future of the continent.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Helena F. S. Lopes, "Neutrality and Collaboration in South China: Macau during the Second World War" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The South China enclave of Macau was the first and last European colonial settlement in East Asia and a territory at the crossroads of different empires. In Neutrality and Collaboration in South China: Macau during the Second World War (Cambridge UP, 2023), Helena F. S. Lopes analyses the layers of collaboration that developed from neutrality in Macau during the Second World War.

Exploring the intersections of local, regional and global dynamics, she unpacks the connections between a plurality of actors with competing and collaborative interests, including Chinese Nationalists, Communists and collaborators with Japan, Portuguese colonial authorities and British and Japanese representatives. Lopes argues that neutrality eased the movement of refugees of different nationalities who sought shelter in Macau during the war and that it helped to guarantee the maintenance of two remnants of European colonialism - Macau and Hong Kong. Drawing on extensive research from multilingual archival material from Asia, Europe, Australasia and America, this book brings to light the multiple global connections framing the experiences of neutrality and collaboration in the Portuguese-administered enclave of Macau.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Zach Fredman, "The Tormented Alliance: American Servicemen and the Occupation of China, 1941–1949" (UNC Press, 2022)

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Tormented Alliance: American Servicemen and the Occupation of China, 1941–1949 (UNC Press, 2022) explores the wartime partnership between China and the United States from the ground up. Beginning in 1941, and especially after Pearl Harbor, both sides had high hopes for wartime cooperation against Japan. But as The Tormented Alliance shows, ‘a military alliance with the United States means a military occupation by the United States.’ This occupation was underpinned by inequalities of race, gender, nation, wealth, and power which strained relations between China and the United States during both the Second World War and the ensuing Chinese Civil War. The tens of thousands of US military personnel in China transformed themselves into a widely loathed occupation force: an aggressive, resentful, emasculating source of physical danger and compromised sovereignty. Following multiple archival trails, Fredman finds how negative on-the-ground interactions between US servicemen and all kinds of Chinese people – civilian and military – turned Sino-American cooperation into a ‘tormented alliance’ and helped unravel it from below.

This groundbreaking study is highly recommended for anyone interested in twentieth-century China, US foreign relations, and the history of war.

Mark Baker is lecturer (assistant professor) in East Asian history at the University of Manchester, UK.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

S4E9 The Fragility of China: A Conversation with Dennis Unkovic

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of Madison's Notes, we sit down with Dennis Unkovic to discuss his latest book, The Fragility of China (Encounter Books, 2024). Unkovic delves into the complex forces shaping China's political, economic, and social landscape. From the country's rising internal challenges to its evolving role on the global stage, Unkovic offers a nuanced perspective on why China's future may be more uncertain than it appears. He unpacks the key themes of his book, including economic instability, demographic shifts, and geopolitical tensions, while offering insights into what these trends mean for the rest of the world.

Dennis Unkovic is an international attorney with decades of experience advising global businesses on trade, investment, and international relations. He is a prolific author and speaker, known for his expertise in U.S.-Asia relations. In addition to The Fragility of China, Unkovic has authored several books and articles on global trade and economic issues.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The UN and its Discreet Diplomacy in Peacemaking

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

This week on International Horizons, RBI Director John Torpey interviews Bertrand Ramcharan, former top UN diplomat and author of the recent book, The UN Security Council and Its Protective Function (Melrose Legal Publishers, 2024). Ramcharan describes the many instances in which the UN Secretaries-General worked discreetly to secure peace agreements in conflicts such as the Iran-Iraq war, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Russia-Georgia territorial dispute. He argues that these mediations followed three specific strategies: discreet diplomacy, patience, and waiting for the ripeness of conflicts, through which Secretaries-General have deployed their good offices. Ramcharan also proposes using previously successful approaches to address the current conflicts in Middle East, Ukraine, and Sudan, which involve working with Great Powers instead of lecturing them and appointing envoys whose prestige may enhance the credibility of the UN and facilitate conflict resolution.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nick Lloyd, "The Eastern Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918" (Norton, 2024)

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Writing in the 1920s, Winston Churchill argued that the First World War on the Eastern Front was "incomparably the greatest war in history. In its scale, in its slaughter, in the exertions of the combatants, in its military kaleidoscope, it far surpasses by magnitude and intensity all similar human episodes." It was, he concluded, "the most frightful misfortune" to fall upon mankind "since the collapse of the Roman Empire before the Barbarians." Yet Churchill was an exception, and the war in the east has long been seen as a sideshow to the brutal combat on the Western Front. Finally, with The Eastern Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918 (Norton, 2024)--the first major history of that arena in fifty years--the acclaimed historian Nick Lloyd corrects the record.

Drawing on the latest scholarship as well as eyewitness reports, diary entries, and memoirs, Lloyd moves from the great battles of 1914 to the final collapse of the Central Powers in 1918, showing how a local struggle between Austria-Hungary and Serbia spiraled into a massive conflagration that pulled in Germany, Russia, Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria. The Eastern Front was a vast theater of war that brought about the collapse of three empires and produced almost endless suffering. As many as sixteen million soldiers and two million civilians were killed or wounded in enormous battles that took place across as much as one hundred kilometers. Unlike in the west, where stalemate ruled the day, the war in the east was fluid, with armies embarking on penetrating advances. Lloyd narrates the repeated invasions of Serbia as well as the great battles between Russian, German, and Austrian forces at Tannenberg, Komarów, Gorlice-Tarnów, and the Masurian Lakes. All along, he takes us into the strategy of the generals who decided the war's course, from the Germans Ludendorff and Hindenburg to the Austro-Hungarian chief, Conrad von Hötzendorf, to the brilliant Russian Brusilov.

Perhaps the most radical aspect of the struggle in the east was that the violence was not confined to combatants. The Eastern Front witnessed calculated attacks against civilians that ripped the ethnic and religious fabric of numerous societies, paving the way for the horrors of the Holocaust. Lloyd's magisterial, definitive account of the war in the east will fundamentally alter our understanding of the cataclysmic events that reshaped Europe and the world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Megan Bradley et al., "IOM Unbound?: Obligations and Accountability of the International Organization for Migration in an Era of Expansion" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

It is an era of expansion for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), an increasingly influential actor in the global governance of migration. Bringing together leading experts in international law and international relations, this collection examines the dynamics and implications of IOM's expansion in a new way.

Analyzing IOM as an international organization (IO), IOM Unbound?: Obligations and Accountability of the International Organization for Migration in an Era of Expansion (Cambridge UP, 2023) illuminates the practices, obligations and accountability of this powerful but controversial actor, advancing understanding of IOM itself and broader struggles for IO accountability. The contributions explore key, yet often under-researched, IOM activities including its role in humanitarian emergencies, internal displacement, data collection, ethical labour recruitment, and migrant detention. Offering recommendations for reforms rooted in empirical evidence and careful normative analysis, this is a vital resource for all those interested in the obligations and accountability of international organizations, and in the field of migration. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeffrey Ding, "Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

When scholars and policymakers consider how technological advances affect the rise and fall of great powers, they draw on theories that center the moment of innovation—the eureka moment that sparks astonishing technological feats. In Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition (Princeton UP, 2024), Jeffrey Ding offers a different explanation of how technological revolutions affect competition among great powers. Rather than focusing on which state first introduced major innovations, he investigates why some states were more successful than others at adapting and embracing new technologies at scale. Drawing on historical case studies of past industrial revolutions as well as statistical analysis, Ding develops a theory that emphasizes institutional adaptations oriented around diffusing technological advances throughout the entire economy.

Examining Britain’s rise to preeminence in the First Industrial Revolution, America and Germany’s overtaking of Britain in the Second Industrial Revolution, and Japan’s challenge to America’s technological dominance in the Third Industrial Revolution (also known as the “information revolution”), Ding illuminates the pathway by which these technological revolutions influenced the global distribution of power and explores the generalizability of his theory beyond the given set of great powers. His findings bear directly on current concerns about how emerging technologies such as AI could influence the US-China power balance.

Our guest today is: Jeffrey Ding, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Georgetown University.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sean McMeekin, "To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism" (Basic Books, 2024)

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

When the USSR collapsed in 1991, the world was certain that Communism was dead. Today, three decades later, it is clear that it was not. While Russia may no longer be Communist, Communism and sympathy for Communist ideas have proliferated across the globe.

In To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism (Basic Books, 2024), Sean McMeekin investigates the evolution of Communism from a seductive ideal of a classless society into the ruling doctrine of tyrannical regimes. Tracing Communism's ascent from theory to practice, McMeekin ranges from Karl Marx's writings to the rise and fall of the USSR under Stalin to Mao's rise to power in China to the acceleration of Communist or Communist-inspired policies around the world in the twenty-first century. McMeekin argues, however, that despite the endurance of Communism, it remains deeply unpopular as a political form. Where it has arisen, it has always arisen by force.

Blending historical narrative with cutting-edge scholarship, To Overthrow the World revolutionizes our understanding of the evolution of Communism--an idea that seemingly cannot die.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mary Bridges, "Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

There was nothing inevitable or natural about the rise of US finance capitalism in the early twentieth century.

In Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower, Mary Bridges shows how US foreign banking began as a side hustle of Gilded Age tycoons and evolved into a more staid, bureaucratized network for bolstering US influence overseas. The early waves of US bankers built a network of international branch banks that relied on the power of the US government, copied the example of British foreign bankers, and built new alliances with local elites.

Overseas bank branches provided sites for experimentation in how to fuse US political will with local innovations and on-the-ground improvisation. In the process, branch bankers constructed a flexible and durable new infrastructure that supported the growth of US power abroad.

Using details from ledger entries and other sources, Bridges shows how these branch bankers divided their local communities into groups of “us” and "them," either as potential clients or local populations. In doing so, they constructed a new architecture of US trade finance that relied on long-standing inequalities and hierarchies of privilege. Thus, ideas developed by wealthy white men became part of the enduring fabric of financial infrastructure. She also shows how bank branches could accommodate these hierarchies to make room for new ideas about serving local markets, in response to financial pressures of the 1920s and after the Great Depression cut off other avenues of growth.

Bridges also tells the story of how US bankers created a market based on a new financial asset enabled by the Federal Reserve System called bankers' acceptance and began to collect vast amounts of foreign credit information.

Related resources:

Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean by Peter James Hudson
Infrastructure Is Remaking Geopolitics: How Power Flows from the Systems That Connect the World by Mary Bridges

Author recommended reading:

Plastic Capitalism: Banks, Credit Cards, and the End of Financial Control by Sean H. Vanatta
The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives by Ernest Scheyder

Hosted by Meghan Cochran

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amos C. Fox, "Conflict Realism: Understanding the Causal Logic of Modern War and Warfare" (Howgate, 2024)

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

If you seek a compelling exploration of contemporary armed conflict, then Conflict Realism: Understanding the Causal Logic of Modern War and Warfare (Howgate Publishing, 2024) by Amos C. Fox is for you. It delves into the intricate web of causation to unveil five pivotal trends shaping the landscape of war and warfare - urban warfare, sieges, attrition, precision strike strategy, and proxy wars - revealing a stark reality: wars remain far more attritional than anticipated by policymakers, military practitioners, and analysts alike. What’s more, just as attritional wars are becoming quite common, conflict elongation – wars of extended duration – are also becoming the norm. Through insightful analysis and a keen understanding of geopolitical intricacies, Amos Fox navigates the reader through the intricate interplay of these trends, shedding light on their profound implications for global security. This riveting work challenges conventional wisdom, offering readers a thought-provoking perspective on the contemporary nature of armed conflicts, ultimately urging a reconsideration of strategies and policies in the face of an ever-evolving battlefield.

Amos C. Fox, PhD, is a Fellow with Arizona State University’s Future Security Initiative. Amos is also a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Houston. He hosts the Revolution in Military Affairs, Soldier Pulse and WarCast podcasts, serves as an editorial board member with the Journal of Military Studies and is a senior editor with Small Wars Journal. Amos is also a retired US Army officer, where he served more than 24 years, retiring at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Samuel J. Hirst, "Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism, 1919-1939" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In the aftermath of the First World War the Western great powers sought to redefine international norms according to their liberal vision. They introduced Western-led multilateral organizations to regulate cross-border flows which became pivotal in the making of an interconnected global order.

In contrast to this well-studied transformation, in Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism, 1919-1939 (Oxford University Press, 2024), Samuel Hirst considers in detail for the first time the responses of the defeated interwar Soviet Union and early Republican Turkey who challenged this new order with a reactive and distinctly state-led international politics.

As Mustafa Kemal Atatürk took up arms in 1920 to overturn the terms of the Paris settlement, Vladimir Lenin provided military and economic aid as part of a partnership that both sides described as anti-imperialist. Over the course of the next two decades, the Soviet and Turkish states coordinated joint measures to accelerate development in spheres ranging from aviation to linguistics. Most importantly, Soviet engineers and architects helped colleagues in Ankara launch a five-year plan and build massive state-owned factories to produce textiles and replace Western imports. Whilst the Kemalists' cooperation with the Bolsheviks has often been described as pragmatic, this book demonstrates that Moscow and Ankara actually came together in an ideological convergence rooted in anxiety about underdevelopment relative to the West, gradually arriving at statist internationalism as an alternative to Western liberal internationalism.

Drawing on extensive archival research and offering an often-ignored and non-Western perspective on the history of international relations and diplomacy, Against the Liberal Order presents a novel interpretation of the international order of the interwar period that crosses the borders of historical disciplines and contributes to questions of current concern in world politics.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ian Williams, "Vampire State: The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Economy (Birlinn, 2024)

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

State capitalism. Socialism with Chinese characteristics. A socialist market economy. There have been numerous descriptions of the Chinese economy. However, none seems to capture the predatory, at times surreal, nature of the economy of the world’s most populous nation – nor the often bruising and mind-bending experience of doing business with the Middle Kingdom.

Ian Williams, a long-standing reporter on China, has a new argument in Vampire State: The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Economy (Birlinn, 2024).

Rules and agreements mean little. Markets are distorted, statistics fabricated, foreign industrial secrets and technology systematically stolen. Companies and entrepreneurs, at home and abroad, are bullied – often with the collusion of the victims themselves. The Party is in every boardroom and lab, with businesses thriving or dying at its will.

All this is part of realising President Xi Jinping’s ambition of China becoming the world’s pre-eminent economic, technological and military power.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeff Schuhrke, "Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of U.S. Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade" (Verso, 2024)

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

How the CIA used American unions to undermine workers at home and subvert democracy abroad.

Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of U.S. Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade (Verso, 2024) tells the shocking story of the AFL-CIO's global anticommunist crusade--and its devastating consequences for workers around the world.

Unions have the power not only to secure pay raises and employee benefits but to bring economies to a screeching halt and overthrow governments. Recognizing this, in the late twentieth century, the US government sought to control labor movements abroad as part of the Cold War contest for worldwide supremacy. In this work, Washington found an enthusiastic partner in the AFL-CIO's anticommunist officials, who, in a shocking betrayal, for decades expended their energies to block revolutionary ideologies and militant class consciousness from taking hold in the workers' movements of Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

Jeff Schuhrke is a labor historian, journalist, union activist, and assistant professor at the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies, SUNY Empire State University in New York City. He is a frequent contributor to In These Times and Jacobin, and his scholarship has been published in Diplomatic History and Labor: Studies in Working-Class History.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kerry Brown, "The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power" (Yale UP, 2024)

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London. He is the author of over twenty books on modern Chinese politics, history, and society.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Reversal. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Caroline Burt and Richard Partington, "Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State" (Faber & Faber, 2024)

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State (Faber & Faber, 2024) offers a lively, new and sweeping history of the rise of the state in Plantagenet England.

Between 1199 and 1399, English politics was high drama. These two centuries witnessed savage political blood-letting - including civil war, deposition, the murder of kings and the ruthless execution of rebel lords - as well as international warfare, devastating national pandemic, economic crisis and the first major peasant uprising in English history.

Arise, England uses the six Plantagenet kings who ruled during these two centuries to explore England's emergent statehood. Drawing on original accounts and arresting new research, it draws resonances between government, international relations, and the abilities, egos and ambitions of political actors, then and now. Colourful and complicated, and by turns impressive and hateful, the six kings stride through the story; but arguably the greatest character is the emerging English state itself.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mikhail Zygar, "War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine" (Scribner, 2023)

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

As soon as the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, prominent independent Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar circulated a Facebook petition signed first by hundreds of his cultural and journalistic contacts and then by thousands of others. That act led to a new law in Russia criminalizing criticism of the war, and Zygar fled Russia. In his time as a journalist, Zygar has interviewed President Zelensky and had access to many of the major players--from politicians to oligarchs. As an expert on Putin's moods and behavior, he has spent years studying the Kremlin's plan regarding Ukraine, and here, in clear, chronological order he explains how we got here.

In 1996 to 2004, Ukraine became an independent post-Soviet country where everyone was connected to the former empire at all levels, financially, culturally, psychologically. However, the elite anticipated that the empire would be back and punish them. From 2004 to 2018, there were many states inside one state, each with its own rulers/oligarchs and its own interests--some of them directly connected with Russia. In 2018, a new generation of Ukrainians arrive, and having grown in an independent country, they do not consider themselves to be part of Russia--and that was the moment when the war began, as Putin could not tolerate losing Ukraine forever.

Authoritative, timely, and vitally important, War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine (Scribner, 2023) is an unique overview of the war that continues to threaten the future of the entire world as we know it.

Mikhail Zygar, a journalist, filmmaker, and public historian, was founding editor-in-chief in 2010 of Russia’s only independent news TV channel, Dozhd (TVRain), which provided an alternative to Kremlin-controlled state television and gave a platform to opposition voices. He was also the founder and editor-in-chief of Project 1917, a website revisiting the Russian Revolution through myriad eye-witness perspectives. The New York Times has described Zygar as “one of Russia’s smartest and best-sourced young journalists.” Winner of the International Press Freedom Award in 2014, Zygar is the author of All the Kremlin’s Men (2016), the #1 bestseller in Russia that has been translated into over twenty languages, and The Empire Must Die (2017), a Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year.

Zygar openly protested against the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and then left Russia. He reported on the atrocities committed by Russian armed forces against Ukrainian civilians in the town of Bucha in 2022 and was charged with “distributing false information about Russia’s military.” In 2023 he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to 8.5 years in prison. He has written for based Der Spiegel in Germany and The New York Times in the USA and writes a substack newsletter, “The Last Pioneer.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lynn M. Tesser, "Rethinking the End of Empire: Nationalism, State Formation, and Great Power Politics" (Stanford UP, 2024)

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Why did a nation-state order emerge when nationalist activism was usually an elitist pursuit in the age of empire? Ordinary inhabitants and even most indigenous elites tended to possess religious, ethnic, or status-based identities rather than national identities. Why then did the desires of a typically small number result in wave after wave of new states? The answer has customarily centred on the actions of "nationalists" against weakening empires during a time of proliferating beliefs that "peoples" should control their own destiny.

Rethinking the End of Empire: Nationalism, State Formation, and Great Power Politics (Stanford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Lynn M. Tesser upends conventional wisdom by demonstrating that nationalism often existed more in the perceptions of external observers than of local activists and insurgents. Dr. Tesser adds nuance to scholarship that assumes most, if not all, pre-independence unrest was nationalist and separatist, and sheds light on why the various demands for change eventually coalesced around independence in some cases but not others.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Isaac Nakhimovsky, "The Holy Alliance: Liberalism and the Politics of Federation" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Holy Alliance is now most familiar as a label for conspiratorial reaction. In The Holy Alliance: Liberalism and the Politics of Federation (Princeton University Press, 2024), Dr. Isaac Nakhimovsky reveals the Enlightenment origins of this post-Napoleonic initiative, explaining why it was embraced at first by many contemporary liberals as the birth of a federal Europe and the dawning of a peaceful and prosperous age of global progress. Examining how the Holy Alliance could figure as both an idea of progress and an emblem of reaction, Dr. Nakhimovsky offers a novel vantage point on the history of federative alternatives to the nation state. The result is a clearer understanding of the recurring appeal of such alternatives—and the reasons why the politics of federation has also come to be associated with entrenched resistance to liberalism’s emancipatory aims.

Dr. Nakhimovsky connects the history of the Holy Alliance with the better-known transatlantic history of eighteenth-century constitutionalism and nineteenth-century efforts to abolish slavery and war. He also shows how the Holy Alliance was integrated into a variety of liberal narratives of progress. From the League of Nations to the Cold War, historical analogies to the Holy Alliance continued to be drawn throughout the twentieth century, and Nakhimovsky maps how some of the fundamental political problems raised by the Holy Alliance have continued to reappear in new forms under new circumstances. Time will tell whether current assessments of contemporary federal systems seem less implausible to future generations than initial liberal expectations of the Holy Alliance do to us today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peter Rose, "The Good War of Consul Reeves" (Blacksmith Books, 2024)

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Macau was supposed to be a sleepy post for John Reeves, the British consul for the Portuguese colony on China’s southern coast. He arrived, alone, in June 1941, his wife and daughter left behind in China.

Seven months later, Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, invaded Hong Kong, and made Reeves the last remaining British diplomat for hundreds of miles, responsible for refugees streaming in from China.

Peter Rose uses Reeves as a jumping off point for his newest work of historical fiction, The Good War of Consul Reeves (Blacksmith Books, 2024). Using Reeves’ own unpublished memoir and research in the national archives, Peter tells a tale of how Reeves—a largely unremarkable man—managed to hold things together in the Portuguese colony until Japan’s defeat in 1945.

Peter Rose is a graduate of the George Washington University and the Yale Law School. He first practiced law in Washington DC. It was during a posting in Hong Kong with Goldman Sachs as its Asian Head of Public Affairs that he started to visit Macau and became fascinated with the story of this incongruous piece of Portugal on the edge of China.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Good War of Consul Reeves. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Relations of Estonia and Japan from the 19th Century to early-21st Century

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Is there much to say about historical ties between two countries that are 8000 kilometres apart from each other? Actually, yes. In this episode Ene Selart, Junior Lecturer at University of Tartu, talks about her new book The Relations of Estonia and Japan from the 19th Century to early-21st Century (Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus, 2024) which explores surprisingly intricate connections between Estonia and Japan. The book is trilingual (in Estonian, English and Japanese) and published by University of Tartu Press.

Ene's research reveals that Estonian sailors got to the shores of Japan already in the early 19th century, during Japan's isolation period. Later, many Estonian soldiers participated in Russo-Japanese war and shared their experiences in letters and memoirs. All these cases offer a unique glimpse in how Estonians viewed and perceived Japan. The episode also explores the challenges of writing such a book and Ene's journey through ups and down of researching this field.

The episode is hosted by Dr. Arvydas Kumpis, Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies at Vytautas Magnus University. Since 2023 he is also serving as the Head of Centre for Asian Studies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James M. Scott, "Black Snow: Curtis Lemay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb" (Norton, 2024)

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In our interview about Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022), James M. Scott discusses the principles and personalities involved in the most destructive air attack in history.

Seven minutes past midnight on March 10, 1945, nearly 300 American B-29s thundered into the skies over Tokyo. Their payloads of incendiaries ignited a firestorm that reached up to 2,800 degrees, liquefying asphalt and vaporizing thousands; sixteen square miles of the city were flattened and more than 100,000 men, women, and children were killed.

Black Snow is the story of this devastating operation, orchestrated by Major General Curtis LeMay, who famously remarked: “If we lose the war, we’ll be tried as war criminals.” Scott reconstructs in granular detail that horrific night, and describes the development of the B-29, the capture of the Marianas for use as airfields, and the change in strategy from high-altitude daylight “precision” bombing to low-altitude nighttime incendiary bombing. Most importantly, the raid represented a significant moral shift for America, marking the first time commanders deliberately targeted civilians which helped pave the way for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki five months later.

Drawing on first-person interviews with American pilots and bombardiers and Japanese survivors, air force archives, and oral histories never before published in English, Scott delivers a harrowing and gripping account, and his most important and compelling work to date.

Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gill Bennett, “The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never Dies” (Oxford UP, 2018)

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Zinoviev Affair is a story of one of the most long-lasting and enduring conspiracy theories in modern British politics, an intrigue that still resonates nearly one-hundred years after it was written. Almost certainly a forgery, the so-called Zinoviev Letter, had no original and has never been traced. Notwithstanding, the Letter still haunts British politics. It was the subject of major Whitehall investigations in the 1960s and 1990s, and it even cropped up in the British media as recently as during the Referendum campaign of 2016 and the 2017 general election.

The Letter, addressed to the leadership of the British Communist Party, encouraging the British proletariat to greater revolutionary fervor, was apparently sent by Grigori Zinoviev, head of the Communist International in September 1924. Sent to London through British Secret Intelligence Service channels, the Letter’s publication by the Daily Mail on October 25th 1924 just before the General Election humiliated the first ever British Labour government, headed by Ramsay MacDonald, when its political opponents used it to create a “Red Scare” in the media. Labour blamed (erroneously) the Letter for its defeat, insisting there had been an establishment conspiracy, and many in the Labour Party have never forgotten it.

The Zinoviev Letter has long been a symbol of political dirty tricks and what we would now call “fake news”. Now, former Chief Historian at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Dr. Gill Bennett, who headed up an official inquiry into the Zinoviev Affair in the late 1990s, takes another look at this matter in a fascinating book, The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never Dies (Oxford University Press, 2018). Employing research skills honed by forty-years work at the Foreign Office, Dr. Bennett entrances the reader with this still fascinating detective story of spies and secrets, fraud and forgery, international subversion and the nascent global conflict between communism and capitalism.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Edwin P Rutan II, "High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor" (Kent State UP, 2024)

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In his recent book, High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor (The Kent State University Press, 2024), Edwin P. Rutan II rehabilitates the motivations and contributions of late-war Union soldiers and reframes our understanding of how the Union won the Civil War.

For more than a century, historians have disparaged the men who joined the Union army in the later days of the Civil War –– when higher bounty payments and the conditional draft were in effect –– as unpatriotic mercenaries who made poor soldiers and contributed little to the Union victory. However, as Rutan explains, historians have relied on the accounts of 1861 and 1862 veterans who resented these new recruits who had not yet suffered the hardships of war, and they were jealous of the higher bounties those recruits received. The result, he argues, is a long-standing mischaracterization of the service of 750,000 Union soldiers.

High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac offers a much-needed correction to the historical record, providing a more balanced assessment of the “high-bounty” replacements in the Army of the Potomac. Rutan argues, using combat-effectiveness methodology, that they were generally competent soldiers and indispensable in defeating the Army of Northern Virginia. He also examines the issue of financial motivation, concluding that the volunteers of 1862 may have been more driven by economic incentives than once thought, and 1864 recruits were less driven by this than typically described. Thus, Rutan concludes that the Union “high-bounty” men do not deserve the scorn heaped on them by early volunteers and subsequent generations of historians.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Laura Robson and Arie Dubnov, "Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism" (Stanford UP, 2019)

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The practice of Partition understood as the physical division of territory along ethno-religious lines into separate nation-states is often regarded as a successful political "solution" to ethnic conflict. In their edited volume Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism (Stanford University Press, 2019), Laura Robson and Arie Dubnov uncover the collective history of the concept of partition and locate its genealogy in the politics of twentieth-century empire and decolonization. Moving beyond the nationalist frameworks that served in the first instance to promote partition as a natural phenomenon, the volume discusses creation of new political entities in the world of the British empire, from the Irish Free State, to the Dominions (later Republics) of India and Pakistan, and Palestine.

Yorgos Giannakopoulos is a currently a Junior Research Fellow in Durham University, UK. He is a historian of Modern Britain and Europe. His published research recovers the regional impact of British Intellectuals in Eastern Europe in the age of nationalism and internationalism.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christian Bueger and Timothy Edmunds, "Understanding Maritime Security" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Whether it is pirates, smugglers, illicit fishing, or disputes in the South China Sea, the oceans are of increasing importance in international security.

In Understanding Maritime Security (Oxford UP, 2024), Christian Bueger and Timothy Edmunds provide a concise introduction to the history of security at sea and explain the core frameworks of analysis that professionals use to understand and tackle challenges to maritime order. They discuss key issues within the maritime security agenda, including inter-state disputes, terrorism, piracy, smuggling, trafficking, and illicit fishing, and examine how states have responded.

Bueger and Edmunds analyze future trends and show how maritime security is impacted by the critical infrastructure agenda, emerging technologies, cyber security, climate change, biodiversity loss, and the renaissance of geopolitics.

Comprehensive and incisive, this primer of maritime security is essential reading for maritime security professionals and students of this increasingly important issue.

Our guest today is Christian Bueger, Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michelle Tusan, "The Last Treaty: Lausanne and the End of the First World War in the Middle East" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In The Last Treaty: Lausanne and the End of the First World War in the Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2023), Michelle Tusan profoundly reshapes the story of how the First World War ended in the Middle East. Tracing Europe's war with the Ottoman Empire through to the signing of Lausanne, which finally ended the war in 1923, she places the decisive Allied victory over Germany in 1918 in sharp relief against the unrelenting war in the East and reassesses the military operations, humanitarian activities and diplomatic dealings that continued after the signing of Versailles in 1919.

She shows how, on the Middle Eastern Front, Britain and France directed Allied war strategy against a resurgent Ottoman Empire to sustain an imperial system that favored Europe's dominance within the nascent international system. The protracted nature of the conflict and ongoing humanitarian crisis proved devastating for the civilian populations caught in its wake and increasingly questioned old certainties about a European-led imperial order and humanitarian intervention. Its consequences would transform the postwar world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robin E. Möser, "Disarming Apartheid: The End of South Africa's Nuclear Weapons Programme and Accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, 1968–1991" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

South Africa remains the only state that developed a nuclear weapons capability, but ultimately decided to dismantle existing weapons and abandon the programme. Disarming Apartheid: The End of South Africa's Nuclear Weapons Programme and Accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, 1968–1991 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Robin E. Möser reconstructs the South African decision-making and diplomatic negotiations over the country's nuclear weapons programme and its international status, drawing on new and extensive archival material and interviews.

This deeply researched study brings to light a unique disarmament experience. It traces the country's previously neglected path towards accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Rather than relying primarily on US government archives, the book joins the burgeoning field of national nuclear histories based on unprecedented access to policymakers and documents in the country studied. Robin E. Möser, in addition to providing access to important new documents, offers original interpretations that enrich the study of nuclear politics for historians and political scientists.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Vitalis, "Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security That Haunt U.S. Energy Policy" (Stanford UP, 2020)

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

We've heard and rehearsed the conventional wisdom about oil: that the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf is what guarantees access to this strategic resource; that the "special" relationship with Saudi Arabia is necessary to stabilize an otherwise volatile market; and that these assumptions in turn provide Washington enormous leverage over Europe and Asia.

That common sense is wrong. The author of America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stanford University Press, 2007), Robert Vitalis returns to disenchant us once again—this time from "oilcraft," a line of magical thinking closer to witchcraft than statecraft. Contrary to the deeply-held beliefs of hawkish foreign policy experts and career academics alike, oil is a commodity like any other: bought, sold, and subject to market forces. The House of Saud does many things for U.S. investors, firms, and government agencies, but guaranteeing the flow of oil, making it cheap, or stabilizing the price isn't one of them. Nevertheless, persistent fears of oil scarcity and conflict continue to breed real consequences. Robert Vitalis, Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security That Haunt U.S. Energy Policy (Stanford UP, 2020) presses us to reconsider, among many things, the U.S.-Saudi special relationship, which confuses and traps many into unnecessarily accepting what we imagine is a devil's bargain. Along the way, Vitalis resurrects a forgotten school of critics of empire—a reprisal of his task in White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Cornell University Press, 2017).

Freeing ourselves from the spell of oilcraft won't be easy. But the benefits of doing so, and the drawbacks of not, make it essential.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eyck Freymann, "One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World" (Harvard UP, 2020)

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

China’s One Belt One Road policy, or OBOR, represents the largest infrastructure program in history. Yet little is known about it with any certainty. How can something so large be so bewildering?

In One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2020), Eyck Freymann, a DPhil Candidate in China Studies at the University of Oxford, explores the nature, function, and purposes of OBOR. Drawing on primary documents in five languages, interviews with senior officials, and on-the-ground case studies in Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Greece, Freymann sifts through the purposeful ambiguity of the Chinese Communist Party and unravels a series of popular myths about OBOR.

He finds that OBOR is not controlled by a monolithic state apparatus; that recipient nations do not consider OBOR a debt trap; and that appeal of OBOR is growing, not shrinking.

Ultimately, Freymann argues that the infrastructure projects are a sideshow to something else: Xi Jinping’s project to restore China’s greatness in world affairs and to solidify his place at the helm of the new Chinese empire.

John Sakellariadis is a 2020-2021 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

Anders Persson, "EU Diplomacy and the Israeli-Arab Conflict, 1967-2019" (Edinburgh UP, 2020)

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Nearly 50 years since the European Foreign Ministers issued their first declaration on the conflict between Israel and Palestine in 1971, the European Union continues to have close political and economic ties with the region. Based exclusively on primary sources, Anders Persson's EU Diplomacy and the Israeli-Arab Conflict, 1967-2019 (Edinburgh UP, 2020) offers an up-to-date overview of the European Union’s involvement in the Israeli-Arab conflict since 1967. This study uses an innovative conceptual methodology to examine keyword frequency in a sample of more than 2300 declarations and statements published in the Bulletin of the European Communities/European Union (1967–2009) as well as council reports and press interviews (2009–2018) to uncover broad patterns for qualitative analysis. The study suggests that the Israeli-Arab conflict is more important to the EU than any other conflict, having been key to shaping EU’s foreign policy overall.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oliver Volckart, "The Silver Empire: How Germany Created Its First Common Currency" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Wed, 21 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The problems that gave rise to the widespread desire to introduce a common currency were myriad. While trade was able to cope with-and even to benefit from-the parallel circulation of many different types of coin, it nevertheless harmed both the common people and the political authorities. The authorities in particular suffered from neighbours who used their comparatively good money as raw material to mint poor imitations. Debasing their own coinage provided an, at best, short-term solution. Over the medium and long term, it drove the members of the Empire into rounds of competitive debasements, until they realised that a common currency was the only answer that addressed the core of the problem.

In The Silver Empire: How Germany Created Its First Common Currency (Oxford University Press, 2024) Dr. Oliver Volckart examines the conditions that shaped the monetary outlook of the member states of the Empire, paying particular attention to the uneven access to silver and gold. Following closely the negotiations that prepared the common currency, he is able to illuminate the interest groups that were formed, what their agendas and ulterior motives were, how alliances were forged, and how it was eventually possible to obtain majority agreement on what a common currency should look like: a silver-based currency that was introduced in 1559-66.

In fact, in contrast to what historians once believed, the common currency they achieved turns out to have functioned not significantly worse than other currencies of the time: it had similar problems and similar advantages as the money issued by more centralised governments.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gregory Makoff, "Default: The Landmark Court Battle over Argentina's $100 Billion Debt Restructuring" (Georgetown UP, 2024)

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The dramatic inside story of the most important case in the history of sovereign debt law Unlike individuals or corporations that become insolvent, nations do not have access to bankruptcy protection from their creditors. When a country defaults on its debt, the international financial system is ill equipped to manage the crisis. Decisions by key individuals—from national leaders to those at the International Monetary Fund, from holdout creditors to judges—determine the fate of an entire national economy. A prime example is Argentina’s 2001 default on $100 billion in bonds, which stands out for its messy outcomes and outsized impact on sovereign debt markets, sovereign debt law, and IMF policy.

Default: The Landmark Court Battle over Argentina's $100 Billion Debt Restructuring (Georgetown UP, 2024) is the riveting story of Argentina’s sovereign debt drama, which reveals the obscure inner workings of sovereign debt restructuring. This detailed case study describes the intense fight over the role of the IMF in Argentina’s 2005 debt restructuring and the ensuing bitter decade of litigation with holdout creditors, demonstrating that outcomes for sovereign debt are determined by a complex interplay between financial markets, governments, the IMF, the press, and the courts. This cautionary tale lays bare the institutional, political, and legal pressures that come into play when a country cannot repay its debts. It offers a deeper understanding of how global financial capitalism functions for those who work in or study debt markets, international finance, international relations, and international law.

Gregory Makoff, PhD, is a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and an expert on sovereign debt management. A former banker specializing in debt advice, liability management, and derivatives, he has also advised the US Department of the Treasury.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Angela Geck, "The Power to Persuade: Strategic Arguing at the World Trade Organization" (U Toronto Press, 2024)

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Power to Persuade: Strategic Arguing at the World Trade Organization (University of Toronto Press, 2024) by Dr. Angela Geck provides an innovative and eye-opening analysis of strategic arguing as a means of power in global politics. Based on an empirical case study of arguing processes in the World Trade Organization (WTO), the book shows how discursive contexts, institutional norms and procedures, and unequal human resources condition who has the power to persuade.

While accounts of arguing in international relations are typically based on a notion of arguing as a power-free mode of interaction oriented towards understanding, Dr. Geck shows how such an approach precludes the question of persuasive power. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Geneva diplomats and a document-based analysis of the negotiations on two Doha Round issues, the book examines the practices governing strategic arguing in the WTO and uncovers two sources of persuasive power: firstly, prevalent discourses and connected regime norms empower some actors over others; secondly, their ability to debate is conditioned by exclusionary procedures and unequal human resources.

Offering a grounded theory of strategic arguing in trade politics, The Power to Persuade presents a novel analysis of the relationship between arguing and power.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Justine Bendel, "Litigating the Environment: Process and Procedure Before International Courts and Tribunals" (Edward Elgar, 2023)

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Litigating the Environment: Process and Procedure Before International Courts and Tribunals (Edward Elgar, 2023), Dr Justine Bendel scrutinises how international courts and tribunals may respond procedurally to an ever-growing list of environmental disputes. In a time of environmental crisis, she lays crucial groundwork for strengthening the application of international environmental law, a topic of increasing relevance for global civil society.

Putting into perspective the practices of various international courts and tribunals, Dr Bendel works within the constraints of the existing judicial framework to sharpen international environmental justice and governance. She provides judges and litigators with tools that they can use when confronted with environmental disputes, to extract the best practices in the interest of improving environmental litigation for each phase of a judicial procedure.

In this podcast, Dr Bendel discusses the complexity of multiple legal, regulatory and guidance frameworks insofar as international environmental law is concerned. She explains how it is highly likely that the subject matter of an environmental dispute will cover common areas or resources that affect global or multilateral interests, which inevitably adds a political dimension to any dispute resolution when it comes to areas that transcend national jurisdictions. Dr Bendel explores how typically bilateral proceedings under international law might be expanded to accommodate the interests of other states – and non-state actors such as international non-governmental organisations – through creatively and flexibly adapting procedures that already exist before international courts and tribunals, including dispute resolution and non-compliance procedures. Now is the time, she says, for international courts and tribunals to be used to resolve environmental disputes and to make authoritative legal determinations on protecting the planet and its precious resources.

Alex Batesmith is a Lecturer in Legal Profession at the School of Law, University of Leeds, UK. His research focuses on lawyers, their professional self-identity and their motivations, and how these shape the institutions and the discipline in which they work. He has a particular interest in, and practitioner experience of, international criminal law and transitional justice. Twitter: @batesmith

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Isabel Bramsen, "The Micro-Sociology of Peace and Conflict" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

How do micro-interactions of resistance, fighting and dialogue shape larger patterns of peace and conflict? How can nonviolent resistance, conflict transformation and diplomacy be analysed in micro-detail? Exploring these questions in The Micro-Sociology of Peace and Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Dr. Isabel Bramsen introduces micro-sociology to Peace Research and International Relations.

Breaking new methodological, empirical and theoretical ground, Bramsen develops a novel theoretical and analytical framework for analysing micro-dynamics of peace and conflict. The book features chapters on the methods of micro-sociology (including Video Data Analysis) as well as analytical chapters on violence, nonviolence, conflict transformation, peace talks and international meetings. It is at once broad and specific, analysing a wide variety of phenomena and cases, while also introducing very specific lenses to analysing peace and conflict.

Presenting a highly practical and micro-detailed approach, The Micro-Sociology of Peace and Conflict will be of use to students, researchers, practitioners, activists and diplomats interested in understanding and addressing contemporary conflicts. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeremy Black, "Rethinking Geopolitics" (Indiana UP, 2024)

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Amid the bloody Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2021 and the escalating tensions across the Taiwan Strait, the geopolitical balance of power has changed significantly in a very short period. If current trends continue, we may be witnessing a tectonic realignment unseen in more than a century.

In 1904, Halford Mackinder delivered a seminal lecture entitled "The Geographical Pivot of History" to a packed house at the Royal Geographical Society in London about the historic changes then taking place on the world stage. Britain was the great power of that historical moment, but its political, military, and economic primacy was under serious challenge from the United States, Germany, and Russia. Mackinder predicted that the "heartland" of Eastern Europe held the key to global hegemony and that the struggle for control over this region would be the next great conflict. Ten years later, when an assassin's bullet in Sarajevo launched the world into a calamitous war, Mackinder's analysis proved prescient.

As esteemed historian Jeremy Black argues in Rethinking Geopolitics (Indiana UP, 2024), the 2020s may be history's next great pivot point. The continued volatility of the global system in the wake of a deadly pandemic exacerbates these pressures. At the same time, the American public remains divided by the question of engagement with the outside world, testing the limits of US postwar hegemony. The time has come for a reconsideration of the 120 years from Mackinder's lecture to now, as well as geopolitics of the present and of the future.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lauren Benton, "They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A sweeping account of how small wars shaped global order in the age of empires.

Imperial conquest and colonization depended on pervasive raiding, slaving, and plunder. European empires amassed global power by asserting a right to use unilateral force at their discretion. They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton UP, 2024) is a panoramic history of how these routines of violence remapped the contours of empire and reordered the world from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries.

In an account spanning from Asia to the Americas, Lauren Benton shows how imperial violence redefined the very nature of war and peace. Instead of preparing lasting peace, fragile truces ensured an easy return to war. Serial conflicts and armed interventions projected a de facto state of perpetual war across the globe. Benton describes how seemingly limited war sparked atrocities, from sudden massacres to long campaigns of dispossession and extermination. She brings vividly to life a world in which warmongers portrayed themselves as peacemakers and Europeans imagined "small" violence as essential to imperial rule and global order.

Holding vital lessons for us today, They Called It Peace reveals how the imperial violence of the past has made perpetual war and the threat of atrocity endemic features of the international order.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marc Ambinder, “The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983” (Simon & Schuster, 2018)

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983 (Simon & Schuster, 2018), by Marc Ambinder, is a history of US-Soviet Relations under Ronald Reagan and an exploration of nuclear command and control operations. Ambender weaves together accounts of military exercises, false alarms, and espionage to tell the story of how close the U.S. and the former Soviet Union came to nuclear war in 1983. The Brink is a narrative-style book that also details the evolution of U.S. nuclear war decision-making practices, continuity of government planning, and U.S. interactions with NATO and allies in during the 1980s.

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Barbara Emerson, "The First Cold War: Anglo-Russian Relations in the 19th Century" (Hurst, 2024)

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Britain and Russia maintained a frosty civility for a few years after Napoleon's defeat in 1815. But, by the 1820s, their relations degenerated into constant acrimonious rivalry over Persia, the Ottoman Empire, Central Asia--the Great Game--and, towards the end of the century, East Asia.

The First Cold War: Anglo-Russian Relations in the 19th Century (Hurst, 2024) presents for the first time the Russian perspective on this 'game', drawing on the archives of the Tsars' Imperial Ministry. Both world powers became convinced of the expansionist aims of the other, and considered these to be at their own expense. When one was successful, the other upped the ante, and so it went on. London and St Petersburg were at war only once, during the Crimean War. But Russophobia and Anglophobia became ingrained on each side, as these two great empires hovered on the brink of hostilities for nearly 100 years.

Not until Britain and Russia recognized that they had more to fear from Wilhelmine Germany did they largely set aside their rivalries in the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, which also had major repercussions for the balance of power in Europe. Before that came a century of competition, diplomacy and tension, lucidly charted in this comprehensive new history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matthew Evangelista, "Allied Air Attacks and Civilian Harm in Italy, 1940–1945: Bombing among Friends" (Routledge, 2024)

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 04:00:00 -0000

Tens of thousands of Italian civilians perished in the Allied bombing raids of World War II. More of them died after the Armistice of September 1943 than before, when the air attacks were intended to induce Italy’s surrender.

Allied Air Attacks and Civilian Harm in Italy, 1940–1945 (Routledge, 2023) addresses this seeming paradox, by examining the views of Allied political and military leaders, Allied air crews, and Italians on the ground. It tells the stories of a little-known diplomat (Myron Charles Taylor), military strategist (Solly Zuckerman), resistance fighter (Aldo Quaranta), and peace activist (Vera Brittain) – architects and opponents of the bombing strategies. It describes the fate of ordinary civilians, drawing on a wealth of local and digital archival sources, memoir accounts, novels, and films, including Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro.

The book will be of interest to readers concerned about the ethical, legal, and human dimensions of bombing and its effects on civilians, to students of military strategy and Italian history, and to World War II buffs. They will benefit from a people-focused history that draws on a range of eclectic and rarely used sources in English and Italian.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Dragonbear in the Geopolitics of the 21st Century

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

What is the “dragonbear”? It is a metophor of an emerging strategic alliance between Russia and China. In this episdoe, Julie Yu-Wen Chen talks to geostrategist Velina Tchakarova about the dragonbear in the geopolitics of the 21st century.

What does the Dragonbear really aim to achieve in global affairs? First and foremost, it is about counterbalancing arising centrifugal forces in all fields — from economy, finance, trade, diplomacy, to military, defense and strategic alliances. But it also has a lot to do with Russia and China’s overlapping understanding that the world is in a system transformation, whose results are unpredictable and whose implications might be very dangerous for them. Velina Tchakarova’s previous position as the Director of the Austrian Institute for European and Security Policy (AIES) in Vienna is marked by profound contributions to understanding the geopolitical domain and its implications for various sectors. In her current consulting firm, FACE For A Conscious Experience, Velina leverages her broad network and practical experience as a geopolitical strategist to deliver tailored solutions, helping the public and private sector adeptly navigate the complex geopolitical terrain. In this episode, Velina Tchakarova articulates that the unpredictable trajectory of Russia's war against Ukraine may force Putin to align Russia more closely with China’s geopolitical and geoeconomic interests, increasing dependencies within the dragonbear modus.

Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland) and visiting professor at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia at Mahidol University (Thailand). Since 2023, she has been involved in the EUVIP: The EU in the Volatile Indo-Pacific Region, a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe coordination and support action 10107906 (HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ACCESS-03).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeremy Black, "Histories of War" (Pen & Sword Military, 2024)

Sun, 04 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A global account of histories of war, from Antiquity to the present day, Histories of War (Pen & Sword Military, 2024) shows how the varied modes of representation record political, cultural and social developments as well as military events. Covers all forms of discussion and commemoration from statuary to scholarship, films to novels. Important not only to those interested in the history of war but also to those concerned with culture and history in general.

This erudite volume on the theory and practice of military history will interest a wide readership including both professional historians of war and those concerned with its broader philosophical dimension. The author - a well established authority in European history - has provided an informed, rigorous analysis of a difficult topic. It will delight those who seek enlightenment of the historian's craft, military or otherwise.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Petra Goedde, "The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Sun, 04 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Earlier histories of the Cold War haven’t exactly been charitable toward the peace activists and pacifists who led peace initiatives. Pacifists in the United States were either simplistic and naïve, or they were fellow travelers of the Soviet Union. Peace proposals coming from the Soviet Union were nothing more than propaganda. Activists in Europe, meanwhile, were treated as a kind of curiosity in the broader Cold War, but their role was to highlight the growing tensions between the superpowers. This left an important question unanswered: what exactly was the significance of this peace activism that emerged after 1945? Did it amount to anything?

Petra Goedde’s The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History (Oxford University Press, 2019) fills in the important history of peace movements during the Cold War. Goedde discusses the different movements that existed in the United States and Europe from 1945 until the early 1970s. She looks at different facets of these peace movements. Much of it is centered on opposition to nuclear weapons, but Goedde’s analysis extends into the realm of decolonization, environmentalism, and gender. She concludes by noting some of the long-term impacts of peace activism, including the formation of the Green Party in Germany and the adoption of certain policies by foreign policy realists such as Richard Nixon.

Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Edward Kaplan, "The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Waging and winning a nuclear war have been called “thinking about the unthinkable” but that’s exactly what Edward Kaplan and I discussed in our interview about his recent book, The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age (Cornell UP, 2022).

The current Dean of the School of Strategic Landpower at the US Army War College, Kaplan recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC).

From 1953 onward, US leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen if they failed in a nuclear war―how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain. The NESC told Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of the worst failure of American strategy―a maximum-effort surprise Soviet nuclear assault on the United States.

Kaplan details how NESC studies provided key information for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with the USSR and on the size and shape of the US military. The subcommittee delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During these critical moments and day-to-day containment of the USSR, the NESC’s reports offered the best estimates of the butcher’s bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives.

Taken with the intelligence community’s assessment of the probability of a surprise attack, the NESC’s work framed the risks of US strategy in the chilliest years of the Cold War. The End of Victory reveals how all policy decisions run risks―and ones involving military force run grave ones―though they can rarely be known with precision.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Sino-Vietnamese Border Relations

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode, host SEAC Director John Sidel talks with Dr Qingfei Yin, SEAC Associate and Assistant Professor of International History at LSE. Dr Qingfei Yin talks about her new book State Building in Cold War Asia Comrades and Competitors on the Sino-Vietnamese Border (due out with Cambridge University Press in August 2024), explains how she became interested in her research on China and Vietnam relations and the borderlands between the two countries, and discusses other projects she has begun working on beyond her forthcoming book.

Dr Qingfei Yin is Assistant Professor of International History (China and the World) at LSE. As a historian of contemporary China and inter-Asian relations, her research focuses on China’s relations with its Asian neighbours, Asian borderlands, and the Cold War in Asia. She is particularly interested in how the global Cold War interacted with state-building in marginal societies. Her book State Building in Cold War Asia: Comrades and Competitors on the Sino-Vietnamese Border will be published by Cambridge University Press in August 2024. Subsequent projects focus on how capitalist Southeast Asian countries shaped China during the latter’s early reform era in the 1980s and the historical memory of the Sino-Vietnamese Cold War partnership in the two countries. Dr Yin is an alumna of the LSE-Peking University Double MSc in International Affairs Programme. She studied International Politics and History at Peking University for her undergraduate degree and completed her PhD in History at George Washington University. Before returning to LSE, she was Assistant Professor of History at Virginia Military Institute. She also serves as the Book Review Editor of Journal of Military History and on the Editorial Board of Cold War History.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David A. Messenger, "Hunting Nazis in Franco's Spain" (LSU Press, 2014)

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In the waning days and immediate aftermath of World War II, Nazi diplomats and spies based in Spain decided to stay rather than return to a defeated Germany. The decidedly pro-German dictatorship of General Francisco Franco gave them refuge and welcomed other officials and agents from the Third Reich who had escaped and made their way to Iberia. Amid fears of a revival of the Third Reich, Allied intelligence and diplomatic officers developed a repatriation program across Europe to return these individuals to Germany, where occupation authorities could further investigate them. Yet due to Spain's longstanding ideological alliance with Hitler, German infiltration of the Spanish economy and society was extensive, and the Allies could count on minimal Spanish cooperation in this effort.

In Hunting Nazis in Franco's Spain (LSU Press, 2014), David Messenger deftly traces the development and execution of the Allied repatriation scheme, providing an analysis of Allied, Spanish, and German expatriate responses. Messenger shows that by April 1946, British and American embassy staff in Madrid had compiled a census of the roughly 10,000 Germans then residing in Spain and had drawn up three lists of 1,677 men and women targeted for repatriation to occupied Germany. While the Spanish government did round up and turn over some Germans to the Allies, many of them were intentionally overlooked in the process. By mid-1947, Franco's regime had forced only 265 people to leave Spain; most Germans managed to evade repatriation by moving from Spain to Argentina or by solidifying their ties to the Franco regime and Span-ish life. By 1948, the program was effectively over.

Drawing on records in American, British, and Spanish archives, this first book-length study in English of the repatriation program tells the story of this dramatic chapter in the history of post--World War II Europe.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, "The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973: The USSR's Military Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict" (Oxford UP, 2017)

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Russia's forceful re-entry into the Middle Eastern arena, and the accentuated continuity of Soviet policy and methods of the 1960s and '70s, highlight the topicality of this groundbreaking study, which confirms the USSR's role in shaping Middle Eastern and global history.

The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973: The USSR's Military Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict (Oxford UP, 2017) covers the peak of the USSR's direct military involvement in the Egyptian-Israeli conflict. The head-on clash between US-armed Israeli forces and some 20,000 Soviet servicemen with state-of-the-art weaponry turned the Middle East into the hottest front of the Cold War. The Soviets' success in this war of attrition paved the way for their planning and support of Egypt's cross-canal offensive in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Ginor and Remez challenge a series of long-accepted notions as to the scope, timeline and character of the Soviet intervention and overturn the conventional view that détente with the US induced Moscow to restrainthat a US-Moscow détente led to a curtailment of Egyptian ambitions to recapture of the land it lost to Israel in 1967. Between this analytical rethink and the introduction of an entirely new genre of sources-- -memoirs and other publications by Soviet veterans themselves---The Soviet-Israeli War paves the way for scholars to revisit this pivotal moment in world history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tiffany Gill, "To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism" (U Illinois Press, 2019)

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Black women undertook an energetic and unprecedented engagement with internationalism from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s. In many cases, their work reflected a complex effort to merge internationalism with issues of women's rights and with feminist concerns.

To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (U Illinois Press, 2019) examines these and other issues with a collection of cutting-edge essays on black women's internationalism in this pivotal era and beyond. Analyzing the contours of gender within black internationalism, scholars examine the range and complexity of black women's global engagements. At the same time, they focus on these women's remarkable experiences in shaping internationalist movements and dialogues. The essays explore the travels and migrations of black women; the internationalist writings of women from Paris to Chicago to Spain; black women advocating for internationalism through art and performance; and the involvement of black women in politics, activism, and global freedom struggles.

Tiffany Gill is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies & History and Cochran Scholar at the University of Delaware.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jacob Lee, "Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions Along the Mississippi" (Harvard UP, 2019)

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

America’s waterways were once the superhighways of travel and communication. Coursing through a central line across the landscape, with tributaries connecting the South to the Great Plains and the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River meant wealth, knowledge, and power for those who could master it. In Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions Along the Mississippi(Harvard University Press, 2019), Jacob Lee offers a new understanding of early America based on the long history of warfare and resistance in the Mississippi River valley.

Lee, an Assistant Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University, traces the Native kinship ties that determined which nations rose and fell in the period before the Illinois became dominant. With a complex network of allies stretching from Lake Superior to Arkansas, the Illinois were at the height of their power in 1673 when the first French explorers—fur trader Louis Jolliet and Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette—made their way down the Mississippi. Over the next century, a succession of European empires claimed parts of the midcontinent, but they all faced the challenge of navigating Native alliances and social structures that had existed for centuries. When American settlers claimed the region in the early nineteenth century, they overturned 150 years of interaction between Indians and Europeans. Masters of the Middle Waters shows that the Mississippi and its tributaries were never simply a backdrop to unfolding events. We cannot understand the trajectory of early America without taking into account the vast heartland and its waterways, which advanced and thwarted the aspirations of Native nations, European imperialists, and American settlers alike.

Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sino-Pacific Relations: A Discussion with Rodolfo Maggio

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The 2024 Solomon Islands elections were surprisingly peaceful. The deepening economic inequalities, widespread corruption, rogue demagogues manipulating the mob, and other aspects such as the heated debate about the increasing presence and influence of China, did not result in the kind of riots that hit this Pacific Island country twice in the previous decade. In an attempt to explain why, Julie Yu-Wen Chen talks to Rodolfo Maggio, a senior researcher at the University of Helsinki to understand Sino-Pacific relations, based on his ethnographic research conducted in Marovo Lagoon, Malaita, and Honiara in 2024.

Rodolfo Maggio is a social anthropologist of moral and economic values in the Asia-Pacific region. At the University of Helsinki, he is working on an ERC-funded project “properties of units and standards”. Maggio’s ethnographic research takes a grassroots perspective on a topic that, in recent years, has been investigated only from a top-down, geopolitical perspective: is the Pacific becoming increasingly Chinese? While recognizing the coloniality implicit in such a question, he argues that increasingly sophisticate intercultural relations by young leaders enabled the difficult transition from conflict to peace. His argument is supported by the analysis of artifacts, newspapers, interviews, performances, and data collected with participant observation in Marovo Lagoon, Malaita, and Honiara. Previously, Maggio had an episode on Kiribati in the Chinese Pacific with Nordic Asia Podcast that might interest listeners.

Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland) and visiting professor at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia at Mahidol University (Thailand). Since 2023, she has been involved in the EUVIP: The EU in the Volatile Indo-Pacific Region, a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe coordination and support action 10107906 (HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ACCESS-03).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mónica A. Jiménez, "Making Never-Never Land: Race and Law in the Creation of Puerto Rico" (UNC Press, 2024)

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Myths about the powers held by the United States are often supported by the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, which derives its logic from the interpretation of a document that the US itself developed. Therefore, when pressure is placed on a specific legal precedent, the shallowness of its validity is revealed. Dr. Mónica A. Jiménez accomplishes this kind of scholarly work in her recently published book Making Never-Never Land: Race and Law in the Creation of Puerto Rico (University of North Carolina Press, 2024). By tracing the legal logic of what continues to animate the colonial dynamics between the United States and Puerto Rico, Jiménez offers a “genealogy of racial exclusion in law” (36) that both folds time and space to make clear how late-19th century Supreme Court logics and opinions continue to subjugate the land and people of Puerto Rico to colonial violence.

Split into two sections, the first half of the book details the key case Downes v. Bidwell (1901), while the second half explores how the legal ramifications of Downes continued to haunt the archipelago. The first chapter focuses on the development of Downes and its outcome, which argued that territories of the United States were not allowed to access certain provisions of the U.S. Constitution. The ambiguous legal foundation for this decision was established in 1900 after Puerto Rico was acquired by the United States when the US Supreme Court established the territorial incorporation doctrine, effectively creating the legal category of “unincorporated territory." Chapter two probes the white supremacist U.S. legal landscape to offer a “genealogy of racial exclusion in law” (36) that shows the reader how U.S. settler colonialism and empire-making are dependent on the reuse and recycling of legal precedents and tactics that disenfranchised and dispossessed racially marginalized communities. By excavating the legal opinions handed down during the Marshal Trilolgy and Dred Scott v. Sandford – a collection of Supreme Court cases that defined 19th-century legal policy for Native Americans and African Americans, respectively – Jiménez makes clear that “It is not a coincidence that the most shameful cases in the United States’ legal history of race should serve as direct precedents to a decision that continues to serve as the basis for Puerto Rico’s exclusion more than one hundred years after it was handed down” (9).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mark L. Haas, "Frenemies: When Ideological Enemies Ally" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Sat, 13 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Alliances among ideological enemies confronting a common foe, or "frenemy" alliances, are unlike coalitions among ideologically-similar states facing comparable threats. Members of frenemy alliances are perpetually torn by two powerful opposing forces.

Frenemies: When Ideological Enemies Ally (Cornell University Press, 2022) shows that shared material threats push these states together while ideological differences pull them apart. Each of these competing forces has dominated the other at critical times. This difference has resulted in stable alliances among ideological enemies in some cases but the delay, dissolution, or failure of these alliances in others.

This book examines how states' susceptibility to major domestic ideological changes and the nature of the ideological differences among countries provide the key to alliance formation or failure. This sophisticated framework is applied to a diverse range of critical historical and contemporary cases, from the failure of British and French leaders to ally with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany in the 1930s to the likely evolution of the United States' alliance system against a rising China in the early 21st century.

In Frenemies, author Mark Haas develops a groundbreaking argument that explains the origins and durability of alliances among ideological enemies and offers policy-guiding perspectives on a subject at the core of international relations.

Our guests today is Mark Haas, Professor of Political Science at Duquesne University.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Zana Gulmohamad, "The Making of Foreign Policy in Iraq: Political Factions and the Ruling Elite" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Sat, 13 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

How is foreign policy made in Iraq? Based on dozens of interviews with senior officials and politicians, The Making of Foreign Policy in Iraq: Political Factions and the Ruling Elite (Bloomsbury, 2021) provides a clear analysis of the development of domestic Iraqi politics since 2003. Dr. Zana Gul explains how the federal government of Iraq and Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) have functioned and worked together since toppling Saddam to reveal in granular detail the complexity of their foreign policy making.

The book shows that the ruling elites and political factions in Baghdad and in the capital of the Kurdistan Region, Erbil, create foreign policies according to their agendas. The formulation and implementation of the two governments' foreign policies is to a great extent uncoordinated. Yet Dr. Gul places this incoherent model of foreign policy making in the context of the country's fragmented political and social context and explains how Iraq's neighbouring countries - Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Syria before the civil war - have each influenced its internal affairs. The book is the first study dedicated to the contemporary dynamics of the Iraqi state - outside the usual focus on the “great powers” - and it explains exactly how Iraqi foreign policy is managed alongside the country's economic and security interests.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Karine Varley, "Vichy's Double Bind: French Collaboration between Hitler and Mussolini during the Second World War" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Karine Varley's book Vichy's Double Bind: French Collaboration between Hitler and Mussolini during the Second World War (Cambridge UP, 2023) advances a significant new interpretation of French collaboration during the Second World War. Arguing that the path to collaboration involved not merely Nazi Germany but Fascist Italy, it suggests that the Vichy French government was caught in a double bind. On the one hand, many of the threats to France's territory, colonial empire and power came from Rome as well as Berlin. On the other, Vichy was caught between the irreconcilable yet inescapable positions of the two Axis governments. Unable to resolve the conflict, Vichy sought to play the two Axis powers against each other.

By exploring French dealings with Italy at diplomatic, military and local levels in France and its colonial empire, Double Bind reveals the multi-dimensional and multi-directional nature of Vichy's policy. It therefore challenges many enduring conceptions of collaboration with reference to Franco-German relations and offers a fresh perspective on debates about Vichy France and collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Miranda Melcher, "Securing Peace in Angola and Mozambique: The Importance of Specificity in Peace Treaties" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Explaining how and why there are such diverging outcomes of UN peace negotiations and treaties, this book offers a detailed examination of peace processes in order to demonstrate that how treaties are negotiated and written significantly impacts their implementation.

Drawing on case studies from the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars, Miranda Melcher demonstrates the critical importance of specificity in peace treaties in understanding implementation outcomes for military integration. Based on unique primary source data, including interviews with key actors who have participated in peace treaty negotiations, as well as thousands of previously unassessed UN archival documents, Securing Peace in Angola and Mozambique: The Importance of Specificity in Peace Treaties (Bloomsbury, 2024) offers new insights and policy recommendations for key details whose presence or absence can have a significant impact on how peace processes unfold.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dmitri Alperovitch, "World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the 21st Century" (PublicAffairs, 2024)

Sat, 06 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In his book World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the 21st Century (PublicAffairs, 2024), Dmitri Alperovitch (with Garrett M. Graff) argues that the United States is in a “Cold War II” with China, and lays out a set of policy recommendations for how the US can win this new Cold War.

Alperovitch is currently the Founder and Executive Chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator, a think tank focused on “advancing American prosperity and global leadership in the 21st century and beyond.” Before moving into the think tank world, Alperovitch was the CTO and co-founder of CrowdStrike, a multi-billion dollar cybersecurity company that gained public attention for investigating the 2016 DNC email leaks and 2014’s North Korean hack of Sony Pictures.

Through his work at CrowdStrike and McAfee before that, Alperovitch was involved in investigating numerous Chinese cyber-intrusions into US and global institutions, for instance Operation Aurora and Operation Shady RAT. Alperovitch’s cybersecurity expertise has also led him to advise numerous US government institutions including the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security.

Drawing from his experiences across the private and public sectors, Alperovitch injects World on the Brink with incisive analyses and historical precedents that should spark the interest of those who follow US-China competition.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

J. Megan Greene, "Building a Nation at War: Building a Nation at War: Transnational Knowledge Networks and the Development of China during and after World War II" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Thu, 27 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Building a Nation at War: Building a Nation at War: Transnational Knowledge Networks and the Development of China during and after World War II (Harvard UP, 2022) argues that the Chinese Nationalist government’s retreat inland during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), its consequent need for inland resources, and its participation in new scientific and technical relationships with the United States led to fundamental changes in how the Nationalists engaged with science and technology as tools to promote development.

The war catalyzed an emphasis on applied sciences, comprehensive economic planning, and development of scientific and technical human resources—all of which served the Nationalists’ immediate and long-term goals. It created an opportunity for the Nationalists to extend control over inland China and over education and industry. It also provided opportunities for China to mobilize transnational networks of Chinese-Americans, Chinese in America, and the American government and businesses. These groups provided technical advice, ran training programs, and helped the Nationalists acquire manufactured goods and tools. J. Megan Greene shows how the Nationalists worked these programs to their advantage, even in situations where their American counterparts clearly had the upper hand. Finally, this book shows how, although American advisers and diplomats criticized China for harboring resources rather than putting them into winning the war against Japan, US industrial consultants were also strongly motivated by postwar goals.

J. Megan Greene is Professor of History at the University of Kansas. Her field of study is the history of the Republic of China under the KMT both in China and on Taiwan. She is also the author of The Origins of the Developmental State in Taiwan: Science Policy and the Quest for Modernization (Harvard University Press, 2008), a study of industrial science policy in China and Taiwan under the KMT.

Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Donald Stoker, "Purpose and Power: US Grand Strategy from the Revolutionary Era to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In our interview, I spoke with Donald Stoker about the changes in American grand strategy over the past 250 years and the major themes from his new book: Purpose and Power: US Grand Strategy from the Revolutionary Era to the Present (Cambridge UP, 2024).

Across the full span of the nation’s history, Stoker challenges our understanding of the purposes and uses of American power. From the struggle for independence to the era of renewed competition with China and Russia, he reveals the grand strategies underpinning the nation’s pursuit of sovereignty, security, expansion, and democracy abroad. He shows how successive administrations have projected diplomatic, military, and economic power, and mobilized ideas and information to preserve American freedoms at home and secure US aims abroad. He exposes the myth of American isolationism, the good and ill of America’s quest for democracy overseas, and how too often its administrations have lacked clear political aims or a concrete vision for where they want to go. Understanding this history is vital if America is to relearn how to use its power to meet the challenges ahead and to think more clearly about political aims and grand strategy.

The interview reflects the opinions of the author and not that of the US government or National Defense University.

Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Orazio Coco, "Sino-Italian Political and Economic Relations: From the Treaty of Friendship to the Second World War" (Routledge, 2024)

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Sino-Italian Political and Economic Relations: From the Treaty of Friendship to the Second World War (Routledge, 2024) presents a comprehensive narrative and historical analysis of the political and economic relations between China and Italy from the Treaty of Friendship and Commerce signed in October 1866 to the Second World War.

Utilizing primary sources found in public and private archives, the volume acknowledges the relevance of eminent figures and their roles and contributions in developing the relations between Italy and China. It provides an extensive presentation of the close relations between the Chinese nationalist and Italian fascist regimes and their interaction in the interwar period. The Italian and Chinese governments had a prolonged political and economic dialogue, which lasted for almost a decade and involved the active mediation of politicians, economists, academics, and professionals at different levels and in diverse fields. International historiography mostly neglects the relevance of this period in broader historical contexts. This work overcomes the unjustified oversight and examines, with reliable primary sources, the relevance of this extraordinary season of international relations.

With a valuable exploration of a wealth of sources, this book provides a new opportunity of reflection for scholars and students interested in Sino-European relations and international history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andreas Fulda, "Germany and China: How Entanglement Undermines Freedom, Prosperity and Security" (Bloombury, 2024)

Sat, 22 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Germany and China: How Entanglement Undermines Freedom, Prosperity and Security (Bloomsbury, 2024) is a groundbreaking book, of which the findings have significant implications both for German-China relations and also in understanding the rising influence of autocratic China on liberal democracies globally. In today's interview, Associate Professor Andreas Fulda and I spoke about Germany's entanglement with China, and the extent of Germany's dependancies on China in terms of economics, technology, politics and academia. We spoke about the blind spots of policy makers and academics have, and the way that China policy is constructed and interpreted as a result. We also spoke about the implications for national security and German sovereignty, and the way that Germany entanglement with China is a warning sign for democratic states everywhere.

Dr Fulda is a political scientist and China scholar with a keen interest in the philosophy of science. You can listen to an interview about his previous book, The Struggle for Democracy in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong KongSharp Power and its Discontents (Routledge: 2019) here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

M. Girard Dorsey, "Holding Their Breath: How the Allies Confronted the Threat of Chemical Warfare in World War II" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Holding Their Breath: How the Allies Confronted the Threat of Chemical Warfare in World War II (Cornell UP, 2023), M. Girard Dorsey uncovers just how close Britain, the United States, and Canada came to crossing the red line that restrained poison gas during World War II.

Unlike in World War I, belligerents did not release poison gas regularly during the Second World War. Yet, the looming threat of chemical warfare significantly affected the actions and attitudes of these three nations as they prepared their populations for war, mediated their diplomatic and military alliances, and attempted to defend their national identities and sovereignty.

The story of chemical weapons and World War II begins in the interwar period as politicians and citizens alike advocated to ban, to resist, and eventually to prepare for gas use in the next war. Molly Dorsey reveals, through extensive research in multinational archives and historical literature, that although poison gas was rarely released on the battlefield in World War II, experts as well as lay people dedicated significant time and energy to the weapon's potential use; they did not view chemical warfare as obsolete or taboo.

Poison gas was an influential weapon in World War II, even if not deployed in a traditional way, and arms control, for various reasons, worked. Thus, what did not happen is just as important as what did. Holding Their Breath provides insight into these potentialities by untangling World War II diplomacy and chemical weapons use in a new way.

Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US foreign policy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joanna Siekiera, "21st Century as the Pacific Century: Culture and Security of Oceania States in Great Power Competition" (Warsaw UP, 2023)

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

With the ever-greater shift of the balance of global power towards the Pacific region, what does this have implications for the geopolitics of the region? How should the rest of the world, especially Europe, address the growing power and influence of the Pacific region? How does the complex interplay of cultural, civilizational, economic, legal, environmental, and political factors affect the Pacific region? These and other questions are the subject of 21st Century as the Pacific Century. Culture and Security of Oceania States in Great Power Competition (Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2023) edited by Dr. Joanna Siekiera.

This publication, which is the result of a conference of the same title, aims to explain to the readers culture, political relations and climate conditions in the region of the South Pacific. The authors point to cause and effect relationships, provide figures and in-depth analyses of political, economic and social forces operating in Southeast Asia and Oceania and the influence countries of the region exert on the whole modern world.

Dr. Joanna Siekiera is an international lawyer, Doctor of Public Policy from Poland. She is a fellow at the United States Marine Corps University and works as a legal advisor to various military institutions, primarily NATO.

Dr. Siekiera did her postdoctoral research at the Faculty of Law, University of Bergen, Norway, and Ph.D. studies in New Zealand, at the Faculty of Law, Victoria University of Wellington.

She is the author of over 100 scientific publications in several languages, various legal opinions for the Polish Ministry of Justice, as well as the book Regional Policy in the South Pacific, and the editor of 8 monographs on international law, international relations, and security. Her areas of expertise are Law of armed conflict (Lawfare, Legal Culture in Armed Conflict, NATO legal framework) and the Indo-Pacific region, Pacific law, Maritime Security.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kira Huju, "Cosmopolitan Elites: Indian Diplomats and the Social Hierarchies of Global Order" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Cosmopolitan Elites: Indian Diplomats and the Social Hierarchies of Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Kira Huju narrates the birth, everyday life, and fracturing of a Western-dominated global order from its margins. It offers a critical sociological examination of the elite Indian Foreign Service and its members, many of whom were present at the founding of this order. Dr. Huju explores how these diplomats set out to remake the service in the name of a radically anti-colonial global subaltern, but often ended up seeking status within its hierarchies through social mimicry of its most powerful actors. This is a book about the struggles of belonging: it revisits what it takes to be a recognized member of international society and asks what the experience of historically marginalised actors inside the diplomatic club can tell us about the evident woes of global order today. In interrogating how Indian diplomats learned to live under a Westernised world order, it also offers a sociologically grounded reading of what might happen in spaces like India as the world transitions past Western domination.

An awkward balancing act animates the order-making of India's cosmopolitan diplomats: despite a genuine desire to strive toward a postcolonial world founded on diversity, difference, and the symbolic representation of a global subaltern, there is a strong sense of a lingering caricature-like notion of a white, European-dominated homogenous club, to which Indian diplomats feel a deep-rooted and colonially embedded desire to belong. Cosmopolitanism operates inside this balancing act not as an international ethic upholding an equal, tolerant, or liberal global order, but rather as an elite aesthetic which presumes cultural compliance, diplomatic accommodation, and social assimilation into Western mores.

Based on 85 interviews with Indian diplomats, politicians, and foreign policy experts, as well as archival work in New Delhi, the book asks what the experience of historically marginalised actors inside the diplomatic club tells us about the social hierarchies of race, class, religion, gender, and caste under global order.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Keane and Baogang He, "China's Galaxy Empire: Wealth, Power, War, and Peace in the New Chinese Century" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In China's Galaxy Empire: Wealth, Power, War, and Peace in the New Chinese Century (Oxford University Press, 2024), authors Dr. John Keane and Dr. Baogang He, target a development of enormous significance: China's return, after two centuries of decline and subjugation, to a position of prominence in world affairs. The daring thesis is that China is a newly rising empire of a kind never before witnessed: a galaxy empire. The first to be born of the digital communications era, this young empire is economically and politically powerful, and heavily armed. Its gravitational, push-pull effects are impacting every continent--and even outer space, where China is competing with the United States, India, and Europe to become the leading power.

The galaxy empire interpretation rejects clichéd misdescriptions of China as a "big power" or monolithic "autocracy", and it explains why China defies older definitions of land, sea, and air-based empires. The book charts the developments that have made its rising empire so novel, including the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative, the rapid rise of a global Chinese middle class, and internal colonialism in Tibet and Xinjiang. The book notes the protean, shapeshifting qualities of this young empire. It therefore warns against the political and military perils of simple-minded, friend-versus-enemy thinking and "Big China, Bad China" politics. But it also proffers a forewarning to China's rulers: while every rising empire aims to shift the balance of power in its favour, no empire lasts forever, and some are stillborn, because they indulge illusions of greatness and reckless power adventures.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Criekemans, "Geopolitics and International Relations: Grounding World Politics Anew" (Brill, 2021)

Sun, 16 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Although we live in a globalised world, territorially embedded factors are highly relevant in such domains as security, economy, energy, environment, politics & diplomacy. Today's analysts of world affairs are often loosely referring to 'geopolitics', but do not always clearly define it. Geopolitics and International Relations: Grounding World Politics Anew (Brill | Nijhoff, 2021) therefore offers a necessary framework: an introduction into the main components of geopolitical analysis, an overview of the main geopolitical schools of thought, as well as reflections on how technology and geopolitics affect each other in economy, energy and security. In addition, several empirical studies are showcased, each developing innovative approaches. Leading authors reflect upon containment, analyse geopolitical myths, research geoeconomic rivalries, study mental maps, analyse conflict through territorially embedded variables & greed motivations and apply 'neo-medievalism' to study sub-state diplomacy.

David Criekemans is Associate Professor in International Relations at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). He also teaches at KU Leuven (Belgium), University College Roosevelt (Utrecht University) in Middelburg (the Netherlands), Geneva Institute of Geopolitical Studies (Switzerland) and Blanquerna, Ramon Lull University in Barcelona (Spain).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lydia Walker, "States-in-Waiting: A Counter Narrative of Global Decolonization" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Lydia Walker's deeply researched and carefully narrated debut monograph, States-in-Waiting: A Counter Narrative of Global Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2024) traces “the un-endings of decolonization” – the messy and improvised ways in which the 20th-century state-centric international order replaced empire as the default mode of political organization. States-in-Waiting zooms in on the postwar Naga national liberation movement which failed to achieve independence from India at a time when dozens of European colonial possessions secured statehood. The work illuminates the complicated issue of self-determination for minority peoples within new postcolonial states and highlights transcontinental networks of Asian, African, American, and European activists and insurgents who pushed against legal-political constraints of an emergent postimperial world order. Finally, the author recovers riveting “hidden dramas” of decolonization by amplifying the voices of marginalized historical actors, lost non-state archives, and understudied regions. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Dr. Lydia Walker is the Assistant Professor and Myers Chair in Global Military History at the Ohio State University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ibrahim Fraihat, "Iran and Saudi Arabia: Taming a Chaotic Conflict" (Edinburgh UP, 2020)

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Ibrahim Fraihat’s latest book, Iran and Saudi Arabia: Taming a Chaotic Conflict (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) is much more than an exploration of the history of animosity between Saudi Arabia and Iran and its debilitating impact on an already volatile Middle East. It is a detailed roadmap for management and resolution of what increasingly looks like an intractable conflict. Based on years of field research, Fraihat builds a framework that initially could help Saudi Arabia and Iran prevent their conflict from spinning out of control, create mechanisms for communication and travel down a road of confidence building that could create building blocks for a resolution. Fraihat’s book could not have been published at a more critical moment. A devastating coronavirus pandemic has hit both Saudi Arabia and Iran hard. So has the associated global economic breakdown and the collapse of oil markets. The double whammies constitute the most existential crisis the kingdom has faced in at least half a century. They hit Iran particularly hard as it labours under harsh US sanctions. Fraihat offers a roadmap that would allow Saudi Arabia and Iran to ultimately extricate themselves from costly proxy wars in Yemen, Syria and Libya. By providing a detailed roadmap, Fraihat’s book makes a major contribution not only to a vast literature of conflict in the Middle East but also to policymakers in Saudi Arabia and as well as would-be mediators.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Timothy P. Storhoff, "Harmony and Normalization: US-Cuban Musical Diplomacy" (UP of Mississippi, 2020)

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Harmony and Normalization: US-Cuban Musical Diplomacy (University Press of Mississippi, 2020) explores the channels of musical exchange between Cuba and the United States during the eight-year presidency of Barack Obama, who eased the musical embargo of the island and restored relations with Cuba. Musical exchanges during this period act as a lens through which to view not only US-Cuban musical relations but also the larger political, economic, and cultural implications of musical dialogue between these two nations. In this first book on the subject since Obama’s presidency, musicologist Timothy P. Storhoff describes how, after specific policy changes, musicians were some of the first to take advantage of new opportunities for travel, push the boundaries of new regulations, and expose both the possibilities and limitations of licensing musical exchange. This ethnography demonstrates how performances reflect aspirations for stronger transnational ties and a common desire to restore the once-thriving US-Cuban musical relationship.

Dr. Timothy Storhoff is an orchestra administrator, fundraiser, and ethnomusicologist in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Miles M. Evers and Eric Grynaviski, "The Price of Empire: American Entrepreneurs and the Origins of America's First Pacific Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The United States was an upside-down British Empire. It had an agrarian economy, few large investors, and no territorial holdings outside of North America. However, decades before the Spanish-American War, the United States quietly began to establish an empire across thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean.

While conventional wisdom suggests that large interests – the military and major business interests – drove American imperialism, The Price of Empire: American Entrepreneurs and the Origins of America's First Pacific Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2024) argues that early American imperialism was driven by small entrepreneurs. When commodity prices boomed, these small entrepreneurs took risks, racing ahead of the American state. Yet when profits were threatened, they clamored for the US government to follow them into the Pacific.

Through novel, intriguing stories of American small businessmen, this book shows how American entrepreneurs manipulated the United States into pursuing imperial projects in the Pacific. It explores their travels abroad and highlights the consequences of contemporary struggles for justice in the Pacific.

Our guests today are: Miles M. Evers, who is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut; and Eric Grynaviski, who is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We Should Not Take the UN For Granted: A Discussion with Abiodun Williams

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In times where conflicts around the globe are an everyday topic, the place of the United Nations in resolving these conflicts is constantly being questioned. In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Director John Torpey discusses this issue with Professor Abiodun Williams, Professor of the Practice of International Politics at Tufts University and former Director of Strategic Planning to UN Secretaries-General Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon. A leading analyst of the UN, Williams is also a past Chair of the Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS).

The conversation is centered on the findings of Williams’ recent book, Kofi Annan and Global Leadership at the United Nations (Oxford University Press, 2024). As a former UN official himself, Williams offers an insider’s point of view on how to improve the UN's conflict prevention efforts, emphasizing the importance of strengthening the organization’s means of preventing conflicts and recruiting talented international civil servants.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kazushi Minami, "People's Diplomacy: How Americans and Chinese Transformed US-China Relations During the Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Fri, 31 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In People's Diplomacy: How Americans and Chinese Transformed US-China Relations During the Cold War (Cornell UP, 2024), Kazushi Minami shows how the American and Chinese people rebuilt US-China relations in the 1970s, a pivotal decade bookended by Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China and 1979 normalization of diplomatic relations. Top policymakers in Washington and Beijing drew the blueprint for the new bilateral relationship, but the work of building it was left to a host of Americans and Chinese from all walks of life, who engaged in "people-to-people" exchanges. After two decades of estrangement and hostility caused by the Cold War, these people dramatically changed the nature of US-China relations. Americans reimagined China as a country of opportunities, irresistible because of its prodigious potential, while Chinese reinterpreted the United States as an agent of modernization, capable of enriching their country and rejuvenating their lives. Drawing on extensive research at two dozen archives in the United States and China, People's Diplomacy redefines contemporary US-China relations as a creation of the American and Chinese people.

Kazushi Minami is Associate Professor at the Osaka School of International Public Policy, Osaka University. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Texas at Austin before joining OSIPP in 2019. Drawing on English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean sources, his research investigates various aspects of international relations in East Asia to foster a deeper understanding of the region from both historical and policy perspectives.

Nick Zeller is an independent scholar working on China’s international relations and the history of radical politics in Asia. He has held faculty positions in History at the University of South Carolina and Kennesaw State University. He earned his Ph.D. in Modern Chinese History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2021.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gary J. Bass, "Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia" (Knopf, 2023)

Thu, 30 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In December 1948, a panel of 12 judges sentenced 23 Japanese officials for war crimes. Seven, including former Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, were sentenced to death. The sentencing ended the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, an over-two-year-long trial over Imperial Japan’s atrocities in China and its decision to attack the U.S.

But unlike the trials at Nuremberg, now seen as one of the touchstones of modern international law, the trials at Tokyo were a messy affair. The ruling wasn’t unanimous, with two judges dissenting. Indian judge Radhabinod Pal even chose to acquit everybody. The judges couldn’t agree on anything, the prosecution made significant mistakes, and the defense constantly complained about not having enough time and resources.

Gary Bass tells the entire story of the trials at Tokyo—from their formulation at the end of a long World War by a triumphant yet weary U.S., to the eventual decision to let many sentenced defendants out on parole as Japan became a close Cold War ally of Washington—in his book Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia (Knopf: 2023)

Gary Bass is also the author of The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissenger and a Forgotten Genocide (Vintage: 2014), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction and won the Arthur Ross Book Award from the Council on Foreign Relations, among other awards. He is the William P. Boswell Professor of World Politics of Peace and War at Princeton University. His previous books are Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group: 2008) and Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton University Press: 2002). A former reporter for The Economist, Bass writes often for The New York Times and has written for The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and other publications.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Including its review of Judgment at Tokyo. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vanessa Walker, "Principles in Power: Latin America and the Politics of U.S. Human Rights Diplomacy" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Mon, 27 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Vanessa Walker's Principles in Power: Latin America and the Politics of U. S. Human Rights Diplomacy (Cornell University Press, 2020) explores the relationship between policy makers and nongovernment advocates in Latin America and the United States government in order to explain the rise of anti-interventionist human rights policies uniquely critical of U.S. power during the Cold War. Walker shows that the new human rights policies of the 1970s were based on a complex dynamic of domestic and foreign considerations that was rife with tensions between the seats of power in the United States and Latin America, and the growing activist movement that sought to reform them. By addressing the development of U.S. diplomacy and politics alongside that of activist networks, especially in Chile and Argentina, Walker shows that Latin America was central to the policy assumptions that shaped the Carter administration's foreign policy agenda. The coup that ousted the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, sparked new human rights advocacy as a direct result of U.S. policies that supported authoritarian regimes in the name of Cold War security interests. From 1973 onward, the attention of Washington and capitals around the globe turned to Latin America as the testing ground for the viability of a new paradigm for U.S. power. This approach, oriented around human rights, required collaboration among activists and state officials in places as diverse as Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Washington, DC. Principles in Power tells the complicated story of the potentials and limits of partnership between government and nongovernment actors. Analyzing how different groups deployed human rights language to reform domestic and international power, Walker explores the multiple and often conflicting purposes of U.S. human rights policy.

Jo Butterfield is the Advisor for the Human Rights Certificate offered by the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights and is an Adjunct Asst. Professor with the UI Department of History.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Seyed Ali Alavi, "Iran and Palestine: Past, Present, and Future" (Routledge, 2019)

Mon, 27 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Iran and Palestine: Past, Present and Future (Routledge, 2019), Seyed Ali Alavi (SOAS University of London) surveys the history of the relationship between Iran – and especially the Islamic Republic of Iran - with Palestinian organisations and leadership. It also, quite obviously, deals with Iranian views of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Analysing the connections of the Iranian revolutionary movements, both the Left and the Islamic camps’ perspectives are scrutinized. To provide a historical background to the post-revolutionary period, the genealogy of pro-Palestinian sentiments before 1979 are traced additionally.

Demonstrating the pro-Palestinian stance of post-revolutionary Iran, the study focuses on the causes of roots of the ideological outlook and the interest of the state. Despite a growing body of literature on the Iranian Revolution and its impacts on the region, Iran’s connection with Palestine have been overlooked. This new volume fills the gap in the literature and enables readers to unpack the history of the two states.

This unique and comprehensive coverage of Iran and Palestine’s relationship is a key resource for scholars and students interested in international relations, politics, Islamic and Middle East studies.

Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism and Judaism (SUNY Press, 2017). You can read more of Yadgar’s work here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mark Moyar, "Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968" (Encounter, 2023)

Wed, 22 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968 (Encounter, 2023) is the long-awaited sequel to the immensely influential Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965. Like its predecessor, this book overturns the conventional wisdom using a treasure trove of new sources, many of them from the North Vietnamese side. Rejecting the standard depiction of U.S. military intervention as a hopeless folly, it shows America's war to have been a strategic necessity that could have ended victoriously had President Lyndon Johnson heeded the advice of his generals. In light of Johnson's refusal to use American ground forces beyond South Vietnam, General William Westmoreland employed the best military strategy available. Once the White House loosened the restraints on Operation Rolling Thunder, American bombing inflicted far greater damage on the North Vietnamese supply system than has been previously understood, and it nearly compelled North Vietnam to capitulate.

The book demonstrates that American military operations enabled the South Vietnamese government to recover from the massive instability that followed the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem. American culture sustained public support for the war through the end of 1968, giving South Vietnam realistic hopes for long-term survival. America's defense of South Vietnam averted the imminent fall of key Asian nations to Communism and sowed strife inside the Communist camp, to the long-term detriment of America's great-power rivals, China and the Soviet Union.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Lyman, "A War of Empires: Japan, India, Burma, and Britain: 1941–45" (Osprey, 2021)

Tue, 21 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In 1941 and 1942 the British and Indian Armies were brutally defeated and Japan reigned supreme in its newly conquered territories throughout Asia. But change was coming. New commanders were appointed, significant training together with restructuring took place, and new tactics were developed.

A War of Empires: Japan, India, Burma, and Britain: 1941–45 (Osprey, 2021) by acclaimed historian Robert Lyman expertly records these coordinated efforts and describes how a new volunteer Indian Army, rising from the ashes of defeat, would ferociously fight to turn the tide of war.

But victory did not come immediately. It wasn't until March 1944, when the Japanese staged their famed 'March on Delhi', that the years of rebuilding paid off and, after bitter fighting, the Japanese were finally defeated at Kohima and Imphal. This was followed by a series of extraordinary victories culminating in Mandalay in May 1945 and the collapse of all Japanese forces in Burma. Until now, the Indian Army's contribution has been consistently forgotten and ignored by many Western historians but Robert Lyman proves how vital this hard-fought campaign was in securing Allied victory in the east. Detailing the defeat of Japanese militarism, he recounts how the map of the region was ultimately redrawn, guaranteeing the rise of an independent India free from the shackles of empire.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stuart A. Reid, "The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination" (Knopf, 2023)

Sun, 19 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Stuart Reid about his new book The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination (Knopf, 2023).

It was supposed to be a moment of great optimism, a cause for jubilation. The Congo was at last being set free from Belgium—one of seventeen countries to gain independence in 1960 from ruling European powers. At the helm as prime minister was charismatic nationalist Patrice Lumumba. Just days after the handover, however, the Congo’s new army mutinied, Belgian forces intervened, and Lumumba turned to the United Nations for help in saving his newborn nation from what the press was already calling “the Congo crisis.” Dag Hammarskjöld, the tidy Swede serving as UN secretary-general, quickly arranged the organization’s biggest peacekeeping mission in history. But chaos was still spreading. Frustrated with the fecklessness of the UN and spurned by the United States, Lumumba then approached the Soviets for help—an appeal that set off alarm bells at the CIA. To forestall the spread of Communism in Africa, the CIA sent word to its station chief in the Congo, Larry Devlin: Lumumba had to go.

Within a year, everything would unravel. The CIA plot to murder Lumumba would ﬁzzle out, but he would be deposed in a CIA-backed coup, transferred to enemy territory in a CIA-approved operation, and shot dead by Congolese assassins. Hammarskjöld, too, would die, in a mysterious plane crash en route to negotiate a cease-ﬁre with the Congo’s rebellious southeast. And a young, ambitious military officer named Joseph Mobutu, who had once sworn fealty to Lumumba, would seize power with U.S. help and misrule the country for more than three decades. For the Congolese people, the events of 1960–61 represented the opening chapter of a long horror story. For the U.S. government, however, they provided a playbook for future interventions.

Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US foreign policy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anna Brinkman, "Balancing Strategy: Sea Power, Neutrality, and Prize Law in the Seven Years' War" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Sat, 18 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

What is the relationship between seapower, law, and strategy? In Balancing Strategy: Seapower, Neutrality, and Prize-Law in the Seven Years' War (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Dr. Anna Brinkman uses in-depth analysis of cases brought before the Court of Prize Appeal during the Seven Years' War to explore how Britain worked to shape maritime international law to its strategic advantage. Within the court, government ofﬁcials and naval and legal minds came together to shape legal decisions from the perspectives of both legal philosophy and maritime strategic aims. As a result, neutrality and the negotiation of rights became critical to maritime warfare. Balancing Strategy unpicks a complex web of competing priorities: deals struck with the Dutch Republic and Spain; imperial rivalry; mercantilism; colonial trade; and the relationships between metropoles and colonies, trade, and the navy. Ultimately, influencing and shaping international law of the sea allows a nation to create the norms and rules that constrain or enable the use of seapower during war.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson, "Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Thu, 16 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

For centuries, the vastness of the Chinese market tempted foreign companies in search of customers. But in the 1970s, when the United States and China ended two decades of Cold War isolation, China’s trade relations veered in a very different direction. In Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade (Harvard University Press, 2024) Dr. Elizabeth Ingleson shows how the interests of US business and the Chinese state aligned to reframe the China market: the old dream of plentiful customers gave way to a new vision of low-cost workers by the hundreds of millions. In the process, the world’s largest communist state became an indispensable component of global capitalism.

Drawing on Chinese- and English-language sources, including previously unexplored corporate papers, Ingleson traces this transformation to the actions of Chinese policymakers, US diplomats, maverick entrepreneurs, Chinese American traders, and executives from major US corporations including Boeing, Westinghouse, J. C. Penney, and Chase Manhattan Bank. Long before Walmart and Apple came to China, businesspeople such as Veronica Yhap, Han Fanyu, Suzanne Reynolds, and David Rockefeller instigated a trade revolution with lasting consequences. And while China’s economic reorganisation was essential to these connections, Ingleson also highlights an underappreciated but crucial element of the convergence: the US corporate push for deindustrialization and its embrace by politicians.

Reexamining two of the most significant transformations of the 1970s—US-China rapprochement and deindustrialization in the United States—Made in China takes bilateral trade back to its faltering, uncertain beginnings, identifying the tectonic shifts in diplomacy, labor, business, and politics in both countries that laid the foundations of today’s globalized economy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lisa Langdon Koch, "Nuclear Decisions: Changing the Course of Nuclear Weapons Programs" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Thu, 16 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Throughout the nuclear age, states have taken many different paths toward or away from nuclear weapons. These paths have been difficult to predict and cannot be explained simply by a stable or changing security environment. We can make sense of these paths by examining leaders' nuclear decisions. The political decisions state leaders make to accelerate or reverse progress toward nuclear weapons define each state's course. Whether or not a state ultimately acquires nuclear weapons depends to a large extent on those nuclear decisions.

Nuclear Decisions: Changing the Course of Nuclear Weapons Programs (Oxford University Press, 2023) offers a novel theory of nuclear decision-making that identifies two mechanisms that shape leaders' understandings of the costs and benefits of their nuclear pursuits.

The internal mechanism is the intervention of domestic experts in key scientific and military organizations. If the conditions are right, those experts may be able to influence a leader's nuclear decision-making. The external mechanism emerges from the structure and politics of the international system. This book identifies three different proliferation eras, in which changes to international political and structural conditions have constrained or freed states pursuing nuclear weapons development.

Scholars and practitioners alike will gain new insights from the fascinating case studies of nine states across the three eras. Through this global approach to studying nuclear proliferation, this book pushes back against the conventional wisdom that determined states pursue a straight path to the bomb. Instead, nuclear decisions define a state's nuclear pursuits.

Our guest today is Lisa Langdon Koch, Associate Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College and author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lisa Bhungalia, "Elastic Empire: Refashioning War Through Aid in Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2023)

Wed, 15 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The United States integrated counterterrorism mandates into its aid flows in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the early years of the global war on terror. Some two decades later, this securitized model of aid has become normalized across donor intervention in Palestine. Elastic Empire: Refashioning War Through Aid in Palestine (Stanford UP, 2023) traces how foreign aid, on which much of the Palestinian population is dependent, has multiplied the sites and means through which Palestinian life is regulated, surveilled, and policed—this book tells the story of how aid has also become war.

Drawing on extensive research conducted in Palestine, Elastic Empire offers a novel accounting of the US security state. The US war chronicled here is not one of tanks, grenades, and guns, but a quieter one waged through the interlacing of aid and law. It emerges in the infrastructures of daily life—in a greenhouse and library, in the collection of personal information and mapping of land plots, in the halls of municipal councils and in local elections—and indelibly transfigures lives. Situated in a landscape where the lines between humanitarianism and the global war on terror are increasingly blurred, Elastic Empire reveals the shape-shifting nature of contemporary imperial formations, their realignments and reformulations, their haunted sites, and their obscured but intimate forms.

Lisa Bhungalia is Assistant Professor of Geography at Kent State University. Her new position (as of fall 2024) will be Assistant Professor of Geography and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christopher Tounsel, "Bounds of Blackness: African Americans, Sudan, and the Politics of Solidarity" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Wed, 15 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Christopher Tounsel's book Bounds of Blackness: African Americans, Sudan, and the Politics of Solidarity (Cornell UP, 2024) explores the history of Black America's intellectual and cultural engagement with the modern state of Sudan. Ancient Sudan occupies a central place in the Black American imaginary as an exemplar of Black glory, pride, and civilization, while contemporary Sudan, often categorized as part of "Arab Africa," rather than "Black Africa," is often sidelined and overlooked. In this pathbreaking book, Christopher Tounsel unpacks the vacillating approaches of Black Americans to the Sudanese state and its multiethnic populace through periods defined by colonialism, postcolonial civil wars, genocide in Darfur, and South Sudanese independence. By exploring the work of African American intellectuals, diplomats, organizations, and media outlets, Tounsel shows how this transnational relationship reflects the robust yet capricious terms of racial consciousness in the African Diaspora.

Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeremy Garlick, "Advantage China: Agent of Change in an Era of Global Disruption" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Thu, 09 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

China’s rise to global prominence is a pretty good contender for the most important world development in the past 30 years. But now the question is how Beijing managed to be successful on the international stage–let alone how large that success is—with fierce debates between hawks and doves in the West and elsewhere.

Jeremy Garlick tries to offer an explanation of China’s success and how Beijing is trying to remake the international system in Advantage China: Agent of Change in an Era of Global Disruption (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Jeremy is an associate professor in the Department of International and Diplomatic Studies at the Prague University of Economics and Business and the director of the Jan Masaryk Centre for International Studies. His first book is The Impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative: From Asia to Europe (Routledge: 2019), and his second is Reconfiguring the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (Routledge: 2022)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Advantage China. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Tal, "The Making of an Alliance: The Origins and Development of the US-Israel Relationship" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Wed, 08 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Laying the foundation for an understanding of US-Israeli relations, this lively and accessible book provides critical background on the origins and development of the 'special' relations between Israel and the United States.

Questioning the usual neo-realist approach to understanding this relationship, David Tal instead suggests that the relations between the two nations were constructed on idealism, political culture, and strategic ties.

Based on a diverse range of primary sources collected in archives in both Israel and the United States, The Making of an Alliance: The Origins and Development of the US-Israel Relationship (Cambridge UP, 2022) discusses the development of relations built through constant contact between people and ideas, showing how presidents and Prime Ministers, state officials, and ordinary people from both countries, impacted one another. It was this constancy of religion, values, and history, serving the bedrock of the relations between the two countries and peoples, over which the ephemeral was negotiated.

The author, David Tal, is Professor and Yossi Harel Chair in Modern Israel Studies in the Department of History at the University of Sussex. A historian of diplomatic and military history, he has published extensively on Israeli diplomatic and military history, and U.S. diplomatic history and disarmament policies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Donald Stoker, "Why America Loses Wars: Limited War and US Strategy from the Korean War to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Sun, 05 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this provocative challenge to United States policy and strategy, former Professor of Strategy & Policy at the US Naval War College, and author or editor of eleven books, Dr. Donald Stoker argues that America endures endless wars because its leaders no longer know how to think about war in strategic terms and he reveals how ideas on limited war and war in general have evolved against the backdrop of American conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. These ideas, he shows, were and are flawed and have undermined America's ability to understand, wage, and win its wars, and to secure peace afterwards. America's leaders he argues have too often taken the nation to war without understanding what they want or valuing victory, leading to the “forever wars” of today in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why America Loses Wars: Limited War and US Strategy from the Korean War to the Present(Cambridge University Press, 2019) dismantles seventy years of misguided thinking and lays the foundations for a new approach to the wars of tomorrow. Why American Loses War is a must read for policy practitioners, serving soldiers and the lay educated public.

Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, "Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Sun, 05 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In 1935, two Soviet satirists, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, undertook a 10,000-mile American road trip from New York to Hollywood and back. They immortalised their journey in a popular travelogue entitled One-storied America (published as Little Golden America in the US), a suite of newspaper articles, and a series of photographs.

In Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip (Cambridge UP, 2024), Lisa A. Kirschenbaum reconstructs this epic journey, exploring Ilf and Petrov’s encounters with a vast range of characters, from famous authors, artists, poets and filmmakers to unemployed hitchhikers and revolutionaries. Using the authors’ notes, archival material in both Russia and the US, and even FBI files, she reveals the role played by ordinary individuals in shaping foreign relations as Ilf, Petrov and the immigrants, communists, and fellow travellers who served as their hosts, guides, and translators became creative actors in cultural exchange between the two countries.

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum is Professor of History at West Chester University. In addition to her latest book Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip (2024), she is the author of Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932 (Routledge Falmer, 2000); The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (Cambridge University Press, 2006); and International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion (Cambridge University Press 2015).

Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mateo Jarquín, "The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History" (UNC Press, 2024)

Sat, 04 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Sandinista Revolution and its victory against the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua gripped the United States and the world in the 1980s. But as soon as the Sandinistas were voted out of power in 1990 and the Iran Contra affair ceased to make headlines, it became, in Washington at least, a thing of the past.

In The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History (UNC Press, 2024), Mateo Jarquin recenters the revolution as a major episode in the history of Latin America, the international left, and the Cold War. Drawing on research in Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, and Costa Rica, he recreates the perspective of Sandinista leaders in Managua and argues that their revolutionary project must be understood in international context. Because struggles over the Revolution unfolded transnationally, the Nicaraguan drama had lasting consequences for Latin American politics at a critical juncture. It also reverberated in Western Europe, among socialists worldwide, and beyond, illuminating global dynamics like the spread of democracy and the demise of a bipolar world dominated by two superpowers. Jarquin offers a sweeping analysis of the last left-wing revolution of the twentieth century, an overview of inter-American affairs in the 1980s, and an incisive look at the making of the post-Cold War order.

Mateo Jarquín is assistant professor of history at Chapman University.

Katie Coldiron is the Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and PhD student in History at Florida International University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mukund Padmanabhan, "The Great Flap of 1942: How the Raj Panicked over a Japanese Non-invasion (Vintage Books, 2024)

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In April 1942, at least half a million people fled the city of Madras, now known as Chennai. The reason? The British, after weeks of growing unease about the possibility of a Japanese invasion, finally recommended that people leave the city. In the tense, uncertain atmosphere of 1942, many people took that advice to heart–and fled.

The Japanese, of course, did not invade in 1942. But between the attack on Pearl Harbor and, say, mid-1942 when the Allies held back the Japanese advance, both the Indian colonial establishment and pro-independence activists thought carefully about the possibility of invasion—and how to respond to it, if it happened.

Mukund Padmanabhan writes about this panic in his first bookThe Great Flap of 1942: How the Raj Panicked over a Japanese Non-invasion (Vintage Books, 2024). In this interview, Mukund and I talk about the fierce debates in India about how to respond to the threat of a Japanese invasion.

Mukund Padmanabhan is the former Editor of The Hindu, one of India’s largest and most respected newspapers. He was appointed to the post in 2016, after having been Editor of the business daily, Hindu BusinessLine. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Krea University, near Chennai.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Flap of 1942. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the History and Evolution of Zionism

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

On today's episode of the New Books Network, we are privileged to have Professor Arie Dubnov joining us for an in-depth discussion on the multifaceted history and evolution of Zionism.

Professor Dubnov is the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies at George Washington University and a preeminent scholar on Zionist thought and nationalist movements. His acclaimed works include the intellectual biography Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) and the edited volumes Zionism - A View from the Outside and Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism (Stanford UP, 2019).

In this comprehensive interview, Professor Dubnov draws from his current research project examining the interwar ties between Zionist and British imperial thinkers. He provides a sweeping analysis tracing Zionism's diverse ideological currents and how they manifested from the movement's origins through the tumultuous events surrounding Israeli statehood in 1948 and into our present era.

With his profound insights, Professor Dubnov illuminates the complex social, political and intellectual forces that shaped Zionism over decades, offering a nuanced perspective on this influential nationalist ideology's evolving place in regional and global contexts. This thought-provoking discussion promises a masterclass on the rich histories and ongoing reverberations of Zionisms.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert D. Kaplan, "The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China" (Random House, 2023)

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Middle East remains one of the world’s most complicated, thorny—and, uncharitably, unstable—parts of the world, as countless headlines make clear. Internal strife, regional competition and external interventions have been the region’s history for the past several decades.

Robert Kaplan—author, foreign policy thinker, longtime writer on international affairs—has written about what he terms the “Greater Middle East”, a region that spans from the Mediterranean, south to Ethiopia and eastwards to Afghanistan and Pakistan, for decades. These insights are the foundation of his latest book: The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China (Random House, 2023)

In his book, Kaplan criticizes how the U.S. has approached the region—intervention and regime change (including his own mea culpa for his previous support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, only for Washington to look somewhere else when newly-formed regimes inevitably disappoint.

In this interview, Robert and I talk about his idea of the “Greater Middle East,” some of the experiences that most stood out to him, and his conclusions on how to think about democracy, order, and anarchy in this part of the world.

Robert D. Kaplan is the bestselling author of twenty books on foreign affairs and travel, including Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age (Random House: 2022), The Good American: The Epic Life of Bob Gersony, the U.S. Government's Greatest Humanitarian (Random House: 2021), The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate (Random House: 2012), Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific (Random House: 2014), Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Random House: 2010), The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (Random House: 2000), and Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (St. Martins Press: 1993). He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. He was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the U.S. Navy’s Executive Panel.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Traian Sandu, "Ceausescu: The Ambiguous Dictator" (Perrin, 2023)

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Traian Sandu about his book Ceausescu: Le dictateur ambigu (Perrin, 2023).

Born in January 1918, Nicolae Ceauşescu began his apprenticeship in Bucharest and discovered the social struggle and its repression at the age of fifteen within the Romanian Communist Party. In 1948, the Stalinist Gheorghiu-Dej, his mentor, having taken power, he took the opportunity to quickly climb the ranks of the party and the state. Installed in power in March 1965, Ceauşescu inherited the policy of his predecessor: avoiding de-Stalinization by playing the nationalist card. Its beginnings were popular thanks to a certain cultural liberalization, the beginning of a consumer society and an opening towards the West. However, the oil shocks and the détente between the United States and the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s deprived him of the resources needed to pursue his policy.

His role as a bridge between East and West, his industrialization policy based on Western capital and technologies and his popularity within Romanian society collapsed at the turn of the 1980s. The beginning of social and political opposition (strikes and dissidence), the decision to repay the debt to Western institutions (IMF and World Bank) which led to cruel shortages and the end of the Cold War with the arrival of Gorbachev sounded the death knell for his regime which collapsed in three days in December 1989. The one who called himself the "genius of the Carpathians", or even the "Danube of thought", was executed with his wife, Elena, at the end of a particularly hasty trial, ending a strange revolution in which many saw the hand of the Soviet "big brother". Between autocratic drift and reformist desires, nationalism and submission to the USSR, growing paranoia and all-consuming megalomania, the man remained a mystery.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mauricio Fernando Castro, "Only a Few Blocks to Cuba: Cold War Refugee Policy, the Cuban Diaspora, and the Transformations of Miami" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Only a Few Blocks to Cuba: Cold War Refugee Policy, the Cuban Diaspora, and the Transformations of Miami (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024), Mauricio Castro shows how the U.S. government came to view Cuban migration to Miami as a strategic asset during the Cold War, in the process investing heavily in the city's development and shaping its future as a global metropolis. When Cuban refugees fleeing Communist revolution began to arrive in Miami in 1959, the city was faced with a humanitarian crisis it was ill-equipped to handle and sought to have the federal government solve what local politicians clearly viewed as a Cold War geopolitical problem. In response, the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, and their successors, provided an unprecedented level of federal largesse and freedom of transit to these refugees.

The changes to the city this investment wrought were as impactful and permanent as they were unintended. What was meant to be a short-term geopolitical stratagem instead became a new reality in South Florida. A growing and increasingly powerful Cuban community contested their place in Miami and navigated challenges like bilingualism, internal political disputes, socioeconomic polarization, and ongoing struggles and negotiations with Washington and Havana in the decades that followed. This contested process, argues Mauricio Castro, not only transformed South Florida, but American foreign policy and the calculus of national politics. Castro uses extensive archival research in local and national sources to demonstrate that the Cuban diaspora and Cold War refugee policy made South Florida a key space to understanding the shifting landscape of the late twentieth century. In this way, Miami serves as an example of both the lived effects of defense spending in urban spaces and of how local communities can shape national politics and international relations. American politics, foreign relations, immigration policy, and urban development all intersected on the streets of Miami.

Mauricio Castro is Assistant Professor of History at Centre College.

Katie Coldiron is the Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and PhD student in History at Florida International University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Louis Howard Porter, "Reds in Blue: UNESCO, World Governance, and the Soviet Internationalist Imagination" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Before Josef Stalin's death in 1953, the USSR had, at best, an ambivalent relationship with noncommunist international organisations. Although it had helped found the United Nations, it refused to join the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and other major agencies beyond the Security Council and General Assembly, casting them as foreign meddlers. Under new leadership, the USSR joined UNESCO and a slew of international organisations for the first time, including the World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization. As a result, it enabled Soviet diplomats, scholars, teachers, and even some blue-collar workers to participate in global discussions on topics ranging from their professional specialties to worldwide problems.

Reds in Blue: UNESCO, World Governance, and the Soviet Internationalist Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Louis Porter investigates Soviet relations with one of the most prominent of these organisations, UNESCO, to present a novel way of thinking about the role of the United Nations in the Soviet experience of the Cold War. Drawing on unused archival material from the former USSR and elsewhere, the book examines the forgotten stories of Soviet citizens who contributed to the nuts-and-bolts operations and lesser-known activities of world governance. These unexamined dimensions of everyday participation in the UN's bureaucracy, conferences, publications, and technical assistance show the body's importance for a group of Soviet "one-worlders," who used the UN to imagine and work for a better world amidst the realities of the Cold War. Meanwhile, the Khrushchev and early Brezhnev governments sought to use their participation as a means of spreading Soviet influence within Western-dominated international organisations but discovered that this required risk-taking and a degree of openness for which the Soviet leadership and domestic institutions were often unprepared.

Moving beyond debates over the successes and failures of UN diplomatic activities, Reds in Blue offers fresh perspectives on how Soviet citizens became citizens of the world and advocated for opening up Soviet society in ways that transcended Cold War categories without abandoning a sense of loyalty to their homeland. In doing so, it recaptures a space where East and West worked together towards a future without international conflict in the years before détente.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matthieu Grandpierron, "Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War: How Leaders of Great Powers Cope with Status Decline" (McGill-Queen's Press, 2024)

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Why do great powers go to war? Why are non-violent, diplomatic options not prioritised? Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War: How Leaders of Great Powers Cope with Status Decline (McGill-Queen's Press, 2024) by Dr. Matthieu Grandpierron argues that world leaders react to status decline by going to war, guided by a nostalgic, virile understanding of what it means to be powerful. This nostalgic virility - a system of subjective beliefs about power, bravery, strength, morality, and health - acts as a filter through which leaders articulate glorified interpretations of history and assess their power and their country’s status on the international stage.

In this rigorous study of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Dr. Grandpierron tests the theory of nostalgic virility against the two more common theoretical frameworks of realism and the diversionary theory of war. Consulting thousands of newly declassified government documents at the highest levels of decision making, Dr. Grandpierron examines three specific cases - the early years of the Indochina War (1945-47), the British reconquest of the Falklands in 1982, and the US invasion of Grenada in 1983 - convincingly contending that status-seeking behaviour and nostalgic virility are more relevant in explaining why a leader chooses war and conflict over non-violent, diplomatic options than the dominant frameworks.

Looking to the recent past, Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War considers how this new model can be applied to current conflicts - from the Russian war in Ukraine to Chinese actions in the South China Sea - and provides surprising ways of thinking about the relationship between power, decision makers, and causes of war.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yuliya Zabyelina, "Between Immunity and Impunity: External Accountability of Political Elites for Transnational Crime" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

How do top-level public officials take advantage of immunity from foreign jurisdiction afforded to them by international law? How does the immunity entitlement allow them to thwart investigations and trial proceedings in foreign courts? What responses exist to prevent and punish such conduct?

In Between Immunity and Impunity: External Accountability of Political Elites for Transnational Crime (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Dr. Yuliya Zabyelina unravels the intricate layers of impunity of political elites complicit in transnational crimes. By examining cases of trafficking in persons and drugs, corruption, and money laundering that implicate heads of state and of government, ministers, diplomats, and international civil servants, she shows that, despite the potential of international law immunity to impede or delay justice, there are prominent instruments of external accountability. Accessible and compelling, this book provides novel insights for readers interested in the close-knit bond between power, illicit wealth, and impunity.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Veevers, "The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire" (Ebury Press, 2023)

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

It’s very easy to study the history of the British Empire from the perspective of, well, the British–and to extend the early 20th century version of the empire as a world-spanning entity backwards through history.

David Veevers, in his new book The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire (Ebury Press, 2023) studies the English, and later British, empires from a different perspective: Not the British, but the Irish, Native Americans, Southeast Asians, and Indians they met, traded–and often fought–with. And he shows that, for much of its history, the British Empire’s position was far more precarious than its later dominance implies.

In this interview, David and I talk about how the English Empire got its start, and how other groups pushed back.

Dr David Veevers is an award-winning historian and Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Bangor, and was formerly a Leverhulme Fellow in the School of History at Queen Mary, University of London. He is also the author of the acclaimed academic book, The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600 - 1750 (Cambridge University Press: 2020)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Defiance. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

William Bain, "Political Theology of International Order" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Is contemporary international order truly a secular arrangement? Theorists of international relations typically adhere to a narrative that portrays the modern states system as the product of a gradual process of secularization that transcended the religiosity of medieval Christendom. William Bain's Political Theology of International Order (Oxford University Press, 2020) challenges this narrative by arguing that modern theories of international order reflect ideas that originate in medieval theology. They are, in other words, worldly applications of a theological pattern.

This ground-breaking book makes two key contributions to scholarship on international order. First, it provides a thorough intellectual history of medieval and early modern traditions of thought and the way in which they shape modern thinking about international order. It explores the ideas of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, Martin Luther, and other theologians to rise above the sharp differentiation of medieval and modern that underpins most international thought. Uncovering this theological inheritance invites a fundamental reassessment of canonical figures, such as Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, and their contribution to theorizing international order. Second, this book shows how theological ideas continue to shape modern theories of international order by structuring the questions theorists ask as well as the answer they provide. It argues that the dominant vocabulary of international order, system and society, anarchy, balance of power, and constitutionalism, is mediated by the intellectual commitments of nominalist theology. It concludes by exploring the implications of thinking in terms of this theological inheritance, albeit in a world where God is only one of several possibilities that can called upon to secure the regularity of order.

William Bain is Associate Professor of International Relations at National University of Singapore. He is the author of Between Anarchy and Society: Trusteeship and the Obligations of Power (OUP, 2003) and editor of, and contributor to, Medieval Foundations of International Relations (Routledge, 2016) and The Empire of Security and the Safety of the People (Routledge, 2006). He has written widely on the theory of international society and the history of international thought.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily Conroy-Krutz, "Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Sun, 24 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2024) illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided. Yet as decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries' power. Were missionaries serving the interests of American diplomacy? Or were they creating unnecessary problems?

As Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz demonstrates, they were doing both. Across the century, missionaries forced the government to articulate new conceptions of the rights of US citizens abroad and of the role of the US as an engine of humanitarianism and religious freedom. By the time the US entered the first world war, missionary diplomacy had for nearly a century created the conditions for some Americans to embrace a vision of their country as an internationally engaged world power. Missionary Diplomacy exposes the longstanding influence of evangelical missions on the shape of American foreign relations.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

George S. Takach, "Cold War 2.0: Artificial Intelligence in the New Battle between China, Russia, and America" (Pegasus Book, 2024)

Sun, 24 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A vivid, thoughtful examination of how technological innovation—especially AI—is shaping the tensions between democracy and autocracy during the new Cold War.

So much of what we hear about China and Russia today likens the relationship between these two autocracies and the West to a “rivalry” or a “great-power competition.” Some might consider it alarmist to say we are in the midst of a second Cold War, but that may be the only responsible way to describe today’s state of affairs. What’s more, we have come a long way from Mao Zedong’s infamous observation that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Now we live in an age more aptly described by Vladimir Putin’s cryptic prophecy that “artificial intelligence is the future not only of Russia, but of all mankind, and whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become ruler of the world.”

George S. Takach’s incisive and meticulously researched new volume, Cold War 2.0: Artificial Intelligence in the New Battle between China, Russia, and America (Pegasus Book, 2024), is the book we need to thoroughly understand these frightening and perilous times. In the geopolitical sphere, there are no more pressing issues than the appalling mechanizations of a surveillance state in China, Russia’s brazen attempt to assert its autocratic model in Ukraine, and China’s increasingly likely plans to do the same in Taiwan. But the key here, Takach argues, is that our new Cold War is not only ideological but technological: the side that prevails in Cold War 2.0 will be the one that bests the other in mastering the greatest innovations of our time. Artificial intelligence sits in our pockets every day—but what about AI that coordinates military operations and missile defense systems? Or the highly sophisticated semiconductor chips and quantum computers that power those missiles and a host of other weapons? And, where recently we have seen remarkable feats of bio-engineering to produce vaccines at record speed, shouldn’t we be concerned how catastrophic it would be if bio-engineering were co-opted for nefarious purposes? Takach thoroughly examines how each of these innovations will shape the tension between democracy and autocracy, and how each will play a central role in this second Cold War. Finally, he crafts a precise blueprint for how Western democracies should handle these innovations to respond to the looming threat of autocracy—and ultimately prevail over it.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marc-William Palen, "Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Sat, 23 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A new economic history which uncovers the forgotten left-wing, anti-imperial, pacifist origins of economic cosmopolitanism and free trade from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

The post-1945 international free-trade regime was established to foster a more integrated, prosperous, and peaceful world. As US Secretary of State Cordell Hull (1933-1944), "Father of the United Nations" and one of the regime's principal architects, explained in his memoirs, "unhampered trade dovetailed with peace; high tariffs, trade barriers, and unfair economic competition, with war." Remarkably, this same economic order is now under assault from the country most involved in its creation: the United States. A global economic nationalist resurgence - heralded by Donald Trump's "America First" protectionism and resultant trade wars with the USA's closest allies and trading partners - now looks to transform over seventy years of regional and global market integration into an illiberal economic order resembling that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Economic cosmopolitan critics of today's retreat from free trade have offered dire warnings that doing so would be catastrophic for global consumers and an existential threat to regional and world peace. But under what circumstances did this ideological marriage of free trade, prosperity, and peace arise? Who were its main adherents? How did this same free-trade ideology succeed in becoming the new economic orthodoxy following the Second World War? And how might the successes and failures of this earlier struggle to reform the economic order inform today's globalization crisis?

In Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World (Princeton UP, 2024), economic historian Marc-William Palen finds answers amid a century of transnational peace and anti-imperial activism that stretched from Britain's unilateral adoption of free trade in 1846 to the founding of the US-led liberal trading system that arose immediately after the Second World War. Over five thematic chapters, considering the period from different perspectives, and utilising archival research conducted in Europe, North America, and Australia, Palen shows that this politico-ideological struggle to create a more prosperous and peaceful world through free trade pitted economic cosmopolitans against economic nationalists. Cosmopolitans sought to counter the industrialising world's embrace of economic nationalism because they believed - much like today's critics of Trump's tariffs and Brexit - that economic nationalism laid the groundwork for trade wars, high prices for consumers, and geopolitical conflict; while free trade created market interdependence, prosperity, social justice, and a more peaceful world. Pax Economica argues that this cosmopolitan fight for free trade laid foundations for a century of anti-imperial and peace activism across the globe - and paved the way for today's global trade regime now under siege.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Patryk I. Labuda, "International Criminal Tribunals and Domestic Accountability" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In the 1990s, the promise of justice for atrocity crimes was associated with the revival of international criminal tribunals (ICTs). More recently, however, there has been a renewed emphasis on domestic accountability for international crimes across the globe. In identifying a 'complementarity turn', a paradigm shift toward domestic accountability in the field of international criminal justice, this book investigates how the shadow of international criminal tribunals influences the treatment of serious crimes at the national level.

Drawing on research and interviews in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sierra Leone, International Criminal Tribunals and Domestic Accountability: In the Court's Shadow (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Patryk I. Labuda develops a tripartite framework to analyse how states and tribunals work with, despite, or against one another in the fight against impunity. While international prosecutors and judges use the principle of complementarity to foster cooperation and decrease tension with government actors, Dr. Labuda argues that too much deference by ICTs toward states reduces the likelihood of accountability and may enable national elites to consolidate authoritarian power.

By interrogating how international accountability stakeholders relate to their domestic counterparts, International Criminal Tribunals and Domestic Accountability advocates improvements to ICTs' institutional design and more dynamic interactions with states to strengthen the enforcement of international criminal law.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eileen Kane et al., "Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The roots of the Arab world’s current Russian entanglements reach deep into the tsarist and Soviet periods. To explore those entanglements, Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History (Oxford UP, 2023) presents and contextualizes a set of primary sources translated from Russian, Arabic, Armenian, Persian, French, and/or Tatar: a 1772 Russian naval officer’s diary, an Arabic slave sale deed from the Caucasus, an interview with a Russian-educated contemporary Syrian novelist, and many more. These archival, autobiographical, and literary sources, introduced by specialists and in some cases by pairs of scholars with complementary language expertise, highlight connections long obscured by disciplinary cleavages between Slavic and Middle East studies. Taken together, the thirty-four chapters of this book show how various Russian/Soviet and Arab governments sought to nurture political and cultural ties and expand their influence, often with unplanned results. They reveal the transnational networks of trade, pilgrimage, study, ethnic identity, and political affinity that state policies sometimes fostered and sometimes disrupted. Above all, they give voice to some of the resourceful characters who have embodied and exploited Arab-Russian contacts: missionaries and diplomats, soldiers and refugees, students and party activists, scholars and spies. A set of new maps helps orient readers amid the expansion and collapse of empires, border changes, population transfers, and creation of new nation-states that occurred during the two centuries these sources cover.

Eileen Kane teaches modern European history at Connecticut College, where she also directs the Program in Global Islamic Studies. A historian of imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, she is the author of Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca. She is the 2017 recipient of a Mellon New Directions Fellowship and is currently writing a history of Jewish and Muslim migrations from Russia to the Middle East.

Masha Kirasirova is assistant professor of history at New York University Abu Dhabi. She is a historian of exchanges between the Soviet Eurasia and the Middle East. She is finishing a book called The Eastern International: Culture, Power, and Politics in Soviet-Arab Relations. Her articles have appeared in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Ab Imperio, Iranian Studies, and Mediterranean Politics.

Margaret Litvin is associate professor of Arabic and comparative literature at Boston University. A historian of modern Arabic literature and its global ties, she is the author of Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost and the translator of Sonallah Ibrahim’s Arabic novel Ice, set in 1973 Moscow. Her current book project, Another East: Arab Writers, Moscow Dreams, reconstructs some literary legacies of Arab-Russian and Arab-Soviet cultural ties during the long 20th century. She also writes about Arabic theatre for global audiences.

Tugrul Mende holds an M.A in Arabic Studies. He is based in Berlin as a project coordinator and independent researcher.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How to Be a Good Statesman: Johnny Burtka on Political Leadership from Xenophon to Churchill

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

We have a preponderance of books on leadership in business; yet, despite broad dissatisfaction with our political leaders, almost none on how to be a good statesman. John A. Burtka IV, President and CEO of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, discusses lessons on political leadership from thinkers and leaders throughout history, from Xenophon and Aristotle to Machiavelli, Washington and everyone in between. Along the way, he delves into the differences between the theory and practice of statesmanship, the distinctions between Western and Eastern political advice, whether Christianity makes one a better leader, and why the "Mirrors for Princes" tradition can be helpful for students and leaders in modern democracies.

John A. Burtka IV is the President and CEO of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a non-profit founded in 1953 by William F. Buckley and Frank Chodorov focused on introducing undergraduates to the American tradition of liberty. He earned his BA at Hillsdale College and graduate degree in theology from La Faculté Jean Calvin in Aix-en-Provence, France. His writing has been widely featured in publications including The American Conservative, the Washington Post, First Things, The Dispatch, and the Intercollegiate Review. He recently published an edited collection, Gateway to Statesmanship: Selections from Xenophon to Churchill, which contains excerpts of great thinkers from the ancient, medieval, renaissance, and modern eras designed to teach students about the history of statesmanship.

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yaacov Nir, "Establishment and History of the Cyprus Detention Camps for Jewish Refugees (1946-1949)" (Cambridge Scholars, 2024)

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Yaacov Nir's Establishment and History of the Cyprus Detention Camps for Jewish Refugees (1946-1949) (Cambridge Scholars, 2024) explores the nature of the severe conflict over immigration to Palestine during the post-Second World War period, and the British policy of deportation to Detention Camps in Cyprus (1946-1949). It considers the perspective of actors such as the British Foreign Office, dominated by stubborn Ernest Bevin, and the Colonial Office, the Palestinian Jewish community and its underground Haganah and Palmach forces, the Palestinian Arabs, and the Colonial Cyprus authorities.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rachel Blumenthal, "Right to Reparations: The Claims Conference and Holocaust Survivors, 1951–1964" (Lexington, 2021)

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Right to Reparations: The Claims Conference and Holocaust Survivors, 1951–1964 (Lexington, 2021) examines the early years of the Claims Conference, the organization which lobbies for and distributes reparations to Holocaust survivors, and its operations as a nongovernmental actor promoting reparative justice in global politics. Rachel Blumenthal traces the founding of the organization by one person, and its continued campaign for the payment of compensation to survivors after Israel left the negotiations. This book explores the degree to which the leadership entity served individual victims of the Third Reich, the Jewish public, or member organizations.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephanie Chasin, "British Jews and Imperial Service: Nationalism, Pan-Islamism and Zionism in Mandate Palestine and Colonial India" (I. B. Tauris, 2023)

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In the wake of the devastating WWI, three Jews headed the most valuable territory in the British Empire in addition to a strategically important new addition. Edwin Montagu held the position of Secretary of State for India, Rufus Isaacs (Lord Reading) was the newly appointed Viceroy of India, and Herbert Samuel arrived in Jerusalem as the first High Commissioner of Palestine.

Their appointments came at a time of great upheaval as Indian nationalists clamoured for independence, pan-Islamists fought to keep the defeated Ottoman Empire intact and the sultan in Constantinople, and Zionists sought to build on the wartime promise by the British government to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine in face of opposition by Palestinians and pan-Islamists. The task of tackling these issues was made all the more difficult by accusations that Jews were not loyal to the British Empire and its goals, a view promoted by the appearance of the antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion in English translation.

British Jews and Imperial Service: Nationalism, Pan-Islamism and Zionism in Mandate Palestine and Colonial India (Bloomsbuy, 2023) by Dr. Stephanie Chasin follows this web of divisive imperial politics, and nationalist and pan-Islamist aspirations in India and Palestine, through the lives and work of these three men whose efforts were coloured by the post-war fear of a declining empire that was being corroded from within.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alina Nychyk, "Ukraine Vis-à-Vis Russia and the EU: Misperceptions of Foreign Challenges in Times of War, 2014-2015" (Ibidem Press, 2023)

Sat, 16 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Ukraine Vis-à-Vis Russia and the EU: Misperceptions of Foreign Challenges in Times of War, 2014-2015 (Ibidem Press, 2023) investigates the making of Ukraine’s foreign policy towards the European Union and Russia between February 2014 and February 2015. To contextualize the events of the first year of the Russian-Ukrainian War, Nychyk lays out the history of the EU-Ukraine-Russia triangle since 1991 and draws lessons relevant for the 2022 Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The book is based on her doctoral research and rests on a game-theory-inspired approach to foreign policy analysis. It relies on 38 elite interviews, official documents, and media reports.

Nychyk uncovers various mutual misperceptions in EU-Ukraine-Russia relations. Looking at Ukraine’s ‘side of the story’, her analysis shows how Russian assertiveness and the EU’s passivity, but also Ukrainian leaders’ limited crisis management experience and erroneous policy decisions contributed to worse outcomes for Ukraine. The latter included poor analysis of foreign interlocutors, trust in their good intentions, and corruption. After 2015, a persistence—although with certain changes—of some of these pathologies left Ukraine in a weaker position in the face of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrew J. Kirkendall, "Hemispheric Alliances: Liberal Democrats and Cold War Latin America" (UNC Press, 2022)

Sat, 16 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Hemispheric foreign policy has waxed and waned since the Mexican War, and the Cold War presented both extraordinary promises and dangerous threats to U.S.-Latin American cooperation.

In Hemispheric Alliances: Liberal Democrats and Cold War Latin America (UNC Press, 2022), Andrew J. Kirkendall examines the strengths and weaknesses of new models for U.S.-Latin American relations created by liberal Democrats who came to the fore during the Kennedy Administration and retained significant influence until the Reagan era. Rather than exerting ironfisted power in Latin America, liberal Democrats urged Washington to be a moral rather than a militaristic leader in hemispheric affairs. Decolonization, President Eisenhower's missteps in Latin America, and the Cuban Revolution all played key roles in the Kennedy administration's Alliance for Progress, which liberal Democrats hailed as a new cornerstone for U.S.-Latin American foreign policy. During the Vietnam War era, liberal Democrats began to incorporate human rights more centrally into their agendas, using Latin America as the primary arena for these policies. During the long period of military dictatorship in much of Latin America and the Caribbean, liberal Democrats would see their policies dissolved by the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush administrations who favored militant containment of both communism and absolutism.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ruth A. Morgan, "Climate Change and International History: Climate Diplomacy in the Global North and South Since 1950" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Sat, 16 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Exploring how climate change has configured the international arena since the 1950s, Climate Change and International History: Negotiating Science, Global Change, and Environmental Justice (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Ruth A. Morgan reveals the ways that climate change emerged and evolved as an international problem, and how states, scientists and non-governmental organisations have engaged in diplomatic efforts to address it. Developing amidst the Cold War, decolonization and a growing transnational environmental consciousness, it asks how this wider historical context has shaped international responses to the greatest threat to humankind to date.

Thinking beyond the science of climate change to the way it is received and responded to, Dr. Morgan shows how climate science has been mobilised in the political sphere, paying particular attention to the North-South dynamics of climate diplomacy. The privileging of climate science and the mobilisation of climate scepticism are explored to consider how they have undermined efforts to remedy this planetary problem. Studying climate change and international history in tandem, this book explains the origins of the debates around this environmental emergency, the response of political leaders attempting to address the threat, and the barriers to creating an international regime to resolve the climate crisis.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On America’s Blind Spot Towards the Palestinians

Sat, 09 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In their handling of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process over the decades, U.S. officials have displayed a “systemic blind spot” by alleviating pressure on the stronger party, Israel, and increasing pressure on the weaker party, the Palestinians, Khaled Elgindy argues in Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, From Balfour to Trump (Brookings Institution Press, 2019). In my conversation with Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, we explore the particular forms that this blind spot took in successive presidential administrations from Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump. And we conclude with his thoughts on how the blind spot is expressed in the Joe Biden presidency as the Israel-Hamas war rages in Gaza.

Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His latest book, Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports) will be published in January.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Priyasha Saksena, "Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia (Oxford UP, 2023), Dr Priyasha Saksena interrogates the centuries-old question of what constitutes a sovereign state in the international legal sphere. She explores the history of sovereignty through an analysis of the jurisdictional politics involving the princely states of colonial South Asia. Governed by local rulers, these princely states were subject to British paramountcy whilst remaining legally distinct from directly ruled British India. Their legal status and the extent of their rights remained the subject of feverish debates through the entirety of British colonial rule. This book traces the ways in which the language of sovereignty shaped the discourse surrounding the legal status of the princely states to illustrate how the doctrine of sovereignty came to structure political imagination in colonial South Asia and the framework of the modern Indian state.

In this podcast, Dr Saksena explores how the various players within British India – international lawyers, British politicians, colonial officials, rulers and bureaucrats of princely states, and anti-colonial nationalists – used definitions of sovereignty to construct political orders in line with their interests and aspirations. By invoking the vernacular of sovereignty in contrasting ways to support their differing visions of imperial and world order, these actors also attempted to reconfigure the boundaries among the spheres of the national, the imperial, and the international. Our discussions chart the debates and disputes over the princely states across two hundred years of Indian history, and how they continually defined and redefined the concept of sovereignty and international legitimacy in South Asia.

The podcast explores the importance of the language of international law, how it is used and by whom, and how it is both a counterweight and a shaping force for political power. We discuss how different understandings of sovereignty have been (and still are) influencing the various ways in which people think about organising the world and their relationship to each other.

Alex Batesmith is a Lecturer in Legal Profession at the School of Law, University of Leeds, UK. His research focuses on lawyers, their professional self-identity and their motivations, and how these shape the institutions and the discipline in which they work. Twitter: @batesmith

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Poulshock, "Power Structures in International Politics" (Low 8, 2023)

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Power Structures in International Politics (Low 8, 2023) presents an original perspective on the dynamics underlying world events, approaching international relations through the lens of computational science. It explains how states accumulate political power and how this competition leads to resource conflict, coalition building, imperialism, the balance of power, and global instability. Written in an engaging and accessible style with over a hundred illustrations, the book will appeal to a wide audience interested in geopolitics, international relations, and quantitative science.

Michael Poulshock is a lawyer, software engineer, and technology manager.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eline van Ommen, "Nicaragua Must Survive: Sandinista Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Global Cold War" (U California Press, 2024)

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Nicaragua Must Survive: Sandinista Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Global Cold War (University of California Press, 2023) tells the story of the Sandinistas' innovative diplomatic campaign, which captured the imaginations of people around the globe and transformed Nicaraguan history at the tail end of the Cold War. The Sandinistas' diplomacy went far beyond elite politics, as thousands of musicians, politicians, teachers, activists, priests, feminists, and journalists flocked to the country to experience the revolution firsthand. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews, Eline van Ommen reveals the role that Western Europe played in Nicaragua's revolutionary diplomacy. Blending grassroots organizing and formal foreign policy, pragmatic guerrillas, creative diplomats, and ambitious activists from Europe and the Americas were able to create an international environment in which the Sandinista Revolution could survive despite the odds. Nicaragua Must Survive argues that this diplomacy was remarkably effective, propelling Nicaragua into the global limelight and allowing the revolutionaries to successfully challenge the United States' role in Central America.

Eline van Ommen is Lecturer in Contemporary History at the University of Leeds.

Katie Coldiron is the Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and PhD student in History at Florida International University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philip Giurlando and Daniel F. Wajner, "Populist Foreign Policy: Regional Perspectives of Populism in the International Scene" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The focus of the research on populism as a category of political analysis has mostly been on domestic politics and can be traced back to the 1960s. Only in the last two decades this field of inquiry taken a more focused and specialized hue, involving systematic attempts to investigate populist governments’ behavior in the international arena. ...

While some scholars understand populism as a threat to the institutions of liberal democracy and even of the liberal international order, others consider the populist potential to enhance democracy—understood as popular rule—and promote a fairer global governance.

– Introduction to Populist Foreign Policy (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)

This edited volume, Populist Foreign Policy: Regional Perspectives of Populism in the International Scene, explores the global phenomenon of populism in relation to states' foreign policy, addressing two key questions: How do populists mold their foreign policies? What are the domestic and external factors that enable and constrain it? To this end, Professors Giurlando and Wajner’s book brings together a diverse group of scholars who have already researched on populist foreign policies (PFP) in specific countries to contribute shared chapters that examine their drivers, patterns, and effects according to distinctive regions: North America, Western Europe, Southern Europe, Central-Eastern Europe, Latin America, South-East Asia, the Middle East, Oceania, and Africa.

The empirical analysis sheds new light on how populists’ distinctive conception of a world divided antagonistically between “the people” and “the elites” influences behavior towards multilateral organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union, and regional or global hegemonic powers like the United States, Germany, Russia, and China. The book also shows how ideas related to identity, ideology, status and emotions, impinge on populists’ conduct vis-à-vis other international actors, and how national and international structures affect the implementation of populist foreign policies in the regional, interregional, and global arenas. The wide geographical diversity and regional representation are also valuable in identifying cultural similarities and differences. Hence, the findings contribute to lively debates on whether there is a unified and coherent foreign policy among populist leaderships, and whether populism leads to a gradual “corrective” of transnational trends in contemporary politics or, conversely, to a more radical, structural shift in the liberal international order.

Philip Giurlando is Assistant Professor of International Relations in the International Studies Department at Xian-Jiao Tong Livermore University. His research interests include the formation and consequences of inter-state hierarchies, and populist foreign policies. His first book, Eurozone Politics: Perception and Reality in Italy, the UK, and Germany (2016) lays the foundation for the interview.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ned Richardson-Little, "The Human Rights Dictatorship: Socialism, Global Solidarity and Revolution in East Germany" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In The Human Rights Dictatorship: Socialism, Global Solidarity and Revolution in East Germany (Cambridge UP, 2020), Ned Richardson-Little exposes the forgotten history of human rights in the German Democratic Republic, placing the history of the Cold War, Eastern European dissidents and the revolutions of 1989 in a new light. By demonstrating how even a communist dictatorship could imagine itself to be a champion of human rights, this book challenges popular narratives on the fall of the Berlin Wall and illustrates how notions of human rights evolved in the Cold War as they were re-imagined in East Germany by both dissidents and state officials. Ultimately, the fight for human rights in East Germany was part of a global battle in the post-war era over competing conceptions of what human rights meant. Nonetheless, the collapse of dictatorship in East Germany did not end this conflict, as citizens had to choose for themselves what kind of human rights would follow in its wake.

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

Peter Harmsen, "Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze" (Casemate, 2015)

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Peter Harmsen's book Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (Casemate, 2015) describes one of the great forgotten battles of the 20th century. At its height it involved nearly a million Chinese and Japanese soldiers while sucking in three million civilians as unwilling spectators and victims. It turned what had been a Japanese adventure in China into a general war between the two oldest and proudest civilizations of the Far East. Ultimately, it led to Pearl Harbor and to seven decades of tumultuous history in Asia. The Battle of Shanghai was a pivotal event that helped define and shape the modern world.

Actors from a variety of nations were present in Shanghai during the three fateful autumn months when the battle raged. The rich cast included China's ascetic Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his Japanese adversary, General Matsui Iwane, who wanted Asia to rise from disunity, but ultimately pushed it toward its deadliest conflict ever. Claire Chennault, later of "Flying Tiger" fame, was among the figures emerging in the course of the campaign, as was First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. In an ironic twist, Alexander von Falkenhausen, a stern German veteran of the Great War, abandoned his role as a mere advisor to the Chinese army and led it into battle against the Japanese invaders.

In its sheer scale, the struggle for China's largest city was a sinister forewarning of what was in store for the rest of mankind only a few years hence. It demonstrated how technology had given rise to new forms of warfare, or had made old forms even more lethal. Amphibious landings, tank assaults, aerial dogfights and most importantly, urban combat, all happened in Shanghai in 1937. It was a dress rehearsal for World War II--or perhaps more correctly it was the inaugural act in the war--the first major battle in the global conflict.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Future of the Chinese Military: A Discussion with James A. Siebens

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

For all the talk of China being a peaceful country with no aggressive intentions, it has behaved like most other rising powers – spending lots of money on its military. But what do we know of how that military is used? James A. Siebens is the editor of China’s Use of Armed Coercion: To Win Without Fighting (Routledge, 2023). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett-Jones.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Kimmage, "Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

One war, three collisions: Russia with Ukraine, Europe, and the US. On the second anniversary of the full-scale invasion, Michael Kimmage analyses the disparate factors that led to war in Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability (OUP Press, 2024).

"After a few anomalous years of peace, Europe became in 2022 what it has always been, an epicentre of conflict, the fault line around which the biggest and worst geopolitical earthquakes tend to occur".

A member of the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the US State Department where he handled the Ukraine/Russia portfolio from 2014-2016, Michael Kimmage is now a Professor of History at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC.

*The authors' book recommendations are Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan (Random House, 2002) and The Russo-Ukrainian War by Serhii Plokhy (Allen Lane, 2023).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ricky W. Law, "Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German Japanese Relations, 1919-1936" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In his new book, Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German Japanese Relations, 1919-1936 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University Ricky W. Law examines the cultural context of Tokyo and Berlin’s political rapprochement in 1936. This study of interwar German-Japanese relations is the first to employ sources in both languages. Transnational Nazism was an ideological and cultural outlook that attracted non-Germans to become adherents of Hitler and National Socialism, and convinced German Nazis to identify with certain non-Aryans. Because of the distance between Germany and Japan, mass media was instrumental in shaping mutual perceptions and spreading transnational Nazism. This work surveys the two national media to examine the impact of transnational Nazism. When Hitler and the Nazi movement gained prominence, Japanese newspapers, lectures and pamphlets, nonfiction, and language textbooks transformed to promote the man and his party. Meanwhile, the ascendancy of Hitler and his regime created a niche for Japan in the Nazi worldview and Nazified newspapers, films, nonfiction, and voluntary associations.

Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vytautas Jankauskas and Steffen Eckhard, "The Politics of Evaluation in International Organizations" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Evaluation has become a key tool in assessing the performance of international organisations, in fostering learning, and in demonstrating accountability. Within the United Nations (UN) system, thousands of evaluators and consultants produce hundreds of evaluation reports worth millions of dollars every year. But does evaluation really deliver on its promise of objective evidence and functional use?

By unravelling the internal machinery of evaluation systems in international organisations, The Politics of Evaluation in International Organisations (Oxford University Press, 2023) challenges the conventional understanding of evaluation as a value-free activity. Dr. Vytautas Jankauskas and Dr. Steffen Eckhard show how a seemingly neutral technocratic tool can serve as an instrument for power in global governance; they demonstrate and explain how deeply politics are entrenched in the interests of evaluation stakeholders, in the control and design of IO evaluation systems, and to a lesser extent also in the content of evaluation reports. The analysis draws on 120 research interviews with evaluators, member state representatives, and IO secretariat officials as well as on textual analysis of over 200 evaluation reports. The investigation covers 21 UN system organisations, including detailed case studies of the ILO, IMF, UNDP, UN WOMEN, IOM, UNHCR, FAO, WHO, and UNESCO.

Shedding light on the (in-)effectiveness of evidence-based policymaking, the authors propose possible ways of better reconciling the observed evaluation politics with the need to gather reliable evidence that is used to improve the functioning of the United Nations. The answer to evaluation politics is not to abandon evaluation or isolate it from the stakeholders but to acknowledge surrounding political interests and design evaluation systems accordingly.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tobias Straumann, "1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

What can we learn from the financial crisis that brought Hitler to power? How did diplomatic deadlock fuel the rise of authoritarianism? Tobias Straumann shares vital insights with 1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler (Oxford University Press, 2019). Through his fast-paced narrative, Straumann reveals how inflexible treaties created an inescapable debt trap that spawned Nazism. Caught between investor confidence and domestic political pressure, unrealistic agreements left decision makers little room for maneuver when crisis struck. 1931 reminds us of hard lessons relevant to designing resilient agreements today.

Tobias Straumann is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Zurich and teaches economic history both to historians and economists. His research interests span numerous contributions to contemporary European business, monetary, and financial history. 1931 is his fourth book.

Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His book exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title A Discriminating Terror. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rachel Applebaum, "Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The familiar story of Soviet power in Cold War Eastern Europe focuses on political repression and military force. But in Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia (Cornell University Press, 2019), Rachel Applebaum shows how the Soviet Union simultaneously promoted a policy of transnational friendship with its Eastern Bloc satellites to create a cohesive socialist world. This friendship project resulted in a new type of imperial control based on cross-border contacts between ordinary citizens. In a new and fascinating story of cultural diplomacy, interpersonal relations, and the trade of consumer-goods, Applebaum tracks the rise and fall of the friendship project in Czechoslovakia, as the country evolved after World War II from the Soviet Union's most loyal satellite to its most rebellious.

Throughout Eastern Europe, the friendship project shaped the most intimate aspects of people's lives, influencing everything from what they wore to where they traveled to whom they married. Applebaum argues that in Czechoslovakia, socialist friendship was surprisingly durable, capable of surviving the ravages of Stalinism and the Soviet invasion that crushed the 1968 Prague Spring. Eventually, the project became so successful that it undermined the very alliance it was designed to support: as Soviets and Czechoslovaks got to know one another, they discovered important cultural and political differences that contradicted propaganda about a cohesive socialist world. Empire of Friends reveals that the sphere of everyday life was central to the construction of the transnational socialist system in Eastern Europe―and, ultimately, its collapse.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ian Saxine, "Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier" (NYU Press, 2019)

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier (NYU Press, 2019), Ian Saxine, Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Bridgewater State University, shows the dynamic relationship between Native and English systems of property on the turbulent edge of Britain’s empire, and how so many colonists came to believe their prosperity depended on acknowledging Indigenous land rights. As absentee land speculators and hardscrabble colonists squabbled over conflicting visions for the frontier, Wabanaki Indians’ unity allowed them to forcefully project their own interpretations of often poorly remembered old land deeds and treaties. The result was the creation of a system of property in Maine that defied English law, and preserved Native power and territory. Eventually, ordinary colonists, dissident speculators, and grasping officials succeeded in undermining and finally destroying this arrangement, a process that took place in councils and courtrooms, in taverns and treaties, and on battlefields.

Properties of Empire challenges assumptions about the relationship between Indigenous and imperial property creation in early America, as well as the fixed nature of Indian “sales” of land, revealing the existence of a prolonged struggle to re-interpret seventeenth-century land transactions and treaties well into the eighteenth century. The ongoing struggle to construct a commonly agreed-upon culture of landownership shaped diplomacy, imperial administration, and matters of colonial law in powerful ways, and its legacy remains with us today.

Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How to Stage a Coup and Ten Other Lessons from the World of Secret Statecraft

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Why do states engage in secret statecraft and covert action? How different are these secret and covert state activities in real world settings compared to their popular culture representations? And what effect do they have on democracy both globally and in individual states? Join Rory Cormac as he talks to Petra Alderman about his book How to Stage a Coup and Ten Other Lessons from the World of Secret Statecraft (Atlantic Books UK, 2023).

Rory Cormac is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Nottingham. He specialises in secret intelligence and covert action. His most recent book, How to Stage A Coup and Ten Other Lessons from the World of Secret Statecraft, was described in the CIA's in-house journal as “a valuable and thought-provoking work, the most thorough treatment of the topic to date.”

Petra Alderman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics at the University of Birmingham and Research Fellow at CEDAR.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"War is what you make of it" with Neta Crawford of Oxford University and the Costs of War Project

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

We begin this new season of International Horizons with an interview by RBI Director John Torpey with Neta Crawford from Oxford University and the Cost of War Project. Prof. Crawford argues that conflict is less lethal than in the past, although the overall costs of war exceed the duration of previous wars in many dimensions. The conversation delves into the possibilities of a conflict with China and Crawford's concern that the U.S's overreaction to the Chinese challenge could be extremely perilous. That said, misperceptions and misconceptions of the so-called "China threat" can be mitigated through diplomatic exchanges. Finally, Professor Crawford discusses the costs of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, arguing that war has both domestic and external causes and consequences – a point that needs to be better understood when we think about war today.

International Horizons is a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly expertise to bear on our understanding of international issues. John Torpey, the host of the podcast and director of the Ralph Bunche Institute, holds conversations with prominent scholars and figures in state-of-the-art international issues in our weekly episodes.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Immerwahr, "How to Hide an Empire: The History of the Greater United States" (FSG, 2019)

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

“Is America an Empire?” is a popular question for pundits and historians, likely because it sets off such a provocative debate. All too often, however, people use empire simply because the United States is a hegemon, ignoring the country’s imperial traits to focus simply on its power. Dr. Daniel Immerwahr’s book How to Hide an Empire: The History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) corrects this by explicitly focusing on the country’s territories and territories overseas possessions.

Dr. Immerwahr begins at the country’s founding as apprehension over aggressive westward settlement gave way to enthusiastic land grabs by pioneers such as Daniel Boone. Propelled by an astonishingly high birth rate and immigration, Euroamericans displaced indigenous peoples. In addition to this more familiar narrative, other factors drove territorial expansion. A desperate need for fertilizers led to the annexation of nearly one hundred “guano islands” in the Pacific and Caribbean, followed by the annexation of even more territory following the Spanish-American War in 1898. These new territories, including Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, and others enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the United States: they did not enjoy constitutional protections but nevertheless had a close relationship with what they called the mainland. While the United States backed away from traditional colonialism after 1945, what emerged instead was a “pointillist empire” that depended on bases and new uses of older territory to function.

Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Timothy A. Sayle, "Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization regularly appears in newspapers and political science scholarship. Surprisingly, historians have yet to devote the attention that the organization’s history merits. Timothy A. Sayle, an Assistant Professor of history at the University of Toronto, attempts to correct this. His fascinating new book, Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order (Cornell University Press, 2019), examines the history of NATO from its founding in the late 1940s through to its expansion in the post-Cold War era. Sayle shows how NATO wasn’t just any organization; it was, he writes, “an instrument of great-power politics and the basis for a Pax Atlantica.”

Taking his readers deep into the decision-making of NATO and its member states from the 1940s to the 1990s, Sayle provides a new, innovative international history of the second half of the twentieth century. Enduring Alliance should interest historians and scholars from across subfields—military history, U.S. foreign policy history, Cold War history, and global governance studies.

Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ana Lucia Araujo, "The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2023) explores how objects of prestige contributed to cross-cultural exchanges between Africans and Europeans during the Atlantic slave trade. An eighteenth-century silver ceremonial sword, commissioned in the port of La Rochelle by French traders, was offered as a gift to an African commercial agent in the port of Cabinda (Kingdom of Ngoyo), in twenty-first century Angola. Slave traders carried this object from Cabinda to Abomey, the capital of the Kingdom of Dahomey in twenty-first century's Republic of Benin, from where French officers looted the item in the late nineteenth century. Drawing on a rich set of sources in French, English, and Portuguese, as well as artifacts housed in museums across Europe and the Americas, Ana Lucia Araujo illuminates how luxury objects impacted European-African relations, and how these economic, cultural, and social interactions paved the way for the European conquest and colonization of West Africa and West Central Africa.

Ana Lucia Araujo is a Professor of History at Howard University.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Klaus Schmider, "Hitler's Fatal Miscalculation: Why Germany Declared War on the United States" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Fri, 09 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Hitler's decision to declare war on the United States has baffled generations of historians. In this revisionist new history of those fateful months, Klaus H. Schmider seeks to uncover the chain of events which would incite the German leader to declare war on the United States in December 1941.

In Hitler's Fatal Miscalculation: Why Germany Declared War on the United States (Cambridge UP, 2021), Schmider provides new insights not just on the problems afflicting German strategy, foreign policy and war production but, crucially, how they were perceived at the time at the top levels of the Third Reich. Schmider sees the declaration of war on the United States not as an admission of defeat or a gesture of solidarity with Japan, but as an opportunistic gamble by the German leader. This move may have appeared an excellent bet at the time, but would ultimately doom the Third Reich.

Joe Tasca is a host and a reporter for the NPR affiliate in Providence, Rhode Island.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wendy Cheng, "Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism" (U Washington Press, 2023)

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

This episode, which is co-hosted with Tandee Wang, features a conversation with Dr. Wendy Cheng, author of Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism. Published in November 2023 by the University of Washington Press, Island X delves into the compelling political lives of Taiwanese migrants who came to the United States as students from the 1960s through the 1980s.

Often depicted as compliant model minorities, Island X reveals that many Taiwanese students were deeply political, shaped by Taiwan's colonial history, and influenced by the global social movements of their times. As activists, they fought to make Taiwanese people visible as subjects of injustice and deserving of self-determination. Under the distorting shadows of Cold War geopolitics, the Kuomintang regime and collaborators across US campuses attempted to control Taiwanese in the diaspora through extralegal surveillance and violence, including harassment, blacklisting, imprisonment, and even murder. Drawing on interviews with student activists and extensive archival research, Cheng documents how Taiwanese Americans developed tight-knit social networks as infrastructures for identity formation, consciousness development, and anticolonial activism. They fought for Taiwanese independence, opposed state persecution and oppression, and participated in global political movements.

Raising questions about historical memory and Cold War circuits of power, Island X is a testament to the lives and advocacy of a generation of Taiwanese American activists. Our conversation today focuses on contextualizing Taiwanese student activism during the Cold War to provide greater nuance to existing frameworks of Asian American activism within Asian American studies.

Donna Doan Anderson (she/her) is a PhD candidate in History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Tandee Wang (he/him) is a PhD student in History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matthew Kruer, "Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

A gripping account of the violence and turmoil that engulfed England’s fledgling colonies and the crucial role played by Native Americans in determining the future of North America.

In 1675, eastern North America descended into chaos. Virginia exploded into civil war, as rebel colonists decried the corruption of planter oligarchs and massacred allied Indians. Maryland colonists, gripped by fears that Catholics were conspiring with enemy Indians, rose up against their rulers. Separatist movements and ethnic riots swept through New York and New Jersey. Dissidents in northern Carolina launched a revolution, proclaiming themselves independent of any authority but their own. English America teetered on the edge of anarchy.

Though seemingly distinct, these conflicts were in fact connected through the Susquehannock Indians, a once-mighty nation reduced to a small remnant. Forced to scatter by colonial militia, Susquehannock bands called upon connections with Indigenous nations from the Great Lakes to the Deep South, mobilizing sources of power that colonists could barely perceive, much less understand. Although the Susquehannock nation seemed weak and divided, it exercised influence wildly disproportionate to its size, often tipping settler societies into chaos. Colonial anarchy was intertwined with Indigenous power.

Piecing together Susquehannock strategies from a wide range of archival documents and material evidence, Matthew Kruer shows how one people’s struggle for survival and renewal changed the shape of eastern North America. Susquehannock actions rocked the foundations of the fledging English territories, forcing colonial societies and governments to respond. Time of Anarchy recasts our understanding of the late seventeenth century and places Indigenous power at the heart of the story.

Matthew Kruer is assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago where he teaches early American history.

John Cable is assistant professor of history at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia. He is the author of Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi (Univ. Press of Kansas, 2023).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beatrice Heuser, "War: A Genealogy of Western Ideas and Practices" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

War is often thought of mainly the concern of professional soldiers and maybe politicians as well. However, philosophers and theorists of varying types have addressed the issue of war in its many aspects. This is because war has numerous political, ethical, philosophical, and even legal elements. When is the right time to go to war? What is a legitimate reason to go to war? Who has the proper authority to declare war? Who should serve and fight in war? These and other questions have been debated since the times of Antiquity to the present day. Greek philosophy, Roman law, and the Jewish and Christian religious traditions have formed the foundations for the majority of Western thinking concerning the nature of war. In her book War: A Genealogy of Western Ideas and Practices (Oxford University Press, 2022), Beatrice Hesuer traces the nearly 2,500 year history of how these ideas have shaped Western conceptions of war.

Beatrice Heuser holds the Chair in International Relations at Glasgow University. From 1991-2003 she taught at the Department of War Studies, King's College London, ultimately as Chair of International and Strategic Studies. She has also taught at Sciences Po' and the Universities Paris I, IV (Sorbonne), and VIII (St Denis), and at two German universities. From 1997-1998, she worked in the International Staff at NATO headquarters in Brussels. Between 2003-2007 she was Director for Research at the Military History Research Office of the Bundeswehr in Potsdam. She is also the host of the Talking Strategy podcast for the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kiribati in the Chinese Pacific: A Discussion with Rodolfo Maggio

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Is Kiribati in the American lake, Indo-Pacific or Chinese Pacific? In this Episode, Julie Yu-Wen Chen talks to Rodolfo Maggio, a senior researcher at the University of Helsinki to conceptualize Kiribati as an interstitial island in the Chinese Pacific.

Rodolfo Maggio is a social anthropologist of moral and economic values in the Asia-Pacific region. At the University of Helsinki, he is working on an ERC-funded project “properties of units and standards”. In 2023, he published an article in Political Geography that critically analyzes the case of a 2020 Chinese diplomatic visit in Kiribati. The event became known on August 16th, 2020, when Michael Field, a journalist writing with a focus on the South Pacific, posted a visually shocking photograph on Twitter. He typed the following words as a commentary to the exceptional circumstances that the picture depicted: “KIRIBATI - Event in which Chinese Ambassador Tang Songgen walked on backs of children as part of a welcome took place Friday/Saturday at Marakei, 80 km northeast of Tarawa, Kiribati”. Rodolfo Maggio uses his anthropological lens to clarify that the way the welcome ceremony for the Chinese diplomat has been enacted suggests that the “I-Kiribati political project” is far from being a passive acceptance of Chinese presence and influence in the Pacific Ocean.

Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland) and visiting professor at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia at Mahidol University (Thailand). Dr. Chen serves as one of the editors of the Journal of Chinese Political Science (Springer, SSCI). Formerly, she was chair of Nordic Association of China Studies (NACS) and Editor-in-Chief of Asian Ethnicity (Taylor & Francis). Since 2023, she has been involved in the EU twinning project “The EU in the Volatile Indo-Pacific Region”, leading the preparatory research and providing supervision and counselling to junior researchers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Erin R. Graham, "Transforming International Institutions: How Money Quietly Sidelined Multilateralism at the United Nations" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Drawing on historical institutionalism and interpretive tools of international law, Transforming International Institutions: How Money Quietly Sidelined Multilateralism at The United Nations (Oxford University Press, 2023) Dr. Erin Graham provides a novel theory of uncoordinated change over time. The book illuminates how a slow, quiet, subterranean process can produce big, radical change in international institutions and organisations. It highlights how early participants in a process who do not foresee the transformative potential of their acts, but nonetheless enable subsequent actors to push change in new directions to profound effect.

Dr. Graham deploys this to explain how changes in UN funding rules in the 1940s and 1960s—perceived as small and made to solve immediate political disagreements—ultimately sidelined multilateral governance at the United Nations in the twenty-first century. The perception of funding rules as marginal to fundamental principles of governance, and the friendly orientation of change-initiators toward the UN, enabled this quiet transformation.

Challenging the UN's reputation for rigidity and its status as a bastion of egalitarian multilateralism, Transforming International Institutions demonstrates that the UN system is susceptible to subtle change processes and that its egalitarian multilateralism governs only a fraction of the UN's operational work.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anna Reid, "A Nasty Little War: The West's Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution" (Basic Books, 2024)

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adrian Goldsworthy, "Rome and Persia: The Seven Hundred Year Rivalry" (Basic Books, 2023)

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

For almost seven centuries, two powers dominated the region we now call the Middle East: Rome and Persia. From the west: The Roman Republic, later the Roman Empire, later the Byzantine Empire. From the East: The Parthian Empire, later replaced by the Sasanian Empire.

The two ancient superpowers spent centuries fighting for influence, paying each other off, encouraging proxy fights in their neighbors, and seizing opportunities while the other was distracted with internal strife. The relationship culminates in an almost-three-decade long war that so exhausts the two powers that they both end up getting overrun by the Arabs years later.

Adrian Goldsworthy gives a detailed account of this long history in his recent book Rome and Persia: The Seven Hundred Year Rivalry (Basic Books: 2023), starting from the (alleged) first contact in 92 BC through to the collapse of Persia in the seventh century. The two of us are going to try our best to talk about this long history in our interview today.

Adrian Goldsworthy is an award-winning historian of the classical world. He is the author of numerous books about ancient Rome, including Hadrian’s Wall (Basic Books: 2018), Caesar: Life of a Colossus (Yale University Press: 2008), How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower (Yale University Press: 2010), Pax Romana: War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World (Yale University Press: 2016), and Augustus: First Emperor of Rome (Yale University Press: 2014).

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Rome and Persia. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Simon Shuster, "The Showman: The Inside Story of the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky" (William Morrow, 2024)

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Since Simon Shuster's November 2023 Time cover story ("Nobody believes in our victory like I do - Nobody"), anyone with an interest in the war in Ukraine has been waiting for his fly-on-the-wall study of command. Finally, The Showman: The Inside Story of the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky (William Morrow, 2024) is out.

Born in Moscow but raised in California, Simon Shuster has reported from Russia and Ukraine for 17 years. Before joining Time, he worked in the region for the Moscow Times, Reuters, and AP. He first met Ukraine’s leader and his entourage when Zelensky was running for president in 2019 and built enough trust to be granted sustained wartime access three years later. Based on off-and-on-the-record conversations with the Ukrainian principals – including the president, his wife, their childhood friends, his chief of staff, his defence minister, his national security advisor, and the chief of staff of the armed forces – The Showman provides a unique insight into the conduct of the war from the top.

*The authors' book recommendations are Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham (Bantam Press, 2019) and Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick (Viking, 1993).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Democracy, Great Powers, and the Russia-Ukraine War. A Discussion with Stefan Wolff

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

How helpful is the democracy-authoritarianism binary when it comes to our understanding of contemporary conflict? What is the state of the Russia-Ukraine war? And how has it affected the great power rivalry between the United States and China? Listen to Stefan Wolff and Petra Alderman talk about the global struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, the state of the Russia-Ukraine war, and whether democracy is likely to lose out from the heightening tensions between the three great powers: the United States, Russia, and China.

Stefan Wolff is a Professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham. He is well-known for his research on the management of contemporary security challenges, especially in the prevention and settlement of ethnic conflicts and civil wars. He is also an expert on post-conflict state-building in deeply divided and war-torn societies and has written extensively on the geopolitics and geo-economics in Eurasia, including great power competition between Russia, China, and the West. He is a regular contributor to The Conversation and a co-founder of the Navigating the Vortex.

Petra Alderman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics at the University of Birmingham and Research Fellow at CEDAR.

Please note that this episode was recorded in December 2023. All mentions of ‘this year’ refer to 2023 and mentions of ‘last year’ refer to 2022.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Uri Kaufman, "Eighteen Days in October: The Yom Kippur War and How It Created the Modern Middle East" (St. Martin's Press, 2023)

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

October 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, a conflict that shaped the modern Middle East. The War was a trauma for Israel, a dangerous superpower showdown, and, following the oil embargo, a pivotal reordering of the global economic order. The Jewish State came shockingly close to defeat. A panicky cabinet meeting debated the use of nuclear weapons. After the war, Prime Minister Golda Meir resigned in disgrace, and a 9/11-style commission investigated the "debacle."

But, argues Uri Kaufman in Eighteen Days in October: The Yom Kippur War and How It Created the Modern Middle East (St. Martin's Press, 2023), from the perspective of a half century, the War can be seen as a pivotal victory for Israel. After nearly being routed, the Israeli Defense Force clawed its way back to threaten Cairo and Damascus. In the war's aftermath both sides had to accept unwelcome truths: Israel could no longer take military superiority for granted--but the Arabs could no longer hope to wipe Israel off the map. A straight line leads from the battlefields of 1973 to the Camp David Accords of 1978 and all the treaties since. Like Michael Oren's Six Days of War, this is the definitive account of a critical moment in history.

Drora Arussy, EdD, MA, MJS, is the Executive Director of Unity Through Diversity Institute.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeffrey A. Friedman, "The Commander-in-Chief Test: Public Opinion and the Politics of Image-Making in US Foreign Policy" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Americans frequently criticize US foreign policy for being overly costly and excessively militaristic. With its rising defense budgets and open-ended "forever wars," US foreign policy often appears disconnected from public opinion, reflecting the views of elites and special interests rather than the attitudes of ordinary citizens.

The Commander-in-Chief Test: Public Opinion and the Politics of Image-Making in US Foreign Policy (Cornell UP, 2023) argues that this conventional wisdom underestimates the role public opinion plays in shaping foreign policy. Voters may prefer to elect leaders who share their policy views, but they prioritize selecting presidents who seem to have the right personal attributes to be an effective commander in chief. Leaders then use hawkish foreign policies as tools for showing that they are tough enough to defend America's interests on the international stage. This link between leaders' policy positions and their personal images steers US foreign policy in directions that are more hawkish than what voters actually want.

Combining polling data with survey experiments and original archival research on cases from the Vietnam War through the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, Friedman demonstrates that public opinion plays a surprisingly extensive—and often problematic—role in shaping US international behavior. With the commander-in-chief test, a perennial point of debate in national elections, Friedman's insights offer important lessons on how the politics of image-making impacts foreign policy and how the public should choose its president.

Jeffrey A. Friedman is Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College.

Sam Canter is a policy and strategy analyst, PhD candidate in Politics and International Relations, and Army Reserve intelligence officer. His views are his own and do not reflect any institution, organization, or entity with which he is affiliated.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matthew Romaniello, "Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In his new book Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia (Cambridge University Press), Matthew Romaniello examines the workings of the British Russia Company and the commercial entanglements of the British and Russian empires in the long eighteenth century.

This innovative and highly readable monograph challenges the long-held views of Russian economic backwardness in the early modern period and stresses the importance of personal histories and individual agency in global economic dynamics. By focusing on diplomatic and commercial careers of a fascinating set of characters, Romaniello charts vibrant knowledge and information-sharing networks that were essential for the success of both empires in the Eurasian economic and geopolitical arenas.

A non-conventional economic history, Enterprising Empires traverses the micro-historical and the macro-economic to reevaluate Russian commercial prowess before 1800 and illuminate an overlooked area of Anglo-Russian cooperation and rivalry.

Matthew Romaniello is an Associate Professor of History at Weber State University and a historian of the Russian empire, commodities, and medicine. He is currently the editor of The Journal of World History and the former editor of Sibirica: Interdisciplinary Journal of Siberian Studies.

Vladislav Lilić is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the place and persistence of quasi-sovereignty in late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Southeastern Europe. Vladislav’s other fields of interest include the socio-legal history of empire, global history of statehood, and the history of international thought. You can reach him at vladislav.lilic@vanderbilt.edu.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yaroslav Trofimov, "Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence" (Penguin, 2023)

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Since February 2022, a string of books have been published about the war in Ukraine but, for the most part, these have been histories and political studies. Only now are the “first drafts of history” from war reporters starting to emerge.

Christopher Miller and Andrew Harding published last summer and they will be followed, in late January, by Simon Shuster’s inside account of Volodymyr Zelensky’s war. But, beating Shuster by a fortnight, is Yaroslav Trofimov’s Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence (Penguin Press, 2024) - an account of the first year of the full-scale invasion combining history, frontline reporting, and flashes of emotion from the Wall Street Journal's Kyiv-born chief foreign-affairs correspondent

"Being in a country at war,” he writes, “one is rarely distressed by the causalities of the invading army ... But, in the forests outside Lyman, these freshly dead Russian men with their civilian backpacks containing their meagre possessions, with their sleeping bags and pouches of fever and pain medication, were no longer anonymous and generic invaders. I looked at their faces and felt anger".

Yaroslav Trofimov joined the Wall Street Journal in 1999 – reporting from Rome, Singapore, Pakistan, Dubai, and Afghanistan where he covered the Taliban’s takeover in 2021. Since January 2022 – a month before the invasion – he has been working out of Ukraine. This is his third book.

*The authors' book recommendations are Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine by Timothy Snyder (Yale University Press, 2005) and Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte (first published in Italian in 1944, the latest edition from Adelphi, 2014; translated into English and published in 2007 by NYRB Classics).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan Scott, "How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution, 1500-1800" (Yale UP, 2019)

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Jonathan Scott is one of the most original interpreters of the early modern world. How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution, 1500-1800 (Yale University Press, 2019) is a deft and cogent synthesis in which Scott returns to the turbulent seventeenth century in Britain, and examines how a period of political upheaval in its middle decade laid the foundations for a process of state-formation across the Anglo-Dutch-American world. While it tracks across the familiar ground of revolution, empire, commerce, and republicanism, this is a book with broad horizons. It is about movement, water, the interchange of ideas, peoples, and cultures. At its centre is the Anglo-Dutch relationship and, at its many peripheries, Scott reveals the transformative effects of this unique republican pulse.

Jonathan Scott is Professor of History at the University of Auckland, and the author of seminal studies of the early modern British world, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (2004), and When the Waves Ruled Britannia: Geography and Political Identities, 1500-1800 (2011).

Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), who has written on the politics of religion in early modern Britain, and whose work has recently expanded to the intersection of colonial, indigenous, and imperial politics in early America. He co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elena Schneider, "The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic World" (UNC Press, 2018)

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Histories of the British occupation of Havana in 1762 have focused on imperial rivalries and the actions and decisions of European planters, colonial officials, and military officers. In her stunning revision, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic World (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Elena Schneider restores the central roles of enslaved Africans in all stages of the story. The relevance of the slave trade and the multiple and essential roles of African and African descended people in battle and in urban life emerge in this beautifully written account. In the aftermath, their valor and loyalty were omitted from contemporary accounts and the ensuing historiography. This book draws from a wide range of sources and multiple archives in a careful narrative that connects the Atlantic worlds of Spain, London, Havana, Kingston and the colonial United States, and zooms in on the enslaved individuals that made that world possible.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Julia F. Irwin, "Catastrophic Diplomacy: US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century" (UNC Press, 2023)

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Catastrophic Diplomacy: US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century (UNC Press, 2023) offers a sweeping history of US foreign disaster assistance, highlighting its centrality to twentieth-century US foreign relations. Spanning over seventy years, from the dawn of the twentieth century to the mid-1970s, it examines how the US government, US military, and their partners in the American voluntary sector responded to major catastrophes around the world. Focusing on US responses to sudden disasters caused by earthquakes, tropical storms, and floods—crises commonly known as "natural disasters"—historian Julia F. Irwin highlights the complex and messy politics of emergency humanitarian relief.

Deftly weaving together diplomatic, environmental, military, and humanitarian histories, Irwin tracks the rise of US disaster aid as a tool of foreign policy, showing how and why the US foreign policy establishment first began contributing aid to survivors of international catastrophes. While the book focuses mainly on bilateral assistance efforts, it also assesses the broader international context in which the US government and its auxiliaries operated, situating their humanitarian responses against the aid efforts of other nations, empires, and international organizations. At its most fundamental level, Catastrophic Diplomacy demonstrates the importance of international disaster assistance—and humanitarian aid more broadly—to US foreign affairs.

Julia F. Irwin, PhD, Yale University, 2009, is professor of history at Louisiana State University. Her research focuses on the place of humanitarian aid in twentieth-century U.S. foreign relations. Her first book, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (2013), is a history of U.S. international relief efforts during the World War I era; the dissertation on which it is based won the Betty M. Unterberger Dissertation Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marixa Lasso, "Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal" (Harvard UP, 2019)

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Many of our presumptions about the Panama Canal Zone are wrong; it was not carved out of uninhabited jungle, the creation of Lake Gatún did not flood towns and force them to move, people living in the zone prior to the construction of the canal were not out of step with modernity. In her new book, Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal (Harvard University Press, 2019), Marixa Lasso argues compellingly that the construction of the Panama Canal prompted the destruction of a bustling network of towns, along with the livelihoods and democratic traditions of their inhabitants.

Alejandra Bronfman is Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeremy Yellen, "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Jeremy Yellen’s The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a challenging transnational exploration of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan’s ambitious, confused, and much maligned attempt to create a new bloc order in East and Southeast Asia during World War II. Yellen’s book is welcome both as the first book-length treatment of the Sphere in English and for also being innovative in both approach and analysis. The book is divided into two parts, each addressing one of the “two Pacific Wars,” as Yellen puts it: a “war of empires” and “an anticolonial war… for independence.” The first half of the book treats the Japanese “high policy” of the Sphere. Here, Yellen not only provides—through the Coprosperity Sphere—a provocative new reading of the Tripartite Pact and the imbrication of Japan’s regional and global geopolitical strategies, but also outlines an important timeline of how Japanese conceptualizations of the Sphere evolved with the changing economic, political, and military expediencies of the Pacific War. Though ideas about the Sphere as a regional order of hierarchical solidarity with Japan at its apex, a “grand strategy of opportunism” rooted in the “sphere-of-influence diplomacy” and “cooperative imperialism” of Japan’s bombastic and enigmatic foreign minister, Matsuoka Yōsuke, Yellen shows that plans for the Sphere only became specific and concrete when Japan’s war situation descended into increasing desperation from 1942 on. The second half of the book shifts gears to examine responses to the Sphere in the Philippines and Burma. Yellen shows that for local nationalist elites like Burma’s first prime minister Ba Maw, whether Japanese rhetoric about the creation of more-or-less liberal international order within the Sphere for the top-echelon nations like Burma and the Philippines was genuine or self-serving, “even sham independence brought opportunity.” By focusing on these pragmatic nationalists (“patriotic collaborators”) Yellen contributes to a growing body of literature on empire that refuses to be pigeonholed by binaries of virtuous resistance and traitorous collaboration.

This podcast was recorded as a lecture/dialogue for a live audience at Nagoya University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thomas A. Schwartz, "Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography" (Hill and Wang, 2020)

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Over the past six decades, Henry Kissinger has been America's most consistently praised--and reviled--public figure. He was hailed as a "miracle worker" for his peacemaking in the Middle East, pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union, negotiation of an end to the Vietnam War, and secret plan to open the United States to China. He was assailed from the left and from the right for his indifference to human rights, complicity in the pointless sacrifice of American and Vietnamese lives, and reliance on deception and intrigue. Was he a brilliant master strategist--"the 20th century's greatest 19th century statesman"--or a cold-blooded monster who eroded America's moral standing for the sake of self-promotion?

In Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography (Hill and Wang, 2020), the renowned diplomatic historian Thomas A. Schwartz offers an authoritative, and fair-minded, answer to this question. While other biographers have engaged in hagiography or demonology, Schwartz takes a measured view of his subject. He recognizes Kissinger's successes and acknowledges that Kissinger thought seriously and with great insight about the foreign policy issues of his time, while also recognizing his failures, his penchant for backbiting, and his reliance on ingratiating and fawning praise of the president as a source of power. Throughout, Schwartz stresses Kissinger's artful invention of himself as a celebrity diplomat and his domination of the medium of television news. He also notes Kissinger's sensitivity to domestic and partisan politics, complicating--and undermining--the image of the far-seeing statesman who stands above the squabbles of popular strife.

Rounded and textured, and rich with new insights into key dilemmas of American power, Henry Kissinger and American Power stands as an essential guide to a man whose legacy is as complex as the last sixty years of US history itself.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ilkay Yilmaz, "Ottoman Passports: Security and Geographic Mobility, 1876-1908" (Syracuse UP, 2023)

Sun, 24 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In Ottoman Passports: Security and Geographic Mobility, 1876-1908 (Syracuse University Press, 2023), İlkay Yılmaz reconsiders the history of two political issues, the Armenian and Macedonian questions, approaching both through the lens of mobility restrictions during the late Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1908. Yılmaz investigates how Ottoman security perceptions and travel regulations were directly linked to transnational security regimes battling against anarchism. The Hamidian government targeted “internal threats” to the regime with security policies that created new categories of suspects benefiting from the concepts of vagrant, conspirator, and anarchist. Yılmaz explores how mobility restrictions and the use of passports became critical to targeting groups including Armenians, Bulgarians, seasonal and foreign workers, and revolutionaries. Taking up these new policies on surveillance, mobility, and control, Ottoman Passports offers a timely look at the origins of contemporary immigration debates and the historical development of discrimination, terrorism, and counterterrorism.

Reuben Silverman is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philip Snow, "China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord" (Yale UP, 2023)

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Russia and China, the largest and most populous countries in the world, respectively, have maintained a delicate relationship for four centuries. In addition to a four-thousand-kilometer border, they have periodically shared a common outlook on political and economic affairs. But they are, in essence, profoundly different polities and cultures, and their intermittent alliances have proven difficult and at times even volatile.

In China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord (Yale UP, 2023), Philip Snow provides a full account of the relationship between these two global giants. Looking at politics, religion, economics, and culture, Snow uncovers the deep roots of the two nations' alignment. We see the shifts in the balance of power, from the wealth and strength of early Qing China to the Tsarist and Soviet ascendancies, and episodes of intense conflict followed by harmony. He looks too at the experiences and opinions of ordinary people, which often vastly differed from those of their governments, and considers how long the countries' current amicable relationship might endure.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Huw Bennett, "Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles, 1966–1975" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Huw Bennett is a Reader in International Relations at Cardiff Unviersity. He specializes in strategic studies, the history of war, and intelligence studies, and work on both historical and contemporary issues concerning the use of military power. His research focuses on the experiences of the British Army since 1945, in the contexts of British politics, the Cold War, the end of empire, and the War on Terror.

In this interview he discusses his book Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles, 1966–1975 (Cambridge UP, 2023).

When Operation Banner was launched in 1969 civil war threatened to break out in Northern Ireland and spread over the Irish Sea. Uncivil War reveals the full story of how the British army acted to save Great Britain from disaster during the most violent phase of the Troubles but, in so doing, condemned the people of Northern Ireland to protracted, grinding conflict. Huw Bennett shows how the army's ambivalent response to loyalist violence undermined the prospects for peace and heightened Catholic distrust in the state. British strategy consistently underestimated community defence as a reason for people joining or supporting the IRA whilst senior commanders allowed the army to turn in on itself, hardening soldiers to the suffering of ordinary people. By 1975 military strategists considered the conflict unresolvable: the army could not convince Catholics or Protestants that it was there to protect them and settled instead for an unending war.

Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tom Buitelaar, "Assisting International Justice: Cooperation Between UN Peace Operations and the International Criminal Court in the Democratic Republic of Congo" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Although the International Criminal Court (ICC) - as the only permanent international court that addresses crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes - has important potential to end impunity and find justice for victims of atrocities, it is dependent on others for almost all aspects of its functioning. The Court has frequently relied on the peacekeeping operations that the UN deploys in the field and, over the past two decades, UN peacekeepers have provided logistical assistance and security to Court investigators, shared large amounts of information, and have even been involved in the arrest of Court suspects. But their track record has been inconsistent: they have sometimes refused to take action against people accused of war crimes and have found it difficult to balance their impartiality with court prosecutions. Despite the empirical importance of this phenomenon, we know preciously little about the circumstances under which it occurs.

In Assisting International Justice: Cooperation Between UN Peace Operations and the International Criminal Court in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Tom Buitelaar reveals the conditions under which UN peacekeepers address impunity in their mission areas. He presents an original single-country case study of assistance provided by the UN mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and a plausibility probe of other peace operations in ICC situation countries. Relying on new empirical material, including over 130 interviews of key decision-makers, and comprehensive archival research, this scholarly volume explores how the UN navigates the terrain of conflict mediation and punitive accountability and demonstrates the collaborative but contingent relationship between the UN and the ICC.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Randall Hansen, "War, Work, and Want: How the OPEC Oil Crisis Caused Mass Migration and Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sat, 16 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The oil shock of 1973 changed everything. It brought the golden age of American and European economic growth to an end; it destabilized Middle Eastern politics; and it set in train processes that led to over one hundred million unexpected—and unwanted—immigrants.

In War, Work, and Want: How the OPEC Oil Crisis Caused Mass Migration and Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Randall Hansen asks why, against all expectations, global migration tripled after 1970. The answer, he argues, lies in how the OPEC Oil crisis transformed the global economy, Middle Eastern geopolitics and, as a consequence, international migration. The quadrupling of oil prices and attendant inflation destroyed economic growth in the West while flooding the Middle East with oil money. American and European consumers, their wealth drained, rebuilt their standard of living on the back of cheap labor—and cheap migrants. The Middle East enjoyed the benefits of a historic wealth transfer, but oil became a poisoned chalice leading to political instability, revolution, and war, all of which resulted in tens of millions of refugees. The economic, and migratory, consequences of the OPEC oil crisis transformed the contours of domestic politics around the world. They fueled the growth of nationalist-populist parties that built their brands on blaming immigrants for collapsing standards of living, willfully ignoring the fact that mass immigration was the effect, not the cause, of that collapse.

In showing how war (the main driver of refugee flows), work (labor migrants), and want (the desire for ever cheaper products made by migrants) led to the massive upsurge in global migration after 1973, this book will reshape our understanding of the past half-century of global history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gary J. Bass, "Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia" (Knopf, 2023)

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia (Knopf, 2023), a book ten years in the making, is the definitive account of the postwar trial of Japan’s leaders as war criminals, and the impact it had on the modern history of Asia.

Written by Gary Bass, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, the book shines a much-needed spotlight on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the criminal process historically overshadowed by its namesake in Nuremberg for the senior leaders of the Nazi regime in the Third Reich. In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, the victorious powers turned to the question of how to move on from years of carnage and destruction. To them, it was clear that Japan’s militaristic leaders needed to be tried and punished for their crimes. For the Allied powers, the trials were an opportunity both to render judgment on their vanquished foes and to create a legal framework to prosecute war crimes and prohibit the use of aggressive war. For the Japanese leaders on trial, it was their chance to argue that their war had been waged to liberate Asia from Western imperialism and that the court was no more than victors’ justice. Professor Bass tells a meticulously-researched compelling story of wartime action, dramatic courtroom battles, and the epic formative years that set the stage for the postwar era in the Asia–Pacific. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the meaning and morality of international justice, in all its messy complexity and contradiction.

Alex Batesmith is a Lecturer in Legal Profession in the School of Law at the University of Leeds, and a former barrister and UN war crimes prosecutor, with teaching and research interests in international criminal law, cause lawyering and the legal profession, and law and emotion. LInkedIn. Twitter: @batesmith

His recent publications include:

“‘Poetic Justice Products’: International Justice, Victim Counter-Aesthetics, and the Spectre of the Show Trial” in Christine Schwöbel-Patel and Rob Knox (eds) Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice (Counterpress, forthcoming 2023, ISBN 978-1-910761-17-5)
"Lawyers who want to make the world a better place – Scheingold and Sarat’s Something to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyering" in D. Newman (ed.) Leading Works on the Legal Profession (Routledge, July 2023), ISBN 978-1-032182-80-3)
“International Prosecutors as Cause Lawyers" (2021) Journal of International Criminal Justice 19(4) 803-830 (ISSN 1478-1387)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Louis-Alexandre Berg, "Governing Security After War: The Politics of Institutional Change in the Security Sector" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Security assistance has become the largest component of international peacebuilding and stabilisation efforts, and a primary tool for responding to civil war and insurgency. Donors and peacekeepers not only train and equip military and police forces, they also seek to overhaul their structure, management, and oversight. Yet, we know little about why these efforts succeed or fail. Efforts to restructure security forces in Iraq, Libya, South Sudan, Timor-Leste, and the Democratic Republic of Congo ended amidst factional fighting. Similar efforts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, El Salvador, Mozambique, and Bosnia and Herzegovina helped to transform security forces and underpin peace. What accounts for the mixed outcomes of efforts to restructure security forces after civil war? What is the role of external involvement on these outcomes?

In Governing Security After War: The Politics of Institutional Change in the Security Sector (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Louis-Alexandre Berg examines the political dimensions of security governance through systematic, cross-country comparison. Dr. Berg argues that the extent to which state policymakers adopt changes to the management and oversight of security forces depends on internal political dynamics, specifically the degree to which leaders need to consolidate power. The different political strategies leaders pursue, in turn, affect opportunities for external actors to influence institutional changes through means such as conditions on aid, norm diffusion, or day-to-day participation in decision-making.

Drawing on an original dataset of security governance and field research in Liberia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Timor-Leste, as well as mini-case studies of Iraq, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Somalia, Dr. Berg draws out novel implications that help explain the recurrence of civil war and the impact of foreign aid on peacebuilding. Moreover, Berg provides practical recommendations for navigating the political challenges of institutional change in conflict-affected countries. Ultimately, Governing Security After War seeks to explain the success and failure of international assistance in war-torn countries and sheds light on the politics of peacebuilding.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have We Entered a New Era of African Politics and International Relations?

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Is the recent resurgence of military coups reshaping politics in sub-Saharan Africa? Is faith in multiparty elections waning among citizens? And how do emerging military juntas impact regional stability and democracy? Listen to Nic Cheeseman, Mwita Chacha and Obert Hodzi talk about the recent spate of coups in sub-Saharan Africa, the domestic and international trends that explain them, and the impact these coup will have on Africa in the years to come.

Mwita Chacha is an Associate Professor in International Relations at the University of Birmingham. A leading thinker on coups, conflict and regional politics, he has published a series on influential articles on topics including public attitudes towards democracy promotion and post-coup democratization.

Obert Hodzi is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Liverpool. Trained in international relations, he is a rising star and has published important work on foreign aid and the role of China in Africa, including two books: The end of China’s non-intervention in Africa (Palgrave 2018) and Chinese in Africa: ‘Chineseness’ and the Complexities of Identity (Routledge 2019).

Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael W. Doyle, "Cold Peace: Avoiding the New Cold War" (Liveright, 2023)

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Michael W. Doyle's book Cold Peace: Avoiding the New Cold War (Liveright, 2023) offers an urgent examination of the world barreling toward a new Cold War.

By 1990, the first Cold War was ending. The Berlin Wall had fallen and the Warsaw Pact was crumbling; following Russia’s lead, cries for democracy were being embraced by a young Chinese populace. The post–Cold War years were a time of immense hope and possibility. They heralded an opportunity for creative cooperation among nations, an end to ideological strife, perhaps even the beginning of a stable international order of liberal peace.

But the days of optimism are over.

As renowned international relations expert Michael Doyle makes hauntingly clear, we now face the devastating specter of a new Cold War, this time orbiting the trilateral axes of Russia, the United States, and China, and exacerbated by new weapons of cyber warfare and more insidious forms of propaganda.

Such a conflict at this phase in our global history would have catastrophic repercussions, Doyle argues, stymieing global collaboration efforts that are key to reversing climate change, preventing the next pandemic, and securing nuclear nonproliferation. The recent, devastating invasion of Ukraine is both an example and an augur of the costs that lay in wait.

However, there is hope.

Putin is not Stalin, Xi is not Mao, and no autocrat is a modern Hitler. There is also an unprecedented level of shared global interest in prosperity and protecting the planet from environmental disaster.

While it is unlikely that the United States, Russia, and China will ever establish a “warm peace,” there are significant, reasonable compromises between nations that can lead to a détente. While the future remains very much in doubt, the elegant set of accords and non-subversion pacts Doyle proposes in this book may very well save the world.

Andrew O. Pace is a historian of moral dilemmas of US foreign relations and an adjunct professor of history at Salt Lake Community College. He is a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network and is currently working on a book about the reversal in US foreign policy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at apace24@slcc.edu or via andrewopace.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Afsar Mohammad, "Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The story Afsar Mohammad's book Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad (Cambridge UP, 2023) follows begins on August 15, 1947. As the new nation-states of India and Pakistan prepared to negotiate land and power, the citizens of the princely state of Hyderabad experienced the unravelling of an intense political conflict between the Union government of India and the local ruler, the Nizam of Hyderabad. With evidence from the oral histories of various sections - both Muslims and non-Muslims - and a wide variety of written sources and historical documents, this book captures such an intense moment of new politics and cultural discourses.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amy Matthewson, "Cartooning China: Punch, Power, & Politics in the Victorian Era" (Routledge, 2022)

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Dr. Amy Matthewson's Cartooning China: Punch, Power, & Politics in the Victorian Era (Routledge, 2022) explores the series of cartoons of China and the Chinese that were published in the popular British satirical magazine Punch over a sixty-year period from 1841 to 1901. Filled with political metaphors and racial stereotypes, these illustrations served as a powerful tool in both reflecting and shaping notions and attitudes towards China at a tumultuous time in Sino-British history. A close reading of both the visual and textual satires in Punch reveals how a section of British society visualised and negotiated with China as well as Britain’s position in the global community. By contextualising Punch’s cartoons within the broader frameworks of British socio-cultural and political discourse, the Dr. Matthewson engages in a critical enquiry of popular culture and its engagements with race, geopolitical propaganda, and public consciousness. This book will interest scholars and researchers of cultural studies, political history and Empire, Chinese studies, popular culture, Victoriana, as well as media studies comics-based research.

Dr. Amy Matthewson has a PhD degree in history from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), at the University of London, in the UK. Dr. Matthewson is a historian interested in representation through visual and material culture, in particular the ways in which China and Chinese communities were understood by Western nations in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with specific interest in Britain’s relationship with China. She is currently teaching history at University of Iceland.

Elizabeth Allyn Woock an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Palacky University in the Czech Republic with an interdisciplinary background in history and popular literature. Her specialization falls within the study of comic books and graphic novels.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ibrahim Fraihat and Isak Svensson, "Conflict Mediation in the Arab World" (Syracuse UP, 2023)

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Isak Svensson (editor) and Laurie Nathan (contributor) about Conflict Mediation in the Arab World (Syracuse UP, 2023), a very important and timely work focusing on mediation in the Arab world. While we focused on the book, we also tried to look how various models discussed in the book may fit the current situation in Israel and Palestine.

The Middle East and North Africa region has been plagued with civil wars, international interventions, and increasing militarization, making it one of the most war-affected areas in the world today. Despite numerous mediation processes and initiatives for conflict resolution, most have failed to transform conflicts from war to peace. Seeking to learn from these past efforts and apply new research, Fraihat and Svensson present the first comprehensive approach to mediation in the Arab world, taking on cases from Yemen to Sudan, from Qatar to Palestine, Syria, and beyond. Conflict Mediation in the Arab World focuses on mediation at three different levels of analysis: between countries, between governments and armed actors inside single countries, and between different communities. In applying this holistic method, the editors identify similarities and differences in the conditions for conflict resolution and management. Drawing upon the work of experts in the field with a deep understanding of the increasing complexities and changing dynamics of the region, this volume offers a valuable resource for academics, policy makers, and practitioners interested in conflict resolution and management in the Middle East and North Africa.

Roberto Mazza is currently an independent scholar. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert B. Rakove, "Days of Opportunity: The United States and Afghanistan Before the Soviet Invasion" (Columbia UP, 2023)

Sun, 03 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Long before the 1979 Soviet invasion, the United States was closely concerned with Afghanistan. For much of the twentieth century, American diplomats, policy makers, businesspeople, and experts took part in the Afghan struggle to modernize, delivered vital aid, and involved themselves in Kabul’s conflicts with its neighbors. For their own part, many Afghans embraced the potential benefits of political and commercial ties with the United States. Yet these relationships ultimately helped make the country a Cold War battleground.

Robert B. Rakove sheds new light on the little-known and often surprising history of U.S. engagement in Afghanistan from the 1920s to the Soviet invasion, tracing its evolution and exploring its lasting consequences. Days of Opportunity: The United States and Afghanistan Before the Soviet Invasion (Columbia UP, 2023) chronicles the battle for influence in Kabul, as Americans contended with vigorous communist bloc competition and the independent ambitions of successive Afghan governments. Rakove examines the phases of peaceful Cold War competition, including development assistance, cultural diplomacy, and disaster relief. He demonstrates that Americans feared the “loss” of Afghanistan to Soviet influence—and were never simply bystanders, playing pivotal roles in the country’s political life. The ensuing collision of U.S., Soviet, and Afghan ambitions transformed the country—and ultimately led it, and the world, toward calamity.

Harnessing extensive research in U.S. and international archives, Days of Opportunity unveils the remarkable and tragic history of American involvement in Afghanistan.

Robert B. Rakove is a lecturer in international relations at Stanford University. He is the author of Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World (2012).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On “Henry Kissinger and His World” with author Barry Gewen

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In my talk with Barry Gewen on his 2020 book, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World (W. W. Norton, 2020), we explore the disparate influences that shaped Kissinger as both an intellectual and as a practitioner of power.

Our conversation touches on Kissinger’s upbringing in a German-Jewish community in Bavaria at the time of Hitler’s rise to power and pivots to an understanding of Kissinger’s Realism as his pessimistic yet unwavering approach to foreign affairs and exigencies like the balance of power. In his committed opposition to the Wilsonian creed—the missionary idea of America’s role in the world—Kissinger was decidedly in the camp of the political scientist Hans Morgenthau, a fellow German-Jewish immigrant and mentor of sorts. Barry Gewen, a former editor at The New York Times Book Review, deserves to be heard, and his book deserves to be read, for his judicious, textured appraisal of Kissinger. His Kissinger is neither a war criminal nor a diplomatic magician but one guided by the stern maxim that order is prior to justice in the affairs of an ever-perilous world. Our talk closes with Gewen’s assessment of Kissinger’s thinking on the present-day foreign-policy challenges for the U.S. of China and the Russia-Ukraine war.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sandra Destradi, "Reluctance in World Politics: Why States Fail to Act Decisively" (Bristol UP, 2023)

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Why do international actors, including powerful states, often fail to develop clear foreign policies and instead adopt indecisive, ‘muddling-through’ approaches?

In Reluctance in World Politics: Why States Fail to Act Decisively (Bristol University Press, 2023), Dr. Sandra Destradi develops a concept and a theory of reluctance in world politics. Applying it to the study of regional crisis management by leading powers, it finds that reluctance emerges when governments fail to devise clear foreign policy preferences and face competing international pressures.

The study of reluctance in world politics sheds new light on some of the most pressing problems of our time, from weak crisis management to cooperation deficits in global governance.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

D. L. d'Avray, "The Power of Protocol: Diplomatics and the Dynamics of Papal Government, c. 400-c.1600" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The Power of Protocol: Diplomatics and the Dynamics of Papal Government, c. 400 – c.1600 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. David d’Avray asks: How did the papacy govern European religious life without a proper bureaucracy and the normal resources of a state?

From late Antiquity, papal responses were in demand. The 'apostolic see' took over from Roman emperors the discourse and demeanour of a religious ruler of the Latin world. Over the centuries, it acquired governmental authority analogous to that of a secular state – except that it lacked powers of physical enforcement, a solid financial base (aside from short periods) and a bureaucracy as defined by Max Weber. Through the discipline of Applied Diplomatics, which investigates the structures and settings of documents to solve substantive historical problems,

The Power of Protocol explores how such a demand for papal services was met. It is about the genesis and structure of papal documents – a key to papal history generally – from the Roman empire to after the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, and is the only book of its kind.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Charles S. Maier, "The Project-State and Its Rivals: A New History of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

We thought we knew the story of the twentieth century. For many in the West, after the two world conflicts and the long cold war, the verdict was clear: democratic values had prevailed over dictatorship. But if the twentieth century meant the triumph of liberalism, as many intellectuals proclaimed, why have the era’s darker impulses—ethnic nationalism, racist violence, and populist authoritarianism—revived?

The Project-State and Its Rivals: A New History of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (Harvard University Press, 2023) by Dr. Charles S. Maier offers a radical alternative interpretation that takes us from the transforming challenges of the world wars to our own time. Instead of the traditional narrative of domestic politics and international relations, Dr. Maier looks to the political and economic impulses that propelled societies through a century when territorial states and transnational forces both claimed power, engaging sometimes as rivals and sometimes as allies. Dr. Maier focuses on recurring institutional constellations: project-states including both democracies and dictatorships that sought not just to retain power but to transform their societies; new forms of imperial domination; global networks of finance; and the international associations, foundations, and NGOs that tried to shape public life through allegedly apolitical appeals to science and ethics.

In this account, which draws on the author’s studies over half a century, Dr. Maier invites a rethinking of the long twentieth century. His history of state entanglements with capital, the decline of public projects, and the fragility of governance explains the fraying of our own civic culture—but also allows hope for its recovery.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Henrietta Harrison, "The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators Between Qing China and the British Empire" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators Between Qing China and the British Empire (Princeton UP, 2021) is a fascinating history of China's relations with the West--told through the lives of two eighteenth-century translators.

The 1793 British embassy to China, which led to Lord George Macartney's fraught encounter with the Qianlong emperor, has often been viewed as a clash of cultures fueled by the East's lack of interest in the West. In The Perils of Interpreting, Henrietta Harrison presents a more nuanced picture, ingeniously shifting the historical lens to focus on Macartney's two interpreters at that meeting--Li Zibiao and George Thomas Staunton. Who were these two men? How did they intervene in the exchanges that they mediated? And what did these exchanges mean for them? From Galway to Chengde, and from political intrigues to personal encounters, Harrison reassesses a pivotal moment in relations between China and Britain. She shows that there were Chinese who were familiar with the West, but growing tensions endangered those who embraced both cultures and would eventually culminate in the Opium Wars.

Harrison demonstrates that the Qing court's ignorance about the British did not simply happen, but was manufactured through the repression of cultural go-betweens like Li and Staunton. She traces Li's influence as Macartney's interpreter, the pressures Li faced in China as a result, and his later years in hiding. Staunton interpreted successfully for the British East India Company in Canton, but as Chinese anger grew against British imperial expansion in South Asia, he was compelled to flee to England. Harrison contends that in silencing expert voices, the Qing court missed an opportunity to gain insights that might have prevented a losing conflict with Britain.

Uncovering the lives of two overlooked figures, The Perils of Interpreting offers an empathic argument for cross-cultural understanding in a connected world.

Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a Research Assistant Professor at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. She can be reached at sarahbr@hku.hk

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brian D. Blankenship, "The Burden-Sharing Dilemma: Coercive Diplomacy in US Alliance Politics" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Sun, 26 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The Burden-Sharing Dilemma: Coercive Diplomacy in US Alliance Politics (Cornell UP, 2023) examines the conditions under which the United States is willing and able to pressure its allies to assume more responsibility for their own defense.

The United States has a mixed track record of encouraging allied burden-sharing—while it has succeeded or failed in some cases, it has declined to do so at all in others. This variation, Brian D. Blankenship argues, is because the United States tailors its burden-sharing pressure in accordance with two competing priorities: conserving its own resources and preserving influence in its alliances. Although burden-sharing enables great power patrons like the United States to lower alliance costs, it also empowers allies to resist patron influence.

Blankenship identifies three factors that determine the severity of this burden-sharing dilemma and how it is managed: the latent military power of allies, the shared external threat environment, and the level of a patron's resource constraints. Through case studies of US alliances formed during the Cold War, he shows that a patron can mitigate the dilemma by combining assurances of protection with threats of abandonment and by exercising discretion in its burden-sharing pressure.

Blankenship's findings dismantle assumptions that burden-sharing is always desirable but difficult to obtain. Patrons, as the book reveals, can in fact be reluctant to seek burden-sharing, and attempts to pass defense costs to allies can often be successful. At a time when skepticism of alliance benefits remains high and global power shifts threaten longstanding pacts, The Burden-Sharing Dilemma recalls and reconceives the value of burden-sharing and alliances.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Idea of "Central Europe" from Naumann to Kundera

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Central Europe has long been infamous as a region beset by war, a place where empires clashed and world wars began. In The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe (Basic Books, 2023) Martyn Rady offers the definitive history of the region, demonstrating that Central Europe has always been more than merely the fault line between West and East. Even as Central European powers warred with their neighbors, the region developed its own cohesive identity and produced tremendous accomplishments in politics, society, and culture. Central Europeans launched the Reformation and Romanticism, developed the philosophy of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and advanced some of the twentieth century's most important artistic movements.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Maria Popova and Oxana Shevel, "Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States" (Polity, 2023)

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Russia and Ukraine have alternative histories and alternative destinies. After the Soviet Union collapsed - depending on who you spoke to – they were either a single people artificially divided and destined for reunification, or one nation with a distinct history, culture, and language serially repressed by a dominant neighbour.

In Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States (Polity, 2023), Maria Popova and Oxana Shevel argue that: "The root of the difficult Russia–Ukraine relationship is the misaligned understanding of Soviet dissolution – as the end of common statehood or as its reinvention".

Maria Popova is a Jean Monnet Chair and Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University in Montreal. Oxana Shevel is an Associate Professor of comparative politics at the Department of Political Science at Tufts University in Massachusetts.

*The authors' own book recommendations are: [Popova] Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage, and Integration After Communism by Milada Anna Vachudova (OUP Oxford, 2005) and Courage and Fear by Ola Hnatiuk - translated by Ewa Siwak - (Academic Studies Press, 2019) and [Shevel] Nations and Nationalism by Ernest Gellner (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006) and In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas by Stanislav Aseyev - translated by Lidia Wolanskyj - (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2022).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jenny Benham, "International Law in Europe, 700–1200" (Manchester UP, 2022)

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Was there international law in the Middle Ages? Using treaties as its main source, International Law in Europe, 700-1200 (Manchester University Press, 2022) by Dr. Jenny Benham examines the extent to which such a system of rules was known and followed in the period 700 to 1200. It considers how consistently international legal rules were obeyed, whether there was a reliance on justification of action and whether the system had the capacity to resolve disputed questions of fact and law. The book further sheds light on issues such as compliance, enforcement, deterrence, authority and jurisdiction, challenging traditional ideas over their role and function in the history of international law.

International law in Europe, 700-1200 will appeal to students and scholars of medieval Europe, international law and its history, as well as those with a more general interest in warfare, diplomacy and international relations.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrew Monaghan and Richard Connolly. "The Sea in Russian Strategy" (Manchester UP, 2023)

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The common perception of Russia's status as a great power is often portrayed as being based largely on land power. Being the largest country in the world and fielding massively large field armies, there is some considerable truth to this perception. By contrast, when concerning Russian capabilities as a naval power, the picture is different. Common references to the Battle of Tsushima during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), the Kursk submarine incident of 2000, and more recently the sinking of the Moskva warship in 2022 tend to portray Russia's naval abilities as very negligible at best.

Nevertheless, this common perception is very misleading. Russia has in the 21st century been highly active in establishing itself as a major maritime power on the global stage, and these efforts have even accelerated since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022. Andrew Monaghan and Richard Connolly have co-edited The Sea in Russian Strategy (Manchester University Press, 2023), bringing together top-tier scholars and experts to analyze Russia's growing maritime strength and how it should not be underestimated.

Andrew Monaghan is Director of the Russia Research Network and a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marika Sosnowski, "Redefining Ceasefires: Wartime Order and Statebuilding in Syria" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Since 2012, ceasefires have been used in Syria to halt violence and facilitate peace agreements. However, in Redefining Ceasefires: Wartime Order and Statebuilding in Syria (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Dr. Marika Sosnowski argues that a ceasefire is rarely ever just a 'cease fire'. Instead, she demonstrates that ceasefires are not only military tactics but are also tools of wartime order and statebuilding.

Bringing together rare primary documents and first-hand interviews with over eighty Syrians and other experts, Dr. Sosnowski offers original insights into the most critical conflict of our time, the Syrian civil war. From rebel governance to citizen and property rights, humanitarian access to economic networks, ceasefires have a range of heretofore underexamined impacts. Using the most prominent ceasefires of the war as case studies, Dr. Sosnowski demonstrates the diverse consequences of ceasefires and provides a fuller, more nuanced portrait of their role in conflict resolution.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The US State Department and Ever-Changing Global Politics

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Assistant Secretary of State for Global Public Affairs Bill Russo. Assistant Secretary Russo commented on the role of the United States in the ever-changing dynamics of global politics and how it is perceived as a leader in conflict resolution and often called to act as an arbitrator in wars.

Moreover, Assistant Secretary Russo explains how the “dissent channels” in the State Department, which originated during the Vietnam War as a way to offer opportunities for State Department personnel to criticize Department policy, continue to do so in the context of the Israel-Hamas war.

Finally, the Assistant Secretary highlighted the importance of the recruiting process into the Foreign Service to ensure that the ranks reflect the demographic composition of the United States and explained how the democratization of the foreign service has been carried out in the past two decades since Colin Powell was Secretary of State in the early part of the 21st century.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Providence and Power: Rabbi Meir Soloveichik on Jewish Statesmanship from King David to David Ben Gurion

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

For thousands of years, the Jewish people lacked a political state; yet, what can we say about the Jewish tradition of statesmanship? What makes it distinctive, and what can we learn from it? In Providence and Power: Ten Portraits in Jewish Statesmanship (Encounter Books, 2023) , Rabbi Meir Soloveichik investigates ten Jews, from King David all the way to the foundation of Israel, what we can learn from their examples, and how history can provide hope amidst recent events in Israel.

Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveichik is director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University and the rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States. He received his PhD in Religion at Princeton in 2010. Among the world's preeminent Jewish thinkers and educators, Rabbi Soloveichik has lectured across the United States and Europe on topics relating to Jewish theology, bioethics, wartime ethics, and Jewish-Christian relations. He has a monthly column in Commentary magazine, and his writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, First Things, and many other outlets. He is the host of the podcast Bible 365, and you can also listen to him via the Meir Soloveichik podcast.

Sources and examples referenced in the interview:

Rembrandt's David in Prayer, 1652.
John Trumbull's George Washington Resigning His Commission and Declaration of Independence (1826).
George Washington's Letter to the Jews of Savannah (1790).
Dan Senor and Saul Singer's recent book The Genius of Israel.
A secular Israeli broadcaster borrows a kippah and performs a blessing.

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Antonis Klapsis et al., "The Greek Junta and the International System: A Case Study of Southern European Dictatorships, 1967-74" (Routledge, 2020)

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The Greek Junta and the International System: A Case Study of Southern European Dictatorships, 1967-74 (Routledge, 2020) examines the international dimensions of the Greek military dictatorship of 1967 to 1974 and uses it as a case study to evaluate the major shifts occurring in the international system during a period of rapid change.

The policies of the major nation-states in both East and West were determined by realistic Cold War considerations. At the same time, the Greek junta, a profoundly anti-modernist force, failed to cope with an evolving international agenda and the movement towards international cooperation. Denouncing it became a rallying point both for international organizations and for human rights activists, and it enabled the EEC to underscore the notion that democracy was an integral characteristic of the European identity.

This volume is an original in-depth study of an under-researched subject and the multiple interactions of a complex era. It is divided into three sections: Part I deals with the interaction of the Colonels with state actors; Part II deals with the responses of international organizations and the rising transnational human rights agenda for which the Greek junta became a totemic rallying point; and Part III compares and contrasts the transitions to democracy in Southern Europe, and analyses the different models of transition and region-building, and how they intersected with attempts to foster a European identity. The Greek dictatorship may have been a parochial military regime, but its rise and fall interacted with signifi cant international trends and can therefore serve as a salient case study for promoting a better understanding of international and European trends during the 1960s and 1970s.

This book will be of much interest to students of Cold War studies, international history, foreign policy, transatlantic relations and International Relations, in general.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thomas Blake Earle, "The Liberty to Take Fish: Atlantic Fisheries and Federal Power in Nineteenth-Century America" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Sun, 19 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In The Liberty to Take Fish: Atlantic Fisheries and Federal Power in Nineteenth-Century America (Cornell University Press, 2023), Dr. Thomas Blake Earle offers an incisive and nuanced history of the long American Revolution, describing how aspirations to political freedom coupled with the economic imperatives of commercial fishing roiled relations between the young United States and powerful Great Britain. The American Revolution left the United States with the "liberty to take fish" from the waters of the North Atlantic. Indispensable to the economic health of the new nation, the cod fisheries of the Grand Banks, the Bay of Fundy, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence quickly became symbols of American independence in an Atlantic world dominated by Great Britain.

The fisheries issue was a near-constant concern in American statecraft that impinged upon everything, from Anglo-American relations, to the operation of American federalism, and even to the nature of the marine environment. Dr. Earle explores the relationship between the fisheries and the state through the Civil War era when closer ties between the United States and Great Britain finally surpassed the contentious interests of the fishing industry on the nation's agenda.

The Liberty to Take Fish is a rich story that moves from the staterooms of Washington and London to the decks of fishing schooners and into the Atlantic itself to understand how ordinary fishermen and the fish they pursued shaped and were, in turn, shaped by those far-off political and economic forces. Earle returns fishing to its once-central place in American history and shows that the nation of the nineteenth century was indeed a maritime one.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bálint Madlovics and Bálint Magyar, "The Russia-Ukraine War, Volumes 1-2" (CEU Press, 2023)

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast Series, host Bálint Madlovics sat down for a fascinating discussion on the impact of the war on Ukraine’s patronal democracy, with his co-editor Bálint Magyar and with Oksana Huss, Mikhail Minakov and Kálmán Mizsei, who all contributed to the new volumes from CEU Press on the Russia-Ukraine War. Volume one is entitled Ukraine's Patronal Democracy and the Russian Invasion and volume two Russia's Imperial Endeavor and Its Geopolitical Consequences.

Both volumes are available open access through the Opening the Future initiative. You can download volume one on Ukraine here and volume two on Russia here.

The CEU Press Podcast Series delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We will also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and talk about their series or books.

Interested in the CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more here.

Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Future of World Disorder: A Discussion with Peter R. Neumann

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Do confusions in the West threaten a new world disorder? It’s a question asked by Professor Peter R. Neumann of Kings College, London. He is the author of The New World Disorder: How the West is Destroying Itself (Scribe, 2024). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Natasha Wheatley, "The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Natasha Wheatley is an Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University. Her bold and riveting debut monograph, The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty (Princeton University Press, 2023), narrates the transition from empire to nation-states in the heartlands of Europe once governed by the Habsburg Empire. The book traces the modern history of sovereignty over one hundred tumultuous years, explaining how a regime of nation-states theoretically equal under international law emerged from the ashes of a dynastic empire.

The Life and Death of States reveals how Habsburg Europe was the crucible for our contemporary world order. Wheatley's aim is to theorize from Central Europe to see how sovereignty can be (re)produced in a complex world. The study uncovers how the Central European experience crystallized legal questions that would arise again in the era of global decolonization, connecting the story of the end of empire to the birth of new nations throughout the twentieth century. In this respect, the work serves not only as a history of Central Europe but also a "prehistory" of the era of decolonization.

Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steven Simon, "Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East" (Penguin, 2023)

Sat, 11 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

A longtime American foreign policy insider’s penetrating and definitive reckoning with this country’s involvement in the Middle East

The culmination of almost forty years at the highest levels of policymaking and scholarship, Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East (Penguin, 2023) is Steven Simon’s tour de force, offering a comprehensive and deeply informed account of U.S. engagement in the Middle East. Simon begins with the Reagan administration, when American perception of the region shifted from a cluster of faraway and frequently skirmishing nations to a shining, urgent opportunity for America to (in Reagan’s words) “serve the cause of world peace and the future of mankind.”

Reagan fired the starting gun on decades of deepening American involvement, but as the global economy grew, bringing an increasing reliance on oil, U.S. diplomatic and military energies were ever more fatefully absorbed by the Middle East. Grand Delusion explores the motivations, strategies, and shortcomings of each presidential administration from Reagan to today, exposing a web of intertwined events—from the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict amid Israeli domestic politics, Cold War rivalries, and Saudi Arabia’s quest for security, to 9/11 and the war on terror—managed by a Washington policy process frequently ruled by wishful thinking and partisan politics.

Simon’s sharp sense of irony and incisive writing brings complex history to life. He illuminates the motives behind America's commitment to Israel; explodes the popular narrative of Desert Storm as a “good war”; and calls out the devastating consequences of our mistakes, particularly for people of the region trapped by the onslaught of American military action and pitiless economic sanctions.

Grand Delusion reveals that this story, while episodically impressive, has too often been tragic and at times dishonorable. As we enter a new era in foreign policy, this is an essential book, a cautionary history that illuminates America's propensity for self-deception and misadventure at a moment when the nation is redefining its engagement with a world in crisis.

Andrew O. Pace is a historian of moral dilemmas of US foreign relations and an adjunct professor of history at Salt Lake Community College. He is a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network and is currently working on a book about the reversal in US foreign policy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at apace24@slcc.edu or via andrewopace.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Macfarlane, "Natural Allies: Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)

Sat, 11 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

No two nations have exchanged natural resources, produced transborder environmental agreements, or cooperatively altered ecosystems on the same scale as Canada and the United States. Environmental and energy diplomacy have profoundly shaped both countries’ economies, politics, and landscapes for over 150 years.

Natural Allies: Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023) looks at the history of US-Canada relations through an environmental lens. From fisheries in the late nineteenth century to oil pipelines in the twenty-first century, Daniel Macfarlane recounts the scores of transborder environmental and energy arrangements made between the two nations. Many became global precedents that influenced international environmental law, governance, and politics, including the Boundary Waters Treaty, the Trail Smelter case, hydroelectric megaprojects, and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreements. In addition to water, fish, wood, minerals, and myriad other resources, Natural Allies details the history of the continental energy relationship - from electricity to uranium to fossil fuels -showing how Canada became vital to American strategic interests and, along with the United States, a major international energy power and petro-state.

Environmental and energy relations facilitated the integration and prosperity of Canada and the United States but also made these countries responsible for the current climate crisis and other unsustainable forms of ecological degradation. Looking to the future, Natural Allies argues that the concept of national security must be widened to include natural security - a commitment to public, national, and international safety from environmental harms, especially those caused by human actions.

Daniel Macfarlane is associate professor at the School of the Environment, Geography, and Sustainability at Western Michigan University and senior fellow at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History at the University of Toronto.

Filippo De Chirico is a PhD student in History and Politics of Energy at Roma Tre University (Italy).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jieh-min Wu, "Rival Partners: How Taiwanese Entrepreneurs and Guangdong Officials Forged the China Development Model" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Taiwan has been depicted as an island facing the incessant threat of forcible unification with the People’s Republic of China. Why, then, has Taiwan spent more than three decades pouring capital and talent into China?

In Rival Partners: How Taiwanese Entrepreneurs and Guangdong Officials Forged the China Development Model (Harvard UP, 2022), Wu Jieh-min follows the development of Taiwanese enterprises in China over twenty-five years and provides fresh insights. The geopolitical shift in Asia beginning in the 1970s and the global restructuring of value chains since the 1980s created strong incentives for Taiwanese entrepreneurs to rush into China despite high political risks and insecure property rights. Taiwanese investment, in conjunction with Hong Kong capital, laid the foundation for the world’s factory to flourish in the southern province of Guangdong, but official Chinese narratives play down Taiwan’s vital contribution. It is hard to imagine the Guangdong model without Taiwanese investment, and, without the Guangdong model, China’s rise could not have occurred.

Going beyond the received wisdom of the “China miracle” and “Taiwan factor,” Wu delineates how Taiwanese businesspeople, with the cooperation of local officials, ushered global capitalism into China. By partnering with its political archrival, Taiwan has benefited enormously, while helping to cultivate an economic superpower that increasingly exerts its influence around the world.

This book is the winner of 2023 Global and Transnational Sociology Best Publication (Book) by an International Scholar Award, the American Sociological Association, 國科會111年度(2022) 傑出研究獎, 2020年第九屆中央研究院人文及社會科學學術性專書獎, 科技部2020最具影響力研究專書(人文及社會科學領域), 2019年孫運璿學術獎最佳書籍.

Wu Jieh-min is a research fellow at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Stacy Mosher is a translator and editor based in Brooklyn.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Malcolm D. Evans, "Tackling Torture: Prevention in Practice" (Bristol UP, 2023)

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

How big a problem is torture? Are the right things being done to prevent it? Why does the UN appear at times to be so impotent in the face of it? Tackling Torture: Prevention in Practice (Bristol University Press, 2023) by Malcolm D. Evans tells the story of torture prevention under international law, setting out what is really happening around the world. Challenging assumptions about torture’s root causes, he calls for what is needed to enable us to bring about change.

The author draws on over ten years’ experience as Chair of the UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture to give a frank account of the remarkable capacities of this system, what it has achieved in practice, or not been able to achieve – and most importantly, why.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hamas, Iran and Israel: The Perils of Overreaction

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, Colin Clarke, director of research at the Soufan Center, discusses the possible trajectories of the Israel-Palestine conflict with RBI director John Torpey. Clarke introduces the linkages of Hamas with Iran and the way in which the Iranian government backs a number of different proxy groups in the Middle East. He argues that Hamas miscalculated the attack on Israel and that Israel’s overreaction (backed by the U.S.) is very dangerous, threatening a wider war in the region. Clarke also comments on the role of the "international community" in all this, as there are no credible brokers to negotiate peace, potentially making the conflict harder to end. Moreover, Clarke contends that Israel acknowledges that it will be criticized internationally no matter what it does; thus, the focus of Israel's policy is on domestic public opinion, which may be backfiring for Netanyahu.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peter Layton, "Grand Strategy" (2018)

Sat, 04 Nov 2023 08:00:00 -0000

With the revival of great power competition in international relations, the term "grand strategy" has also encountered a considerable revival from its Cold War era heights of prestige. What exactly is "grand strategy" and how should policy-makers of different countries, states, and other political entities go about in constructing and implementing such schemes? This elusive term is not always easy to define, but Peter Layton does an admirable job at doing so with his appropriately titled book Grand Strategy (2018). Drawing upon a rich interdisciplinary tapestry delving into history, international relations, and cognitive sciences; Layton lays out with much clarity what grand strategy is all about.

Peter Layton is a Visiting Fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University. He has a doctorate from the University of New South Wales on grand strategy and has taught on the topic at the Eisenhower College, US National Defence University. He has extensive defence experience, and for his work at the Pentagon on force structure matters was awarded the US Secretary of Defense's Exceptional Public Service Medal. For his academic work he was awarded a Fellowship to the European University Institute, Italy. He contributes regularly to the public policy debate on defence and foreign affairs issues and is widely published.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eleonora Mattiacci, "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 08:00:00 -0000

An in-depth account of why countries' treacherous foreign policies often have harmless origins, how this predicament shapes international politics, and what to do about it.

The increasing unpredictability of state behavior in recent world politics is a surprising development. The uncertainty that results intensifies conflict and stymies trust. In Volatile States in International Politics (Oxford UP, 2022), Eleonora Mattiacci offers the first account of this issue that investigates which states have been volatile and why. Leveraging statistical techniques and archival data in a probing analysis of rivals and allies since the end of World War II, she rejects attempts at dismissing volatility as reflecting mercurial leaders or intractable issues. Instead, Mattiacci explains that a state acts in a volatile manner when its clashing domestic interests leverage power to achieve their goals on the international arena. In demonstrating states' potential for volatile behaviors, she asks us to reconsider how much we really know about change and instability in international politics. When properly understood, she shows, volatile behavior can become less confusing for observers and potentially less dangerous. This book offers novel, evidence-based tools to cope with volatility in the global arena.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Norman Solomon, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine" (New Press, 2023)

Sat, 28 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

More than twenty years ago, 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan set into motion a hugely consequential shift in America’s foreign policy: a perpetual state of war that is almost entirely invisible to the American public. War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (New Press, 2023), by the journalist and political analyst Norman Solomon, exposes how this happened, and what its consequences are, from military and civilian casualties to drained resources at home.

From Iraq through Afghanistan and Syria and on to little-known deployments in a range of countries around the globe, the United States has been at perpetual war for at least the past two decades. Yet many of these forays remain off the radar of average Americans. Compliant journalists add to the smokescreen by providing narrow coverage of military engagements and by repeating the military’s talking points. Meanwhile, the increased use of high technology, air power, and remote drones has put distance between soldiers and the civilians who die. Back at home, Solomon argues, the cloak of invisibility masks massive Pentagon budgets that receive bipartisan approval even as policy makers struggle to fund the domestic agenda.

Necessary, timely, and unflinching, War Made Invisible is an eloquent moral call for counting the true costs of war.

Jeff Bachman is an associate professor at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Luke Moffett, "Reparations and War: Finding Balance in Repairing the Past" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Fri, 27 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

For thousands of years, reparations have been used to secure the end of war and to alleviate its deleterious consequences. While human rights law establishes that victims have a right to reparations, reparations are not always feasible and are often difficult to deliver.

In Reparations and War: Finding Balance in Repairing the Past (Oxford UP, 2023), Professor Luke Moffett used interviews with hundreds of victims, ex-combatants, government officials, and civil society actors from six post-conflict countries to examine the history, theoretical justifications, and practical challenges of implementing reparations after war. In his engaging interview with Lavinia Stan, Moffett draws on his own experience growing up in Northern Ireland to explain how reparations are related to transitional justice. Listen to him explaining what reparations can (and cannot do), how they can be politically manipulated, and how they achieve justice for the victims.

Lavinia Stan is a professor of political science at St. Francis Xavier University in Canada.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Itamar Rabinovich, "Middle Eastern Maze: Israel, the Arabs and the Region" (Brookings Institution Press, 2023)

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Navigating through the intricate web of Middle Eastern geopolitics, few are better equipped to provide insights than Itamar Rabinovich in his compelling book, Middle Eastern Maze: Israel, The Arabs, and the Region 1948-2022 (Brookings Institution Press, 2023). In this update to his earlier work, The Lingering Conflict published by Brookings in 2012, Rabinovich delves deeper, and informs readers on the recent twists and turns of the Middle East conflict.

With a storied career as both an academic historian and a diplomat — notably, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S and a peace negotiator with Syria — Rabinovich brings a unique blend of scholarly rigor and real-world experience. This allows him to place Arab-Israeli dynamics not just as a standalone issue but within the broader canvas of Middle Eastern regional and international politics.

A significant highlight of the book is Rabinovich's attention to the evolving roles of regional powerhouses Iran and Turkey. However, his analysis doesn't stop there. The United States, being a global superpower with intricate ties to the Middle East, gets its due attention, especially its special relationship with Israel and the transitions in its Middle Eastern policy from the Trump era to the Biden administration.

The book is timely and relevant, covering pivotal moments and shifts, such as:

The groundbreaking Abraham Accords signified a fresh direction in Arab-Israeli relations.
Russia’s decisive military intervention exacerbated the tumultuous Syrian civil war and its far-reaching implications.
The rise and subsequent decline of the formidable Islamic State.
The mounting tensions surrounding the Iranian nuclear ambitions.
And lastly, Israel's own internal challenges marked by prolonged political instability.

For those seeking a nuanced understanding of Middle Eastern geopolitics and the ever-evolving Arab-Israeli relationship, Middle Eastern Maze promises to be an instructive read, enriched by the author's unique vantage point at the intersection of history, diplomacy, and contemporary politics.

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 reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the Invention of the Passport to the Golden Passport

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Kristin Surak, professor at the London School of Economics, about her new book, The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires (Harvard University Press, 2023). The conversation starts with the contrast of Torpey’s The Invention of the Passport (Cambridge UP, 2018) and the “golden passport,” which reflects how, in the past three decades, many countries have opened avenues for the wealthy to buy passports and citizenship (aka “citizenship by investment”). Surak discusses the creation of this market and the reasons why some countries are opening these opportunities. Despite not necessarily being attractive citizenship destinations in themselves, there is a hierarchy of citizenships whereby some countries like Turkey can be a citizenship option for citizens with less attractive citizenships such as Syria, Afghanistan or Iraq. Finally, the author delves into the political economy of citizenship for small countries and how it has become a source of revenue for a number of struggling small countries.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sparta, Athens, Ukraine, Israel: A Conversation with Paul Rahe on Proxy Wars

Mon, 23 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Proxy wars like those in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and now Ukraine have played major roles in military history. Historian Paul Rahe takes us back to one of the earliest yet most influential proxy wars in the West: Athens' invasions of Spartan-backed Sicily. Here, he discusses his most recent book, Sparta's Sicilian Proxy War (Encounter Books, 2023), the fifth in his series "The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta." Along the way, he explores the structure of ancient Sparta as compared with Athens and with modern America, and what lessons proxy wars in the ancient world can teach us about modern conflicts.

Paul A. Rahe is the Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College, and Professor of History. In addition to his series The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, his books include Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution, Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under the English Republic, and Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville and the Modern Prospect.

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Welsh, "Big Bend National Park: Mexico, the United States, and a Borderland Ecosystem" (U Nevada Press, 2021)

Sun, 22 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

National Parks are sites where politics, cultures, and ecology converge. University of Northern Colorado historian Michael Welsh argues that, at Big Bend National Park in West Texas, a fourth dynamic is at play: diplomacy.

In Big Bend National Park: Mexico, the United States, and a Borderland Ecosystem (U Nevada Press, 2021), Welsh tells the story of how this place - isolated even in its Indigenous history - came to be a site of diplomatic wrangling between the United States and Mexico. Situated along the border of the two nations, Big Bend has been a prism through which both Americans and Mexicans have seen the relationship between their two nations. Big Bend's story thus is one of colonization, conservation and changing American ideas about wilderness, but also about international diplomacy, war, and peace. Big Bend has been many things to many people, and as Welsh argues, few National Park sites have the same dramatic and complex history as this arid range of Texas mountains along the Rio Grande.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" (Vintage, 2006)

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s major motion picture, Oppenheimer, this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography explores the life and times of J. Robert Oppenheimer – the “Father of the Atomic Bomb” – who, like the mythological Prometheus, brought atomic fire to mankind. In deep detail, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Vintage, 2006) explores Oppenheimer’s early career at the forefront of quantum physics, his associations with left-wing politics and the Communist Party, his leadership of the Manhattan Project, and his confrontations with the moral and political consequences of scientific progress during the Cold War. Twenty-five years in the making, this definitive biography charts the rise and fall of one of the twentieth century’s most iconic and paradoxical characters and restores Oppenheimer’s legacy and his humanity.

Andrew O. Pace is a historian of moral dilemmas of US foreign relations and an adjunct professor of history at Salt Lake Community College.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shellen Xiao Wu, "Birth of the Geopolitical Age: Global Frontiers and the Making of Modern China" (Stanford UP, 2023)

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

From the 1850s until the mid-twentieth century, a period marked by global conflicts and anxiety about dwindling resources and closing opportunities after decades of expansion, the frontier became a mirror for historically and geographically specific hopes and fears. From Asia to Europe and the Americas, countries around the world engaged with new interpretations of empire and the deployment of science and technology to aid frontier development in extreme environments. Through a century of political turmoil and war, China nevertheless is the only nation to successfully navigate the twentieth century with its imperial territorial expanse largely intact.

In Birth of the Geopolitical Age: Global Frontiers and the Making of Modern China (Stanford University Press, 2023), Dr. Shellen Xiao Wu demonstrates how global examples of frontier settlements refracted through China's unique history and informed the making of the modern Chinese state. Dr. Wu weaves a narrative that moves through time and space, the lives of individuals, and empires' rise and fall and rebirth, to show how the subsequent reshaping of Chinese geopolitical ambitions in the twentieth century, and the global transformation of frontiers into colonial laboratories, continues to reorder global power dynamics in East Asia and the wider world to this day.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cleric, Cadre, Businessman: China’s Development Strategy in Sri Lanka

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

What does Buddhism have to do with harbors? Find out how China is leveraging religion in its foreign policy and why it is a vital part of China's soft power strategy, aligned closely with domestic policies. Learn how Sri Lanka's reception and reproduction of narratives can impact the country's foreign relations and domestic dynamics.

Tabita Rosendal Ebbesen, Doctoral student at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University unravels Chinese Development policy, governance practices and the use of Buddhism in diplomatic and public diplomacy efforts in Sri Lanka in conversation with Frode Hübbe. Mentioned in the article is Tabita’s great article China’s Buddhist Strategic Narratives in Sri Lanka – Benefits and Buddhism? Which is accessible open source.

Tabita's research focuses on contemporary Chinese governance practices of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, part of the Belt and Road Initiative. Aiming to fill knowledge gaps on port projects, Tabita has conducted fieldwork in Sri Lanka, interviewing key stakeholders. Read more here.

Frode is a student assistant as the Nordic Institute of Asia Studies and a China Studies Student at the University of Copenhagen with a particular interest in China’s regionalizing efforts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Allison M. Prasch, "The World Is Our Stage: The Global Rhetorical Presidency and the Cold War" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Allison M. Prasch, Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has a new book that focuses on the way that presidents used words, speeches, and international visits to communicate more than simple policy prescriptions during the Cold War period. This is a fascinating analysis and takes the reader through particular presidential visits to a variety of places—where the president’s symbolic quality as well as the words spoken communicate not only to the country or place visited, but also are communicating to American citizens back home as well as our antagonists in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. The World Is Our Stage: The Global Rhetorical Presidency and the Cold War (U Chicago Press, 2023) examines the ways in which the office of the American president—along with the individual inhabiting it—combines with the presentation of policy and rhetorical engagement to impact thinking about U.S. power abroad as well as at home. This is an important thesis and Prasch delineates a clear analysis of how this looked and operated during the Cold War, with five case studies that provide evidence and examples of how this actually worked.

The five case studies include President Harry S. Truman at Potsdam, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Good Will Tours, particularly in South America, President John F. Kennedy in West Berlin, President Richard M. Nixon’s trip/opening to China, and finally President Ronald W. Reagan in Normandy. Prasch weaves together historical, political, cultural, and rhetorical dimensions of each of these presidential events to understand the impacts and the reverberations for the United States, for the Soviet Union, for U.S. allies and enemies. She documents the ways in which some of these moves were responses to similar kinds of trips and events taken by Soviet leaders at the same time. Prasch has included deep archival research at presidential libraries and the like in order to flesh out the Oval Office discussions about these events—going through memos and interviews with presidential staff who were in charge of the planning and orchestration of the trips, the particular speeches, and the choices as to the venue and audiences.

The World is Our Stage: The Global Rhetorical Presidency and the Cold War is a crucial addition to the scholarship on rhetoric and the American presidency, moving beyond the words themselves and examining the multiple dimensions of presidentiality on display on the world stage when a president takes the opportunity to give a speech at a certain global venue. This analysis is particularly vital given the symbolic, performative, and policy import of these kinds of events.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Javier Garcia Oliva and Helen Hall, "Constitutional Culture, Independence, and Rights: Insights from Quebec, Scotland, and Catalonia" (U Toronto Press, 2023)

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In Constitutional Culture, Independence, and Rights: Insights from Quebec, Scotland, and Catalonia (University of Toronto Press, 2023), Dr. Javier García Oliva and Dr. Helen Hall coin the term "constitutional culture" to encapsulate the collective rules and expectations that govern the collective life within a jurisdiction. Significantly, these shared norms have both legal and social elements, including matters as diverse as standards of parenting, the modus operandi of police officers, and taboos around sexuality. Using Quebec, Scotland, and Catalonia as case studies, the book delves into what these constitutional battles mean for the rights, identity, and needs of everyday people, and it powerfully demonstrates why the hypothetical future independence of these regions would have far-reaching practical consequences, beyond the realm of political structures and academic theory.

The book does not present a magic bullet to resolve debates around independence – this is not its purpose, and the text in fact demonstrates why there is no objectively optimal approach in any or all contexts. Instead, it seeks to shed light on aspects of these situations often overlooked in discussions around the fate of nations, and it addresses what the consequences of constitutional paradigm shifts might be for individuals. Constitutional culture is a complex web of interconnected understandings and behaviours, and the vibrations from shaking or cutting a fundamental strand will be felt throughout the structure.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tom Gallagher, "Europe's Leadership Famine: Portraits of Defiance and Decay 1950-2022" (Scotview, 2023)

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Tom Gallagher about his new book Europe's Leadership Famine: Portraits of Defiance and Decay 1950-2022 (Scotview, 2023).

Representative democracy endured in Europe because its political leaders’ deviousness and self-advancement were balanced by altruism, fortitude and civic virtue. However, in this century, the reputation and calibre of politicians has slumped in country after country, as fads, image, process, triviality and spin are promoted over experience, prudence and long-term outcomes. National leadership roles are increasingly filled by inexperienced careerists, who are disconnected from the people on whose behalf they are supposed to rule. How can Europe remain mostly free and adequately governed, if this leadership famine drags on?

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lucy Fulford, "The Exiled: Empire, Immigration and the Ugandan Asian Exodus" (Coronet, 2023)

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Uganda, August 1972. President Idi Amin makes a shocking pronouncement – the country’s South Asian population is being expelled. They have ninety days to leave. After packing scant possessions and countless memories, 50,000 Ugandan Asians vied for limited space in countries including Canada, India and the United Kingdom. More than 28,000 expellees from Britain’s former colony arrived in the UK and began building new lives – but their incredible stories have, until now, remained largely hidden.

Fifty years on from the exodus, The Exiled: Empire, Immigration and the Ugandan Asian Exodus (Coronet, 2023) by Lucy Fulford draws on first-hand interviews and testimonies, including from the author’s family, to illuminate a time of painful alienation and incredible courage. As an entire people stepped into the unknown, a global diaspora was born, and the fate of the United Kingdom changed forever.

Journeying across continents and decades, this staggering work of reportage illuminates an essential, and under-explored, chapter in post-colonial history, challenging politically expedient narratives to uncover the true fate of minorities at the end of empire.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James J. A. Blair, "Salvaging Empire: Sovereignty, Natural Resources, and Environmental Science in the South Atlantic" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Salvaging Empire: Sovereignty, Natural Resources, and Environmental Science in the South Atlantic (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. James J. A. Blair probes the historical roots and current predicaments of a twenty-first century settler colony seeking to control an uncertain future through resource management and environmental science.

Four decades after a violent 1982 war between the United Kingdom and Argentina reestablished British authority over the Falkland Islands (Las Malvinas in Spanish), a commercial fishing boom and offshore oil discoveries have intensified the sovereignty dispute over the South Atlantic archipelago. Scholarly literature on the South Atlantic focuses primarily on military history of the 1982 conflict. However, contested claims over natural resources have now made this disputed territory a critical site for examining the wider relationship between imperial sovereignty and environmental governance.

Dr. Blair argues that by claiming self-determination and consenting to British sovereignty, the Falkland Islanders have crafted a settler colonial protectorate to extract resources and extend empire in the South Atlantic. Responding to current debates in environmental anthropology, critical geography, Atlantic history, political ecology, and science and technology studies, Dr. Blair describes how settlers have asserted indigeneity in dynamic relation with the environment. Salvaging Empire uncovers the South Atlantic's outsized importance for understanding the broader implications of resource management and environmental science for the geopolitics of empire.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Swati Srivastava, "Hybrid Sovereignty in World Politics" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The idea of “hybrid sovereignty” describes overlapping relations between public and private actors in important areas of global power, such as contractors fighting international wars, corporations regulating global markets, or governments collaborating with nongovernmental entities to influence foreign elections.

Hybrid Sovereignty in World Politics (Cambridge UP, 2022) shows that these connections – sometimes hidden and often poorly understood – underpin the global order, in which power flows without regard to public and private boundaries. Drawing on extensive original archival research, Swati Srivastava reveals the little-known stories of how this hybrid power operated at some of the most important turning points in world history: spreading the British empire, founding the United States, establishing free trade, realizing transnational human rights, and conducting twenty-first century wars. In order to sustain meaningful dialogues about the future of global power and political authority, it is crucial that we begin to understand how hybrid sovereignty emerged and continues to shape international relations.

Swati Srivastava is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Purdue University. Her research focuses on private actors in global governance including tech companies, contractors, lobbyists, and international NGOs. She is the author of articles in International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Perspectives on Politics, and other outlets. She directs the International Politics and Responsible Tech (iPART) research lab with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is currently a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Future of Superstates: A Discussion with Alasdair Roberts

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Empires are supposed to be a thing of the past but very big countries with global reach are becoming more entrenched. By 2050, almost 40 per cent of the world’s population will live in just four polities: India, China, the US and the EU. So, in what respects are these entities imperial and is there a future for small states? Listen to Owen Bennett-Jones in conversation with Alasdair Roberts, author of Superstates: Empires of the 21st Century (Polity Press, 2023).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephenie Foster and Susan A. Markham, "Feminist Foreign Policy in Theory and in Practice" (Routledge, 2023)

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In 2014, Sweden announced the world’s first “feminist foreign policy,” an approach more than two dozen other nations have since adopted. But different national approaches and a range of theoretical frameworks complicate definitions of what feminist foreign policy should or could be. With Feminist Foreign Policy in Theory and in Practice: An Introduction (Routledge 2023), Stephenie Foster and Susan Markham offer an accessible overview of the main tenets of a feminist foreign policy, and how such policies have evolved in practice since 2014. With decades of experience working on gender equality issues, both in and out of government, Markham and Foster build on their own professional backgrounds to examine what feminist foreign policy roadmap might look like in the United States context, drawing on definitions from governments, civil society organizations, feminist activists, and academics. As feminist foreign policy continues to spread on the global stage, “Feminist Foreign Policy in Theory and in Practice” is a useful primer for practitioners and scholars seeking to understand the origins and the future of this agenda.

Rebecca Turkington is a PhD Candidate in History at Cambridge University studying transnational women’s networks.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

India, Asia, and the Global South

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

How should we understand the emergence of the Global South as a political actor? What is the role of India within this framework? Which challenges and tensions arise from China’s assertiveness in Asia, and how is it reshaping regional dynamics? How is the Indo-Pacific region emerging as a new geopolitical structure with the potential to redefine regional alliances and relationships?

Ravinder Kaur is joined by leading foreign policy expert on India, Raja Mohan to discuss these questions. Drawing on decades of experience, Mohan lays out India’s relationship with the Global South as an increasingly consequential political actor, examining the factors that have pushed this concept to the forefront of today’s geopolitical stage. Professor Mohan provides valuable insights into the contrasting nature of Asia's political terrain compared to Europe’s, underscoring the pivotal role played by mini-lateralism – an intricate network of overlapping alliances and cooperative endeavors between nations. Tune in to the newest episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast to learn more…

Professor Raja Mohan is a renowned commentator on world affairs and a distinguished policy fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Mumbai. As a leading analyst of India’s foreign policy, Mohan is also an expert on South Asian security, great-power relations in Asia, and arms control. He is the foreign affairs columnist for the Indian Express, and a visiting research professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore.

Our host, Ravinder Kaur is an associate professor of Modern India and South Asian Studies at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. Kaur works across the disciplines of history, anthropology, and international politics. Her long-term research has focused on two critical transformations in the history of modern India.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Benjamin Savill, "England and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages: Papal Privileges in European Perspective, C. 680-1073" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

England and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages: Papal Privileges in European Perspective, c. 680-1073 (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Benjamin Savill provides the first dedicated, book-length study of interactions between England and the papacy throughout the early middle ages. It takes as its lens the extant English record of papal privileges: legal diplomas drawn-up on metres-long scrolls of Egyptian papyrus, acquired by pilgrim-petitioners within the city of Rome, and then brought back to Britain to negotiate local claims and conflicts.

How, why, and when did English petitioners choose to invoke the distant authority of Rome in this way, and how did this compare to what was taking place elsewhere in Europe? How successful were these efforts, and how were they remembered in later centuries?

By using these still-understudied papal documents to reassess what we know of the worlds of Bede, the Mercian Supremacy, the West Saxon 'Kingdom of the English', and the Norman Conquest—locating them in the process within a comparative, Europe-wide setting—this book offers important new contributions to Anglo-Saxon studies, legal and documentary history, papal history, and the study of early medieval Europe more widely.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Angelina Chin, "Unsettling Exiles: Chinese Migrants in Hong Kong and the Southern Periphery During the Cold War" (Columbia UP, 2023)

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The conventional story of Hong Kong celebrates the people who fled the mainland in the wake of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. In this telling, migrants thrived under British colonial rule, transforming Hong Kong into a cosmopolitan city and an industrial and financial hub. Unsettling Exiles: Chinese Migrants in Hong Kong and the Southern Periphery During the Cold War (Columbia UP, 2023) recasts identity formation in Hong Kong, demonstrating that the complexities of crossing borders shaped the city’s uneasy place in the Sinophone world.

Angelina Y. Chin foregrounds the experiences of the many people who passed through Hong Kong without settling down or finding a sense of belonging, including refugees, deportees, “undesirable” residents, and members of sea communities. She emphasizes that flows of people did not stop at Hong Kong’s borders but also bled into neighboring territories such as Taiwan and Macau. Chin develops the concept of the “Southern Periphery”—the region along the southern frontier of the PRC, outside its administrative control yet closely tied to its political space. Both the PRC and governments in the Southern Periphery implemented strict migration and deportation policies in pursuit of border control, with profound consequences for people in transit. Chin argues that Hong Kong identity emerged from the collective trauma of exile and dislocation, as well as a sense of being on the margins of both the Communist and Nationalist Chinese regimes during the Cold War. Drawing on wide-ranging research, Unsettling Exiles sheds new light on Hong Kong’s ambivalent relationship to the mainland, its role in the global Cold War, and the origins of today’s political currents.

Angelina Y. Chin is associate professor of history at Pomona College. She is the author of Bound to Emancipate: Working Women and Urban Citizenship in Early Twentieth-Century China and Hong Kong (2012).

Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert P. Watson, "When Washington Burned: The British Invasion of the Capital and a Nation's Rise from the Ashes" (Georgetown UP, 2023)

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Perhaps no other single day in US history was as threatening to the survival of the nation as August 24, 1814, when British forces captured Washington, DC. This unique moment might have significantly altered the nation’s path forward, but the event and the reasons why it happened are little remembered by most Americans.

Robert P. Watson's book When Washington Burned: The British Invasion of the Capital and a Nation's Rise from the Ashes (Georgetown UP, 2023) narrates and examines the British campaign and American missteps that led to the fall of Washington during the War of 1812. Watson analyzes the actions of key figures on both sides, such as President James Madison and General William Winder on the US side and Rear Admiral George Cockburn and Major General Robert Ross on the British side. He pinpoints the reasons the campaign was such a disaster for the United States but also tells the redeeming stories of the courageous young clerks and the bold first lady, Dolley Madison, who risked their lives to save priceless artifacts and documents from the flames, including the Constitution. The British invasion was repulsed over the coming weeks and months, and the United States ultimately emerged stronger. General readers interested in the history of Washington, US history, and military history will be fascinated by this book.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Should We Be Optimistic About Global Governance?

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

This week on International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviewed Richard Gowan, UN director of the International Crisis Group. Gowan discusses the different views of the UN on the occasion of the annual meeting of the General Assembly. The absence of a number of key figures was widely noted, but most major world leaders, such as Biden, Scholz, and Lula did attend. Gowan also commented on the power dissemination taking place in global governance, as other organizations such as the G20, G7 and BRICS are gaining importance. Finally, Gowan recognized the challenges that the UN General Assembly has in terms of securing the sovereignty of countries, but also acknowledges the role of other actors in hindering conflict.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Isaac McKean Scarborough, "Moscow's Heavy Shadow: The Violent Collapse of the USSR" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Moscow's Heavy Shadow: The Violent Collapse of the USSR (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. Isaac Mckean Scarborough tells the story of the collapse of the USSR from the perspective of the many millions of Soviet citizens who experienced it as a period of abjection and violence. Mikhail Gorbachev and the leaders of the USSR saw the years of reform preceding the collapse as opportunities for rebuilding (perestroika), rejuvenation, and openness (glasnost). For those in provincial cities across the Soviet Union, however, these reforms led to rapid change, economic collapse, and violence.

Focusing on Dushanbe, Tajikistan, Dr. McKean Scarborough describes how this city experienced skyrocketing unemployment, a depleted budget, and streets filled with angry young men unable to support their families. Tajikistan was left without financial or military resources, unable and unprepared to stand against the wave of populist politicians of all stripes who took advantage of the economic collapse and social discontent to try to gain power. By May 1992, political conflict became violent and bloody and engulfed the whole of Tajikistan in war. Moscow's Heavy Shadow tells the story of how this war came to be, and how it was grounded in the reform and collapse of the Soviet economy that came before.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gwendolyn Sasse, "Russia's War Against Ukraine" (Polity, 2023)

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Nineteen months since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the books are coming thick and fast.

Fortunately, each tells a different and compelling story. Like other recent books, Gwendolyn Sasse’s Russia's War Against Ukraine (Polity, 2023) analyses three decades of diverging Russian and Ukrainian politics and society, burgeoning Russian neo-imperialism, and Western temerity.

Unique to this book, however, is the restoration of Crimea to centre-stage in the conflict. The war didn’t start in February 2022 when Russian and Ukrainian troops battled on the northern outskirts of Kyiv. It didn't even start in April 2014 when Ukrainian forces tried to retake Sloviansk. "Russia's war against Ukraine began with the annexation of Crimea on 27 February 2014,” writes Professor Sasse, and the signal it sent to secessionists in the Donbas. It may only be 69 years since the Soviet government assigned Crimea to Ukraine but, as she explains, Russia's claim to the peninsular is no stronger. Crimea threads through the book on post-Soviet Ukrainian and Russian histories, the war, and its potential aftermath.

Gwendolyn Sasse directs the Centre for East European and International Studies in Berlin and is a professor at Humboldt university. Before that, she was a professor of comparative politics at Oxford and taught at the Central European University and the London School of Economics. Her 2007 book - The Crimea Question - won the Alec Nove Prize for scholarly work in Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet studies.

*The author's own book recommendations are The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Present by Serhii Plokhy (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2021) and 100 Kinder: Kindersachbuch über den Alltag von Kindern auf der ganzen Welt by Christoph Drösser and Nora Coenenberg (Gabriel Verlag, 2019)

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and also hosts the In The Room podcast series.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alex J. Bellamy, "Warmonger: Vladimir Putin's Imperial Wars" (Agenda Publishing, 2023)

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

"War was always central to Putin's project," writes Alex J. Bellamy in Warmonger: Vladimir Putin's Imperial Wars (Agenda, 2023). Not just the second Chechen war that made him but the NATO-probing wars in Georgia and eastern Ukraine that emboldened him, and the Western-style war from air in Syria designed to mark Russia’s return to Great Power status.

But, the project has not gone well. According to Professor Bellamy, the military and strategic disaster of Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine had long been foretold. In Syria, unable to control his client, Putin has been outwitted and outgunned by his Turkish imperial rival, which has also shifted the balance of power against Moscow in the long-running Azerbaijan/Armenia conflict. Even apparent success in Chechnya was bought by outsourcing to the Kadyrov clan, who run the republic independently at enormous cost to the Kremlin.

"War has finally caught up with the warmonger," writes Bellamy. "Should Russia's imperial dreaming survive its battering in Ukraine, and it is by no means certain that it will, it will be a Potemkin empire existing only in the minds of those who parrot its tropes".

Alex J. Bellamy is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at The University of Queensland. Since Kosovo and International Society in 2002, he has written 15 books as sole author including World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It) in 2019 and Syria Betrayed: Atrocities, War, and the Failure of International Diplomacy in 2022.

*The author's own book recommendations are The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union by Serhii Plokhy (Oneworld Publications, 2014) and Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland (Little Brown, 2019).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Future of Ukraine: A Discussion with Christopher Miller

Sun, 24 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has already changed the world. Why did it happen? Who is winning? How will it end? Christopher Miller is the author of The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine (Bloomsbury, 2023). Hear him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kerry Brown, "China Incorporated: The Politics of a World Where China is Number One" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Thu, 21 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

How do we talk about China? It’s a question every analyst, academic, policymaker, and reporter probably needs to ask themselves.

Is China, as some of the hawks claim, an existential threat to the world order? Is it on the verge of aggressively taking the number one spot—or is it on the verge of collapse? Is it a dangerous military threat or is it—as some Chinese commentators claim—an entirely benevolent power?

Navigating this increasingly black-and-white conversation is Kerry Brown, leading China academic and author of China Incorporated: The Politics of a World Where China is Number One (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023)

In this interview, Kerry and I talk about China’s politics, and discuss what—if anything—lies at the foundation of some of the common descriptions about China.

Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King's College London. He is an Associate of the Asia Pacific Programme at Chatham House, London, an adjunct of the Australia New Zealand School of Government in Melbourne, and the co-editor of the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, run by the German Institute for Global Affairs in Hamburg. From 1998 to 2005 he worked at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as First Secretary at the British Embassy in Beijing, and then as Head of the Indonesia, Philippine and East Timor Section. He is the author of almost 20 books on modern Chinese politics.

Kerry previously joined the podcast in May 2022 to talk about China Through European Eyes: 800 Years of Cultural and Intellectual Encounter (World Scientific: 2022).

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of China Incorporated. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rachel Chrastil, "Bismarck's War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe" (Basic Book, 2023)

Sun, 17 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Among the conflicts that convulsed Europe during the nineteenth century, none was more startling and consequential than the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. Deliberately engineered by Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the war succeeded in shattering French supremacy, deposing Napoleon III, and uniting a new German Empire. But it also produced brutal military innovations and a precarious new imbalance of power that together set the stage for the devastating world wars of the next century.

In Bismarck's War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe (Basic Book, 2023), historian Rachel Chrastil chronicles events on the battlefield in full, while also showing in intimate detail how the war reshaped and blurred the boundaries between civilian and soldier as the fighting swept across France. The result is the definitive history of a transformative conflict that changed Europe, and the history of warfare, forever.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joshua Ehrlich, "The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The East India Company is remembered as the world's most powerful, not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from the 1770s to the 1850s it was also the world's most enlightened one.

Joshua Ehrlich reveals that a commitment to knowledge was integral to the Company's ideology. In The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge UP, 2023), he shows how the Company cited this commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commercial and political power. He moves beyond studies of orientalism, colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach: the history of ideas of knowledge. He recovers a world of debate among the Company's officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the political uses of knowledge. Not only were these historical actors highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company – just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today's politics.

Joshua Ehrlich is a historian of knowledge, political thought, the East India Company, the British Empire, and South and Southeast Asia. Currently Assistant Professor of History at the University of Macau, he received a PhD and MA from Harvard University and a BA from the University of Chicago.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A Better Way to Buy Books

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities.

Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

India, a Non-Aligned Member of the International System?

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

We kick off our Fall 2023 season of International Horizons with Upendra Choudhury from Aligarh Muslim University discussing the role of India in the contemporary international system. Prof. Choudhury argues that India’s vision of a multipolar world order consists of acting as a balancing mediator between the traditional West and a rising China. In that sense, Choudhury claims that India cannot afford not to participate in different multilateral organizations such as the BRICS+, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and I2U2 because it carries an important role in stabilizing the world order. Choudhury also introduces the three lines of thought in India’s foreign policy, arguing that India can both focus on its domestic problems and increase its power capabilities.

Moreover, Prof. Choudhury explains that India’s stance in the Russian war on Ukraine is not strategic ambiguity. Instead, India is often in the spotlight when it does not align with the West, but its pacifist actions behind the scenes are never appreciated. Finally, he argues that in order to become a global leader, India needs to unify its population around the country’s national project.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peter Foster, "What Went Wrong with Brexit? And What We Can Do about It" (Canongate, 2023)

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

It’s been over three years since the UK withdrew from the EU and no one – not even the most ardent Brexiter – thinks it has gone well so far. Defending the cause after yet another summertime setback, the best Matthew Lesh from the Institute of Economic Affairs could offer was: “Brexit simply means that British representatives can make … choices, not that they must point in any particular direction”.

Ever since the British voted to leave the EU in 2016, millions of words have been written for and against the process but Peter Foster’s What Went Wrong With Brexit: And What We Can Do About (Canongate Books, 2023) is the first book to assess the deep economic scars left by Brexit and provide politically realistic palliatives. He writes: "There is little mileage in relitigating the history of Brexit - as the saying goes, 'we are where we are' - but that does not mean accepting that the UK has to remain in its current state of Brexit purgatory".

Since 2020, Peter Foster has been the Financial Times's public policy editor and writer of its Britain After Brexit newsletter. Before that, he was a longtime reporter for The Telegraph - working in New Delhi, Beijing, Washington and as Europe Editor between 2015 and 2020. During this critical five-year period, he became – along with RTÉ’s Tony Connelly – the indispensable Brexit reporter, breaking stories, explaining this intricate and unprecedented divorce, and building huge Twitter followings.

*The author's own book recommendations are The Light that Failed: A Reckoning by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes (Allen Lane, 2019) and The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Picador, 2006).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Suzy Kim, "Among Women Across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Mon, 04 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2023), Suzy Kim follows Korean women’s engagement in a broader international women’s movement from the beginnings of the Korean War in the 1940s until International Women’s Year in 1975. Obscured by layers of “cascading erasures,” the communist women of North Korea have been overlooked in traditional narratives of Asian and feminist history. By tracing their participation in global networks like the Women’s International Democratic Federation, Kim excavates their ideas about work and family, war and peace, and imperialism and capitalism. Turning to women’s magazines, traditional dance, socialist films, and the archives of international organizations, the book resurrects figures like Pak Chong-ae and the Korean Democratic Women’s Union and the transnational circulation of their political, economic, and cultural contributions. Many of their ideas remain strikingly contemporary—from the equitable distribution of domestic labor to an intersectional understanding of justice—and presage debates that feminists continue to grapple with today.

Rebecca Turkington is a PhD Candidate in History at Cambridge University studying transnational women’s networks.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Zachary Jacobson, "On Nixon's Madness: An Emotional History" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)

Sun, 03 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

When Richard Nixon battled for the presidency in 1968, he did so with the knowledge that, should he win, he would face the looming question of how to extract the United States from its disastrous war in Vietnam. It was on a beach that summer that Nixon disclosed to his chief aide, H. R. Haldeman, one of his most notorious, risky gambits: the madman theory.

In On Nixon's Madness: An Emotional History (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Zachary Jonathan Jacobson examines the enigmatic president through this theory of Nixon’s own invention. With strategic force and nuclear bluffing, Nixon attempted to coerce his foreign adversaries through sheer unpredictability. As his national security advisor Henry Kissinger noted, Nixon’s strategy resembled a poker game in which he “push[ed] so many chips into the pot” that the United States’ foes would think the president had gone “crazy.”

From Vietnam, Pakistan, and India to the greater Middle East, Nixon applied this madman theory. Foreign relations were not a steady march toward peaceful coexistence but rather an ongoing test of mettle. Nixon saw the Cold War as he saw his life, as a series of ordeals that demanded great risk and grand gestures. For decades, journalists, critics, and scholars have searched for the real Nixon behind these acts. Was he a Red-baiter, a worldly statesman, a war criminal or, in the end, a punchline?

Jacobson combines biography and intellectual and cultural history to understand the emotional life of Richard Nixon, exploring how the former president struggled between great effusions of feeling and great inhibition, how he winced at the notion of his reputation for rage, and how he used that ill repute to his advantage.

Andrew O. Pace is a historian of moral dilemmas of US foreign relations and an adjunct professor of history at Salt Lake Community College. He is a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network and is currently working on a book about the reversal in US foreign policy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at apace24@slcc.edu.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah R. Coleman, "The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Sarah Coleman, an historian at Texas State University, is the author of an important and topical book about immigration policy in the United States. The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America (Princeton UP, 2023) focuses much less on the often-discussed physical border between the United States and other countries, and more so on the internal touchpoints where immigration federalism takes place. Coleman does a number of things in this book, including providing a fascinating overview of immigration policies and prohibitions throughout U.S. history, but not in a linear mode—instead, she integrates the historical record into the discussion of the domestic policies that were developed over the past 70 years. These policies are the central focus of the book, since it is the structure, execution, and implementation of these policies that constrain and impact citizens and non-citizens in the United States. The Walls Within examines education policy and court decisions, labor policy and the debate about employer sanctions, welfare policy and questions of immigrant contributions and benefits, and, finally, civil liberties and localized immigration enforcement regimes.

Given the current political debate around immigration, the complexity of the politics within and around that debate, and the constantly looming image of “the wall” at the southern border, Coleman’s book explains and clarifies so much of the history, political conversations, policies, and implementation of immigration inside the United States. Sifting through demographic changes, economic shifts, congressional legislation, and court challenges, Coleman weaves together the different policies and outcomes, and the different forms of enforcement. This is what contributes to immigration federalism, since restrictions, prohibitions, and denial of opportunities generally happen at a state or local level. Thus, where immigration policy is actually touching people—citizens and non-citizens alike—is not, per se, where a Border Control officer examines a passport or a document, but in implementing sanctions against employers or in denying a second-grader breakfast before school. The exploration of these touchpoints highlights the themes running through The Walls Within: political culture, electoral politics, and political economy. Coleman notes that there are approximately 24 million immigrants in the United States, and about half that number are unauthorized. Most of the unauthorized immigrants are not coming across either the northern or southern border of the United States but are overstaying visas. Thus, the imaginary that often wraps around these questions is disconnected from the reality of authorized and unauthorized immigration in the United States. The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America works to clarify our current situation and how we ended up where we are, while also explaining the policies and actions that were put into place along the way and how those policies and actions shape the actual immigration landscape in the U.S.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On “Henry Kissinger and His World” with author Barry Gewen

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hans-Lukas Kieser, "When Democracy Died: The Middle East's Enduring Peace of Lausanne" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Treaty of Lausanne, signed in Switzerland in July 1923, officially settled the conflict between the Ottoman Empire and the Allied forces. Not only did the Treaty establish the borders of the modern Turkish republic, but it also defined boundaries, political systems, and understandings of citizenship in the newly formed post-Ottoman nation-states.

In When Democracy Died: The Middle East's Enduring Peace of Lausanne (Cambridge UP, 2023), Hans-Lukas Kieser recounts how the eight dramatic months of the Lausanne Conference concluded more than ten years of war and genocide in the late Ottoman Empire. Crucially, the Treaty was in favour of a homogeneous Turkish state in Asia Minor and became the basis for the compulsory 'unmixing of people' that facilitated the persecution of minority groups, including Armenians, Kurds, and Arabs. Not only did this significant yet oft-overlooked treaty mark the end of the League of Nations' project of self-determination and security for small peoples, but it was crucial in shaping the modern Middle East, and dictatorships in Turkey and Europe.

Hans-Lukas Kieser is also the author of Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide (Princeton UP, 2018)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kalyani Ramnath, "Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942-1962" (Stanford UP, 2023)

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

For more than a century before World War II, traders, merchants, financiers, and laborers steadily moved between places on the Indian Ocean, trading goods, supplying credit, and seeking work. This all changed with the war and as India, Burma, Ceylon, and Malaya wrested independence from the British Empire. Set against the tumult of the postwar period, Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942-1962 (Stanford UP, 2023) centers on the legal struggles of migrants to retain their traditional rhythms and patterns of life, illustrating how they experienced citizenship and decolonization. Even as nascent citizenship regimes and divergent political trajectories of decolonization papered over migrations between South and Southeast Asia, migrants continued to recount cross-border histories in encounters with the law. These accounts, often obscured by national and international political developments, unsettle the notion that static national identities and loyalties had emerged, fully formed and unblemished by migrant pasts, in the aftermath of empires.

Drawing on archival materials from India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, London, and Singapore, Kalyani Ramnath narrates how former migrants battled legal requirements to revive prewar circulations of credit, capital, and labor, in a postwar context of rising ethno-nationalisms that accused migrants of stealing jobs and hoarding land. Ultimately, Ramnath shows how decolonization was marked not only by shipwrecked empires and nation-states assembled and ordered from the debris of imperial collapse, but also by these forgotten stories of wartime displacements, their unintended consequences, and long afterlives.

Kalyani Ramnath is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Georgia, with research and teaching interests in legal history, histories of migration and displacement, transnational history, and questions of archival method.

Kelvin Ng is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at Yale University. His research work brings together the social history of migration and the intellectual history of internationalism in four linked Indian Ocean spaces: British India, Republican China, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. His dissertation examines three intertwined strands of anti-imperial thought—communist internationalism, pan-Islamism, and anti-caste radicalism—in relation to an oceanic political economy of unfree labor and uneven development.

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Samuel Ramani, "Putin's War on Ukraine: Russia’s Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution" (Hurst, 2023)

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Eight years after annexing Crimea, Russia embarked on a full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine in February 2022. For Vladimir Putin, this was a legacy-defining mission--to restore Russia's sphere of influence and undo Ukraine's surprisingly resilient democratic experiment. Yet Putin's aspirations were swiftly eviscerated, as the conflict degenerated into a bloody war of attrition and the Russian economy faced crippling sanctions. How can we make sense of his decision to invade?

Samuel Ramani's Putin's War on Ukraine: Russia’s Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution (Hurst, 2023) argues that Putin's policy of global counter-revolution is driven not by systemic factors, such as preventing NATO expansion, but domestic ones: the desire to unite Russians around common principles and consolidate his personal brand of authoritarianism. This objective has inspired military interventions in Crimea, Donbas and Syria, and now all-out war against Kyiv.

Ramani explores why Putin opted for regime change in Ukraine, rather than a smaller-scale intervention in Donbas, and considers the impact on his own regime's legitimacy. How has Russia's long-term political and foreign policy trajectory shifted? And how will the international response reshape the world order?

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Toward a More Expansive View of Medieval Europe: Kyivan Rus and Norman Salerno in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Focusing on gender relations, family formation, and marriage patterns in areas peripheral to the England, France, and the Holy Roman Empire, Christian Raffensperger and Joanna Drell argue for a more inclusive understanding of medieval Europe. Their conversation dwells on Kyivan Rus and Norman Salerno in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but also the present state of medieval history and the importance of thinking beyond Western Europe and talking across language and geographical divides. Raffensperger is author of Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus in the Medieval World, 988-1146 (Harvard UP, 2012). Joanna Drell is the author of Kinship and Conquest: Family Strategies in the Principality of Salerno during the Norman Period, 1077-1194 (Cornell UP, 2002). Her recent article “The Luxuriant Southern Scene: Textiles as Reflections of Power in the Kingdom of Southern Italy and Sicily” is also a focus of conversation. It is published in Mapping Pre-Modern Sicily: Maritime Violence, Cultural Exchange, and Imagination in the Mediterranean, 800-1700.

Stephen V. Bittner is Special Topics Editor at Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and Professor of History at Sonoma State University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Martin Plaut and Sarah Vaughan, "Understanding Ethiopia's Tigray War" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Martin Plaut and Sarah Vaughan about their new book Understanding Ethiopia's Tigray War (Oxford UP, 2023)

The ongoing war and consequent famine in the Ethiopian province of Tigray are increasingly critical. International journalists are not being allowed to travel to the region, which is almost completely sealed off from the outside world. This is a deliberate strategy by the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments prosecuting the war: their aim is to crush the Tigrayans at almost any cost. This differentiates the current crisis from the famine of 1984-5, when 400,000 died of starvation primarily as the result of a prolonged drought, exacerbated by war and government inaction.

Today's famine is a direct result of supplies to the region being cut off. Hatred of Tigrayans has been stoked by senior advisers to Ethiopia's Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed: they have called Tigrayans "weeds" who must be uprooted, their place in history extinguished. This language is reminiscent of the statements that preceded the genocide in Rwanda. The present situation has been orchestrated since 2018 by Eritrea's President Isaias Afwerki, who wields considerable influence over Ethiopian affairs. His troops are deep inside Ethiopia, his security agents in its towns and cities. For both the Eritrean President and the Ethiopian Prime Minister, this appears to be a fight to the finish.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Simon Mills, "A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship Between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1600-1760" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Simon Mills' book A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship Between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1600-1760 (Oxford UP, 2020) tells the story of three generations of Church of England chaplains who served the English Levant Company in Syria during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reconstructing the careers of its protagonists in the cosmopolitan city of Ottoman Aleppo, Simon Mills investigates the links between English commercial and diplomatic expansion, and English scholarly and missionary interests: the study of Middle-Eastern languages; the exploration of biblical and Greco-Roman antiquities; and the early dissemination of Protestant literature in Arabic. Early modern Orientalism is usually conceived as an episode in the history of scholarship.

By shifting the focus to Aleppo, A Commerce of Knowledge brings to light the connections between the seemingly separate worlds, tracing the emergence of new kinds of philological and archaeological enquiry in England back to a series of real-world encounters between the chaplains and the scribes, booksellers, priests, rabbis, and sheikhs they encountered in the Ottoman Empire. Setting the careers of its protagonists against a background of broader developments across Protestant and Catholic Europe, Mills shows how the institutionalization of English scholarship, and the later English attempt to influence the Eastern Christian churches, were bound up with the international struggle to establish a commercial foothold in the Levant. He argues that these connections would endure until the shift of British commercial and imperial interests to the Indian subcontinent in the second half of the eighteenth century fostered new currents of intellectual life at home.

Simon Mills is a senior lecturer in British and European History at Newcastle University

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yiwen Li, "Networks of Faith and Profit: Monks, Merchants, and Exchanges Between China and Japan, 839-1403 CE" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In her book, Networks of Faith and Profit: Monks, Merchants, and Exchanges Between China and Japan, 839-1403 CE (Cambridge UP, 2023), associate professor of history at City University of Hong Kong Yiwen Li studies the period when the tribute relationship between China and Japan was suspended. Although this official, diplomatic relationship ceased, Li reveals the related development of a vibrant religio-commercial network of Buddhist monks and merchants, who greatly facilitated both trade and Buddhist activity between China and Japan. Carefully analyzing a rich array of sources–both Chinese and Japanese–including Buddhist writings, letters, poems, legal records, archeological findings, and material culture, she recovers relationships vital to Sino-Japanese relations.

In this episode, Li shares how she first developed her research interests in Chinese and Japanese history. She then walks listeners through her book, considering major shifts in the network. She touches upon key figures and moments as monks shifted from practices and procedures developed during formal tribute missions to their collaborations with merchants, who helped transport them and material objects–both ritual and commercial–across the sea in exchange for access to their Buddhist networks and political connections. This network deepened over time, especially when Japanese authorities allowed Chinese merchants to permanently reside in Hakata, Japan, and they became important agents in the transmission of Zen Buddhism to Japan. Yiwen Li has crafted a solid, accessible history of maritime East Asia, shedding light on a private network that sustained Sino-Japanese commerce and religious exchange during a 600-year gap in formal tributary relations.

Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth century US-China relations. She can be reached at laurie.dickmeyer@angelo.edu.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mark Edele, "Russia's War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story" (Melbourne University, 2023)

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

"That Russia and Ukraine have diverged politically so radically since 1991 is partially due to their position vis-à-vis the imploded empire they emerged from," writes Mark Edele in Russia's War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story (Melbourne University Publishing, 2023).

As its subtitle suggests, this short work - "a book by an outsider written for outsiders" - has big ambitions to explain the immediate, long-, and very long-term reasons for the war. How did two so similar yet so different nations emerge? How can “outsiders” separate national myths from true origin stories? Who started the war and how will it end?

Mark Edele is a Russianist who became - in his own words - a historian of the Soviet Empire largely due to his "encounter with Ukraine and its history". Hansen Chair in History at the University of Melbourne, he was born and raised in southern Bavaria and educated at the universities of Erlangen, Tübingen, Moscow, and Chicago, where he completed his doctoral research on Soviet World War II veterans under Sheila Fitzpatrick.

*The author's own book recommendations for the Writers' Writers tip sheet are German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad by Nicole Eaton (Cornell University Press, April 2023) and The Rider by Tim Krabbé (Bloomsbury Paperbacks, 2016 – first published 1978).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Future of Underground/Sea Cables: A Discussion with Henry Farrell

Sat, 12 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

How much of US power is underground? We hear a lot about the US military assets used on land, on the sea, and in the air - but not much about what’s going on underground and on the sea bed. It turns out what goes on down there is a significant source of US power – which has been documented by Henry Farrell in his co-authored book (with Abraham Newman), Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (Henry Holt, 2023). Listen to him describe it all with Owen Bennett-Jones.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Broers, "Napoleon: The Decline and Fall of an Empire, 1811-1821" (Pegasus Books, 2023)

Sat, 12 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In 1811, Napoleon stood at his zenith. He had defeated all his continental rivals, come to an entente with Russia, and his blockade of Britain seemed, at long last, to be a success. The emperor had an heir on the way with his new wife, Marie-Louise, the young daughter of the Emperor of Austria. His personal life, too, was calm and secure for the first time in many years. It was a moment of unprecedented peace and hope, built on the foundations of emphatic military victories.

But in less than two years, all of this was in peril. In four years, it was gone, swept away by the tides of war against the most powerful alliance in European history. The rest of his life was passed on a barren island. This is not a story any novelist could create; it is reality as epic.

Napoleon: The Decline and Fall of an Empire: 1811-1821 (Pegasus Books, 2023) traces this story through the dramatic narrative of the years 1811-1821 and explores the ever-bloodier conflicts, the disintegration and reforging of the bonds among the Bonaparte family, and the serpentine diplomacy that shaped the fate of Europe. At the heart of the story is Napoleon's own sense of history, the tensions in his own character, and the shared vision of a family dynasty to rule Europe.

Drawing on the remarkable resource of the new edition of Napoleon's personal correspondence produced by the Fondation Napoleon in Paris, Michael Broers dynamic new history follows Napoleon's thoughts and feelings, his hopes and ambitions, as he fought to preserve the world he had created. Much of this turns on his relationship with Tsar Alexander of Russia, in so many respects his alter ego, and eventual nemesis. His inability to understand this complex man, the only person with the power to destroy him, is key to tracing the roots of his disastrous decision to invade Russia--and his inability to face diplomatic and military reality thereafter.

Even his defeat in Russia was not the end. The last years of the Napoleonic Empire reveal its innate strength, but it now faced hopeless odds. The last phase of the Napoleonic Wars saw the convergence of the most powerful of forces in European history to date: Russian manpower and British money. The sheer determination of Tsar Alexander and the British to bring Napoleon down is a story of compromise and sacrifice. The horrors and heroism of war are omnipresent in these years, from Lisbon to Moscow, in the life of the common solider. The core of this new book reveals how these men pushed Napoleon back from Moscow to St. Helena.

Among this generation, there was no more remarkable persona than Napoleon. His defeat forged his myth--as well as his living tomb on St. Helena. The audacious enterprise of the 100 Days, reaching its crescendo at the Battle of Waterloo, marked the spectacular end of an unprecedented public life. From the ruins of a life--and an empire--came a new continent and a legend that haunts Europe still.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christine Keiner, "Deep Cut: Science, Power, and the Unbuilt Interoceanic Canal" (U Georgia Press, 2020)

Sat, 05 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Atlantic-Pacific Central American sea-level canal is generally regarded as a spectacular failure. However, Deep Cut: Science, Power, and the Unbuilt Interoceanic Canal (U Georgia Press, 2020) examines the canal in an alternative context, as an anticipated infrastructure project that captured attention from the nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries. Its advocates included naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, physicist Edward Teller, and U.S. presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Jimmy Carter. The waterway did not come to fruition, but as a proposal it served important political and scientific purposes during different eras, especially the years spanning the Cold War and the "environmental decade" of the 1970s.

Historian Christine Keiner shows how the evolving plans for the sea-level ship canal performed distinct kinds of work for diverse historical actors in light of shifting scientific, environmental, and diplomatic values. Dismissing it as a failed scheme prevents us from considering the political, cultural, and epistemological processes that went into constructing the seaway as an innovative diplomatic solution to rising U.S.-Panama tensions, an exciting research opportunity for evolutionary biologists, a superior hydrocarbon highway for the oil industry, or a serious ecological threat to marine biodiversity.

Invoking past dreams and nightmares of peaceful nuclear explosives, invasive sea snakes, and the 1970s energy crisis, Deep Cut uses the Central American seaway proposal to examine the changing roles of environmental diplomacy and state-sponsored environmental impact assessment. More broadly, Keiner amplifies an emerging conversation around the environmental, scientific, and political histories and legacies of unrealized megaprojects.

This book is available open access here.

Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James B. Conroy, "The Devils Will Get No Rest: FDR, Churchill, and the Plan That Won the War" (Simon and Schuster, 2023)

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Devils Will Get No Rest: FDR, Churchill, and the Plan That Won the War (Simon and Schuster, 2023) is a character-driven account of the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, an Anglo-American clash over military strategy that produced a winning plan when World War II could have gone either way. Churchill called it the most important Allied conclave of the war. Until now, it has never been explored in a full-length book.

In a secret, no-holds-barred, ten-day debate in a Moroccan warzone, protected by British marines and elite American troops, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton Jr., Sir Alan Brooke, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Sir Harold Alexander, and their military peers questioned each other's competence, doubted each other's vision, and argued their way through choices that could win or lose the war. You will be treated to a master class in strategy by the legendary statesmen, generals, and admirals who overcame their differences, transformed their alliance from a necessity to a bond, forged a war-winning plan, and glimpsed the postwar world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nick Bunker, "In the Shadow of Fear: America and the World In 1950" (Basic Books, 2023)

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Halfway through the twentieth century, the United States towered over the world in industrial might. After winning the 1948 election, Harry Truman hoped to use this economic strength to build on FDR's achievements with new liberal reforms. But then, in just ten months between September 1949 and June 1950, the president's ambitions were overtaken by events that left the country gripped by rage and fear. The Soviets tested an atomic bomb, Mao's army swept through China, and at home Truman faced labor unrest and a Republican Party desperate for power.

In the Shadow of Fear: America and the World In 1950 (Basic Books, 2023) is an innovative and gripping history of this pivotal moment. Recounting the launch of Senator Joe McCarthy's anti-communist crusade, the defeat of Truman's liberal program, and the start of the Korean War, prizewinning historian Nick Bunker shows us a polarized nation facing crises at home and abroad--a story with deep resonances today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dynamics Among Nations: The Evolution of Legitimacy and Development in Modern States

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 14:33:14 -0000

Liberal internationalism has been the West's foreign policy agenda since the Cold War, and the West has long occupied the top rung of a hierarchical system. In Dynamics Among Nations, Hilton Root argues that international relations, like other complex ecosystems, exists in a constantly shifting landscape, in which hierarchical structures are giving way to systems of networked interdependence, changing every facet of global interaction. Accordingly, policymakers will need a new way to understand the process of change. Root suggests that the science of complex systems offers an analytical framework to explain the unforeseen development failures, governance trends, and alliance shifts in today's global political economy.

Root examines both the networked systems that make up modern states and the larger, interdependent landscapes they share. Using systems analysis--in which institutional change and economic development are understood as self-organizing complexities--he offers an alternative view of institutional resilience and persistence. From this perspective, Root considers the divergence of East and West; the emergence of the European state, its contrast with the rise of China, and the network properties of their respective innovation systems; the trajectory of democracy in developing regions; and the systemic impact of China on the liberal world order. Complexity science, Root argues, will not explain historical change processes with algorithmic precision, but it may offer explanations that match the messy richness of those processes.

Hilton L. Root, an expert on international political economy and development, is Professor at the George Mason University School of Public Policy. He is the author of Alliance Curse: How the U.S. Lost the Third World, Capital and Collusion: Political Logic of Global Economic Development, and other books.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ian Buruma on "Year Zero: A History of 1945"

Sat, 29 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Ian Buruma is the author, co-author and editor of over a dozen books. He has been an editor at the Far Eastern Economic Review and The New York Review of Books. In this talk, he discusses Year Zero: A History of 1945 (Penguin, 2014).

Year Zero is a landmark reckoning with the great drama that ensued after war came to an end in 1945. One world had ended and a new, uncertain one was beginning. Regime change had come on a global scale: across Asia (including China, Korea, Indochina, and the Philippines, and of course Japan) and all of continental Europe. Out of the often vicious power struggles that ensued emerged the modern world as we know it.

In human terms, the scale of transformation is almost impossible to imagine. Great cities around the world lay in ruins, their populations decimated, displaced, starving. Harsh revenge was meted out on a wide scale, and the ground was laid for much horror to come. At the same time, in the wake of unspeakable loss, the euphoria of the liberated was extraordinary, and the revelry unprecedented. The postwar years gave rise to the European welfare state, the United Nations, decolonization, Japanese pacifism, and the European Union. Social, cultural, and political "reeducation" was imposed on vanquished by victors on a scale that also had no historical precedent. Much that was done was ill advised, but in hindsight, as Ian Buruma shows us, these efforts were in fact relatively enlightened, humane, and effective.

A poignant grace note throughout this history is Buruma's own father's story. Seized by the Nazis during the occupation of Holland, he spent much of the war in Berlin as a laborer, and by war's end was literally hiding in the rubble of a flattened city, having barely managed to survive starvation rations, Allied bombing, and Soviet shock troops when the end came. His journey home and attempted reentry into "normalcy" stand in many ways for his generation's experience.

A work of enormous range and stirring human drama, conjuring both the Asian and European theaters with equal fluency, Year Zero is a book that Ian Buruma is perhaps uniquely positioned to write. It is surely his masterpiece.

Since 1977, the New York Institute for the Humanities has brought together distinguished scholars, writers, artists, and publishing professionals to foster crucial discussions around the public humanities. For more information and to support the NYIH, visit nyihumanities.org.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

India's Development Diplomacy and Soft Power in Africa

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode, Kenneth King (University of Edinburgh) & Meera Venkatachalam (University of Mumbai), discuss their recently co-edited volume, India's Development Diplomacy and Soft Power in Africa, published by Boydell and Brewer in 2021.

India has understood its relations with Africa within the framework of South-South cooperation, where postcolonial states collaborated for scientific and technological exchanges, as well as to craft common political positions against the hegemony of 'northern' powers. However, following economic liberalisation and the rise of the political right, India's relationship with Africa has changed. Kenneth & Meera discuss some of the main themes in their book, including how the nature of Indian aid to Africa has changed over the decades; how symbols such as Gandhi have been used by the Indian government as part of its soft power strategy; how mantras of post-colonial solidarity and South-South Cooperation have been replaced by a growing sense of Indian exceptionalism in recent years, and, most importantly, what Africans make of India's growing footprint on the continent.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen is an Associate Professor at the dept. of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies.

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, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael J. Seth, "Korea at War: Conflicts That Shaped the World" (Tuttle Publishing, 2023)

Thu, 27 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Korean War “ended” exactly fifty years ago at Panmunjom. On July 27, 1953, United States and United Nations commanders on one side, and the North Koreans and Chinese commanders on the other, agreed to an immediate cessation of hostilities. Most histories of the Korean War stop there.

Yet the war merely ended in a truce, not a proper peace agreement. The specter of conflict have loomed over the Korean Peninsula in the five decades since, changing development in both North and South Korea as each tries to secure their own future in a conflict that–in theory–could return at any point.

We’re joined by Michael J. Seth, who joins the show to talk about this development and his latest book, Korea at War: Conflicts That Shaped the World (Tuttle, 2023). The book is about much more than just the war itself, as Seth looks at Korea’s pre- and post-war history, and how South Korea is unique in charting its own development while still, technically, in a state of war.

Michael J. Seth is Professor of History at James Madison University. He has authored several books on Korean history including A Concise History of Modern Korea: From the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present (Rowman & Littlefield: 2010), A Concise History of Korea: From the Neolithic to the Nineteenth Century (Rowman & Littlefield: 2006), and Education Fever: Politics, Society and the Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea (University of Hawaii Press: 2002).

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Korea at War. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sheila Miyoshi Jager, "The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Sun, 23 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Sheila Miyoshi Jager presents dramatic new telling of the dawn of modern East Asia, placing Korea at the center of a transformed world order wrought by imperial greed and devastating wars in her new book The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia (Harvard University Press, 2023).

In the nineteenth century, Russia participated in two “great games”: one, well known, pitted the tsar’s empire against Britain in Central Asia. The other, hitherto unrecognized but no less significant, saw Russia, China, and Japan vying for domination of the Korean Peninsula. In this eye-opening account, brought to life in lucid narrative prose, Dr. Miyoshi Jager argues that the contest over Korea, driven both by Korean domestic disputes and by great-power rivalry, set the course for the future of East Asia and the larger global order.

When Russia’s eastward expansion brought it to the Korean border, an impoverished but strategically located nation was wrested from centuries of isolation. Korea became a prize of two major imperial conflicts: the Sino–Japanese War at the close of the nineteenth century and the Russo–Japanese War at the beginning of the twentieth. Japan’s victories in the battle for Korea not only earned the Meiji regime its yearned-for colony but also dislodged Imperial China from centuries of regional supremacy. And the fate of the declining tsarist empire was sealed by its surprising military defeat, even as the United States and Britain sized up the new Japanese challenger.

A vivid story of two geopolitical earthquakes sharing Korea as their epicenter, The Other Great Game rewrites the script of twentieth-century rivalry in the Pacific and enriches our understanding of contemporary global affairs, from the origins of Korea’s bifurcated identity—a legacy of internal politics amid the imperial squabble—to China’s irredentist territorial ambitions and Russia’s nostalgic dreams of recovering great-power status.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Penny M. Von Eschen, "Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder Since 1989" (Duke UP, 2022)

Wed, 19 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder since 1989 (Duke University Press, 2022) Dr. Penny M. Von Eschen offers a sweeping examination of the cold war’s afterlife and the lingering shadows it casts over geopolitics, journalism, and popular culture. She shows how myriad forms of nostalgia across the globe—from those that posit a mythic national past to those critical of neoliberalism that remember a time when people believed in the possibility of a collective good—indelibly shape the post-cold war era.

When Western triumphalism moved into the global South and former Eastern bloc spaces, many articulated a powerful sense of loss and a longing for stability. Innovatively bringing together diplomatic archives, museums, films, and video games, Dr. Von Eschen shows that as the United States continuously sought new enemies for its unipolar world, cold war triumphalism fueled the ascendancy of xenophobic right-wing nationalism and the embrace of authoritarian sensibilities in the United States and beyond. Ultimately, she demonstrates that triumphalist claims that capitalism and military might won the cold war distort the past and disfigure the present, undermining democratic values and institutions.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hassan S. Khalilieh, "Islamic Law of the Sea: Freedom of Navigation and Passage Rights in Islamic Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Wed, 12 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The doctrine of the modern law of the sea is commonly believed to have developed in Renaissance Europe. The role of Islamic law of the sea and customary practices is often ignored though. In Islamic Law of the Sea: Freedom of Navigation and Passage Rights in Islamic Thought (Cambridge UP, 2019), Hassan S. Khalilieh highlights Islamic legal doctrine regarding freedom of the seas and its implementation in practice. He proves that many of the fundamental principles of the pre-modern international law governing the legal status of the high seas and the territorial sea, though originating in the Mediterranean world, are not necessarily European creations. Beginning with the commonality of the sea in the Qur'an and legal methods employed to ensure the safety, security, and freedom of movement of Muslims and aliens by land and sea, Khalilieh then goes on to examine the concepts of the territorial sea and its security premises, as well as issues surrounding piracy and its legal implications as delineated in Islamic law.

Hassan S. Khalilieh is a senior lecturer in the Maritime Civilizations and Multidisciplinary Studies departments and a senior research fellow in the Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies, Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences at the University of Haifa, Israel. His publications include Islamic Maritime Law: An Introduction (1998) and Admiralty and Maritime Laws in the Mediterranean Sea (ca.800-1050): The Kitāb Akriyat al-Sufun and the Nomos Rhodion Nautikos (2006).

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Serhii Plokhy, "The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History" (Norton, 2023)

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Despite repeated warnings from the White House, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. Why did Putin start the war--and why has it unfolded in previously unimaginable ways? Ukrainians have resisted a superior military; the West has united, while Russia grows increasingly isolated.

In The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History (Norton, 2023), Serhii Plokhy, a leading historian of Ukraine and the Cold War, offers a definitive account of this conflict, its origins, course, and the already apparent and possible future consequences. Though the current war began eight years before the all-out assault--on February 27, 2014, when Russian armed forces seized the building of the Crimean parliament--the roots of this conflict can be traced back even earlier, to post-Soviet tensions and imperial collapse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Providing a broad historical context and an examination of Ukraine and Russia's ideas and cultures, as well as domestic and international politics, Plokhy reveals that while this new Cold War was not inevitable, it was predictable.

Ukraine, Plokhy argues, has remained central to Russia's idea of itself even as Ukrainians have followed a radically different path. In a new international environment defined by the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the disintegration of the post-Cold War international order, and a resurgence of populist nationalism, Ukraine is now more than ever the most volatile fault line between authoritarianism and democratic Europe.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rotem Kowner, "Tsushima" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Rotem Kowner about Tsushima (Oxford UP, 2022), which is part of the great battle series in Oxford University press. The Battle of Tsushima, in which the Japanese Imperial Navy defeated the Russian Imperial Navy, was unprecedented in many ways. It marks the first naval victory of an Asian power over a major European power; the most devastating defeat suffered by the Imperial Russian Navy in its entire history; and the only truly decisive engagement between two battleship fleets in modern times. In addition, the Battle of Tsushima was also the most decisive naval engagement of the Russo-Japanese War and one that exerted a major impact on the course of that war. Its impact was so dramatic, in fact, that the two belligerents concluded a peace agreement within three months of the battle's conclusion. Beyond the military and diplomatic realms, being the first great defeat of a “Western” “power” by a non-Western modern military the battel had profound implications across Asia and the colonial world.

Ran Zwigenberg is an associate professor at Pennsylvania State University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Samuel Helfont, "Iraq Against the World: Saddam, America, and the Post-Cold War Order" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The move away from post-Cold War unipolarity and the rise of revisionist states like Russia and China pose a rapidly escalating and confounding threat for the liberal international order. In Iraq Against the World: Saddam, America, and the Post-Cold War Order (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Samuel Helfont offers a new narrative of Iraqi foreign policy after the 1991 Gulf War to argue that Saddam Hussein executed a political warfare campaign that facilitated this disturbance to global norms. Following the Gulf War, the UN imposed sanctions and inspections on the Iraqi state—conditions that Saddam Hussein was in no position to challenge militarily or through traditional diplomacy. Hussein did, however, wage an influence campaign designed to break the unity of the UN Security Council. The Iraqis helped to impede emerging norms of international cooperation and prodded potentially revisionist states to act on latent inclinations to undermine a liberal post-Cold War order.

Drawing on internal files from the ruling Ba'th Party, Dr. Helfont highlights previously unknown Iraqi foreign policy strategies, including the prominent use of influence operations and manipulative statesmanship. He traces Ba'thist operations around the globe—from the streets of New York and Stockholm, to the mosques of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, to the halls of power in Paris and Moscow. Iraqi Ba'thists carried out espionage, planted stories in the foreign press, established overt and covert relations with various political parties, and attempted to silence anyone who disrupted their preferred political narrative. They presented themselves simply as Iraqis concerned about the suffering of their friends and families in their home country, and, consequently, were able to assemble a loose political coalition that was unknowingly being employed to meet Iraq's strategic goals. This, in turn, divided Western states and weakened norms of cooperation and consensus toward rules-based solutions to international disputes, causing significant damage to liberal internationalism and the institutions that were supposed to underpin it. A powerful reconsideration of the history of Iraqi foreign policy in the 1990s and the early 2000s, Iraq against the World offers new insights into the evolution of the post-Cold War order.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Edward Kissi, "Africans and the Holocaust: Perceptions and Responses of Colonized and Sovereign Peoples" (Routledge, 2021)

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

This book is an original and comparative study of reactions in West and East Africa to the persecution and attempted annihilation of Jews in Europe and in former German colonies in sub-Saharan Africa during the Second World War.

An intellectual and diplomatic history of World War II and the Holocaust, Africans and the Holocaust: Perceptions and Responses of Colonized and Sovereign Peoples (Routledge, 2021) looks at the period from the perspectives of the colonized subjects of the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda, as well as the sovereign peoples of Liberia and Ethiopia, who wrestled with the social and moral questions that the war and the Holocaust raised. The five main chapters of the book explore the pre-Holocaust history of relations between Jews and Africans in West and East Africa, perceptions of Nazism in both regions, opinions of World War II, interpretations of the Holocaust, and responses of the colonized and sovereign peoples of West and East Africa to efforts by Great Britain to resettle certain categories of Jewish refugees from Europe in the two regions before and during the Holocaust.

This book will be of use to students and scholars of African history, Holocaust and Jewish studies, and international or global history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philip J. Stern, "Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Thomas Kingston is an early career scholar and a voracious reader (183 books in 2021). You can find his website at www.thomasekingston.com or reach him on twitter @thomasekingston

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Giulia Pecorella, "The United States of America and the Crime of Aggression" (Routledge, 2021)

Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Giulia Pecorella's The United States of America and the Crime of Aggression (Routledge, 2021) traces the position of the United States of America on aggression, beginning with the Declaration of Independence up to 2020, covering the four years of the Trump Administration. The decision of the Assembly of States Parties to the International Criminal Court to activate the Court's jurisdiction over the crime of aggression in 2018 has added further value to a book concerning the position and practice of one of the most influential states, a global military power and permanent member of the UN Security Council.

Organized along chronological lines, the work examines whether, or to what extent, the US position has evolved over time. The book explores how the definition of the crime can impact upon the US, notwithstanding its failure to ratify the Rome Statute. It also shows that the US practice and opinio iuris about the law applicable to the use of force might influence, as it has done in the past, the law itself.

The work will be a valuable guide for students, academics and professionals with an interest in International Criminal Law.

Jeff Bachman is an associate professor at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Frank Costigliola, "Kennan: A Life Between Worlds" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The diplomat and historian George F. Kennan (1904-2005) ranks as one of the most important figures in American foreign policy--and one of its most complex. Drawing on many previously untapped sources, Frank Costigliola's authoritative biography offers a new picture of a man of extraordinary ability and ambition whose idea of containing the Soviet Union helped ignite the Cold War but who spent the next half century trying to extinguish it. Always prescient, Kennan in the 1990s warned that the eastward expansion of NATO would spur a new cold war with Russia.

Even as Kennan championed rational realism in foreign policy, his personal and professional lives were marked by turmoil. And though he was widely respected and honored by presidents and the public, he judged his career a failure because he had been dropped as a pilot of U.S. foreign policy. Impossible to classify, Kennan was a sui generis thinker, a trenchant critic of both communism and capitalism, and a pioneering environmentalist. Living between Russia and the United States, he witnessed firsthand Stalin's tightening grip on the Soviet Union, the collapse of Europe during World War II, and the nuclear arms race of the Cold War.

An absorbing portrait of an eloquent, insightful, and sometimes blinkered iconoclast whose ideas are still powerfully relevant, Kennan: A Life Between Worlds (Princeton UP, 2023) invites us to imagine a world that Kennan fought for but was unable to bring about--one not of confrontations and crises but of dialogue and diplomacy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nicole Wegner, "Martialling Peace: How the Peacekeeper Myth Legitimises Warfare" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Margot Tudor, "Blue Helmet Bureaucrats: United Nations Peacekeeping and the Reinvention of Colonialism, 1945–1971" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sat, 17 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Blue Helmet Bureaucrats: United Nations Peacekeeping and the Reinvention of Colonialism, 1945–1971 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Margot Tudor reveals how United Nations peacekeeping staff reconfigured the functions of global governance and sites of diplomatic power in the post-war world. Despite peacekeeping operations being criticised for their colonial underpinnings, our understanding of the ways in which colonial actors and ideas influenced peacekeeping practices on the ground has been limited and imprecise.

In this multi-archival history, Dr. Tudor investigates the UN's formative armed missions and uncovers the officials that orchestrated a reinvention of colonial-era hierarchies for Global South populations on the front lines of post-colonial statehood. She demonstrates how these officials exploited their field-based access to perpetuate racial prejudices, plot political interference, and foster protracted inter-communal divisions in post-colonial conflict contexts. Bringing together histories of humanitarianism, decolonisation, and the Cold War, Blue Helmet Bureaucrats sheds new light on the mechanisms through which sovereignty was negotiated and re-negotiated after 1945.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Susan McCall Perlman, "Contesting France: Intelligence and US Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

With the defeat of France in 1940 by the Germans during World War II, its status as a world power was deeply shaken. It wasn't until the liberation by the Allies in 1944 that France was able to rebuild itself but faced many challenges both external and internal. Externally, the war against Germany still waged until May 1945. At the same time, the emerging Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union meant France would be forced to pick sides. Internally, the legacy of polarized politics of the 1930s remained with the supporters of Charles de Gaulle on one side and the French Communist Party (PCF) on the other side.

In the midst of this volatile mix were the American administrations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman trying to determine on how best American foreign policy towards France should proceed in the post-liberation era. A common perception promoted by American diplomats in France was that the country was deeply weakened by the German wartime occupation and was on the verge of not only civil war but a Communist takeover as well. This perception would be a major driving force in American foreign policy in the first years of the Cold War. It also marked the beginning of a complex dynamic between diplomacy and intelligence within the U.S. government. This gripping story is the subject of Susan McCall Perlman's Contesting France: Intelligence and US Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Susan McCall Perlman is Professor of History and Intelligence Studies at the National Intelligence University. She has published widely on US foreign relations and intelligence and is the 2020 recipient of the Robert Beland Excellence in Teaching Award.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Allan E. S. Lumba, "Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines" (Duke UP, 2022)

Thu, 15 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines (Duke UP, 2022) investigates the ways in which racial and class hierarchies shaped the monetary policy and banking systems in the Philippines. Combining historical research and normative arguments calling for unconditional decolonization, Allan E. S. Lumba advances a powerful account of how the logics and practices of racial capitalism advanced the United States’ ‘counter-decolonization’ efforts in the Philippines.

In this podcast, Lumba shares the book’s back story, his theoretical inspirations that informed his core arguments, and the importance of understanding the global capitalist order from the perspective of postcolonial nations.

Allan E. S. Lumba is a Global American Studies postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Charles Warren Center and visiting faculty in the Department of History. He has also served as resident fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago and University of Michigan's Bentley Library. His teaching experience and interests spans across myriad fields, including: Southeast Asian history, Asian American and Ethnic studies, U.S. in the World, and Comparative World history.

The open access edition of this book is available here.

Like this interview? You may also be interested in:

Martin Edwards, The IMF, the WTO & the Politics of Economic Surveillance (Routledge 2018)
Jakob Feinig, Moral Economies of Money: Politics and the Monetary Constitution of Society (Stanford University Press 2022)

Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel.

This episode was created in collaboration with Erron C. Medina of the Development Studies Program of Ateneo De Manila University and Nicole Anne Revita.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Simon Sharpe, "Five Times Faster: Rethinking the Science, Economics, and Diplomacy of Climate Change" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

We need to act five times faster to avoid dangerous climate change. As Greenland melts, Australia burns, and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, we think we know who the villains are: oil companies, consumerism, weak political leaders. But what if the real blocks to progress are the ideas and institutions that are supposed to be helping us?

Five Times Faster: Rethinking the Science, Economics, and Diplomacy of Climate Change (Cambridge UP, 2023) is an inside story from Simon Sharpe, who has spent ten years at the forefront of climate change policy and diplomacy. In our fight to avoid dangerous climate change, science is pulling its punches, diplomacy is picking the wrong battles, and economics has been fighting for the other side. This provocative and engaging book sets out how we should rethink our strategies and reorganise our efforts in the fields of science, economics, and diplomacy, so that we can act fast enough to stay safe.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nicholas W. S. Smith, "Colonial Chaos in the Southern Red Sea" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Today, the countries bordering the Red Sea are riven with instability. Why are the region's contemporary problems so persistent and interlinked? Through the stories of three compelling characters, Colonial Chaos in the Southern Red Sea (Cambridge UP, 2021) sheds light on the unfurling of anarchy and violence during the colonial era. A noble Somali sultan, a cunning Yemeni militia leader, and a Machiavellian French merchant ran amok in the southern Red Sea in the nineteenth and twentieth century. In response to colonial hostility and gunboat diplomacy, they attacked shipwrecks, launched piratical attacks, and traded arms, slaves, and drugs. Their actions contributed to the transformation of the region's international relations, redrew the political map, upended its diplomatic culture, and remodelled its traditions of maritime law, sowing the seeds of future unrest. Colonisation created chaos in the southern Red Sea. Colonial Chaos offers an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the relationship between the region's colonial past and its contemporary instability.

Drora Arussy, EdD, MA, MJS, is the Senior Director of the ASF Institute of Jewish Experience.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tobias Ide, "Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints: How Disasters Shape the Dynamics of Armed Conflicts" (MIT Press, 2023)

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Armed conflict and natural disasters have plagued the twenty-first century. Not since the end of World War II has the number of armed conflicts been higher. At the same time, natural disasters have increased in frequency and intensity over the past two decades, their impacts worsened by climate change, urbanization, and persistent social and economic inequalities. Providing the first comprehensive analysis of the interplay between natural disasters and armed conflict, Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints: How Disasters Shape the Dynamics of Armed Conflicts (MIT Press, 2023) explores the extent to which disasters facilitate the escalation or abatement of armed conflicts—as well as the ways and contexts in which combatants exploit these catastrophes.

Tobias Ide utilizes both qualitative insights and quantitative data to explain the link between disasters and the (de-)escalation of armed conflict and presents over thirty case studies of earthquakes, droughts, floods, and storms in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. He also examines the impact of COVID-19 on armed conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and the Philippines.

Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints is an invaluable addition to current debates on climate change, environmental stress, and security. Professionals and students will greatly appreciate the wealth of timely data it provides for their own investigations.

Dr. Tobias Ide is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. His work broadly focuses on the intersections of environmental change and environmental politics with peace, conflict, and security.

Sidney Michelini is a PhD student at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research with the FutureLab - Security, Ethnic Conflicts and Migration. His work focuses on how climate, climate shocks, and climate change impact conflicts of different types.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adrian Masters, "We, the King: Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish New World" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sat, 03 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

We, the King: Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish New World (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Adrian Masters challenges the dominant top-down interpretation of the Spanish Empire and its monarchs' decrees in the New World, revealing how ordinary subjects had much more say in government and law-making than previously acknowledged.

During the viceregal period spanning the post-1492 conquest until 1598, the King signed more than 110,000 pages of decrees concerning state policies, minutiae, and everything in between. Through careful analysis of these decrees, Dr. Masters illustrates how law-making was aided and abetted by subjects from various backgrounds, including powerful court women, indigenous commoners, Afro-descendant raftsmen, secret saboteurs, pirates, sovereign Chiriguano Indians, and secretaries' wives. Subjects' innumerable petitions and labor prompted – and even phrased - a complex body of legislation and legal categories demonstrating the degree to which this empire was created from the “bottom up”.

Innovative and unique, We, the King reimagines our understandings of kingship, imperial rule, colonialism, and the origins of racial categories.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chris Suh, "The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sat, 03 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion (Oxford UP, 2023) traces how American ideas about race in the Pacific were made and remade on the imperial stage before World War II. Following the Russo-Japanese War, the United States cultivated an amicable relationship with Japan based on the belief that it was a "progressive" empire akin to its own. Even as the two nations competed for influence in Asia and clashed over immigration issues in the American West, the mutual respect for empire sustained their transpacific cooperation until Pearl Harbor, when both sides disavowed their history of collaboration and cast each other as incompatible enemies.

In recovering this lost history, Chris Suh reveals the surprising extent to which debates about Korea shaped the politics of interracial cooperation. American recognition of Japan as a suitable partner depended in part on a positive assessment of its colonial rule of Korea. It was not until news of Japan's violent suppression of Koreans soured this perception that the exclusion of Japanese immigrants became possible in the United States. Central to these shifts in opinion was the cooperation of various Asian elites aspiring to inclusion in a "progressive" American empire. By examining how Korean, Japanese, and other nonwhite groups appealed to the United States, this book demonstrates that the imperial order sustained itself through a particular form of interracial collaboration that did not disturb the existing racial hierarchy.

Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Ecumenics program at Princeton Theological Seminary, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions. His research focuses on the indigenous expressions of Christianities found in Southeast Asia, particularly Christianity that is practiced in the Muslim-dominant archipelagic nation of Indonesia. More broadly, he is interested in history and the anthropology of Christianity, complexities of religious conversion and social identity, inter-religious dialogue, ecumenism, and World Christianity.

Chanhee Heo is a Ph.D. candidate in American Religions and a Ph.D. minor in the Department of History at Stanford University. Her research interests include late 19th and early 20th -century transpacific religious history with a focus on race and immigration. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post and the anthology, Migration and Diaspora, from SBL Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brantly Womack, "Recentering Pacific Asia: Regional China and World Order" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Fri, 02 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Pacific Rim of Asia – Pacific Asia – is now the world's largest and most cohesive economic region, and China has returned to its center. In this conversation, Julie Yu-Wen Chen, Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Helsinki discusses with Brantly Womack from the University of Virginia about his new book Recentering Pacific Asia: Regional China and World Order (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

China's global outlook is shaped by its regional experience, first as a pre-modern Asian center, then displaced by Western-oriented modernization, and now returning as a central producer and market in a globalized region. Developments since 2008 have been so rapid that future directions are uncertain, but China's presence, population, and production guarantee it a key role. As a global competitor, China has awakened American anxieties and the US-China rivalry has become a major concern for the rest of the world. However, rather than facing a power transition between hegemons, the US and China are primary nodes in a multi-layered, interconnected global matrix that neither can control. Brantly Womack argues that Pacific Asia is now the key venue for working out a new world order.

Recentering Pacific Asia: Regional China and World Order is written by Brantly Womack. The book contains commentaries from Wang Gungwu (National University of Singapore), Wu Yu-shan (Academia Sinica), Qin Yaqing (China Foreign Affairs University), and Evelyn Goh (Australian National University).

Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland). From 2023-2025, Julie Yu-Wen Chen is in the EU twinning project The EU in the Volatile Indo-Pacific Region (EUVIP) where she leads the preparatory research and provides supervision and counselling to junior researchers. Brantly Womack is on the international advisory board of EUVIP.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hilary Frances Aked, "Friends of Israel: The Backlash Against Palestine Solidarity" (Verso, 2023)

Tue, 30 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Is there such a thing as “the Israel lobby,” and how powerful is it really? Hilary Frances Aked's book Friends of Israel: The Backlash Against Palestine Solidarity (Verso, 2023) provides a forensically researched account of the activities of Israel's advocates in Britain, showing how they contribute to maintaining Israeli apartheid. The book traces the history and changing fortunes of key actors within the British Zionist movement in the context of the Israeli government's contemporary efforts to repress a rising tide of solidarity with Palestinians expressed through the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Offering a nuanced and politically relevant account of pro-Israel actors' strategies, tactics, and varying levels of success in key arenas of society, it draws parallels with the similar anti-boycott campaign waged by supporters of the erstwhile apartheid regime in South Africa.

Roberto Mazza is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Arthur Snell, "How Britain Broke the World: War, Greed and Blunders from Kosovo to Afghanistan (1997-2021)" (Canbury Press, 2022)

Mon, 29 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Arthur Snell's book How Britain Broke the World: War, Greed and Blunders from Kosovo to Afghanistan (1997-2021) (Canbury Press, 2022) critically assesses UK foreign policy over the past 25 years, from Kosovo in 1998 to Afghanistan in 2021, while also scrutinising British policy towards the powerhouses of the USA, Russia, India, and China. Far from being unimportant, Snell reveals, Britain has often played a pivotal role in world affairs. For instance, London supplied the false intelligence that justified the Allied invasion of Iraq and plugged Russia's corrupt elite into Western economies. Then come the bungled humanitarian interventions in foreign states. Without the UK's marginal but key role, the author argues, it's likely that wars would not have blighted the Balkans, Iraq, and Libya, hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved, and the world would be a safer place in the 2020s. Taking in Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Snell charts the key political, economic and geographic factors that drive the behaviour of the most powerful and populous countries. Like a diplomatic version of Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall, How Britain Broke the World reveals the ignominious reality of UK foreign policy and the true state of world affairs. It is a must-read for anyone interested in Britain's role in international affairs.

Philip Blood is a British historian residing in Germany. His specialist research covers military culture, war, security, genocide and the Holocaust.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Neither Friend nor Enemy: Sweden-North Korea Relations

Fri, 26 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Welcome to the fourth NIAS-Korea episode. We invite Dr. Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein to discuss Sweden-North Korea relations. It may seem odd that among the Western countries, Sweden is the one that has maintained friendlier relations with North Korea. For example, Sweden was the first Western country that opened an embassy in Pyongyang, and the embassy still operates. This is notable given that only a few Western countries currently have an embassy in North Korea. How could we make sense of this relationship? What makes Sweden maintain relatively friendlier relations with North Korea? What was Sweden’s role in the Trump-Kim Jong-un negotiations? What would happen if Sweden joined NATO? Dr. Silberstein shares his expertise and answers these questions.

About the speaker

Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein received his PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania, with a dissertation examining the historical evolution of surveillance and social control in post-1948 North Korea. His research agenda focuses broadly on North Korean society in the past and present. At the Safra Center, he is conducting a research project on ties between North Korean market actors and local government officials, exploring tensions and ties between the state and society in the North Korean market economy. He is also preparing a monograph proposal on surveillance in North Korea. Dr Katzeff Silberstein also works with think-tanks in both the United States and Europe on Korean affairs. He is a non-resident fellow at the Stimson Center and a fellow at the Swedish Institute for International Affairs, where he directs a research project on Sweden's relationship with North Korea. He is currently working on a fascinating research project on the past and present of Sweden-North Korea relations at the Swedish Institute for Foreign Affairs, with four researchers using both printed material sources from archives and oral history interviews.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert F. Trager and Joslyn N. Barnhart, "The Suffragist Peace: How Women's Votes Lead to Fewer Wars" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Thu, 25 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In the modern age, some parts of the world are experiencing a long peace. Nuclear weapons, capitalism and the widespread adoption of democratic institutions have been credited with fostering this relatively peaceful period. Yet, these accounts overlook one of the most dramatic transformations of the 20th century: the massive redistribution of political power as millions of women around the world won the right to vote.

The Suffragist Peace: How Women Shape the Politics of War (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Robert Trager and Dr. Joslyn Barnhart presents a deep and historical examination of how the political influence of women at the ballot box has shaped the course of war and peace.

Through gripping history and careful reasoning, this book examines how the political influence of women at the ballot box has shaped war and peace. What would a world ruled by women look like? For more than a hundred years, conventional wisdom held that women's votes had little effect. That view is changing - it turns out that women voters had a profound effect on the world we know and in ways we hardly understand. A world ruled by women's voices is a world that is less willing to fall in love with war as a noble end in itself, less prone to lapse into violence for the sake of maintaining an image. In other words, it is the world we live in now, more so than we have ever realised.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Suzanne Sutherland, "The Rise of the Military Entrepreneur: War, Diplomacy, and Knowledge in Habsburg Europe" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Wed, 24 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In The Rise of the Military Entrepreneur: War, Diplomacy, and Knowledge in Habsburg Europe (Cornell UP, 2022), Suzanne Sutherland explores the role of the military entrepreneur and explains how these international military figures emerged from, and exploited, the seventeenth century's momentous political, military, commercial, and scientific changes. During the Thirty Years' War, these figures traveled rapidly and frequently across Europe using private wealth, credit, and connections to raise and command the armies that rulers desperately needed. Using the individual of Raimondo Montecuccoli (1609–80), a middling nobleman from the Duchy of Modena, who became one of the most powerful men in the Austrian Habsburg monarchy, Sutherland uncovers the influence of military entrepreneurs not only commanders but also diplomats, natural philosophers, information brokers, clients, and subjects on the battlefield.

The Rise of the Military Entrepreneur explains how Montecuccoli addressed battlefield, court, and family responsibilities while contributing to the world of scholarship on an often violent, fragmented political-military landscape. As a result, Sutherland shifts the perspective on war away from the ruler and his court to instead examine the figures supplying force, along with their methods, networks, and reflections on those experiences.

Douglas Bell is a writer, teacher, and historian who lives in the Netherlands. His research interests center on American military history, American foreign policy, German history, and European Studies. Tweet him @douglasibell.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adrian R. Bazbauers and Susan Engel, "The Global Architecture of Multilateral Development Banks: A System of Debt or Development?" (Routledge, 2023)

Wed, 24 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Adrian Bazbauers and Susan Engel’s 2021 book The Global Architecture of Multilateral Development Banks: A System of Debt or Development? (Routledge, 2023) explores the evolution of the 30 functioning multilateral development banks (MDBs). MDBs have their roots in the growing system of international finance and multilateral cooperation, with the first recognizable MDB being proposed by Latin America in financial cooperation with the US in the late 1930s. That Inter-American Bank did not eventuate but was a precursor to the World Bank being negotiated at Bretton Woods in 1944. Since then, a complex network of regional, sub-regional, and specialized development banks has progressively emerged across the globe, including two significant recent entrants established by China and the BRICS.

MDBs arrange loans, credits, and guarantees for investment in member states, generally with the stated aim of fostering economic growth. They operate in both the Global North and South, though there are more MDBs focusing on emerging and developing states. While the World Bank and some of the larger regional banks have been scrutinized, little attention has been paid to the smaller banks or the overall system. This book provides the first study of all 30 MDBs and it evaluates their interrelationships. It analyses the emergence of the MDBs in relation to geopolitics, development paradigms and debt. It includes sections on each of the banks as well as on how MDBs have approached the key sectors of infrastructure, human development, and climate.

This book will be of particular interest to researchers of development finance, global governance, and international political economy.

Dr. Susan Engel is an Associate Professor in Politics and International Studies and co-Director of the Future of Rights Centre. Her research interests focus on the impact of neoliberalism on development and international political economy.

Dr Adrian Robert Bazbauers is a Senior Lecturer in International Public Sector Management, and Undergraduate Coordinator, in the School of Business at UNSW, Canberra.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philip Snow, "China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord" (Yale UP, 2023)

Thu, 18 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

If there’s a starting point to the relationship between Russia and China, it’s likely the 1650s—when Manchu and Cossack forces clash near Khabarovsk, and when Russia sends its first, and unsuccessful, embassy to China.

It’s an inopportune start to four centuries of trade, diplomacy, imperialism, ideology–and a lot of personal griping between different Russian and Chinese leaders, as charted by Philip Snow’s China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord (Yale University Press, 2023)

Snow writes of Russian territorial grabs, China’s reliance on its northern neighbor for diplomatic support and training, Russia’s confused attitude towards Asia—and then the rapid reversal of power and status with the death of Stalin.

In this interview, Philip and I talk about the China-Russia relationship, spanning four centuries–and what that history tells us about China and Russia’s relations today.

Philip Snow has traveled extensively in Russia and China since the 1960s and has lived in Hong Kong since 1994. An expert in China’s international relations, he is the author of The Star Raft: China’s Encounter with Africa (Cornell University Press: 1989) and The Fall of Hong Kong: Britain, China, and the Japanese Occupation (Yale University Press: 2003)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of China and Russia. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Algeria and France: Grievances and the Effects of Decolonialism

Thu, 18 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI's director, John Torpey interviewed Laetitia Bucaille about the factors that explain variation in resentment and grievances in former colonies drawing from the cases of Algeria and South Africa. Bucaille delves deeper into the case of Algeria and the affected populations whose identities were crossed cut by institutions and personal experiences as a former colony. Moreover, she explains how Algeria, considered not a colony but a French territory, still implemented discriminating laws against native Algerians who were deemed as second-class citizens. Finally, the author discusses the long-lasting consequences of this decolonization process and how it gets intertwined with politics and anti-Islam narratives in France.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thom Shanker and Andrew Hoehn, "Age of Danger: Keeping America Safe in an Era of New Superpowers, New Weapons, and New Threats" (Hachette Books, 2023)

Wed, 17 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Again and again, American taxpayers are asked to open their wallets and pay for a national security machine that costs $1 trillion operate. Yet time and time again, the US government gets it wrong on critical issues. So what can be done? Enter bestselling author Thom Shanker and defense expert Andrew Hoehn. With decades of national security expertise between them and access to virtually every expert, they look at what's going wrong in national security and how to make it go right.

Age of Danger: Keeping America Safe in an Era of New Superpowers, New Weapons, and New Threats (Hachette Books, 2023) looks at the major challenges facing America--from superpowers like Russia and China to emerging threats like pandemics, cybersecurity, climate change, and drones--and reimagines the national security apparatus into something that can truly keep Americans safe. Weaving together expert analysis with exclusive interviews from a new generation of national security leaders, Shanker and Hoehn argue that the United States must create an industrial-grade, life-saving machine out of a system that, for too long, was focused only on deterring adversaries and carrying out global military operations. It is a timely and crucial call to action--a call that if heeded, could save Americans lives, money, and our very future on the global stage.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrew I. Port, "Never Again: Germans and Genocide After the Holocaust" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Wed, 17 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

As reports of mass killings in Bosnia spread in the middle of 1995, Germans faced a dilemma. Should the Federal Republic deploy its military to the Balkans to prevent a genocide, or would departing from postwar Germany’s pacifist tradition open the door to renewed militarism? In short, when Germans said “never again,” did they mean “never again Auschwitz” or “never again war”?

Looking beyond solemn statements and well-meant monuments, Andrew I. Port examines how the Nazi past shaped German responses to the genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda—and further, how these foreign atrocities recast Germans’ understanding of their own horrific history. In the late 1970s, the reign of the Khmer Rouge received relatively little attention from a firmly antiwar public that was just “discovering” the Holocaust. By the 1990s, the genocide of the Jews was squarely at the center of German identity, a tectonic shift that inspired greater involvement in Bosnia and, to a lesser extent, Rwanda. Germany’s increased willingness to use force in defense of others reflected the enthusiastic embrace of human rights by public officials and ordinary citizens. At the same time, conservatives welcomed the opportunity for a more active international role involving military might—to the chagrin of pacifists and progressives at home.

Making the lessons, limits, and liabilities of politics driven by memories of a troubled history harrowingly clear, Never Again: Germans and Genocide After the Holocaust (Harvard UP, 2023) is a story with deep resonance for any country confronting a dark past.

Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Claire Provost and Matt Kennard, "Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Wed, 17 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

As European empires crumbled in the 20th century, the power structures that had dominated the world for centuries were up for renegotiation. Yet instead of a rebirth for democracy, what emerged was a silent coup – namely, the unstoppable rise of global corporate power.

Exposing the origins of this epic power grab as well as its present-day consequences, Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Claire Provost & Matt Kennard is the result of two investigative journalist's reports from 30 countries around the world. It provides an explosive guide to the rise of a corporate empire that now dictates how resources are allocated, how territories are governed, and how justice is defined.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

China and the New Cold War: A Conversation with Matt Pottinger

Tue, 16 May 2023 22:50:37 -0000

What does Xi Jinping want, and what is he afraid of? What is the future of China's relationship with Russia? What should the United States be doing to counter China? Matt Pottinger, Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and former Deputy National Security Advisor, joins Madison's Notes to answer these questions and others.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Aarie Glas, "Practicing Peace: Conflict Management in Southeast Asia and South America" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Mon, 15 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Southeast Asia and South America are regions made up of largely illiberal states lacking stabilizing great powers or collective identities. But despite persistent territorial disputes, regime instability, and interstate rivalries, both regions have avoided large-scale war for decades. What accounts for the lack of war in these regions, and importantly, how are conflicts managed?

In Practicing Peace: Conflict Management in Southeast Asia and South America (Oxford University Press, 2022), Dr. Aarie Glas offers a comparative regional perspective on conflict management and diplomacy in Southeast Asia and South America. Dr. Glas finds that regional interstate relations are shaped by particular habitual dispositions—discrete sets of processual and substantive qualities of relations understood and enacted by diplomatic communities of practice. Different habitual dispositions in each case shape conflict management and regionalism in important ways, and lead to a tolerance of limited regional violence. Dr. Glas expands on new developments in social International Relations theory to develop a practice-oriented and interpretive account of regional relations and explores the existence of habitual dispositions across crucial cases of regional conflict management, including the Southeast Asian response to the Preah Vihear dispute in 2011 and the South American response to the Cenepa conflict in 1995.

Drawing on novel research methods and detailed interviews with regional practitioners, Practicing Peace challenges existing scholarly claims of peace in Southeast Asia and South America. Instead, Dr. Glas argues that officials successfully manage pervasive conflict short of war in both regions. He provides an in-depth look into how diplomacy unfolds and peace is practiced within diplomatic communities, from government actors to organizational officials, as they attempt to respond to and resolve territorial disputes.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matthew Jagel, "Khmer Nationalist: Sơn Ngc Thành, the CIA, and the Transformation of Cambodia" (Northern Illinois UP, 2023)

Mon, 15 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Khmer Nationalist: Sơn Ngc Thành, the CIA, and the Transformation of Cambodia (Northern Illinois UP, 2023) is a political history of Cambodia from World War II until 1975, examining the central role of Sõn Ngoc Thành. The book is a story of nationalist movements, political intrigue, coup attempts, war, and American intelligence operations. Matthew Jagel shows how central Sõn Ngoc Thành was to the rise of Cambodian nationalism, the brief period of Japanese dominance, the fight for independence from France, and the establishment of ties with the United States. Factoring Sõn Ngoc Thành into a discussion of Cambodian political history is a major contribution that will advance scholarly discourse about Cold War politics in Southeast Asia. Sõn Ngoc Thành’s career requires us to think about pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodia with much greater nuance.

Dr. Matthew Jagel earned his MA at Northern Illinois University with a thesis entitled “PHILCAG: The History of Filipino Involvement in the Vietnam War” and his Ph.D. with a dissertation on Sõn Ngoc Thành (the source material for this book). Khmer Nationalist: Son Ngoc Thanh, the CIA, and the Transformation of Cambodia is his first book. He has taught at Northern Illinois University and worked for NIU’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Dr. Jagel currently teaches at St. Xavier University in Chicago. When he’s not doing all this amazing academic work, he’s causing trouble with Dr. Eric Jones, his co-host and unindicted co-conspirator, on Napalm in the Morning: The Vietnam War through Film, a podcast that asks serious questions about why John Wayne is facing the wrong way at sunset in The Green Berets and praises the artistic triumph that is Operation Dumbo Drop.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Theodor Tudoroiu and Anna Kuteleva, "China in the Global South: Impact and Perceptions" (Springer, 2023)

Sat, 13 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Using a multidisciplinary approach and case studies based on fieldwork in nine countries scattered across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Oceania, China in the Global South: Impact and Perceptions (Springer, 2023) scrutinizes the frequently ignored agency of the Global South sub-national actors in their interactions with rising China. Diverse case studies engage with two interrelated questions. What are the real economic, political, and social impacts of China’s growing presence in the Global South? And, more critically, how do the state and societies of the Global South frame and interpret their interactions with China amid its rise? Consequently, the volume analyzes how sub-national actors respond to China’s emergence as an increasingly consequential power in the Global South and whether they are attracted by cooperation models proposed by Beijing or deterred by its newfound assertiveness.

Each chapter of this volume identifies and fills a gap in the literature on China’s rise by offering a nuanced perspective on its relations with the Global South that captures such variables as social context, intersubjective meanings, and identities. They also illuminate often neglected aspects of China’s role in the international politics of development and identify emerging trends in South-South cooperation. Critically, the central argument of the volume is that the agency of sub-state and non-state actors in developing countries meaningfully influences the evolution of their interactions with China. Far from being passive recipients of Beijing-constructed images and cooperation models, these actors are fully aware of their identity and interests and respond accordingly to China’s increasingly visible presence in the Global South.

All chapters are based on extensive fieldwork and intimate knowledge of spaces whose dynamics often seem complicated or obscure to outside observers. Building their analysis on firsthand empirical findings, each contributor provides an improved and nuanced understanding of China’s interactions with diverse, frequently divergent, and complex state-society systems of the Global South. A multidisciplinary approach enriches the volume and allows us to bring together insights from International Relations, Political Geography, Government, Development Studies, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Media Studies, and International Communication Studies.

Theodor Tudoroiu is a senior lecturer at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine campus, Trinidad and Tobago.

Anna Kuteleva is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work intertwines international relations, development studies, energy security, and feminist-informed approaches to politics.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Serhii Plokhy, "The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History" (Norton, 2023)

Fri, 12 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

"The Ukrainian nation will emerge from this war more united and certain of its identity than at any other point in its modern history," writes Serhii Plokhy at the end of The Russo-Ukrainian War (Norton, 2023).

But that's not all, says the man acclaimed by the Financial Times as “the world's foremost historian of Ukraine” - author of Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, and Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

"Ukraine’s successful resistance to Russian aggression is destined to promote Russia's own nation-building project. Russia and its elites now have little choice but to reimagine their country's identity by parting ways not only with the imperialism of the Tsarist past but also with the anachronistic model of a Russian nation consisting of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians. By paying an enormous price in wealth and blood of its citizens, Ukraine is terminating the era of Russian dominance in a good part of eastern Europe and challenging Moscow's claim to primacy in the rest of the post-Soviet space".

Serhii Plokhy is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard and director of the university's Ukrainian Research Institute.

*The author's own book recommendations are The Zelensky Effect by Olga Onuch and Henry Hale (Hurst, 2022) and Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990 by Katja Hoyer (Allen Lane, 2023)

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the Twenty-Four Two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James M. Zimmerman, "The Peking Express: The Bandits Who Stole a Train, Stunned the West, and Broke the Republic of China" (PublicAffairs, 2023)

Thu, 11 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Lucy Aldrich, sister-in-law to John D. Rockefeller Jr. and daughter of Rhode Island Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, joked in a letter to her sister that she had an easy out for any boring conversation: For the rest of my life, when I am ‘stalled’ conversationally, it would be a wonderful thing to fall back on: ‘Oh, I must tell you about the time I was captured by Chinese bandits.’

Aldrich was one of many foreign grandees traveling on a 1923 Beijing-bound train from Shanghai, captured by the Shandong Provisional Army, a ragtag group of bandits who hoped the American, British, and European hostages might force China’s government and its many warlords to accede to its demands.

The hostage situation is the subject of The Peking Express: The Bandits Who Stole a Train, Stunned the West, and Broke the Republic of China (PublicAffairs, 2023), from James M. Zimmerman, who studies the frantic efforts by diplomats, China’s government and, at times, the hostages and bandits themselves in avoiding a bloody outcome.

In this interview, James and I talk about what became known as the “Lincheng Incident,” and how this hostage situation and potential diplomatic disaster may have changed the course of Chinese history.

James M. Zimmerman is a Beijing-based lawyer who has lived and worked in China for over 25 years. He is among China's leading foreign lawyers, and is the author of the China Law Deskbook, published by the American Bar Association, and is frequently featured as a political commentator on US-China relations in various print and broadcast media around the globe. He is the former four-term Chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ewelina U. Ochab and David Alton, "State Responses to Crimes of Genocide: What Went Wrong and How to Change It" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

Mon, 08 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In State Responses to Crimes of Genocide: What Went Wrong and How to Change it (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) Dr Ewelina U. Ochab and Lord Alton of Liverpool bring together ongoing situations of genocide around the globe. Foregrounding the testimonies of victims, the authors' multiple visits to the aftermath of atrocities, and the countless actions taken by Lord Alton in British Parliament over his 40 year political career, this book is a chilling but essential read which compels a response. Atrocities are contextualised in the history of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It poses the question as to what, if anything, has improved since the Genocide Convention was enacted in 1948.

In our interview, Dr Ochab and Lord Alton make the case that the international response to recent and ongoing genocides perpetrated against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, against belief minorities in Syria and Iraq, and in Nigeria and Dafur, have been inadequate. Instead, the global community must act to predict, prevent, protect and punish genocide. And while recent responses to these atrocities would seem to give little hope for the future, the book does aim to motivate action to prevent the crime of genocide in the future.

Dr Ewelina U. Ochab is a human rights advocate, author and co-founder of the Coalition for Genocide Response.

Lord David Alton of Liverpool was a Member of the House of Commons in British Parliament for 18 years, and is now an Independent Crossbench Life Peer.

Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nina Hall, "Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era: Think Global, Act Local" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Mon, 08 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era (Oxford UP, 2022) explores the role of digital advocacy organizations, a major new addition to the international arena. Organizations such as MoveOn, GetUp, and Campact derive power and influence from their ability to rapidly mobilize members on-line and off-line and are shaping public opinion on many issues including climate change, trade, and refugees. Research in international relations (IR) has highlighted the influence of non-governmental organizations, which wield power through their expertise and long-term, moral commitment to an issue. However, no IR scholars have explored the spread and power of digital advocacy organizations. Nina Hall provides a detailed investigation of how these organizations have harnessed digitally networked power and can quickly respond to the most salient issues of the day, and mobilize large memberships, to put pressure on politicians. She finds that these organizations operate in a globalized world but tackle transnational problems by focusing on national targets. This new generation of activists have formed a strong transnational network, but still see the state as the locus of power.

Nina Hall is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Europe. Her research explores the role of transnational advocacy and international organizations in international relations. Her first book explored how international organizations have adapted to climate change: Displacement, Development and Climate Change: International Organizations Moving Beyond their Mandates? (Routledge, 2016). Nina holds a DPhil (PhD) in International Relations from the University of Oxford and a master's degree from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She previously worked as a Lecturer at the Hertie School of Governance.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephen Roach, "Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives" (Yale UP, 2022)

Sat, 06 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Denial is a classic symptom of codependency ... Lacking a sense of self, codependent partners tend to be hypersensitive to criticism or negative feedback, preferring instead to deflect it onto others. The resulting denial fuels an escalating cycle of blame and conflict that drives codependent partners apart. Unfortunately, this progressively dysfunctional pathology applies all too well to the conflict between the United States and China. The United States sees its trade deficit as China’s fault, as if its own lack of saving had nothing to do with it. China sees its surplus saving and its related current account and trade surpluses as benevolent support for deficit-prone America, as if its own underfunded social safety net and the resulting suppression of personal consumption were not its own doing. Both economies are steeped in denial over the effects of their self-inflicted saving imbalances. Each then turns that denial into blame directed at the other.

– Stephen Roach, Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives (Yale UP, 2022)

In the short span of four years, America and China have entered a trade war, a tech war, and a new Cold War. This conflict between the world’s two most powerful nations wouldn’t have happened were it not for an unnecessary clash of false narratives. America falsely blames its trade and technology threats on China yet overlooks its shaky saving foundation. China falsely blames its growth challenges on America’s alleged containment of market-based socialism, ignoring its failed economic rebalancing.

In a hard-hitting analysis of both nations’ economies, politics, and policies, Stephen Roach argues that much of the rhetoric on both sides is dangerously misguided, amplified by information distortion, and more a reflection of each nation’s fears and vulnerabilities than a credible assessment of the risks they face. Outlining the disastrous toll of conflict escalation between China and America, Roach offers a new road map to restoring a mutually advantageous relationship.

A rare combination of thought leadership on Wall Street and academia places Stephen Roach in the unique position as a leading practitioner of analytical macroeconomics, and he is one of the country’s most influential economists. A forecaster by training in his early days as a Fed economist, Stephen Roach has long been mindful of the perils of historical extrapolation. As seen through that lens, his vision of the “Next China” grew out of this deep respect for the past as a template for the exciting but daunting possibilities of China’s uncertain future. Roach’s focus on the US-China relationship is an outgrowth of the interplay between two major strands of his professional experience — a leading US economist and an influential analyst of a rising China. Roach’s analyses and opinions on China, the United States, and the global economy have long helped to shape policy debates from Beijing to Washington.

Professor Stephen Roach is a Senior Fellow of the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School. He joined the Yale faculty in 2010 after 30 years at Morgan Stanley, mainly as the firm’s chief economist heading up a highly regarded global team followed by several years as the Hong Kong-based Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. He was also a Senior Lecturer at Yale’s School of Management and has drawn on his rich experience and developed popular new courses on Asia — notably "The Next China" and "The Lessons of Japan." His prolific writings also include two other books Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China (2014), and The Next Asia: Opportunities and Challenges for a New Globalization (2009). The professor’s work has appeared in both domestic and international media, as well as academic journals and in congressional testimony over his long and ongoing career.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elisabeth B. Armstrong, "Bury the Corpse of Colonialism: The Revolutionary Feminist Conference of 1949" (U California Press, 2023)

Sat, 06 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In 1949, women from across the world traveled to Beijing for the Asian Women’s Conference to discuss how to combat the dual threats of colonial rule and a new post-war global imperialism. These activists developed a groundbreaking political strategy, which assigned different roles to women living in colonial nations and those still colonized, arguing that both had a part to place in creating a more just global peace.

In Bury the Corpse of Colonialism: The Revolutionary Feminist Conference of 1949 (University of California Press, 2023), Elisabeth Armstrong looks more closely at the lives of the women who attended the conference. Their backgrounds in anticolonial struggles helped shape the work of the umbrella organization—the Women’s International Democratic Federation—that supported the convening. The book profiles a range of women from Indonesia, Vietnam, the United States, France, India, Iraq, and China among others, who had been involved in armed revolution, antifascist resistance, and leftist party politics worldwide. In the preparations and travel that led to the conference they butted heads, but also built lasting friendships with each other through their activism. Their collective efforts helped create a framework for internationalist solidarity for women’s emancipation in a world structured through militarism, capitalism, patriarchy, and the seeming impossibility of justice.

Rebecca Turkington is a PhD Candidate in History at Cambridge University studying transnational women’s networks.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrew Small, "No Limits: The Inside Story of China's War with the West" (Melville House, 2022)

Thu, 04 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Andrew Small about his book No Limits: The Inside Story of China's War with the West (Melville House, 2022).

Winston Churchill famously described Russia in 1939 as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” But as Andrew Small correctly argues here, China’s path forward has often been laid out quite explicitly by its authoritarian leader Xi Jinping in speeches to the Community Party and elsewhere. The totality of those proclamations is that a real battle lies ahead, perhaps even in military terms. Will China continue to back Russia? Will China ultimately invade Taiwan? Why should Western companies be singularly allowed to decide whether to share their advanced technology with China? Where to draw the line between economic reward and risk in a global economy that is nevertheless splintering in significant ways. Those and more topics get covered here by a guest who is currently based in Berlin but has spent considerable amounts of time in Beijing.

Andrew Small is a senior transatlantic fellow with the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. His previous book, The China-Pakistan Axis, received broad praise from the likes of the New York Review of Books, The Economist, and Foreign Affairs.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His latest two books are Blah Blah Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Lingo and Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jan Ke-Schutte, "Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations" (U California Press, 2023)

Wed, 03 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Today I had the pleasure of talking to Jay Ke-Schutte on his just released book, Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations (U California Press, 2023). Angloscene examines Afro-Chinese interactions within Beijing's aspirationally cosmopolitan student class. Jay Ke-Schutte explores the ways in which many contemporary interactions between Chinese and African university students are mediated through complex intersectional relationships with whiteness, the English language, and cosmopolitan aspiration. At the heart of these tensions, a question persistently emerges: How does English become more than a language—and whiteness more than a race? Engaging in this inquiry, Ke-Schutte explores twenty-first century Afro-Chinese encounters as translational events that diagram the discursive contours of a changing transnational political order—one that will certainly be shaped by African and Chinese relations.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Graveyard of Empires: A Conversation with Ambassador Nathan Sales

Tue, 02 May 2023 14:32:56 -0000

What went wrong in Afghanistan, and who is to blame? Is America safer today than on September 10, 2001? What lessons should the leaders of America's foreign policy draw from the war in Afghanistan? Ambassador Nathan Sales is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the former U.S. State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism, and former acting Under Secretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights. He joins the show to answer these questions and others.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stéfanie von Hlatky, "Deploying Feminism: The Role of Gender in NATO Military Operations" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Mon, 01 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In 1995, the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing launched the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. Successive UN Security Council resolutions highlighted the need to include more women in peace processes, the perpetration of gender-based violence during war, the underrepresentation of women as peacekeepers, and the need for greater diversity at all levels of governance to respond to international security challenges. These norms seemed clear, feminist, and ambitious.

Dr. Stéfanie von Hlatky’s new book, Deploying Feminism: The Role of Gender in NATO Military Operation (Oxford UP, 2022), argues that these WPS norms were distorted during the implementation process. NATO, a predominantly male organizations experimented with gender mainstreaming but instead of serving general equality goals, the Women, Peace, and Security norms served operational effectiveness. Women on the battlefield in Afghanistan and Iraq were seen as a military asset – because they were able to interact with local women and children or more effectively get information from male inhabitants. The ambitious Women, Peace, and Security global norms ultimately left military culture untouched.

Deploying Feminism provides a detailed account of the changes made within the NATO military due to WPS norms. Using comparative case studies, interviews, and feminist I.R. scholarship, Dr. von Hlatky examines why norm distortion occurs and how the military carries it out. She recommends ways that the military might implement gender norms without distortion. distorting it.

Dr. Stéfanie von Hlatky is an Associate professor of political studies and Canada Research Chair on Gender, Security, and the Armed Forces at Queen’s University. She is also fellow at the Centre for International and Defence Policy (CIDP). She is the author of American Allies in Times of War: The Great Asymmetry (Oxford University Press, 2013) and co-editor of Going to War?: Trends in Military Interventions (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016).

Daniella Campos served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.

Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scott Carney and Jason Miklian, "The Vortex: A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation" (Ecco Press, 2022)

Sat, 29 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In November 1970, a storm set a collision course with the most densely populated coastline on Earth. Over the course of just a few hours, the Great Bhola Cyclone would kill 500,000 people and begin a chain reaction of turmoil, genocide, and war. The Vortex: A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation (Ecco Press, 2022) is the dramatic story of how that storm sparked a country to revolution.

Bhola made landfall during a fragile time, when Pakistan was on the brink of a historic election. The fallout ignited a conflagration of political intrigue, corruption, violence, idealism, and bravery that played out in the lives of tens of millions of Bangladeshis. Authors Scott Carney and Jason Miklian take us deep into the story of the cyclone and its aftermath, told through the eyes of the men and women who lived through it, including the infamous president of Pakistan, General Yahya Khan, and his close friend Richard Nixon; American expats Jon and Candy Rhode; soccer star-turned-soldier Hafiz Uddin Ahmad; and a young Bengali revolutionary, Mohammed Hai.

Thrillingly paced and written with incredible detail, The Vortex is not just a story about the painful birth of a new nation but also a universal tale of resilience and liberation in the face of climate emergency that affects every single person on the planet.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robin Prior, "Conquer We Must: A Military History of Britain, 1914-1945" (Yale UP, 2022)

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The First and Second World Wars were separated by a mere two decades, making the period 1914-1945 an unprecedentedly intense and violent era of history. But how did Britain develop its complex military strategy during these wars, and how were decisions made by those at the top?

Conquer We Must: A Military History of Britain, 1914-1945 (Yale UP, 2022) tells the complex story of this military decision-making, revealing how politicians attempted to control strategy--but had little influence on how the army, navy, and air force actually fought.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why do Transatlantic Relations Matter?

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

This week on International Horizons, we present RBI's director John Torpey's interview with David Gill, General Consul of Germany, in New York to celebrate the 2023 Otto and Frank Walter Memorial Lecture. The conversation goes explaining the term “Zeitenwende” and what that entails for Germans, its history and how the military approach of Germany came to a new era. David Gill also discusses the effects of the historical division East-West in Germany in modern day politics, the position of Germany in the Russian War on Ukraine, the recent events in transatlantic relations and the importance of cooperation between US and Germany. Finally, Gill comments on his personal experiences and views of the United States as a diplomat as he is off to return to his motherland.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why do we Still Need Statesmanship?

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In an era of broad disappointment in the integrity of political figures, Dr. Daniel J. Mahoney, author of The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation (Encounter Books, 2022) revives the idea of statesmanship, dwelling on figures ranging from Alexis de Tocqueville to Vaclav Havel, all of whom sought to preserve freedom in times of crisis.

Professor Mahoney, a 2020-21 Garwood Visiting Fellow here at the Madison Program, is a professor emeritus at Assumption University and fellow at the Claremont Institute. His most recent book has been awarded the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's 2023 Conservative Book of the Year award, which honors thoughtful books that contribute to debate about important conservative ideas.

More on Dr. Mahoney here
His book, The Statesman as Thinker
ISI's "Conservative Book of the Year" award

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Imprisoned in Iran: A Conversation with Wang Xiyue

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

For 40 months, Wang Xiyue was imprisoned in Iran on false charges of espionage. A doctoral candidate in history at Princeton University, Wang Xiyue joins the show to discuss his imprisonment and U.S.-Iranian relations.

Xiyue's essay "What I learned in an Iranian prison" is here. His essay "Don’t let Iran’s human rights be sacrificed at the altar of a nuclear deal is here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Future of Eastern Europe: A Discussion with Zsuzsanna Szelényi

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been met with a range of responses in Eastern Europe – with some leaders offering muted solace to Vladimir Putin and others arming Ukraine. To learn more about why that has happened and the future Eastern Europe Owen Bennett Jones has been speaking to Zsuzsanna Szelényi a Hungarian writer, politician, and foreign policy expert. Szelényi is the author of Tainted Democracy: Viktor Orbán and the Subversion of Hungary (Hurst, 2022).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paul Hansbury, "Belarus in Crisis: From Domestic Unrest to the Russia-Ukraine War" (Hurst, 2023)

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The war in Ukraine is entering what could well be its decisive phase as Kyiv prepares a counter-offensive and Russia announces plans to deploy tactical nuclear weapons into Belarus as early as the summer.

More than ever before, this moves Belarus onto the front line of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and its confrontation with NATO. Yet, for three decades, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenka has tried to walk a tightrope between hugging Moscow close and clinging onto policy independence that is domestically popular and secures power for him, his family, and his allies. His increasing economic dependence and the war to his south have forced “Europe’s last dictator” to pick a side.

In Belarus in Crisis: From Domestic Unrest to the Russia–Ukraine War (Hurst, 2023), Paul Hansbury explains why Lukashenka had no choice but to buckle. He writes that "a 'quiet' annexation of Belarus to Russia is largely happening, even if many Belarusians are unaware of the fact" and “the outcome of the Russo-Ukraine war has arguably become the decisive factor shaping Berlarus's future statehood”.

Educated at Birkbeck, University of London, and St Antony's College Oxford, Paul Hansbury is a consulting analyst whose doctoral research was into the foreign policies of small powers - using Belarus as his primary case study.

*His own book recommendations were Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? by Karen Dawisha (Simon & Schuster, 2014) and Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard by Joseph Conrad (Penguin Classics, 2007 - first published 1904).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the Twenty-Four Two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cao Yin, "Chinese Sojourners in Wartime Raj, 1942-45" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Since the outbreak of the Pacific War, British India had been taken as the main logistic base for China's war against the Japanese. Chinese soldiers, government officials, professionals, and merchants flocked into India for training, business opportunities, retreat, and rehabilitation. Chinese Sojourners in Wartime Raj, 1942-45 (Oxford University Press, 2022) by Yin Cao is about how the activities of the Chinese sojourners in wartime India caused great concerns to the British colonial regime and the Chinese Nationalist government alike and how these sojourners responded to the surveillance, discipline, and checks imposed by the governments. The book demonstrates Chinese state building projects in British India during World War II and uncovers the British colonial anxieties toward overseas Chinese. It also provides fresh explanations on the origins of the postwar India-China conflicts. Overall, this book provides a subaltern perspective on the history of modern India-China relations, a topic that has been dominated by accounts of elite cultural interaction and geopolitical machination.

Yin Cao is associate professor and Cyrus Tang Scholar in the Department of History at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. He studies global history, modern Indian history, the British Empire, and India-China connections.

Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Unalienable Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy: A Conversation with Secretary Pompeo and Ambassador Glendon

Sun, 16 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

What is the relationship between America's Founding principles and her foreign policy? What are unalienable rights and how do we know they exist? How have other nations responded to the final report of the U.S. Department of State's Commission on Unalienable Rights? Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo and Mary Ann Glendon, Chair of the Commission on Unalienable Rights, join Madison's Notes to answer these questions and others.

The Final Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights is here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Samuel Ramani, "Putin's War on Ukraine: Russia's Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution" (Hurst, 2023)

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Even as Vladimir Putin massed close to 200,000 troops on Ukraine's border in February 2022, many experts claimed it was a bluff. At worst he would take the Donetsk and Luhansk regions but a full-scale invasion could only fail in the long term and the Russian president wasn't stupid. How to explain his decision? Did Russia feel besieged by NATO's eastern expansion and did Putin himself feel threatened by internal challengers?

No, writes Samuel Ramani in Putin’s War on Ukraine: Russia’s Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution (Hurst, 2023) "The primary motivation for Putin's invasion of Ukraine was to overturn the 2014 Euro-Maidan revolution and its outcomes. Putin's counterrevolutionary agenda stemmed from his desire to reassert Russia's hegemony over Ukraine and promote his brand of illiberalism within the post-Soviet space."

A tutor in politics and international relations at Oxford and an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, Samuel Ramani works at the intersection between Russian domestic politics, national identity and foreign policy-making and is a frequent contributor to Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, Newsweek, the BBC, and CNN.

*His book recommendations are Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia by Timothy Frye (Princeton University Press, 2021) and How to Fight a War by Mike Martin (Hurst, 2023)

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the Twenty-Four Two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lachlan McNamee, "Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Over the past few centuries, vast areas of the world have been violently colonized by settlers. But why did states like Australia and the United States stop settling frontier lands during the twentieth century? At the same time, why did states loudly committed to decolonization like Indonesia and China start settling the lands of such minorities as the West Papuans and Uyghurs? Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop (Princeton University Press, 2023) by Dr. Lachlan McNamee traces this bewildering historical reversal, explaining when and why indigenous peoples suffer displacement at the hands of settlers.

Dr. McNamee challenges the notion that settler colonialism can be explained by economics or racial ideologies. He tells a more complex story about state building and the conflicts of interest between indigenous peoples, states, and settlers. Drawing from a rich array of historical evidence, Dr. McNamee shows that states generally colonize frontier areas in response to security concerns. Elite schemes to populate contested frontiers with loyal settlers, however, often fail. As societies grow wealthier and cities increasingly become magnets for migration, states ultimately lose the power to settle frontier lands.

Settling for Less uncovers the internal dynamics of settler colonialism and the diminishing power of colonizers in a rapidly urbanizing world. Contrasting successful and failed colonization projects in Australia, Indonesia, China, and beyond, this book demonstrates that economic development—by thwarting colonization—has proven a powerful force for indigenous self-determination.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kate Cronin-Furman, "Hypocrisy and Human Rights: Resisting Accountability for Mass Atrocities" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Hypocrisy and Human Rights: Resisting Accountability for Mass Atrocities (Cornell University Press, 2022) examines what human rights pressure does when it does not work. Repressive states with absolutely no intention of complying with their human rights obligations often change course dramatically in response to international pressure. They create toothless commissions, permit but then obstruct international observers' visits, and pass showpiece legislation while simultaneously bolstering their repressive capacity.

Covering debates over transitional justice in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Cambodia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and other countries, Kate Cronin-Furman investigates the diverse ways in which repressive states respond to calls for justice from human rights advocates, UN officials, and Western governments who add their voices to the victims of mass atrocities to demand accountability. She argues that although international pressure cannot elicit compliance in the absence of domestic motivations to comply, the complexity of the international system means that there are multiple audiences for both human rights behavior and advocacy and that pressure can produce valuable results through indirect paths.

Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Laura Hobson Faure, "A 'Jewish Marshall Plan': The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France" (Indiana UP, 2022)

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

While the role the United States played in France’s liberation from Nazi Germany is widely celebrated, it is less well known that American Jewish individuals and organizations mobilized to reconstruct Jewish life in France after the Holocaust. In A 'Jewish Marshall Plan': The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France (Indiana UP, 2022), Laura Hobson Faure explores how American Jews committed themselves and hundreds of millions of dollars to bring much needed aid to their French coreligionists.

Hobson Faure sheds light on American Jewish chaplains, members of the Armed Forces, and those involved with Jewish philanthropic organizations who sought out Jewish survivors and became deeply entangled with the communities they helped to rebuild. While well intentioned, their actions did not always meet the needs and desires of the French Jews.

A 'Jewish Marshall Plan' examines the complex interactions, exchanges, and solidarities created between American and French Jews following the Holocaust. Challenging the assumption that French Jews were passive recipients of aid, this work reveals their work as active partners who negotiated their own role in the reconstruction process.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Susan Allen and Amy Yuen, "Bargaining in the UN Security Council: Setting the Global Agenda" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Even after seventy-five years, the UN Security Council meets nearly every day. They respond to a range of threats to international peace and security, but not all threats. Why does the Security Council take up some issues for discussion and not others? What factors shape the Council's actions, if they take any action at all?

Adapting insights from legislative bargaining, Bargaining in the UN Security Council: Setting the Global Agenda (Oxford UP, 2022) demonstrates that the agenda-setting powers granted in the institutional rules offer less powerful Council members the opportunity to influence the content of a resolution without jeopardizing its passage. The Council also decides when to conduct public or private diplomacy. The analysis shows how external factors like international and domestic public reactions motivate grandstanding behaviors and shape resolutions. New quantitative data on meetings and outside options provide support for these claims. The book also explores the dynamics of the formal analysis in three cases: North Korean nuclear proliferation, the negotiations leading up to NATO bombing in Serbia over Kosovo, and the elected member-led process to codify the principles of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. The book argues that while the powerful veto members do have great influence over the Council, the rules of the most consequential security institution influence its policy outcomes, just as they do in any other international institution.

Susan Allen is an associate (soon to be full!) professor of political science at the University of Mississippi. She received her Ph.D. from Emory University and bachelor's degree from Guilford College. In addition to Bargaining in the UN Security Council, she has published articles on economic and military intervention in International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Peace Research, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Political Research Quarterly, Conflict Management and Peace Science among others. In her spare time, she’s an associate editor at Foreign Policy Analysis. You can also find her on Twitter @lady_professor.

Amy Yuen is a professor of political science and department chair at Middlebury College in Vermont. Alongside her work on the UN Security Council, she has published articles on third-party intervention, peacekeeping, peace duration, and research methods in International Organization, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Political Analysis, International Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Peace Research among others. She is also an associate editor for Conflict Management and Peace Science.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steve Kemper, "Our Man in Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbor" (Mariner Books, 2022)

Sat, 08 Apr 2023 04:00:00 -0000

Our Man in Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbor (Mariner Books, 2022) is a riveting, behind-the-scenes account of the personalities and contending forces in Tokyo during the volatile decade that led to World War II, as seen through the eyes of the American ambassador who attempted to stop the slide to war.

Into this maelstrom stepped Joseph C. Grew, America’s most experienced and talented diplomat. When Grew was appointed ambassador to Japan, not only was the country in turmoil, its relationship with America was rapidly deteriorating. For the next decade, Grew attempted to warn American leaders about the risks of Japan’s raging nationalism and rising militarism, while also trying to stabilize Tokyo’s increasingly erratic and volatile foreign policy. From domestic terrorism by Japanese extremists to the global rise of Hitler and the fateful attack on Pearl Harbor, the events that unfolded during Grew’s tenure proved to be pivotal for Japan, and for the world. His dispatches from the darkening heart of the Japanese empire would prove prescient—for his time, and for our own.

Drawing on Grew’s diary of his time in Tokyo as well as U.S. embassy correspondence, diplomatic dispatches, and firsthand Japanese accounts, Our Man in Tokyo brings to life a man who risked everything to avert another world war, the country where he staked it all—and the abyss that swallowed it.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spofity here. War Books in on YouTube and on Facebook.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David I. Kertzer, "The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler" (Random House, 2022)

Thu, 06 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, his papers were sealed in the Vatican Secret Archives, leaving unanswered questions about what he knew and did during World War II. Those questions have only grown and festered, making Pius XII one of the most controversial popes in Church history, especially now as the Vatican prepares to canonize him.

In 2020, Pius XII’s archives were finally opened, and David I. Kertzer—widely recognized as one of the world’s leading Vatican scholars—has been mining this new material ever since, revealing how the pope came to set aside moral leadership in order to preserve his church’s power.

Based on thousands of never-before-seen documents not only from the Vatican, but from archives in Italy, Germany, France, Britain, and the United States, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler (Random House, 2022) paints a new, dramatic portrait of what the pope did and did not do as war enveloped the continent and as the Nazis began their systematic mass murder of Europe’s Jews. The book clears away the myths and sheer falsehoods surrounding the pope’s actions from 1939 to 1945, showing why the pope repeatedly bent to the wills of Hitler and Mussolini.

Just as Kertzer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Pope and Mussolini became the definitive book on Pope Pius XI and the Fascist regime, The Pope at War is destined to become the most influential account of his successor, Pius XII, and his relations with Mussolini and Hitler. Kertzer shows why no full understanding of the course of World War II is complete without knowledge of the dramatic, behind-the-scenes role played by the pope.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carolyn Woods Eisenberg, "Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia (Oxford UP, 2023) is a compelling, meticulous narrative of the way national security decisions formed at the highest levels of government affect the lives of individuals at home and abroad. By drawing these connections, Carolyn Woods Eisenberg brings to life policy decisions about Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, conveying their significance to a new generation of readers. She breaks fresh ground in contextualizing Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's decisions within a wider institutional and societal framework. While recognizing the distinctive personalities and ideas of these two men, this study more broadly conveys the competing roles and impact of the professional military, the Congress, and a mobilized peace movement.

Drawing upon a vast collection of declassified documents, Eisenberg presents an important re-interpretation of the Nixon Administration's relations with the Soviet Union and China vis a vis the war in Southeast Asia. She argues that in their desperate effort to overcome, or at least overshadow, their failure in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger made major concessions to both nations in the field of arms control, their response to the India-Pakistan war, and the diplomacy surrounding Taiwan--much of this secret. Despite policymakers' claims that the Vietnam War was a "national security" necessity that would demonstrate American strength to the communist superpowers and "credibility" to friendly governments, the historical record suggests a different reality.

A half-century after the Paris Peace Conference marking the withdrawal of US troops and advisors from Vietnam and foreign troops from Laos and Cambodia, Fire and Rain is a dramatic account of geopolitical decision making, civil society, and the human toll of the war on the people of Southeast Asia.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rose Parfitt, "The Process of International Legal Reproduction: Inequality, Historiography, Resistance" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Rose Parfitt is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Kent and the author of The Process of International Legal Reproduction: Inequality, Historiography, Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2019). That all states are free and equal under international law is axiomatic to the discipline. Yet even a brief look at the dynamics of the international order calls that axiom into question. Mobilizing fresh archival research and drawing on a tradition of unorthodox Marxist and anti-colonial scholarship, Rose Parfitt develops a new 'modular' legal historiography to make sense of the paradoxical relationship between sovereign equality and inequality. Juxtaposing a series of seemingly unrelated histories against one another, including a radical re-examination of the canonical story of Fascist Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, The Process of International Legal Reproduction exposes the conditional nature of the process through which international law creates and disciplines new states and their subjects. The result is a powerful critique of international law's role in establishing and perpetuating inequalities of wealth, power, and pleasure, accompanied by a call to attend more closely to the strategies of resistance that are generated in that process.

Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Keir Giles, "Russia's War on Everybody: And What it Means for You" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

With the annexation of Crimea in 2014 as well the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia's place in the world is a matter of fierce debate among world leaders and analysts. For decades it was regarded as irrelevant since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Vladimir Putin came to power with the intent of improving Russian influence on the world stage. How does the Russian leadership intend to achieve this goal of relevancy on the world stage? Keir Giles addresses these issues in Russia's War on Everybody: And What it Means for You (‎Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).

Keir Giles is Senior Consulting Fellow for the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House and Director of the Conflict Studies Research Centre. He has spent three decades explaining Russia, for the BBC, the UK Ministry of Defence, Chatham House, NATO and in the private sector. His previous publications include Russia's 'New' Tools for Confronting the West (2016), the Handbook of Russian Information Warfare (2016) and Moscow Rules (2019).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eric Alterman, "We Are Not One: A History of America's Fight Over Israel" (Basic Book, 2022)

Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Fights about the fate of the state of Israel, and the Zionist movement that gave birth to it, have long been a staple of both Jewish and American political culture. In We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel (Basic Books, 2022), Eric Alterman traces this debate from its nineteenth-century origins. Following Israel’s 1948–1949 War of Independence (called the “nakba” or “catastrophe” by Palestinians), few Americans, including few Jews, paid much attention to Israel or the challenges it faced. Following the 1967 Six-Day War, however, almost overnight support for Israel became the primary component of American Jews’ collective identity. Over time, Jewish organizations joined forces with conservative Christians and neoconservative pundits and politicos to wage a tenacious fight to define Israel’s image in the US media, popular culture, Congress, and college campuses. We Are Not One reveals how our consensus on Israel and Palestine emerged and why, today, it is fracturing.

Eric Alterman is a CUNY distinguished professor of English at Brooklyn College.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rebecca Herman, "Cooperating with the Colossus: A Social and Political History of US Military Bases in World War II Latin America" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

During the Second World War, the United States built over two hundred defense installations on sovereign soil in Latin America in the name of cooperation in hemisphere defense. Predictably, it proved to be a fraught affair. Despite widespread acclaim for Pan-American unity with the Allied cause, defense construction incited local conflicts that belied the wartime rhetoric of fraternity and equality.

Rebecca Herman's book Cooperating with the Colossus: A Social and Political History of US Military Bases in World War II Latin America (Oxford UP, 2022) reconstructs the history of US basing in World War II Latin America, from the elegant chambers of the American foreign ministries to the cantinas, courtrooms, plazas, and brothels surrounding US defense sites. Foregrounding the wartime experiences of Brazil, Cuba, and Panama, the book considers how Latin American leaders and diplomats used basing rights as bargaining chips to advance their nation-building agendas with US resources, while limiting overreach by the "Colossus of the North" as best they could. Yet conflicts on the ground over labor rights, discrimination, sex, and criminal jurisdiction routinely threatened the peace. Steeped in conflict, the story of wartime basing certainly departs from the celebratory triumphalism commonly associated with this period in US-Latin American relations, but this book does not wholly upend the conventional account of wartime cooperation. Rather, the history of basing distills a central tension that has infused regional affairs since a wave of independence movements first transformed the Americas into a society of nations: national sovereignty and international cooperation may seem like harmonious concepts in principle, but they are difficult to reconcile in practice. Drawing on archival research in five countries, Cooperating with the Colossus is a revealing history told at the local, national, and international levels of how World War II transformed power and politics in the Americas in enduring ways.

Rachel Grace Newman is a historian of modern Mexico with particular interests in migration, childhood and youth studies, and social inequality. She is Assistant Professor of History at Colgate University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right but... US Lies and Media Reporting in the 2003 Iraq War

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, journalist and UN director of Human Rights Watch Louis Charbonneau describes the US's government misinformation campaign to justify its invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its aftermath. Charbonneau also discusses the role of media in the lack of questioning of the information they were spreading and contrasts it with the right practices journalists should conduct in their reporting. Finally, the interviewee talks about the consequences of lies from an official source in the spread of fake news, and how the government's actions in 2002 are being used by Russia to respond to the US's criticisms of its invasion of Ukraine.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gordon Barrett, "China’s Cold War Science Diplomacy" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

During the early decades of the Cold War, the People’s Republic of China remained far outside mainstream international science — right?

Gordon Barrett’s new book, China’s Cold War Science Diplomacy (Cambridge University Press, 2022), counters this straightforward narrative and shows a very different side of China’s engagement with the outside world during this period. Barrett shows how scientists became crucial interlocutors for the early PRC, engaging in international and cross-bloc organizations, conferences, and networks. In China’s Cold War Science Diplomacy we follow scientists as they travel to international meetings, advocate for China’s position in international organizations, and correspond with collaborators and peers abroad. Overall, by piecing together a wide range of archival and published materials, Barrett shows how scientists developed transnational networks and interacted closely with overseas counterparts in ways that anticipated and lay the groundwork for China’s emergence as a science and technology powerhouse. Meticulously researched and carefully written, this book is sure to be of interest to those interested in modern Chinese history, science and technology, the Cold War period, and the role that scientists can play in diplomacy and diplomatic work.

Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Present at the Creation: Edward Mead Earle and the Depression-Era Origins of Security Studies

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Edward Mead Earle was a historian, scholar, professor, and international relations expert; he was also a founding father of the field we know as Security Studies. Listen as David Ekbladh and International Security Editor Sean Lynn-Jones discuss Earle's contributions to the field, his views on what Security Studies should be, his seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study, and what he might think of Security Studies today. This conversation was recorded on January 4, 2012.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chrisanthi Giotis, "Borderland: Decolonizing the Words of War" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Every two seconds a person is displaced, caught in one of the more than 40 active conflicts around the world that show no sign of ending. Since 1994, there has been ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has uprooted millions of people and resulted in the deaths of millions more. In the West, we have entered a political era where our border policies are underpinned by unending wars. At this critical juncture, how can journalists, especially those engaged in foreign correspondence, tell these stories? How can they make connections across time and space, and across politics, economics, environments, and crucially, people? Given its colonial history, are these connections possible for the profession of foreign correspondence?

In Borderland: Decolonising the Words of War (Oxford University Press, 2022), Dr. Chrisanthi Giotis argues that decolonization is possible and necessary for the development of a truly global, public sphere. New global narratives need to meaningfully include the voices, and knowledge, of those with the least power who are caught in resource-fuelled wars. Drawing on insights from postcolonial studies, international relations, development studies, and philosophy, which are brought to life through auto-ethnographic descriptions and analysis of "behind-the-scenes" events, Giotis introduces new reporting techniques for foreign correspondents. Borderland argues that decolonized reporting techniques will help journalists—and their audiences—move beyond the sociohistorical and political myopia that prevents us from communicating and understanding the reality of a complex world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chris Alden and Alvaro Mendez, "China and Latin America: Development, Agency and Geopolitics" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

China's role as an economic powerhouse in Latin America is reshaping a region on the cusp of development and change. Since the turn of the century, bilateral trade between China and Latin America has increased massively, going from $12.17 billion in 2000 to $307.94 billion in 2019. From the pampas of Argentina and the vast Brazilian Amazon to Panama's canal and Jamaica's coastal waters, China is financing roads, railways, dams and ports that are transforming regional economies and societies.

Beyond China's global search for resources and markets, Beijing's engagement with Latin America is amplified by cutting-edge technologies and a growing assertiveness in regional diplomatic and military affairs. The United States, once complacent in its dominant position over its proverbial 'backyard', is increasingly alarmed by the spectacle of deepening Chinese involvement in this part of the Western hemisphere.

What are we to make of these shifting dynamics? In this detailed investigation, Dr. Chris Alden and Dr. Alvaro Mendez look at the interests, strategies and practices of China's incoming power. The book, China and Latin America: Development, Agency, Geopolitics (Bloomsbury, 2023) starts by unpacking the historical links between Imperial China and Colonial Latin America through the 19th century, then turns to the revolutionary role played by Mao's China during the Cold War. Next, it turns to global China's contemporary expansion into Latin America by focusing on the development dimensions of engagement in individual countries, and concurrently, on the exercise of agency by Latin American governments and societies intent on managing Chinese interests to their advantage. Finally, the book addresses these relationships in the context of heightened global competition between China and the United States.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Giusi Russo, "Women, Empires, and Body Politics at the United Nations, 1946-1975" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In Women, Empires, and Body Politics at the United Nations, 1946–1975 (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), Giusi Russo focuses on the first decades of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) to examine gender politics in the postwar period. The Commission was comprised of a diverse group of women whose ideas about equality often clashed. Shaped by Cold War politics and the process of decolonization, the CSW’s work grappled with issues like polygamy, family planning, FGM, and women’s role in development. Through its interactions with women and women’s bodies in the colonial world, the CSW moved from concerns with law to practice, and from formal public rights like civic equality and political participation to private rights concerning marriage and reproduction. Russo brings in the voices of a range of CSW delegates to highlight how women representing newly independent nations pushed back against narratives that rested on an imperial feminist foundation. Their rhetoric demonstrates how body politics were intertwined with broader geopolitical trends, and recenters prevailing understandings of the CSW that underestimate its influence prior to 1975. Russo argues that women living under colonial and postcolonial systems were key actors in defining the politics of women’s rights at the UN.

Rebecca Turkington is a PhD Candidate in History at Cambridge University studying transnational women’s networks.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ian Rowen, "One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism (Cornell UP, 2023) shows how tourism performs and transforms territory. In 2008, as the People’s Republic of China pointed over a thousand missiles across the Taiwan Strait, it sent millions of tourists in the same direction with the encouragement of Taiwan’s politicians and businesspeople. Contrary to the PRC’s efforts to use tourism to incorporate Taiwan into an imaginary “One China,” tourism aggravated tensions between the two polities, polarized Taiwanese society, and pushed Taiwanese popular sentiment farther toward support for national self-determination.

Consequently, Taiwan was performed as a part of China for Chinese group tourists versus experienced as a place of everyday life. Taiwan’s national identity grew increasingly plural, such that not just one or two, but many Taiwans coexisted, even as it faced an existential military threat. Ian Rowen’s treatment of tourism as a political technology provides a new theoretical lens for social scientists to examine the impacts of tourism in the region and worldwide.

Ian Rowen is Associate Professor at National Taiwan Normal University. He is the editor of Transitions in Taiwan. Follow him on Twitter @iirowen.

Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bleddyn E. Bowen, "Original Sin: Power, Technology and War in Outer Space" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Space technology was developed to enhance the killing power of the state. The Moon landings and the launch of the Space Shuttle were mere sideshows, drawing public attention away from the real goal: military and economic control of space as a source of power on Earth.

Today, as Bleddyn E. Bowen vividly recounts in Original Sin: Power, Technology and War in Outer Space (Oxford UP, 2022), thousands of satellites work silently in the background to provide essential military, intelligence and economic capabilities. No major power can do without them. Beyond Washington, Moscow and Beijing, truly global technologies have evolved, from the ground floor of the nuclear missile revolution to today's orbital battlefield, shaping the wars to come. World powers including India, Japan and Europe are fully realizing the strategic benefits of commanding Earth's 'cosmic coastline', as a stage for war, development and prestige.

Yet, as new contenders spend more and more on outer space, there is scope for cautious optimism about the future of the Space Age-if we can recognize, rather than hide, its original sin.

Bleddyn E. Bowen is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Leicester, specializing in space policy and military uses of outer space. The internationally recognized author of War in Space, he consults on space policy for institutions including the UK Parliament, the European Space Agency, and the Pentagon.

Sam Canter is a policy and strategy analyst, PhD candidate, and Army Reserve intelligence officer. His views are his own and do not reflect any institution, organization, or entity with which he is affiliated.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robin Prior, "Conquer We Must: A Military History of Britain, 1914-1945" (Yale UP, 2022)

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Robin Prior examines the influence politicians had on military operations, in the first history to assess both world wars together. Drawing uniquely on both military and political archives and previously unexamined sources Prior explores the fraught relationships between civilian and military leaders: from Lloyd George's remarkably interventionist stance on military tactics during the First World War to Churchill's near-constant arguments with American leaders during the Second. Conquer We Must: A Military History of Britain, 1914-1945 (Yale UP, 2022) tells the complex story of this military decision-making, revealing how politicians attempted to control strategy--but had little influence on how the army, navy, and air force actually fought.

Philip Blood is a British historian residing in Germany. His specialist research covers military culture, war, security, genocide and the Holocaust.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tisa Wenger and Sylvester A. Johnson, "Religion and US Empire: Critical New Histories" (NYU Press, 2022)

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The United States has been an empire since the time of its founding, and this empire is inextricably intertwined with American religion. Religion and US Empire: Critical New Histories (NYU Press, 2022) examines the relationship between these dynamic forces throughout the country’s history and into the present. The volume will serve as the most comprehensive and definitive text on the relationship between US empire and American religion.

Whereas other works describe religion as a force that aided or motivated American imperialism, this comprehensive new history reveals how imperialism shaped American religion—and how religion historically structured, enabled, challenged, and resisted US imperialism. Chapters move chronologically from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, ranging geographically from the Caribbean, Michigan, and Liberia, to Oklahoma, Hawai’i, and the Philippines. Rather than situating these histories safely in the past, the final chapters ask readers to consider present day entanglements between capitalism, imperialism, and American religion. Religion and US Empire is an urgent work of history, offering the context behind a relationship that is, for better or worse, very much alive today.

Tisa Wenger is Associate Professor of American Religious History at Yale Divinity School. She is the author of We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (2009) and Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (2017).

Sylvester A. Johnson is Professor in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech, and Assistant Vice Provost the Center for Humanities. He is the author of African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom and co-editor of FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security Before and After 9/11.

This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his websitethereluctantamericanist.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Deception Dividend: FDR's Undeclared War

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Sean Lynn-Jones, editor of International Security, interviews author John Schuessler, whose article "The Deception Dividend: FDR's Undeclared War" appears in the Spring 2010 issue of the journal. Their conversation tackles the question of whether FDR willfully deceived the American public in order to persuade them to support WWII – and touches on perceptions of warring democracies as well as comparisons to the 2003 Iraq War. The conversation was recorded on May 21, 2010

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Susan Colbourn, "Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO (Cornell UP, 2022), Susan Colbourn tells the story of the height of nuclear crisis and the remarkable waning of the fear that gripped the globe. In the Cold War conflict that pitted nuclear superpowers against one another, Europe was the principal battleground. Washington and Moscow had troops on the ground and missiles in the fields of their respective allies, the NATO nations and the states of the Warsaw Pact. Euromissiles―intermediate-range nuclear weapons to be used exclusively in the regional theater of war―highlighted how the peoples of Europe were dangerously placed between hammer and anvil. That made European leaders uncomfortable and pushed fearful masses into the streets demanding peace in their time.

At the center of the story is NATO. Colbourn highlights the weakness of the alliance seen by many as the most effective bulwark against Soviet aggression. Divided among themselves and uncertain about the depth of US support, the member states were riven by the missile issue. This strategic crisis was, as much as any summit meeting between US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, the hinge on which the Cold War turned.

Euromissiles is a history of diplomacy and alliances, social movements and strategy, nuclear weapons and nagging fears, and politics. To tell that history, Colbourn takes a long view of the strategic crisis―from the emerging dilemmas of allied defense in the early 1950s through the aftermath of the INF Treaty thirty-five years later. The result is a dramatic and sweeping tale that changes the way we think about the Cold War and its culmination.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Miriam Bak Mckenna, "Reckoning with Empire: Self-Determination in International Law" (Brill, 2022)

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Miriam Bak McKenna is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University (Denmark). Her first monograph, Reckoning with Empire: Self-Determination in International Law (Brill, 2023), adopts a new approach to self-determination’s international legal history, tracing the ways in which various actors have sought to reinvent self-determination in different juridical, political, and economic iterations to create the conditions for global transformation. The value of the book’s approach lies not only in a more nuanced understanding of self-determination’s legal history, but also in excavating the multiple ways in which actors, particularly those from the Global South, have challenged the existing normative and legal structures which rendered them unequal under the European system of international law. Rethinking this process touches on issues that are relevant not only to debates about the enduring legacy of imperialism in our present, but also to contemporary discussions of the position self-determination has come to occupy in international law.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Xin Wen, "The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Many of us–who maybe aren’t historians–have an image of the Silk Road: merchants who carried silk from China to as far as ancient Rome, in one of the first global trading networks. Historians have since challenged the idea that there really was such an organized network, instead seeing it as a nineteenth-century metaphor that obscures as much as it explains.

But Xin Wen, the author of The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road (Princeton University Press, 2023), tries to revive the idea that there really was a “Silk Road,” at least for the people of Dunhuang, in what is now China’s Gansu Province. His book explains that there really were convoys traveling back-and-forth along an established route–though they likely saw themselves as diplomats more than merchants.

“People in Dunhuang, of course, did not not exactly call the road that connected them with their neighbors the “Silk Road.” Nevertheless, had they been asked about it, they likely would have found the phrase entirely intelligible, even meaningful,” he writes.

Xin Wen is assistant professor of East Asian studies and history at Princeton University. His research interests in medieval China also include manuscript culture, urban history, and digital humanities.

Today, Xin Wen and I talk about the Silk Road, the Dunhuang Archive, and the risks of orienting too much of the history of Central and East Asia around China.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The King’s Road. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Future of the Silk Road: A Discussion with Tim Winters

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The term "Silk Road" evokes images of trade and exotic luxurious goods and Orientalist images. Today, however, it also is associated with the projection of Chinese power abroad. And as that pairing suggests, the term "Silk Road" in fact has many meanings as Professor Tim Winter has been explaining in his book The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures (Oxford University Press, 2022). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett-Jones.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steve Kemper, "Our Man in Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbor" (Mariner Books, 2022)

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In the years leading up to the Second World War, the U.S. was represented in Japan by Ambassador Joseph Grew: born from a patrician family, Harvard-educated, ran away to the foreign service, and deeply respected by his fellow diplomats and Japanese politicians alike.

From his arrival in Tokyo in 1932 to when he was eventually repatriated back to the US in 1942, after Pearl Harbor, Grew dutifully reported to and advised the U.S. on what to do with an increasingly imperialist, militarist—and, at many times—dysfunctional Japan.

And if officials had listened to Grew, as Steve Kemper tells it in his book Our Man In Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbor (Marine Books, 2022), the history of US-Japan relations may have looked very different.

In this interview, Steve and I talk about Joseph Grew, his time in Japan, and how U.S. obstinance, and Japanese imperialism, militarism and dysfunction, got in the way of his diplomacy.

Steve Kemper is a journalist and the author of A Labyrinth of Kingdoms: 10,000 Miles through Islamic Africa (W. W. Norton & Company: 2012), A Splendid Savage: The Restless Life of Frederick Russell Burnham (W. W. Norton & Company: 2016), and Code Name Ginger (Harvard Business Review Press: 2003). He has written for Smithsonian, National Geographic, Outside, Wall Street Journal, BBC Wildlife, and many other magazines and newspapers.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Our Man in Tokyo. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Melvyn P. Leffler, "Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

America's decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 is arguably the most important foreign policy choice of the entire post-Cold War era. Nearly two decades after the event, it remains central to understanding current international politics and US foreign relations.

In Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq (Oxford UP, 2023), the eminent historian of US foreign policy Melvyn P. Leffler analyzes why the US chose war and who was most responsible for the decision. Employing a unique set of personal interviews with dozens of top officials and declassified American and British documents, Leffler vividly portrays the emotions and anxieties that shaped the thinking of the president after the shocking events of 9/11. He shows how fear, hubris, and power influenced Bush's approach to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. At the core of Leffler's account is his compelling portrait of Saddam Hussein. Rather than stressing Bush's preoccupation with promoting freedom or democracy, Leffler emphasizes Hussein's brutality, opportunism, and unpredictability and illuminates how the Iraqi dictator's record of aggression and intransigence haunted the president and influenced his calculations. Bush was not eager for war, and the decision to invade Iraq was not a fait accompli. Yet the president was convinced that only by practicing coercive diplomacy and threatening force could he alter Hussein's defiance, a view shared by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other leaders around the world, including Hans Blix, the chief UN inspector. Throughout, Leffler highlights the harrowing anxieties surrounding the decision-making process after the devastating attack on 9/11 and explains the roles of contingency, agency, rationality, and emotion. As the book unfolds, Bush's centrality becomes more and more evident, as does the bureaucratic dysfunctionality that contributed to the disastrous occupation of Iraq.

A compelling reassessment of George W. Bush's intervention in Iraq, Confronting Saddam Hussein provides a provocative reinterpretation of the most important international event of the 21st century.

Grant Golub is an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and 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

Caroline Dodds Pennock, "On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe" (Knopf, 2023)

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe (Knopf, 2023) by Dr. Caroline Dodds Pennock presents a landmark work of narrative history that shatters our Eurocentric understanding of the Age of Discovery.

We have long been taught to presume that modern global history began when the “Old World” encountered the “New”, when Christopher Columbus “discovered” America in 1492. But, as Dr. Pennock conclusively shows in this groundbreaking book, for tens of thousands of Aztecs, Maya, Totonacs, Inuit and others—enslaved people, diplomats, explorers, servants, traders—the reverse was true: they discovered Europe.

For them, Europe comprised savage shores, a land of riches and marvels, yet perplexing for its brutal disparities of wealth and quality of life, and its baffling beliefs. The story of these Indigenous Americans abroad is a story of abduction, loss, cultural appropriation, and, as they saw it, of apocalypse.

From the Brazilian king who met Henry VIII to the Aztecs who mocked up human sacrifice at the court of Charles V; from the Inuk baby who was put on show in a London pub to the mestizo children of Spaniards who returned “home” with their fathers; from the Inuit who harpooned ducks on the Avon river to the many servants employed by Europeans of every rank: here are a people who were rendered exotic, demeaned, and marginalized, but whose worldviews and cultures had a profound impact on European civilization.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Seiji Shirane, "Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan's Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895-1945" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Seiji Shirane’s Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan's Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895-1945 (Cornell UP, 2022) demonstrates that colonial Taiwan was an imperial center in its own right, a political, social, and economic hub for the southern expansion of Japan’s empire led by officials with agendas that did not always match those of the government in Tokyo. In addition to this contribution to the study of Japanese empire, Imperial Gateway highlights two aspects of the history that are often underappreciated in the Anglophone literature. First, Shirane expands the aperture of his narrative beyond bilateral Sino-Japanese relations to encompass a dynamic multilateral milieu that includes colonial Taiwan, the region’s Western powers, and the Taiwanese subjects of the empire called “overseas Taiwanese” (sekimin) by Japan. Second, Shirane pays particular attention to the agency not just of the Government-General installed by Japan to rule over Taiwan, but also the “overseas Taiwanese” both wooed by the Japanese to advance imperial ambitions and also pursuing their own autonomous interests.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeffrey S. Bachman, "The Politics of Genocide: From the Genocide Convention to the Responsibility to Protect" (Rutgers UP, 2022)

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Why have the founding members of the United Nations (the P5) evaded accountability for their crimes of genocide?

Jeff Bachman, of the American University School of International Service, provides an answer in his book, The Politics of Genocide: From the Genocide Convention to the Responsibility to Protect (Rutgers UP, 2022). It starts with an analysis of the processes that led to the adoption of the United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in December 1948. It ends with a call of the “self-perpetuating” implications of Western impunity for genocidal violence, at home and abroad. Bachman narrows in on the five permanent members of the UN Security Council to highlight the structural inequality baked into the Genocide Convention. The result is a cogent and devastating evaluation of the ways in which the Western powers of the P5 -- the US in particular -- are assumed to act in good faith when it comes to preventing and punishing acts of genocide.

Susan Thomson is an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. I like to interview pretenure scholars about their research. I am particularly keen on their method and methodology, as well as the process of producing academic knowledge about African places and people.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joshua Kurlantzick, "Beijing's Global Media Offensive: China's Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

How is China trying to influence media across Asia and indeed globally? Why has this ambitious project achieved rather mixed results so far? And how should the rest of the world respond? In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, CFR's Josh Kurlantzick talks to NIAS Director Duncan McCargo about his important new book, Beijing's Global Media Offensive (Oxford UP, 2022).

His book is a major analysis of how China is attempting to become a media and information superpower around the world, seeking to shape the politics, local media, and information environments of both East Asia and the World. Since China's ascendancy toward major-power status began in the 1990s, many observers have focused on its economic growth and expanding military. China's ability was limited in projecting power over information and media and the infrastructure through which information flows. That has begun to change. Beijing's state-backed media, which once seemed incapable having a significant effect globally, has been overhauled and expanded. At a time when many democracies' media outlets are consolidating due to financial pressures, China's biggest state media outlets, like the newswire Xinhua, are modernizing, professionalizing, and expanding in attempt to reach an international audience. Overseas, Beijing also attempts to impact local media, civil society, and politics by having Chinese firms or individuals with close links buy up local media outlets, by signing content-sharing deals with local media, by expanding China's social media giants, and by controlling the wireless and wired technology through which information now flows, among other efforts.

In Beijing's Global Media Offensive - a major analysis of how China is attempting to build a media and information superpower around the world, and how this media power integrates with other forms of Chinese influence - Joshua Kurlantzick focuses on how all of this is playing out in both China's immediate neighborhood - Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand - and also in the United States and many other parts of the world. He traces the ways in which China is trying to build an information and influence superpower, but also critically examines the new conventional wisdom that Beijing has enjoyed great success with these efforts. While China has worked hard to build a global media and information superpower, it often has failed to reap gains from its efforts, and has undermined itself with overly assertive, alienating diplomacy. Still, Kurlantzick contends, China's media, information and political influence campaigns will continue to expand and adapt, helping Beijing exports its political model and protect the ruling Party, and potentially damaging press freedoms, human rights, and democracy abroad. An authoritative account of how this sophisticated and multi-pronged campaign is unfolding, Beijing's Global Media Offensive provides a new window into China's attempts to make itself an information superpower.

Joshua Kurlantzick is senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the author of five previous books about China and Southeast Asia. Duncan McCargo is Director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and a professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tara Zahra, "Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars" (Norton, 2023)

Wed, 22 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Before the First World War, enthusiasm for a borderless world reached its height. International travel, migration, trade, and progressive projects on matters ranging from women’s rights to world peace reached a crescendo. Yet in the same breath, an undercurrent of reaction was growing, one that would surge ahead with the outbreak of war and its aftermath.

In Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars (Norton, 2023), a sweeping and ambitious work of history, acclaimed scholar Tara Zahra examines how nationalism, rather than internationalism, came to ensnare world politics in the early twentieth century. The air went out of the globalist balloon with the First World War as quotas were put on immigration and tariffs on trade, not only in the United States but across Europe, where war and disease led to mass societal upheaval. The “Spanish flu” heightened anxieties about porous national boundaries. The global impact of the 1929 economic crash and the Great Depression amplified a quest for food security in Europe and economic autonomy worldwide. Demands for relief from the instability and inequality linked to globalization forged democracies and dictatorships alike, from Gandhi’s India to America’s New Deal and Hitler’s Third Reich. Immigration restrictions, racially constituted notions of citizenship, anti-Semitism, and violent outbursts of hatred of the “other” became the norm—coming to genocidal fruition in the Second World War.

Millions across the political spectrum sought refuge from the imagined and real threats of the global economy in ways strikingly reminiscent of our contemporary political moment: new movements emerged focused on homegrown and local foods, domestically produced clothing and other goods, and back-to-the-land communities. Rich with astonishing detail gleaned from Zahra’s unparalleled archival research in five languages, Against the World is a poignant and thorough exhumation of the popular sources of resistance to globalization. With anti-globalism a major tenet of today’s extremist agendas, Zahra's arrestingly clearsighted and wide-angled account is essential reading to grapple with our divided present.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pete Millwood, "Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade US-China Relations" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In 1971, Americans made two historic visits to China that would transform relations between the two countries. One was by US official Henry Kissinger; the other, earlier, visit was by the US table tennis team. Historians have mulled over the transcripts of Kissinger's negotiations with Chinese leaders. However, they have overlooked how, alongside these diplomatic talks, a rich program of travel and exchange had begun with ping-pong diplomacy.

Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade US-China Relations (Cambridge UP, 2022) reveals how a diverse cast of Chinese and Americans – athletes and physicists, performing artists and seismologists – played a critical, but to date overlooked, role in remaking US-China relations. Based on new sources from more than a dozen archives in China and the United States, Pete Millwood argues that the significance of cultural and scientific exchanges went beyond reacquainting the Chinese and American people after two decades of minimal contact; exchanges also powerfully influenced Sino-American diplomatic relations and helped transform post-Mao China.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lisa Hajjar, "The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight Against Torture" (U California Press, 2022)

Sat, 18 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture (University of California Press, 2022) by Dr. Lisa Hajjar examines how hundreds of lawyers mobilized to challenge the illegal treatment of prisoners captured in the war on terror and helped force an end to the US government's most odious policies.

Told as a suspenseful, high-stakes story, The War in Court clearly outlines why challenges to the torture policy had to be waged on the legal terrain and why hundreds of lawyers joined the fight. Drawing on extensive interviews with key participants, her own experiences reporting from Guantánamo, and her deep knowledge of international law and human rights, Dr. Hajjar reveals how the ongoing fight against torture has had transformative effects on the legal landscape in the United States and on a global scale.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sara Pugach, "African Students in East Germany, 1949-1975" (U Michigan Press, 2022)

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Sara Pugach's African Students in East Germany, 1949-1975 (U Michigan Press, 2022)explores the largely unexamined history of Africans who lived, studied, and worked in the German Democratic Republic. African students started coming to the East in 1951 as invited guests who were offered scholarships by the East German government to prepare them for primarily technical and scientific careers once they returned home to their own countries. Drawn from previously unexplored archives in Germany, Ghana, Kenya, Zambia, and the United Kingdom, African Students in East Germany, 1949–1975 uncovers individual stories and reconstructs the pathways that African students took in their journeys to the GDR and what happened once they got there. The book places these experiences within the larger context of German history and the overlapping contexts of the Cold War and decolonization. During this time, nations across the Western and Soviet blocs were inviting Africans to attend universities and vocational schools as part of a drive to offer development aid to newly independent countries and encourage them to side with either the United States or Soviet Union in the Cold War. African leaders recognized their significance to both Soviet and American blocs and played on the desire of each to bring newly independent nations into their folds.

Nicole Coleman is Associate Professor of German at Wayne State University. She tweets @drnicoleman.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah Foss, "On Our Own Terms: Development and Indigeneity in Cold War Guatemala" (UNC Press, 2022)

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

During the Cold War, U.S. intervention in Latin American politics, economics, and society grew in scope and complexity, with diplomatic legacies evident in today's hemispheric policies. Development became a key form of intervention as government officials and experts from the United States and Latin America believed that development could foster hemispheric solidarity and security. In parts of Latin America, its implementation was especially intricate because recipients of these programs were diverse Indigenous peoples with their own politics, economics, and cultures. Contrary to project planners' expectations, Indigenous beneficiaries were not passive recipients but actively engaged with development interventions and, in the process, redefined racialized ideas about Indigeneity.

In On Our Own Terms: Development and Indigeneity in Cold War Guatemala (UNC Press, 2022), Sarah Foss illustrates how this process transpired in Cold War Guatemala, spanning democratic revolution, military coups, and genocidal civil war. Drawing on previously unused sources such as oral histories, anthropologists' field notes, military records, municipal and personal archives, and a private photograph collection, Foss analyzes the uses and consequences of development and its relationship to ideas about race from multiple perspectives, emphasizing its historical significance as a form of intervention during the Cold War.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Future of the Liberal Order: A Discussion with James E. Cronin

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Has the liberal order been taken for granted? The post war consensus and the impact of the cold war may have helped establish a way of doing politics that in fact was on less secure foundations that it seemed. That’s the view of Professor James E Cronin of Boston College who has written Fragile Victory: The Making and Unmaking of the Liberal Order (Yale University Press, 2023) – listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett-Jones.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah Kunz, "Expatriate: Following a Migration Category" (Manchester UP, 2023)

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Who are expatriates? How do they differ from other migrants? And why should we care about such distinctions? Expatriate: Following a Migration Category (Manchester University Press, 2023) by Dr. Sarah Kunz interrogates the contested category of 'the expatriate' to explore its history and politics, its making and lived experience. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, the book offers a critical reading of International Human Resource Management literature, explores the work and history of the Expatriate Archive Centre in The Hague, and studies the usage and significance of the category in Kenyan history and present-day 'expat Nairobi'. Doing so, the book traces the figure of the expatriate from the mid-twentieth-century era of decolonisation to today's heated debates about migration.

The expatriate emerges as a malleable and contested category, of shifting meaning and changing membership, and as passionately embraced by some as it is rejected by others. Dr. Kunz situates the changing usage of the term in the context of social, political and economic struggle and explores the material and discursive work the expatriate performs in negotiating social inequalities and power relations. Migration, the book argues, is a key terrain on which colonial power relations have been reproduced and translated, and migration categories are at the heart of the insidious ways that intersecting material and symbolic inequalities are enacted today. Any project for social justice needs to dissect and interrogate categories like the expatriate, and this book offers analytical and methodical strategies to advance this project.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Benjamin Hoy, "A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border Across Indigenous Lands" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Sat, 11 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada–United States Border across Indigenous Lands (Oxford UP, 2021), is the recipient of the AHA’s Albert Corey Prize in the history of Canadian–American relations. In A Line of Blood and Dirt, Benjamin Hoy shows how the US-Canadian border was built across Indigenous lands. He explores the experiences of various indigenous groups, European settlers, African Americans, and Chinese immigrants.

Benjamin Hoy is an assistant professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan, where he directs the Historical GIS Lab.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Francis M. Carroll, "America and the Making of an Independent Ireland: A History" (NYU Press, 2021)

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

On Easter Day 1916, more than a thousand Irishmen stormed Dublin city center, seizing the General Post Office building and reading the Proclamation for an independent Irish Republic. The British declared martial law shortly afterward, and the rebellion was violently quashed by the military. In a ten-day period after the event, fourteen leaders of the uprising were executed by firing squad.

In New York, news of the uprising spread quickly among the substantial Irish American population. Initially the media blamed German interference, but eventually news of British-propagated atrocities came to light, and Irish Americans were quick to respond.

America and the Making of an Independent Ireland: A History (NYU Press, 2021) centres on the diplomatic relationship between Ireland and the United States at the time of Irish Independence and World War I. Beginning with the Rising of 1916, Francis M. Carroll chronicles how Irish Americans responded to the movement for Irish independence and pressuring the US government to intervene on the side of Ireland. Carroll's in-depth analysis demonstrates that Irish Americans after World War I raised funds for the Dáil Éireann government and for war relief, while shaping public opinion in favor of an independent nation. The book illustrates how the US government was the first power to extend diplomatic recognition to Ireland and welcome it into the international community.

Overall, Carroll argues that the existence of the state of Ireland is owed to considerable effort and intervention by Irish Americans and the American public at large.

Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yu Tokunaga, "Transborder Los Angeles: An Unknown Transpacific History of Japanese-Mexican Relations" (U California Press, 2022)

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Focusing on Los Angeles farmland during the years between the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Japanese Internment in 1942, Transborder Los Angeles: An Unknown Transpacific History of Japanese-Mexican Relations (U California Press, 2022) weaves together the narratives of Mexican and Japanese immigrants into a single transpacific history. In this book, Yu Tokunaga moves from international relations between Japan, Mexico, and the US to the Southern California farmland, where ethnic Japanese and Mexicans played a significant role in developing local agriculture, one of the major industries of LA County before World War II. Japanese, Mexicans, and white Americans developed a unique triracial hierarchy in farmland that generated both conflict and interethnic accommodation by bringing together local issues and international concerns beyond the Pacific Ocean and the US-Mexico border. Viewing these experiences in a single narrative form, Tokunaga breaks new ground, demonstrating the close relationships between the ban on Japanese immigration, Mexican farmworkers' strikes, wartime Japanese removal, and the Bracero Program.

David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gabriel Glickman, "US-Egypt Diplomacy Under Johnson: Nasser, Komer, and the Limits of Personal Diplomacy" (Bloombury, 2021)

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

What happens to policies when a president dies in office? Do they get replaced by the new president, or do advisers carry on with the status quo? In November 1963, these were important questions for a Kennedy-turned-Johnson administration.

Among these officials was a driven National Security Council staffer named Robert Komer, who had made it his personal mission to have the United States form better relations with Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser after diplomatic relations were nearly severed during the Eisenhower years. While Kennedy saw the benefit of having good, personal relations with the most influential leader in the Middle East-believing that it was the key to preventing a new front in the global Cold War-Johnson did not share his predecessor's enthusiasm for influencing Nasser with aid.

In US-Egypt Diplomacy Under Johnson: Nasser, Komer, and the Limits of Personal Diplomacy (Bloomsbury, 2021), Glickman brings to light the diplomatic efforts of Komer, a masterful strategist at navigating the bureaucratic process. Appealing to scholars of Middle Eastern history and US foreign policy, the book reveals a new perspective on the path to a war that was to change the face of the Middle East, and provides an important “applied history” case study for policymakers on the limits of personal diplomacy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gyan Prakash and Jeremy Adelman, "Inventing the Third World: In Search of Freedom for the Postwar Global South" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

What is the Third World? The term has essentially been scrubbed from our collective consciousness. What once used to be something concrete seems to have vanished into thin air. Today, the Third World seems to be “a closed chapter in world history.” But my guests today are determined that it not remain so. In their new edited volume, Inventing the Third World: In Search of Freedom for the Postwar Global South, historians Gyan Prakash, Jeremy Adelman, and their collaborators argue that the multiple and overlapping projects of the Third World offer an alternative globalism to neoliberal globalization. Characterized, fundamentally, by the search for freedom from imperial domination, a focus on the Third World helps reframe our understanding of the second half of the twentieth century.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard Overy, "Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945" (Viking, 2022)

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Richard Overy sets out in Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945 (Viking, 2022) to recast the way in which we view the Second World War and its origins and aftermath. As one of Britain's most decorated and respected World War II historians, he argues that this was the "last imperial war," with almost a century-long lead-up of global imperial expansion, which reached its peak in the territorial ambitions of Italy, Germany and Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s, before descending into the largest and costliest war in human history and the end, after 1945, of all territorial empires.

Overy also argues for a more global perspective on the war, one that looks broader than the typical focus on military conflict between the Allied and Axis states. Above all, Overy explains the bitter cost for those involved in fighting, and the exceptional level of crime and atrocity that marked the war and its protracted aftermath--which extended far beyond 1945.

Blood and Ruins is a masterpiece, a new and definitive look at the ultimate struggle over the future of the global order, which will compel us to view the war in novel and unfamiliar ways. Thought-provoking, original and challenging, Blood and Ruins sets out to understand the war anew.

Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Catherine Ashton, "And Then What?: Stories from Twenty-First-Century Diplomacy" (Elliott & Thompson, 2023)

Fri, 03 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

When she was chosen as the EU's first High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR/VP) in 2009, Catherine Ashton admits she "felt no exhilaration", fearing she had "few obvious credentials and lukewarm support".

On leaving office five years later - 19 months before the Brexit referendum - this former British minister had confounded her inner doubter. A new European External Action Service had been built from scratch and the HR/VP had become a pivotal global player - brokering what had seemed an impossible settlement between Serbia and Kosovo and performing the role of closer in the multi-party Iranian nuclear negotiations.

Ashton's memoirs of those five years - And Then What?: Inside Stories of 21st-Century Diplomacy (Elliott & Thompson, 2023) - go behind the scenes during critical moments in recent diplomatic history including Egypt's excruciating transition from dictatorship to uneasy democracy, the Iranian nuclear deal, the fragile Serb-Kosovan talks, and the 2014 Ukrainian crisis and its aftermath.

She writes: "Success is rarely the effect of one moment but of thousands of interlocking actions over a sustained period; and tiny details, especially in difficult negotiations, can make the difference between success and failure even if they seem arbitrary or inconsequential".

*Her book recommendations are Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis by Graham Allison (Longman, 1971) and Never by Ken Follett (Macmillan, 2021)

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the Twenty-Four Two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Border Lines: Refugees and the International Order

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Climate change and war have flung millions of people on the move, who often seek safe harbor in the very countries responsible for their displacement. But despite the lofty ideals and supposed simplicity of international refugee law, it turns out borders are not really the fixed lines on a map we imagine them to be.

Guests:

Deborah Anker is Clinical Professor of Law and Founder of the Harvard Law School Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program (HIRC).
Celeste Cantor-Stephens is a musician, interdisciplinary artist, writer, teacher and activist.
Chowra Makaremi is an anthropologist and tenured research scholar at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris.
Adrian Rennix is a writer and an immigration attorney practicing near the southern border.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Greg Brew, "Petroleum and Progress in Iran: Oil, Development, and the Cold War" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

From the 1940s to 1960s, Iran developed into the world's first “petro-state,” where oil represented the bulk of state revenue and supported an industrializing economy, expanding middle class, and powerful administrative and military apparatus.

In Petroleum and Progress in Iran: Oil, Development, and the Cold War (Cambridge UP, 2022), Gregory Brew outlines how the Pahlavi petro-state emerged from a confluence of forces – some global, some local. He shows how the shah's particular form of oil-based authoritarianism evolved from interactions with American developmentalists, Pahlavi technocrats, and major oil companies, all against the looming backdrop of the United States' Cold War policy and the coup d’état of August 1953. By placing oil at the center of the Cold War narrative, Brew contextualizes Iran's pro-Western alignment and slide into petrolic authoritarianism. Synthesizing a wide range of sources and research methods, this book demonstrates that the Pahlavi petro-state was not born, but made, and not solely by the Pahlavi shah.

Grant Golub is an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and 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

Alexandre I. R. White, "Epidemic Orientalism: Race, Capital, and the Governance of Infectious Disease" (Stanford UP, 2023)

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

For many residents of Western nations, COVID-19 was the first time they experienced the effects of an uncontrolled epidemic. This is in part due to a series of little-known regulations that have aimed to protect the global north from epidemic threats for the last two centuries, starting with International Sanitary Conferences in 1851 and culminating in the present with the International Health Regulations, which organize epidemic responses through the World Health Organization. Unlike other equity-focused global health initiatives, their mission—to establish "the maximum protections from infectious disease with the minimum effect on trade and traffic"—has remained the same since their founding.

In Epidemic Orientalism: Race, Capital, and the Governance of Infectious Disease (Stanford UP, 2023), Alexandre White reveals the Western capitalist interests, racism and xenophobia, and political power plays underpinning the regulatory efforts that came out of the project to manage the international spread of infectious disease. He examines how these regulations are formatted; how their framers conceive of epidemic spread; and the types of bodies and spaces it is suggested that these regulations map onto. Proposing a modified reinterpretation of Edward Said's concept of orientalism, White invites us to consider "epidemic orientalism" as a framework within which to explore the imperial and colonial roots of modern epidemic disease control.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David S. Painter and Gregory Brew, "The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951-1954" (UNC Press, 2023)

Sat, 28 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Beginning with the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry in spring 1951 and ending with its reversal following the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in August 1953, the Iranian oil crisis was a crucial turning point in the global Cold War. The nationalization challenged Great Britain's preeminence in the Middle East and threatened Western oil concessions everywhere. Fearing the loss of Iran and possibly the entire Middle East and its oil to communist control, the United States and Great Britain played a key role in the ouster of Mosaddeq, a constitutional nationalist opposed to communism and Western imperialism. U.S. intervention helped entrench monarchical power, and the reversal of Iran's nationalization confirmed the dominance of Western corporations over the resources of the Global South for the next twenty years.

Drawing on years of research in American, British, and Iranian sources, David S. Painter and Gregory Brew provide a concise and accessible account of Cold War competition, Anglo-American imperialism, covert intervention, the political economy of global oil, and Iran's struggle against autocratic government. The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951-1954 (UNC Press, 2023) dispels myths and misconceptions that have hindered understanding this pivotal chapter in the history of the post–World War II world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adam Lajeunesse, "Lock, Stock, and Icebergs: A History of Canada's Arctic Maritime Sovereignty" (UBC Press, 2016)

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In April 1988, after years of failed negotiations over the status of the Northwest Passage, Brian Mulroney gave Ronald Reagan a globe, pointed to the Arctic, and said "Ron that's ours. We own it lock, stock, and icebergs." A simple statement, it summed up Ottawa's official policy: Canada owns the icy waters that wind their way through the Arctic Archipelago. Behind the scenes, however, successive governments have spent over a century trying to figure out how to enforce this claim and on which legal basis to assert Canadian sovereignty over Arctic waters.

In Lock, Stock, and Icebergs: A History of Canada's Arctic Maritime Sovereignty (UBC Press, 2016), Adam Lajeunesse, a Professor of Public Policy and Fellow of the Brian Mulroney Institute of Government at St. Francis Xavier University, guides readers through the evolution of Canada's Arctic sovereignty, showing how the Northwest Passage and the surrounding waters became Canadian. Listen to this engaging podcast to understand what inspired Lajeunesse to write the book, what are the main points of his argument, and how its insights are still relevant today.

Lavinia Stan is a professor of political science at St. Francis Xavier University in Canada.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel F. Runde, "The American Imperative: Reclaiming Global Leadership through Soft Power" (Bombardier, 2023)

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In The American Imperative: Reclaiming Global Leadership through Soft Power (Bombardier, 2023), Washington insider Daniel Runde makes the case for building a new global consensus through vigorous internationalism and the judicious use of soft power.

Daniel F. Runde is Senior Vice President and the William A. Schreyer Chair in Global Analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Patrick Bixby, "License to Travel: A Cultural History of the Passport" (U California Press, 2022)

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

This surprising global history of an indispensable document reveals how the passport has shaped art, thought, and human experience while helping to define the modern world.

In License to Travel: A Cultural History of the Passport (U California Press, 2022), Patrick Bixby takes the reader on a captivating journey from pharaonic Egypt and Han-dynasty China to the passport controls and crowded refugee camps of today. Along the way, you will:

Peruse the passports of artists and intellectuals, writers and musicians, ancient messengers and modern migrants.
See how these seemingly humble documents implicate us in larger narratives about identity, mobility, citizenship, and state authority.
Encounter intimate stories of vulnerability and desire along with vivid examples drawn from world cinema, literature, art, philosophy, and politics.
Witness the authority that travel documents exercise over our movements and our emotions as we circulate around the globe.

With unexpected discoveries at every turn, License to Travel exposes the passport as both an instrument of personal freedom and a tool of government surveillance powerful enough to define our very humanity.

Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on mass media, popular culture and avant-garde art.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Aaron Berman, "America's Arab Nationalists: From the Ottoman Revolution to the Rise of Hitler" (Routledge, 2022)

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Aaron Berman's book America's Arab Nationalists: From the Ottoman Revolution to the Rise of Hitler (Routledge, 2022) focuses in on the relationship between Arab nationalists and Americans in the struggle for independence in an era when idealistic Americans could see the Arab nationalist struggle as an expression of their own values. In the first three decades of the twentieth century (from the 1908 Ottoman revolution to the rise of Hitler), important and influential Americans, including members of the small Arab-American community, intellectually, politically and financially participated in the construction of Arab nationalism. This book tells the story of a diverse group of people whose contributions are largely unknown to the American public.

The role Americans played in the development of Arab nationalism has been largely unexplored by historians, making this an important and original contribution to scholarship. This volume is of great interest to students and academics in the field, though the narrative style is accessible to anyone interested in Arab nationalism, the conflict between Zionists and Palestinians, and the United States’ relationship with the Arab world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jayita Sarkar, "Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Thu, 12 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In 1974, India surprised the world with “Smiling Buddha”: a secret underground nuclear test at Pokhran, Rajasthan. India called it a “peaceful nuclear explosion”—but few outside of India saw it that way.

The 1974 nuclear tests became a symbol of India’s ability to help itself, especially given how the country was left out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an agreement the country argued was colonial. But, as Jayita Sarkar’s Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) points out, India’s nuclear program was in fact the product of Cold War tensions and international networks–including some foreign sources of nuclear knowledge and material. (An open-access version of Jay’s book can be found here)

Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow and the Founding Director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. She can be followed on Twitter at @DrJSarkar, and her Linktree can be found here.

In this interview, Jay and I talk about India’s nuclear program, from its very beginnings through to when India was brought back into the world’s—or, at least, the U.S.’s–nuclear good graces in 2008.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ploughshares and Swords. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Antonia Witt, "Undoing Coups: The African Union and Post-coup Intervention in Madagascar" (Zed Books, 2020)

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Since the beginnings of independence, a number of African nations have been plagued by repeated coup d'états. Within the African Union (AU), there has been a concerted effort to break this cycle through the official adoption of an 'anti-coup norm', by which the AU is mandated to suspend a member state and restore constitutional order following a coup. Supporters of this stance see it as strengthening democracy in Africa, while critics argue that it has served to prop up existing regimes. But there has been little analysis of what the AU's attempts to 'restore constitutional order' have meant for individual African states.

In Undoing Coups: The African Union and Post-coup Intervention in Madagascar (Zed Books, 2020), Dr. Antonia Witt looks at the legacy of the AU's intervention in Madagascar following the 2009 'Malagasy crisis', one of the increasingly relevant yet under-researched cases of non-Western intervention in Africa. Dr. Witt looks at the ways in which international intervention reconfigured the political order in Madagascar, how it facilitated the power struggle within the Madagascan elite and prevented more profound political change. It also considers what the example set by the Madagascan intervention means for the wider international order in Africa and the powers attributed to African international actors such as the AU.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alessandro Iandolo, "Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955-1968" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Tue, 10 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In the middle of the 20th century, there was a passionate affair, between the Soviet empire and newly independent West African states. It was a short, intense, and acrimonious love story built on shared dreams for a noncapitalist future. Alessandro Iandolo’s new book, Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955-1968 (Cornell UP, 2022), explores the history of this unlikely romance. The book traces the rise and fall of the Soviet Union’s engagement with these three West African nations, which Iandolo argues were at the center of the Soviet search for development in the Third World.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lior Lehrs, "Unofficial Peace Diplomacy: Private Peace Entrepreneurs in Conflict Resolution Processes" (Manchester UP, 2022)

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Unofficial Peace Diplomacy: Private Peace Entrepreneurs in Conflict Resolution Processes (Manchester University Press, 2022) by Dr. Lior Lehrs analyses the international phenomenon of private peace entrepreneurs. These are private citizens with no official authority who initiate channels of communication with official representatives from the other side of a conflict in order to promote a conflict resolution process.

Dr. Lehrs combines theoretical discussion with historical analysis, examining four cases from different conflicts: Norman Cousins and Suzanne Massie in the Cold War, Brendan Duddy in the Northern Ireland conflict and Uri Avnery in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The book defines the phenomenon, examines the resources and activities of private peace entrepreneurs and their impact on official diplomacy, and examines the conditions under which they can play an effective role in peace-making processes.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bordering the Bedouin

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 21:00:00 -0000

Contemporary issues like the refugee crisis, climate refugees, and global restrictions on movement caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have brought into stark relief the extent to which our movements, lives, and worldviews are governed by national borders and boundary-making. But these borders and their associated militarization and security infrastructures are a recent phenomenon, the legacy of 20th-century wars and colonialism. Modern borders are also often the result of complex, disputed negotiation processes between governments and other authorities, which rarely take into consideration the local populations living in border zones.

What happens when these modern border-making processes interact with nomadic peoples? How is pastoralism affected and circumscribed by nation-state borders and boundary regimes? This episode discusses histories of border formation in the modern Middle East in relation to nomadic pastoralists - the Bedouin - specifically in Iraq and Israel. I talked to a range of scholars working on these topics, and you'll hear from them throughout the episode. We also talk about the effects of these borders on the Bedouin today, as well as evidence for Bedouin alternatives to borders and maps.

Music in this episode: Desert City by Kevin MacLeod. License.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Bedouin and the Formation of Iraq's National Borders

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The British occupation of Iraq after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire led to the creation of Iraq's national boundaries, a process with profound and long-lasting implications for the inhabitants of Iraq's border regions. In his dissertation, "The Origins and Development of Iraq's National Boundaries, 1918-1932: Policing and Political Geography in the Iraq-Nejd and Iraq-Syria Borderlands" (University of Chicago, 2018), Dr. Carl Shook examined how Iraq's modern national borders were formed in relation to the Bedouin and to the policing of Bedouin tribes. In this episode he joins me to discuss the history of Iraq's southern border with Saudi Arabia, the role of Bedouin tribespeople within the border formation process, and the effects of transnational borders on nomadic peoples. Follow Dr. Shook on Twitter.

Music in this episode: Desert City by Kevin MacLeod. License.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ronald H. Spector, "A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945-1955" (Norton, 2023)

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

On September 2, 1945, Japan surrendered to the United States, ending the Second World War. Yet the Japanese invasion had upended the old geopolitical structures of European empires, leaving old imperial powers on the decline and new groups calling for independence on the rise.

That unsteady situation sparked a decade of conflict: in Indonesia, in Vietnam, in China and in Korea, as esteemed military historian Professor Ronald Spector writes about in his latest book, A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945–1955, published by W. W. Norton in 2023.

In this interview, Ronald and I talk about the decade of conflict following the Second World War–and whether these conflicts were inevitable in the postcolonial, Cold War world.

Ronald H. Spector, professor emeritus of history and international relations at George Washington University, is the author of seven books, including Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan (Free Press: 1984) and In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia (Random House: 2008).

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of A Continent Erupts. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eren Duzgun, "Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Revisiting Turkish Modernity" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Western interpretations of the Ottoman age of reform and the Turkish Republic often evaluate these histories against an idealized, essentialized narrative of the European history, in which a triumphant bourgeois class instigated transitions to political liberalism and capitalism. Consequently, their explanations of persistent authoritarian tendencies and statist economic development policies focus on what features of European modernity are missing or insufficiently present in Turkey.

In Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Revisiting Turkish Modernity (Cambridge UP, 2022), Eren Duzgun, argues that this approach to comparative historical analysis not only fails to grasp Ottoman and Turkish history on its own terms, but it also gets European history wrong by overlooking the variety of trajectories of political and economic development that characterized European history from the age of revolutions onwards. Duzgun argues that the concept of Jacobinism holds the key to understanding both Ottoman and Turkish modernization and transitions to modernity in continental Europe that did not correspond to the narrative of ‘bourgeois revolutions’ that undergirds both liberal and Marxist theories of modernization. We will discuss the origins of the Jacobin route to modernity, how the Jacobin model relates to common understandings of capitalist political economies, and why a book about Turkish and Ottoman history needed a chapter on French history.

Eren Duzgun is assistant professor of international relations at the University of Nottingham’s China Campus in Ningbo, China.

Geoffrey Gordon is a PhD candidate in comparative politics at the University of Virginia. Follow him on Twitter: @geofflgordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Future of Global Trade: A Discussion with Shannon K. O'Neil

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Critics of globalisation come in many forms from environmentalists to trade unionists and many others in between. In the midst of all the controversy less attention has been paid to how big a phenomenon globalisation actually is and how it compares to another trend – regionalism. In this podcast Owen Bennett Jones discusses The Globalisation Myth: Why Regions Matter (Yale University Press, 2022) with its author, Shannon K. O Neil.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andreas Guidi, "Generations of Empire: Youth from Ottoman to Italian Rule in the Mediterranean" (U Toronto Press, 2022)

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In 1912, Italy occupied Rhodes, an Ottoman town inhabited by Greek Orthodox, Muslims, Jews, and Catholics. Rhodes became a territory of Italy's empire in 1923 following the Treaty of Lausanne, only one year after Mussolini seized power in Rome. The Ottoman demise corresponded to the expansion of fascist imperialism in the Mediterranean. Both the Ottoman Young Turks and Italian colonial governors invoked the role of a "new generation" of youth in imperial rule.

Generations of Empire: Youth from Ottoman to Italian Rule in the Mediterranean (U Toronto Press, 2022) investigates the relationship between state and society in light of successive transformations of imperial rule, rethinking Italian colonialism as post-Ottoman history. Andreas Guidi explores how communal life in the town of Rhodes was affected by the transition between these regimes, from an autocratic to a constitutional empire in late Ottoman years to Italian military occupation to fascist annexation. Based on archival sources in five languages from seven different countries, the book investigates generational dynamics in the domains of political activism, the family, education, work and leisure, and mobility. Generations of Empire offers a vivid picture of how a local society navigated large-scale social and political transformations in the modern Mediterranean.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Muhammet Koçak, "Turkey-Russia Relations in the Twenty-First Century: Cooperation and Competition Amid Systemic Turbulence" (Lexington, 2022)

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Turkey and Russia are two of the most significant powerhouses in Eurasia. The foreign policies of two countries directly impact the regional dynamics in Black Sea, Central Asia, Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the Balkan regions. The changes in the bilateral relations between the two countries go well beyond the Black Sea region. In the past, the Russian Empire played a significant role in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey took part in containing the USSR during the Cold War by joining the NATO in 1952. In the twenty-first century, however, Turkey and Russia invested in bilateral trade and established significant partnerships in the strategic defense and energy sectors. In the same period, the competition between Turkey and Russia heightened, giving way to military confrontation in multiple fronts. Turkey-Russia Relations in the Twenty-First Century: Cooperation and Competition Amid Systemic Turbulence (Lexington, 2022) argues that the changing balance of power in the region has triggered adjustments in the foreign policies of Russia and Turkey in the twenty-first century. The decline of the US influence in the region have brought about increased engagement between Turkey and Russia in the form of partnerships and competition for influence.

Muhammet Koçak received his PhD in International Relations from Florida International University.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth N. Ellis. "The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) tackles questions of Native power past and present and provides a fresh examination of the formidable and resilient Native nations—including Biloxis, Choctaws, Chitimachas, Chickasaws, Houmas, Mobilians, and Tunicas—who helped shape the modern Gulf South.

In The Great Power of Small Nations, Elizabeth N. Ellis (Peoria) tells the stories of the many smaller Native American nations that shaped the development of the Gulf South. Based on extensive archival research and oral histories, Ellis’s narrative chronicles how diverse Indigenous peoples—including Biloxis, Choctaws, Chitimachas, Chickasaws, Houmas, Mobilians, and Tunicas—influenced and often challenged the growth of colonial Louisiana. The book centers on questions of Native nation-building and international diplomacy, and it argues that Native American migration and practices of offering refuge to migrants in crisis enabled Native nations to survive the violence of colonization.

Indeed, these practices also made them powerful. When European settlers began to arrive in Indigenous homelands at the turn of the eighteenth century, these small nations, or petites nations as the French called them, pulled colonists into their political and social systems, thereby steering the development of early Louisiana. In some cases, the same practices that helped Native peoples withstand colonization in the eighteenth century, including frequent migration, living alongside foreign nations, and welcoming outsiders into their lands, have made it difficult for their contemporary descendants to achieve federal acknowledgment and full rights as Native American peoples.

The Great Power of Small Nations tackles questions of Native power past and present and provides a fresh examination of the formidable and resilient Native nations who helped shape the modern Gulf South.

John Cable is assistant professor of history at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia. He earned the Ph.D. in history at Florida State University in 2020.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joanne Yao, "The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped the International Order" (Manchester UP, 2022)

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

William Inboden, "The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink" (Dutton, 2022)

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 05:00:00 -0000

With decades of hindsight, the peaceful end of the Cold War seems a foregone conclusion. But in the early 1980s, most experts believed the Soviet Union was strong, stable, and would last into the next century. Ronald Reagan entered the White House with no certainty of what would happen next, only an overriding faith in democracy and an abiding belief that Soviet communism—and the threat of nuclear war—must end.

William Inboden's The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink (Dutton, 2022) reveals how Reagan’s White House waged the Cold War while managing multiple crises around the globe. From the emergence of global terrorism, wars in the Middle East, the rise of Japan, and the awakening of China to proxy conflicts in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, Reagan’s team oversaw the worldwide expansion of democracy, globalization, free trade, and the information revolution. Yet no issue was greater than the Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union. As president, Reagan remade the four-decades-old policy of containment and challenged the Soviets in an arms race and ideological contest that pushed them toward economic and political collapse, all while extending an olive branch of diplomacy as he sought a peaceful end to the conflict.

Reagan’s revolving team included Secretaries of State Al Haig and George Shultz; Secretaries of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Frank Carlucci; National Security Advisors Bill Clark, John Poindexter, and Bud McFarlane; Chief of Staff James Baker; CIA Director Bill Casey; and United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. Talented and devoted to their president, they were often at odds with one another as rivalries and backstabbing led to missteps and crises. But over the course of the presidency, Reagan and his team still developed the strategies that brought about the Cold War’s peaceful conclusion and remade the world.

Based on thousands of pages of newly-declassified documents and interviews with senior Reagan officials, The Peacemaker brims with fresh insights into one of America’s most consequential presidents. Along the way, it shows how the pivotal decade of the 1980s shaped the world today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vladislav M. Zubok, "Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union" (Yale UP, 2021)

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In 1945 the Soviet Union controlled half of Europe and was a founding member of the United Nations. By 1991, it had an army four million strong with five thousand nuclear-tipped missiles and was the second biggest producer of oil in the world. But soon afterward the union sank into an economic crisis and was torn apart by nationalist separatism. Its collapse was one of the seismic shifts of the twentieth century.

Thirty years on, Vladislav Zubok offers a major reinterpretation of the final years of the USSR, refuting the notion that the breakup of the Soviet order was inevitable. Instead, Zubok reveals how Gorbachev's misguided reforms, intended to modernize and democratize the Soviet Union, deprived the government of resources and empowered separatism. Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (Yale UP, 2021) sheds new light on Russian democratic populism, the Baltic struggle for independence, the crisis of Soviet finances--and the fragility of authoritarian state power.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scott Moore, "China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it is that the world is bound together by shared challenges—and that at the center of those challenges stands China. China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future (Oxford UP, 2022) re-envisions China’s role in the world in terms of sustainability and technology. The danger is that China’s next act will drive divergence on the rules and standards the world desperately needs in the decades ahead. This book helps foreign countries, companies, and other organizations prepare for a future shaped by sustainability, technology—and a dramatic new chapter for China and our world.

Sample takeaways:

China-linked political + economic risk isn’t going away and will get worse. No-regrets supply chain diversification will only make more sense over time.
Environmental sustainability will become a bigger and bigger priority in the China market because of growing regulatory + consumer pressure. This is both in direct operations & larger supply chains.
Data privacy, security, and surveillance will pose growing dilemmas for multi-national companies. Data governance is becoming more fragmented, and compliance and cross-border transfer more difficult. Firms need to prepare for “data de-globalization.”
China is becoming a more isolated, but still large & important, innovation ecosystem. How to access & leverage this ecosystem, and the talent within it, will become a bigger challenge as China-global research collaborations, student flows, etc. shrink.
China’s frothy biotech sector is cooling, but will still be a major growth driver in the years ahead. And developments in biotech will disrupt and reshape many sectors and industries via biometrics, biomaterials, etc.

Dr. Scott Moore is an acclaimed authority on China, sustainability, and technology whose career has spanned the U.S. government, multi-lateral institutions, and academia. He currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Director of China Programs and Strategic Initiatives. Before returning to academia, Dr. Moore worked extensively on the Paris Agreement on climate change at the U.S. Department of State and at the World Bank. He graduated from Princeton University and received his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Dong Wang is collection editor of Asian Studies books at Lived Places Publishing (New York & the UK), H-Diplo review editor, director of the Wellington Koo Institute for Modern China in World History (Germany & USA), research associate at Harvard Fairbank Center (since 2002), distinguished professor of history at Shanghai University (since 2016), a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joanna Newman, "Nearly the New World: The British West Indies and the Flight from Nazism, 1933–1945" (Berghahn Books, 2019)

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In the years leading up to the Second World War, increasingly desperate European Jews looked to far-flung destinations such as Barbados, Trinidad, and Jamaica in search of refuge from the horrors of Hitler’s Europe.

Joanna Newman's book Nearly the New World: The British West Indies and the Flight from Nazism, 1933–1945 (Berghahn Books, 2019) tells the extraordinary story of Jewish refugees who overcame persecution and sought safety in the West Indies from the 1930s through the end of the war. At the same time, it gives an unsparing account of the xenophobia and bureaucratic infighting that nearly prevented their rescue—and that helped to seal the fate of countless other European Jews for whom escape was never an option.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rohan Mukherjee, "Ascending Order: Rising Powers and the Politics of Status in International Institutions" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Why do rising powers sometimes challenge an international order that enables their growth, and at other times support an order that constrains them? Ascending Order: Rising Powers and the Politics of Status in International Institutions (Cambridge UP, 2022) offers the first comprehensive study of conflict and cooperation as new powers join the global arena. International institutions shape the choices of rising states as they pursue equal status with established powers. Open membership rules and fair decision-making procedures facilitate equality and cooperation, while exclusion and unfairness frequently produce conflict. Using original and robust archival evidence, the book examines these dynamics in three cases: the United States and the maritime laws of war in the mid-nineteenth century; Japan and naval arms control in the interwar period; and India and nuclear non-proliferation in the Cold War. This study shows that the future of contemporary international order depends on the ability of international institutions to address the status ambitions of rising powers such as China and India.

Rohan Mukherjee is an assistant professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the grand strategies of rising powers and their impact on international security and order, with an empirical specialization in the Asia-Pacific region.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Immerwahr, "The Galactic Vietnam: Technology, Modernization, and Empire in George Lucas’s Star Wars" (2022)

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode I got to chat about two of my favorite things: the history of imperialism and Star Wars with Daniel Immerwahr, Professor of History at Northwestern University. Our conversation focused on his recent article “The Galactic Vietnam: Technology, Modernization, and Empire in George Lucas’s Star Wars,” in Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories, edited by David Milne and Christopher Nichols (Columbia University Press, 2022). In the piece her uses the film and the figure of George Lucas to explore various aspects of the United States in the Cold War. Were Ewoks the Viet Cong? Was the Death Star a B-52? Was Alderaan Hanoi? Listen and find out.

Daniel Immerwahr earned his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in 2011 after undergraduate studies at both Columbia and Cambridge. His previous work includes Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Harvard, 2015) and the award winning and best-selling How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), which has been translated into German, Dutch, Italian, Korean, and Chinese so far. Dr. Immerwahr's writings have appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, the Washington Post, The New Republic, The Nation, Dissent, Jacobin, Slate, and elsewhere.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James Mark and Paul Betts, "Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation (Oxford UP, 2022) is the first work to provide a broad history of the relationship between Eastern Europe and the decolonising world. It ranges from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, but at its core is the dynamic of the post-1945 period, when socialism's importance as a globalising force accelerated and drew together what contemporaries called the 'Second' and 'Third Worlds'.

At the centre of this history is the encounter between the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe on one hand, and a wider world casting off European empires or struggling against western imperialism on the other. The origins of these connections are traced back to new forms of internationalism enabled by the Russian Revolution; the interplay between the first 'decolonisation' of the twentieth century in Eastern Europe and rising anti-colonial movements; and the global rise of fascism, which created new connections between East and South. The heart of the study, however, lies in the Cold War, when these contacts and relationships dramatically intensified. A common embrace of socialist modernisation and anti-imperial culture opened up possibilities for a new and meaningful exchange between the peripheries of Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Such linkages are examined across many different fields - from health to archaeology, economic development to the arts - and through many people - from students to experts to labour migrants - who all helped to shape a different form and meaning of globalisation.

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

Frederic C. Hof, "Reaching for the Heights: The Inside Story of a Secret Attempt to Reach a Syrian-Israeli Peace" (USIP, 2022)

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Reaching for the Heights: The Inside Story of a Secret Attempt to Reach a Syrian-Israeli Peace (USIP, 2022) is an insider’s account of secret negotiations to broker a Syria-Israel peace deal―negotiations that came tantalizingly close to success. Ambassador Frederic Hof, who spearheaded the US-mediated discussions in 2009-11, takes readers behind the scenes in Washington, Damascus, and Jerusalem, where President Assad and Prime Minister Netanyahu inched toward a deal to return Israeli-occupied areas of the Golan Heights in exchange for Syria severing military ties with Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas. Hof’s candid assessments, refreshing self-criticism, compelling prose, and rich historical detail make this a masterful memoir of an unknown chapter in American diplomacy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tanisha M. Fazal, "Wars of Law: Unintended Consequences in the Regulation of Armed Conflict" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In Wars of Law: Unintended Consequences in the Regulation of Armed Conflict (Cornell UP, 2020), Tanisha M. Fazal assesses the unintended consequences of the proliferation of the laws of war for the commencement, conduct, and conclusion of wars over the course of the past one hundred fifty years.

Fazal outlines three main arguments: early laws of war favored belligerents, but more recent additions have constrained them; this shift may be attributable to a growing divide between lawmakers and those who must comply with international humanitarian law; and lawmakers have been consistently inattentive to how rebel groups might receive these laws. By using the laws of war strategically, Fazal suggests, belligerents in both interstate and civil wars relate those laws to their big-picture goals.

Why have states stopped issuing formal declarations of war? Why have states stopped concluding formal peace treaties? Why are civil wars especially likely to end in peace treaties today? In addressing such questions, Fazal provides a lively and intriguing account of the implications of the laws of war.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nicholas Morton, "The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East" (Basic Books, 2022)

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 10:00:00 -0000

For centuries, the Crusades have been central to the story of the medieval Near East, but these religious wars are only part of the region’s complex history. As Nicholas Morton reveals in The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East (Basic Books, 2022), during the same era the Near East was utterly remade by another series of wars: the Mongol invasions. In a single generation, the Mongols conquered vast swaths of the Near East and upended the region’s geopolitics. Amid the chaos of the Mongol onslaught, long-standing powers such as the Byzantines, the Seljuk Turks, and the crusaders struggled to survive, while new players such as the Ottomans arose to fight back. The Mongol conquests forever transformed the region, while forging closer ties among societies spread across Eurasia. The Mongol Storm is the definitive history of the Mongol assault on the Near East and its enduring global consequences.

Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan R. Hunt, "The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam" (Stanford UP, 2022)

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam (Stanford UP, 2022) reveals how a coalition of powerful and developing states embraced global governance in hopes of a bright and peaceful tomorrow. While fears of nuclear war were ever-present, it was the perceived threat to their preeminence that drove Washington, Moscow, and London to throw their weight behind the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) banishing nuclear testing underground, the 1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco banning atomic armaments from Latin America, and the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) forbidding more countries from joining the most exclusive club on Earth.

International society, the Cold War, and the imperial U.S. presidency were reformed from 1945 to 1970, when a global nuclear order was inaugurated, averting conflict in the industrial North and yielding what George Orwell styled a "peace that is no peace" everywhere else. Today the nuclear order legitimizes foreign intervention worldwide, empowering the nuclear club and, above all, the United States, to push sanctions and even preventive war against atomic outlaws, all in humanity's name.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Agathe Demarais, "Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests" (Columbia UP, 2022)

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What will be the Role of Europe in the Changing World Order?

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The transatlantic relationship, arguably the bedrock of the world’s post-World War II international security architecture, came under significant threat during Donald Trump’s tenure in office, as Trump complained about European untrustworthiness and talked about pulling the United States out of NATO. Yet in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the transatlantic relationship has widely been seen to recover its strength and to grow in military terms as Sweden and Finland are on a path to become NATO members. What is the state of the transatlantic relationship and why does it matter?

This week on International Horizons, former State Secretary of Germany, Sigmar Gabriel, joins John Torpey to discuss European security policy and transatlantic relations in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine. He discusses the motivations that led Putin into the war in Ukraine, as he saw an opportunity after the US withdrawal from the Middle East and doubts about NATO. Gabriel delves into the possibilities of a negotiated outcome in Russia’s war in Ukraine, and analyzes the future prospects of geopolitical competition, where the US will look at the Pacific and will operate under systems of alliances and shared military burdens instead of subsidizing the security system of the West. Finally, Gabriel argues that China is often overestimated, and that a potential strategy for the US and Europe could be to offer alternatives to the Belt and Road Initiative, as China is now coping with domestic economic difficulties.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kees Boterbloem, "Russia and the Dutch Republic, 1566–1725: A Forgotten Friendship" (Lexington Books, 2021)

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Once upon a time, it was said that Russia was isolated and ignorant until Peter the Great opened Russia to the West and ushered in modernization. While Tsar Peter I surely did look to the West in his quest to modernize Russia, these processes were underway well before Peter ever launched his first sailboat. Thousands of Europeans who lived in Moscow under the first Romanovs contributed in myriad ways to these modernizing processes. A significant portion of them were from the Netherlands, the small republic at Europe’s edge that threw off its Spanish overloads, mastered its marshy littoral, and went to become the economic powerhouse of seventeenth-century Europe. Building from the unfinished work of the late Jordan Kurland, Kees Boterbloem’s Russia and the Dutch Republic, 1566–1725: A Forgotten Friendship (Lexington Books, 2021) guides us through one of Russia’s most important early modern relationships. This brisque and engaging read introduces us to the diplomats, merchants, mercenaries, and shipwrights, who mediated all manner of exchanges between Russia and the Netherlands, offering a fresh perspective on how this important relationship changed before and during the reign of Peter I.

Erika Monahan is an editor of the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russia and Eurasian Studies and associate professor of History at the University of New Mexico. In 2023-2024 she is an Alexander von Humboldt fellow with the University of Cologne.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael A. Verney, "A Great and Rising Nation: Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early US Republic" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

A Great and Rising Nation: Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early US Republic (University of Chicago Press, 2022) by Dr. Michael A. Verney illuminates the unexplored early decades of the United States’ imperialist naval aspirations.

Conventional wisdom holds that, until the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States was a feeble player on the world stage, with an international presence rooted in commerce rather than military might. Michael A. Verney’s A Great and Rising Nation flips this notion on its head, arguing that early US naval expeditions, often characterized as merely scientific, were in fact deeply imperialist. Circling the globe from the Mediterranean to South America and the Arctic, these voyages reflected the diverse imperial aspirations of the new republic, including commercial dominance in the Pacific World, religious empire in the Holy Land, proslavery expansion in South America, and diplomatic prestige in Europe. As Dr. Verney makes clear, the United States had global imperial aspirations far earlier than is commonly thought.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steve Kemper, "Our Man In Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbor" (Mariner Books, 2022)

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

A gripping, behind-the-scenes account of the personalities and contending forces in Tokyo during the volatile decade that led to World War II, as seen through the eyes of the American ambassador who attempted to stop the slide to war.

In 1932, Japan was in crisis. Naval officers had assassinated the prime minister and conspiracies flourished. The military had a stranglehold on the government. War with Russia loomed, and propaganda campaigns swept the country, urging schoolchildren to give money to procure planes and tanks. Into this maelstrom stepped Joseph C. Grew, America’s most experienced and talented diplomat. When Grew was appointed ambassador to Japan, not only was the country in turmoil, its relationship with America was rapidly deteriorating. For the next decade, Grew attempted to warn American leaders about the risks of Japan’s raging nationalism and rising militarism, while also trying to stabilize Tokyo’s increasingly erratic and volatile foreign policy. From domestic terrorism by Japanese extremists to the global rise of Hitler and the fateful attack on Pearl Harbor, the events that unfolded during Grew’s tenure proved to be pivotal for Japan, and for the world. His dispatches from the darkening heart of the Japanese empire would prove prescient—for his time, and for our own. Drawing on Grew’s diary of his time in Tokyo as well as U.S. embassy correspondence, diplomatic dispatches, and firsthand Japanese accounts, Our Man in Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbor (Mariner Books, 2022) brings to life a man who risked everything to avert another world war, the country where he staked it all—and the abyss that swallowed it.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Benjamin de Carvalho and Halvard Leira, "The Sea and International Relations" (Manchester UP, 2022)

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

While the world's oceans cover more than seventy percent of its surface, the sea has largely vanished as an object of enquiry in International Relations (IR), being treated either as a corollary of land or as time. Yet, the sea is the quintessential international space, and its importance to global politics has become all the more obvious in recent years.

Drawing on interdisciplinary insights from IR, Historical Sociology, Blue Humanities and Critical Ocean Studies, The Sea and International Relations (Manchester University Press, 2022), edited by Dr. Benjamin de Carvalho and Dr. Halvard Leira breaks with this trend of oceanic amnesia, and kickstarts a theoretical, conceptual and empirical discussion about the sea and IR, by highlighting theoretical puzzles, analysing broad historical perspectives and addressing contemporary challenges.

In bringing the sea back into IR, the book reconceptualises the canvas of international relations to include the oceans as a social, political, economic and military space which affects the workings of world politics.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

William Doyle, "Napoleon at Peace: How to End a Revolution" (Reaktion Books, 2022)

Thu, 10 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Holger Afflerbach, "On a Knife Edge: How Germany Lost the First World War" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In On a Knife Edge: How Germany Lost the First World War (Cambridge UP, 2022), Holger Afflerbach argues that the outcome of the war was actually in the balance until relatively late in the war. Using new evidence from diaries, letters and memoirs, he fundamentally revises our understanding of German strategy from the decision to go to war and the failure of the western offensive to the radicalisation of Germany's war effort under Hindenburg and Ludendorff and the ultimate collapse of the Central Powers. He uncovers the struggles in wartime Germany between supporters of peace and hardliners who wanted to fight to the finish. He suggests that Germany was not nearly as committed to all-out conquest as previous accounts argue. Numerous German peace advances could have offered the opportunity to end the war before it dragged Europe into the abyss.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jianglin Li, "When the Iron Bird Flies: China's Secret War in Tibet" (Stanford UP, 2022)

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In When the Iron Bird Flies: China's Secret War in Tibet (Stanford University Press, 2022), Jianglin Li presents an untold story that reshapes our understanding of Chinese and Tibetan history.

From 1956 to 1962, devastating military conflicts took place in China's southwestern and northwestern regions. Official records at the time scarcely made mention of the campaign, and in the years since only lukewarm acknowledgment of the violence has surfaced. When the Iron Bird Flies, by Jianglin Li, breaks this decades long silence to reveal for the first time a comprehensive and explosive picture of the six years that would prove definitive in modern Tibetan and Chinese history.

The CCP referred to the campaign as "suppressing the Tibetan rebellion." It would lead to the 14th Dalai Lama's exile in India, as well as the Tibetan diaspora in 1959, though the battles lasted three additional years after these events. Featuring key figures in modern Chinese history, the battles waged in this period covered a vast geographical region. This book offers a portrait of chaos, deception, heroism, and massive loss. Beyond the significant death toll across the Tibetan regions, the war also destroyed most Tibetan monasteries in a concerted effort to eradicate local religion and scholarship.

Despite being considered a military success, to this day, the operations in the agricultural regions remain unknown. As large numbers of Tibetans have self-immolated in recent years to protest Chinese occupation, Li shows that the largest number of cases occurred in the sites most heavily affected by this hidden war. She argues persuasively that the events described in this book will shed more light on our current moment, and will help us understand the unrelenting struggle of the Tibetan people for their freedom.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Natasha Lance Rogoff, "Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the timing appeared perfect to bring Sesame Street to millions of children living in the former Soviet Union. With the Muppets envisioned as ideal ambassadors of Western values, no one anticipated just how challenging and dangerous this would prove to be.

In Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), Natasha Lance Rogoff brings this gripping tale to life. Amidst bombings, assassinations, and a military takeover of the production office, Lance Rogoff and the talented Moscow team of artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and puppeteers remained determined to bring laughter, learning, and a new way of seeing the world to children in Russia, Ukraine and across the former Soviet empire. With a sharp wit and compassion for her colleagues, Lance Rogoff observes how cultural clashes colored nearly every aspect of the production—from the show’s educational framework to writing comedy to the new Russian Muppets themselves—despite the team’s common goal.

Brimming with insight and nuance, Muppets in Moscow skillfully explores the post-Soviet societal tensions that continue to thwart the Russian people’s efforts to create a better future for their country. More than just a story of a children’s show, this book provides a valuable perspective of Russia’s people, their culture, and their complicated relationship with the West that remains relevant even today.

Natasha Lance Rogoff is an award-winning television director, producer and writer of more than 25 years. Her previous credits include executive producer of Ulitsa Sezam (Sesame Street in Russia) and producer of Plaza Sesamo (Sesame Street in Mexico.) After studying at the Leningrad State University, she wrote about Soviet underground culture, as well as one of the earliest exposé of Soviet government persecution of the Russian LGBTQ community in the San Francisco Chronicle. Her 1985 film, Rock Around the Kremlin, about underground rock artists, aired on ABC TV’s “20/20. Lance Rogoff embedded herself with hardline Russian communist fascists for two years, filming “Russia for Sale” which aired on ABC’s Nightline with Ted Koppel the night of the failed 1991 coup that ended the Soviet Union. She is now an Associate in the Art, Film and Visual Studies Department at Harvard University and lives between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York City. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter and follow the book on Facebook.

Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard Overy, "Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945" (Viking, 2022)

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ghassan Moazzin, "Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Using previously unexplored and meticulously analyzed sources from China and to a lesser extent Japan, combined with those of Germany and the UK, Ghassan Moazzin provides a refreshing look at a number of levels: the workings of multinational banks, international networks of bankers, the interactions of Chinese and German empires with other state actors.

In Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870-1919 (Cambridge UP, 2022), Moazzin introduces the novel concept of a "frontier bank" while building a case study around the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank (DAB). He aims to answer questions as to what is the role that individual actors such as the DAB play in early 20th century China?, What technological and business advancements build around multinational banks?, To what extent does our knowledge and understanding of capitalism is enabled by looking at local sources at end of the Chinese empire?

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 musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrew S. Rosenberg, "Undesirable Immigrants: Why Racism Persists in International Migration" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 officially ended the explicit prejudice in American immigration policy that began with the 1790 restriction on naturalization to free White persons of “good character.” By the 1980s, the rest of the Anglo-European world had followed suit, purging discriminatory language from their immigration laws and achieving what many believe to be a colorblind international system. Undesirable Immigrants: Why Racism Persists in International Migration (Princeton UP, 2022) challenges this notion, revealing how racial inequality persists in global migration despite the end of formally racist laws.

In this eye-opening book, Andrew Rosenberg argues that while today’s leaders claim that their policies are objective and seek only to restrict obviously dangerous migrants, these policies are still correlated with race. He traces how colonialism and White supremacy catalyzed violence and sabotaged institutions around the world, and how this historical legacy has produced migrants that the former imperial powers and their allies now deem unfit to enter. Rosenberg shows how postcolonial states remain embedded in a Western culture that requires them to continuously perform their statehood, and how the closing and policing of international borders has become an important symbol of sovereignty, one that imposes harsher restrictions on non-White migrants.

Drawing on a wealth of original quantitative evidence, Undesirable Immigrants demonstrates that we cannot address the challenges of international migration without coming to terms with the brutal history of colonialism.

Andrew Rosenberg is an assistant of political science at the University of Florida. His research examines racial inequality in the international system, the politics of migration, and global inequality. His current projects empirically break down the ideologies that maintain racial inequality in international migration. His research has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, International Studies Quarterly, Political Analysis, and Security Dialogue. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Ohio State University and is originally from Des Moines, Iowa.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cornelia Baciu, "Civil-Military Relations and Global Security Governance: Strategy, Hybrid Orders and the Case of Pakistan" (Routledge, 2022)

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 08:00:00 -0000

What are the problems with Samuel Huntington’s views about civil-military relations? Why do military coups persist in countries such as Pakistan, and what might be done to reduce their likelihood? In a study drawing upon extensive interview research in Pakistan, Cornelia Baciu argues that international organisations can help create a framework of security governance which can have a positive impact upon the political roles assumed by the military.

Her 2021 book Civil-Military Relations and Global Security Governance Strategy: Hybrid Orders and the Case of Pakistan investigates the relationship between international security governance, democratic civil-military relations and the relevance of strategy, as well as of absolute and relative gains, in norms formation in hybrid orders.

Highlighting caveats of the legacy of Huntington’s paradigm of military professionalism, the book applies a robust methodology and data collected in four sample regions in Pakistan. It gauges the effects of international and local actors’ support in the Security Sector Reform domain and examines instances of civil-military interactions and military transition. The book also analyses determinants and strategies that can influence them to demonstrate the impact of global governance in norms diffusion, as well as of absolute and relative utility gains and incentives in normative change. The author generates a new theory pertaining to international organisations and actors as determinants of transformation processes and consequently sheds new light on the issue of global security governance, especially its impact on civil-military relations and democratisation in hybrid orders.

Cornelia Baciu is a researcher at the Centre for Military Studies at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. She specialises in international security organizations and conflict research.

Duncan McCargo is Director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and a professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrew Fitzmaurice, "King Leopold's Ghostwriter: The Creation of Persons and States in the Nineteenth Century" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Eminent jurist, Oxford professor, advocate to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Travers Twiss (1809–1897) was a model establishment figure in Victorian Britain, and a close collaborator of Prince Metternich, the architect of the Concert of Europe. Yet Twiss’s life was defined by two events that threatened to undermine the order that he had so stoutly defended: a notorious social scandal and the creation of the Congo Free State. In King Leopold's Ghostwriter: The Creation of Persons and States in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton UP, 2021), Dr. Andrew Fitzmaurice tells the incredible story of a man who, driven by personal events that transformed him from a reactionary to a reformer, rewrote and liberalised international law—yet did so in service of the most brutal regime of the colonial era.

In an elaborate deception, Twiss and Pharaïlde van Lynseele, a Belgian prostitute, sought to reinvent her as a woman of suitably noble birth to be his wife. Their subterfuge collapsed when another former client publicly denounced van Lynseele. Disgraced, Twiss resigned his offices and the couple fled to Switzerland. But this failure set the stage for a second, successful act of re-creation. Twiss found new employment as the intellectual driving force of King Leopold of Belgium’s efforts to have the Congo recognised as a new state under his personal authority. Drawing on extensive new archival research, King Leopold’s Ghostwriter recounts Twiss’s story as never before, including how his creation of a new legal personhood for the Congo was intimately related to the earlier invention of a new legal personhood for his wife.

Combining gripping biography and penetrating intellectual history, King Leopold’s Ghostwriter uncovers a dramatic, ambiguous life that has had lasting influence on international law.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nicholas Micinski, "Delegating Responsibility: International Cooperation on Migration in the European Union" (U Michigan Press, 2022)

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Delegating Responsibility: International Cooperation on Migration in the European Union (U Michigan Press, 2022) explores the politics of migration in the European Union and explains how the EU responded to the 2015–17 refugee crisis. Based on 86 interviews and fieldwork in Greece and Italy, Nicholas R. Micinski proposes a new theory of international cooperation on international migration. States approach migration policies in many ways—such as coordination, collaboration, subcontracting, and unilateralism—but which policy they choose is based on capacity and on credible partners on the ground. Micinski traces the fifty-year evolution of EU migration management, like border security and asylum policies, and shows how EU officials used “crises” as political leverage to further Europeanize migration governance. In two in-depth case studies, he explains how Italy and Greece responded to the most recent refugee crisis. He concludes with a discussion of policy recommendations regarding contemporary as well as long-term aspirations for migration management in the EU.

Nicholas R. Micinski is Libra Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the University of Maine. His research focuses on global governance, particularly how states and international organizations respond to refugees, migration, climate change, and peacebuilding. Micinski is the author of two books: Delegating Responsibility: International Cooperation on Migration in the European Union (University of Michigan Press, 2022) and UN Global Compacts: Governing Migrants and Refugees (Routledge, 2021). Previously, Micinski was postdoctoral fellow at Université Laval, ISA James N. Rosenau Postdoctoral Fellow, and visiting researcher at the Center for the Study of Europe, Boston University. Before academia, he worked in the NGO sector in London for five years on refugee policy and service delivery. Micinski received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sam W. Haynes, "Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas" (Basic Books, 2022)

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Texas Revolution has long been cast as an epic episode in the origins of the American West. As the story goes, larger-than-life figures like Sam Houston, David Crockett, and William Barret Travis fought to free Texas from repressive Mexican rule. In Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas (Basic Books, 2022), historian Sam Haynes reveals the reality beneath this powerful creation myth. He shows how the lives of ordinary people—white Americans, Mexicans, Native Americans, and those of African descent—were upended by extraordinary events over twenty-five years. After the battle of San Jacinto, racial lines snapped taut as a new nation, the Lone Star republic, sought to expel Indians, marginalize Mexicans, and tighten its grip on the enslaved.

This is a revelatory and essential new narrative of a major turning point in the history of North America.

Andrew R. Graybill is professor of history and director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He is the author of The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (Liveright, 2013).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ian Morris, "Geography Is Destiny: Britain and the World--A 10,000-Year History" (FSG, 2022)

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Geography Is Destiny: Britain and the World--A 10,000-Year History (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), Ian Morris chronicles the eight-thousand-year history of Britain's relationship to Europe as it has changed in the context of a globalizing world. When Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016, the 48 percent who wanted to stay and the 52 percent who wanted to go each accused the other of stupidity, fraud, and treason.

In reality, the Brexit debate merely reran a script written eight thousand years earlier, when the rising seas physically separated the British Isles from the European continent. Ever since, geography has been destiny—yet it is humans who get to decide what that destiny means. Ian Morris, the critically acclaimed author of Why the West Rules—for Now, describes how technology and organization have steadily enlarged Britain's arena, and how its people have tried to turn this to their advantage. For the first seventy-five hundred years, the British were never more than bit players at the western edge of a European stage, struggling to find a role among bigger, richer, and more sophisticated continental rivals. By 1500 CE, however, new kinds of ships and governments had turned the European stage into an Atlantic one; with the English Channel now functioning as a barrier, England transformed the British Isles into a United Kingdom that created a worldwide empire. Since 1900, however, thanks to rapid globalization, Britain has been overshadowed by American, European, and—increasingly—Chinese actors. But in trying to find its place in a global economy, Britain has been looking in all the wrong places. The eight-thousand-year story bracingly chronicled by Geography Is Destiny shows that the great question for the coming century is not what to do about Brussels; it's what to do about Beijing.

Javier Mejia is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Political Science Department at Stanford University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeffers Lennox, "North of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the Long American Revolution" (Yale UP, 2022)

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The story of the Thirteen Colonies’ struggle for independence from Britain is well known to every American schoolchild. But at the start of the Revolutionary War, there were more than thirteen British colonies in North America. Patriots were surrounded by Indigenous homelands and loyal provinces. Independence had its limits.

North of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the Long American Revolution (Yale University Press, 2022) by Dr. Jeffers Lennox focuses on Upper Canada, Lower Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and especially the homelands that straddled colonial borders. He argues that these areas were far less foreign to the men and women who established the United States than Canada is to those who live here now. These northern neighbors were far from inactive during the Revolution. The participation of the loyal British provinces and Indigenous nations that largely rejected the Revolution—as antagonists, opponents, or bystanders—shaped the progress of the conflict and influenced the American nation’s early development.

In this book, historian Dr. Lennox looks north, as so many Americans at that time did, and describes how Loyalists and Indigenous leaders frustrated Patriot ambitions, defended their territory, and acted as midwives to the birth of the United States while restricting and redirecting its continental aspirations.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Future of Cold War: A Discussion with Sergey Radchenko

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Are we in a new cold war? And if so, is the US up against China or Russia? Join Owen Bennett Jones for a discussion with Sergey Radchenko, the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Radchenko is the author of Unwanted Visionaries: The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War and Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962-1967 among other works.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Maria Adele Carrai and Jennifer Rudolph, "The China Questions 2: Critical Insights Into US-China Relations" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

For decades Americans have described China as a rising power. That description no longer fits: China has already risen. What does this mean for the U.S.–China relationship? For the global economy and international security?

In this conversation, Julie Yu-Wen Chen, Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Helsinki discusses with Maria Adele Carrai from New York University Shanghai. Maria Adele Carrai is co-creator of a website called Mapping Global China. She recently co-edited “The China Questions 2: Critical Insights into US-China Relations” (Harvard University Press, 2022) with Jennifer Rudolph and Michzel Szonyi to offer essential insights into the many dimensions of the world’s most important bilateral relationship between the US and China. The voices included in The China Questions 2 recognize that the U.S.–China relationship has changed, and that the policy of engagement needs to change too. But they argue that zero-sum thinking is not the answer. Much that is good for one society is good for both—we are facing not another Cold War but rather a complex and contextually rooted mixture of conflict, competition, and cooperation that needs to be understood on its own terms.

One unique feature of this book is that it even includes discussion of Chinese literature. In this episode, Maria Adele Carrai read a short passage from Xudong Zhang’s chapter, illuminating how Chinese writers, with “their freedom, irreverence, and subversiveness undermine the suffocating (self-)censorship, stifling conformism and the formulaic media coverage. Like a spinning gyro rotating on an invisible axis, their work points to an aesthetically determined North Star, constant and free-standing, all the while attentive to and capable of absorbing the sound and fury, sighs, and laughter around this single-minded movement (Zhang, page 393).

Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland). Dr. Chen serves as one of the editors of the Journal of Chinese Political Science (Springer, SSCI). Formerly, she was chair of Nordic Association of China Studies (NACS) and Editor-in-Chief of Asian Ethnicity (Taylor & Francis). You can find her on University of Helsinki Chinese Studies’ website, Youtube and Facebook, and her personal Twitter.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Loukas Tsoukalis, "Europe's Coming of Age" (Polity Press, 2022)

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The EU, writes Loukas Tsoukalis, is “a strange vehicle … unlike any others on the roads of the world, surely not a flashy vehicle – rather slow and not easy to drive. However, it has been able to accommodate ever-increasing numbers of passengers and covered a remarkably long distance – often in adverse conditions and with accidents on the way”.

However, while the union has shown itself to be resilient, the new economic, societal and geopolitical challenges it faces mean it has to be much more than that. It has to project as well as protect. It has to grow up. In Europe's Coming of Age (Polity, 2022), Tsoukalis explains why and how.

Born in Athens, Loukas Tsoukalis studied economics and international relations in Manchester, Bruges, and Oxford where he also taught for many years, followed by chairs at the University of Athens and the London School of Economics, and visiting professorships at Harvard and the College of Europe. Today, he is a professor at Sciences Po in Paris. This is the latest of his many books on the EU including The Politics and Economics of European Monetary Integration, What Kind of Europe? and In Defence of Europe: Can the European Project Be Saved?

*The authors' own book recommendations are: The Globalization Paradox: Why Global Markets, States, and Democracy Can't Coexist by Dani Rodrik (Oxford University Press, 2012), and Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic (Belknap Press, 2019).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors and writes the Twenty-Four Two newsletter on Substack.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

U.S. Determinization of Genocide in Myanmar: Part One, Roots

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In March of 2022 the U.S. government announced its determination that genocide was committed by the Myanmar military against Rohingya communities in Myanmar’s Rakhine State in 2017. What will this mean for the roughly one million Rohingya refugees living in neighboring countries, for Rohingya IDPs in Rakhine State, and for post-coup Myanmar? In this episode Terese Gagnon speaks with Kyaw Zeyar Win about this long-awaited determination. In this conversation we hear from Zeyar about the violent origins of the Rohingya genocide, rooted in the long history of securitization of Rohingya in Myanmar. Terese and Zeyar discuss the possible implications of the genocide determination for Rohingya both within and outside of post-coup Myanmar.

Kyaw Zeyar Win is a Project Coordinator at the International Republican Institute in Washington D.C. He is an expert in politics, international relations, and human rights with a focus on Myanmar. He holds a master’s in international relations from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University where he was an Open Society Fellow. He has previously worked at organizations including Voice of America and Amnesty International. He is author of the chapter “Securitization of the Rohingya in Myanmar” from the book Myanmar Transformed? People, Places and Politics.

Terese Gagnon is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at University of Copenhagen in the "The Politics of Climate and Sustainability in Asia”. She holds a PhD in anthropology from Syracuse University. Her dissertation is about Karen food, seed, and political sovereignty across landscapes of home and exile.

Links to related podcasts:

https://nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast/podcasts/karen_sanctuaries/

https://nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast/podcasts/the-politics-of-protest-in-myanmar/

https://nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast/podcasts/what-remains-textiles-from-tuol-sleng/

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Erin A. Snider, "Marketing Democracy: The Political Economy of Democracy Aid in the Middle East" (Cambridge UP. 2022)

Mon, 03 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

For nearly two decades, the United States devoted more than $2 billion towards democracy promotion in the Middle East with seemingly little impact. To understand the limited impact of this aid and the decision of authoritarian regimes to allow democracy programs whose ultimate aim is to challenge the power of such regimes, Marketing Democracy: The Political Economy of Democracy Aid in the Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines the construction and practice of democracy aid in Washington DC and in Egypt and Morocco, two of the highest recipients of US democracy aid in the region. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, novel new data on the professional histories of democracy promoters, archival research and recently declassified government documents, Erin A. Snider focuses on the voices and practices of those engaged in democracy work over the last three decades to offer a new framework for understanding the political economy of democracy aid. Her research shows how democracy aid can work to strengthen rather than challenge authoritarian regimes. Marketing Democracy fundamentally challenges scholars to rethink how we study democracy aid and how the ideas of democracy that underlie democracy programs come to reflect the views of donors and recipient regimes rather than indigenous demand.

Erin A. Snider is an assistant professor of international affairs at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service. She was a Carnegie Fellow with the New America Foundation, a Fulbright Fellow in Egypt, and a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University’s Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance. Her research focuses on the political economy of development in the Middle East, democratization, and foreign aid. Her research has been published in International Studies Quarterly, PS: Political Science and Politics, and Middle East Policy, among other outlets. She holds a PhD in politics from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Scholar.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Canada-US Border: A History of a Fluid and Unstable Boundary

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Greg Marchildon interviews Benjamin Hoy, author of A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands (Oxford UP, 2021). Hoy’s book is a history of the infrastructure, policies, and personnel that were put in place over the past three centuries to create a boundary between the United States and British North America and, subsequently, Canada after 1867. Hoy also examines the impact of this boundary on Indigenous peoples who lived on either side of this border, or on both sides simultaneously. A transnational historian and a dual citizen of both Canada and the United States, Benjamin Hoy is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan.

This interview was produced with the support of The Champlain Society. The mission of The Champlain Society is to increase public awareness of, and accessibility to, Canada’s rich store of historical records.

Gregory P. Marchildon is the Ontario Research Chair in Health Policy and System Design with the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sean Brennan, "The KGB and the Vatican: Secrets of the Mitrokhin Files" (CUA Press, 2022)

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

One of the greatest ironies of the history of Soviet rule is that, for an officially atheistic state, those in the political police and in the Politburo devoted an enormous amount of time and attention to the question of religion. The Soviet government’s policies toward religious institutions in the USSR, and toward religious institutions in the non-Communist world, reflected this, especially when it came to the Vatican and Catholic Churches, both the Latin and Byzantine Rite, in Soviet territory. The KGB and the Vatican consists of the transcripts of KGB records concerning the policies of the Soviet secret police towards the Vatican and the Catholic Church in the Communist world, transcripts provided by KGB archivist and defector Vasili Mitrokhin, from the Second Vatican Council to the election of John Paul II. Among the topics covered include how the Soviet regime viewed the efforts of John XXIII and Paul VI of reaching out to eastern side of the Iron Curtain, the experience of the Roman Catholic Church in Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic and the underground Greek Catholic Church in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the religious underground in the key cities of Leningrad and Moscow, and finally the election of John Paul II and its effect on the tumultuous events in Poland in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

This valuable primary source collection also contains a historical introduction written by the translator, Sean Brennan, a professor of History at the University of Scranton.

Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rahul Sagar, "To Raise a Fallen People: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Indian Views on International Politics" (Columbia UP, 2022)

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Most people tend to mark the beginning of Indian international relations thought to Nehru, and his self-proclaimed attempt to build a true non-aligned movement and more enlightened international system.

But Indian thought didn’t emerge sui generis after Indian independence, as Rahul Sagar notes in his edited anthology, To Raise a Fallen People: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Indian Views on International Politics (Juggernaut / Columbia University Press: 2022).

Rahul collects writings from Indian thinkers on a variety of topics: the threat posed by Russia, the value of free trade, discrimination faced by Indians at home and overseas, showing the diversity of views present in Indian political debate long before 1945.

In this interview, Rahul and I talk about these collected writings, and what they tell us about India then and, perhaps India today.

Rahul Sagar is Global Network Associate Professor of Political Science at New York University Abu Dhabi. His other books include Secrets and Leaks: The Dilemma of State Secrecy (Princeton University Press: 2013) and The Progressive Maharaja: Sir Madhava Rao’s Hints on the Art and Science of Government (Oxford University Press: 2022). He can be followed on Twitter at @rahulsagar.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of To Raise A Fallen People. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christopher Nichols and David Milne, "Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories" (Columbia UP, 2022)

Wed, 28 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Ideology drives American foreign policy in ways seen and unseen. Racialized notions of subjecthood and civilization underlay the political revolution of eighteenth-century white colonizers; neoconservatism, neoliberalism, and unilateralism propelled the post–Cold War United States to unleash catastrophe in the Middle East. Ideologies order and explain the world, project the illusion of controllable outcomes, and often explain success and failure. How does the history of U.S. foreign relations appear differently when viewed through the lens of ideology?

Christopher Nichols and David Milne's Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories (Columbia UP, 2022) explores the ideological landscape of international relations from the colonial era to the present. Contributors examine ideologies developed to justify—or resist—white settler colonialism and free-trade imperialism, and they discuss the role of nationalism in immigration policy. The book reveals new insights on the role of ideas at the intersection of U.S. foreign and domestic policy and politics. It shows how the ideals coded as “civilization,” “freedom,” and “democracy” legitimized U.S. military interventions and enabled foreign leaders to turn American power to their benefit. The book traces the ideological struggle over competing visions of democracy and of American democracy’s place in the world and in history. It highlights sources beyond the realm of traditional diplomatic history, including nonstate actors and historically marginalized voices. Featuring the foremost specialists as well as rising stars, this book offers a foundational statement on the intellectual history of U.S. foreign policy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sibel Oktay, "Governing Abroad: Coalition Politics and Foreign Policy in Europe" (U Michigan Press, 2022)

Mon, 26 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

From Austria to New Zealand, coalition governments often pave the road to foreign policy. In Western Europe, nearly 90 percent of postwar governments include two or more political parties. Israel, the Middle East’s only consolidated democracy according to many, has never experienced single-party rule in its history. Even the United Kingdom, known for its long streak of single-party rule, now navigates multiparty cabinets. Coalitions are everywhere, but we still have little understanding of how they act in foreign affairs. History shows that coalitions can sometime engage in powerful international commitments such as participating in military operations, but at other times, they postpone their decisions, water down their policy positions, or promise to do less than they otherwise would. What explains these differences in behavior?

Sibel Oktay's book Governing Abroad: Coalition Politics and Foreign Policy in Europe (U Michigan Press, 2022) unpacks the little-known world of coalition governments to find out. Oktay argues that the specific constellation of parties in government explains why some coalitions can make more assertive foreign policy decisions than others. Building on the rich literature in political science on coalitions, legislatures, and voting behavior, the book weaves together sophisticated statistical analyses of foreign policy events across thirty European countries alongside in-depth case studies from Denmark, the Netherlands, and Finland. It brings political parties back into the study of foreign policy, demonstrating that the size of the coalition, the ideological proximity of the governing parties, and their relationship with the parliamentary opposition together influence the government’s ability to act in the international arena. This book challenges our existing perceptions about the constraints and weaknesses of coalition governments. It sheds new light on the conditions that allow them to act decisively abroad.

Sibel Oktay is associate professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Springfield and a nonresident senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Her research focuses on the interaction between domestic politics and foreign policy, and how leaders influence those relationships. She has published in the European Journal of Political Research, British Journal of Politics and International Affairs, and European Security, among others. She has also written for outlets including War On The Rocks, The Hill, and Responsible Statecraft. She is a 2022-2023 recipient of the Jefferson Science Fellowship from the U.S. Department of State.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard W. Maass, "The Picky Eagle: How Democracy and Xenophobia Limited U. S. Territorial Expansion" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 15:20:00 -0000

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Patrick O. Cohrs, "The New Atlantic Order: The Transformation of International Politics, 1860-1933" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The New Atlantic Order: The Transformation of International Politics, 1860-1933 (Cambridge UP, 2022) elucidates a momentous transformation process that changed the world: the struggle to create, for the first time, a modern Atlantic order in the long twentieth century (1860-2020). Placing it in a broader historical and global context, Patrick O. Cohrs reinterprets the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 as the original attempt to supersede the Eurocentric 'world order' of the age of imperialism and found a more legitimate peace system - a system that could not yet be global but had to be essentially transatlantic. Yet he also sheds new light on why, despite remarkable learning-processes, it proved impossible to forge a durable Atlantic peace after a First World War that became the long twentieth century's cathartic catastrophe. In a broader perspective this ground-breaking study shows what a decisive impact this epochal struggle has had not only for modern conceptions of peace, collective security and an integrative, rule-based international order but also for formative ideas of self-determination, liberal-democratic government and the West.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jamie Martin, "The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance (Harvard University Press, 2022) presents a pioneering history that traces the origins of global economic governance—and the political conflicts it generates—to the aftermath of World War I.

International economic institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank exert incredible influence over the domestic policies of many states. These institutions date from the end of World War II and amassed power during the neoliberal era of the late twentieth century. But as Jamie Martin shows, if we want to understand their deeper origins and the ideas and dynamics that shaped their controversial powers, we must turn back to the explosive political struggles that attended the birth of global economic governance in the early twentieth century.

In The Meddlers, Dr. Jamie Martin tells the story of the first international institutions to govern the world economy, including the League of Nations and Bank for International Settlements, created after World War I. These institutions endowed civil servants, bankers, and colonial authorities from Europe and the United States with extraordinary powers: to enforce austerity, coordinate the policies of independent central banks, oversee development programs, and regulate commodity prices. In a highly unequal world, they faced a new political challenge: was it possible to reach into sovereign states and empires to intervene in domestic economic policies without generating a backlash?

Dr. Martin follows the intense political conflicts provoked by the earliest international efforts to govern capitalism—from Weimar Germany to the Balkans, Nationalist China to colonial Malaya, and the Chilean desert to Wall Street. The Meddlers shows how the fraught problems of sovereignty and democracy posed by institutions like the IMF are not unique to late twentieth-century globalization, but instead first emerged during an earlier period of imperial competition, world war, and economic crisis.

Jamie Martin is Assistant Professor of History and of Social Studies at Harvard University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Future of Nuclear Weapons: A Conversation with Fred Kaplan

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

For much of the Cold War the United States had thousands more nuclear weapons than it needed. And it took decades for American political leaders to realise no one had ever asked: ‘how many nuclear weapons is enough?’ As for Ronald Reagan, he went into office a nuclear hawk and came out considering total disarmament. These aspects of the history the US nuclear programme are described in Fred Kaplan’s book The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War (Simon & Schuster, 2021). Owen Bennett-Jones has been speaking with Fred Kaplan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John M. Curatola, "Autumn of Our Discontent: Fall 1949 and the Crises in American National Security" (US Naval Institute Press, 2022)

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In the Fall of 1949, a series of international events shattered the notion that the United States would return to its traditional small peacetime military posture following World War II. John M. Curatola's book Autumn of Our Discontent: Fall 1949 and the Crises in American National Security (US Naval Institute Press, 2022) chronicles the events that triggered the wholesale review of United States national security policies. The review led to the adoption of recommendations advanced in NSC-68, which laid the foundation for America's Cold War activities, expanded conventional forces, sparked a thermonuclear arms race, and, equally important to the modern age, established the national security state-all clear breaks from America's martial past and cornerstone ideologies.

In keeping with the American military tradition, the United States dismantled most of its military power following World War II while Americans, in general, enjoyed unprecedented post-war and peacetime prosperity. In the autumn of 1949, however, the Soviet's first successful test of their own atomic weapon in August was followed closely by establishment of the communist People's Republic of China on October 1st shattered the illusion that American hegemony would remain unchallenged. Combined with the decision at home to increase the size of the atomic stockpile on and the on-going debate regarding the "Revolt of the Admirals," the United States found itself facing a new round of crisis in what became the Cold War. Curatola explores these events and the debates surrounding them to provide a detailed history of an era critical to our own modern age. Indeed, the security state conceived of in the events of this critical autumn and the legacy of the choices made by American policymakers and military leaders continue to this day.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A MAD, MAD, World

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The world lived under the shadow of the acronym MAD for forty years. Mutually Assured Destruction was no laughing matter, but Stanley Kubrick thought dark comedy was the only way to approach a topic as ridiculous as MAD. In this episode we compare and contrast Dr. Strangelove (1964) with Failsafe, a serious film about the same subject that came out the same year. We reveal just how spot on Dr. Strangelove was about MAD versus Failsafe’s unwarranted optimism that limited nuclear war was possible. An army of political scientists and bureaucrats game theoried fighting and winning a nuclear war like it was just another social science problem. Civilians are the warmongers in our MAD films. Dr. Strangelove may be a deranged Nazi freak, but everything he said was seriously considered by real life MAD Men.

Lia Paradis is a professor of history at Slippery Rock University. Brian Crim is a professor of history at the University of Lynchburg. For more on Lies Agreed Upon, go here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Future of American Decline: A Conversation with Jed Esty

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The UK spent decades in its the post imperial phase trying to work out how it should think of itself and align itself in the world - a debate that Brexit showed is far from over. Will the US find it as hard? The debate about American decline rests on a widespread assumption in the country that global supremacy is the US’s national purpose. How difficult will it be to get beyond that? Owen Bennett Jones speaks to Professor Jed Esty of the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at Its Limits (Stanford UP, 2022).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Manoj Joshi, "Understanding the India-China Border: The Enduring Threat of War in High Himalaya" (Hurst, 2022)

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

On June 16 2020, Indian and Chinese forces clashed high in the Himalayan mountains in Aksai Chin. Beijing and New Delhi both claim control over this remote region in a territorial dispute dating back decades. Sources differ on how many soldiers died in the skirmish, fought with fists and clubs rather than guns, with the potential dead ranging into the dozens.

Looking back two years later, Galwan marked a clear turning point in relations between the two Asian countries, with India now taking a much harsher line towards China, joining the U.S., Australia and Japan in the so-called Quad Alliance, banning Chinese-affiliated apps like Alibaba and TikTok.

Why has the border between China and India been disputed for so long? And what made the bloody clash at Galwan a watershed for New Delhi? Manoj Joshi in Understanding the India-China Border: The Enduring Threat of War in High Himalaya (Hurst: 2022) explains where this dispute came from, how it sometimes sparked war, and the many failed attempts to find a negotiated solution.

Manoj Joshi is a Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation. He has been a journalist specializing on national and international politics and is a commentator and columnist on these issues. As a reporter, he has written extensively on issues relating to Siachen, Pakistan, China, Sri Lanka and terrorism in Kashmir and Punjab.

Today, Manoj and I talk about the border dispute, where it came from, and why both countries have been unable to reach a negotiated solution.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Understanding the India-China Border. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adam B. Lerner, "From the Ashes of History: Collective Trauma and the Making of International Politics" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In recent years, calls for reparations and restorative justice, alongside the rise of populist grievance politics, have demonstrated the stubborn resilience of traumatic memory. From the transnational Black Lives Matter movement's calls for reckoning with the legacy of slavery and racial oppression, to continued efforts to secure recognition of the Armenian genocide or Imperial Japan's human rights abuses, international politics is replete with examples of past violence reasserting itself in the present. But how should scholars understand trauma's long-term impacts? Why do some traumas lie dormant for generations, only to surface anew in pivotal moments? And how does trauma scale from individuals to larger political groupings like nations and states, shaping political identities, grievances, and policymaking?

In From the Ashes of History: Collective Trauma and the Making of International Politics (Oxford University Press, 2022), Dr. Adam B. Lerner looks at collective trauma as a foundational force in international politics—a "shock" to political cultures that can constitute new actors and shape decision-making over the long-term. As Dr. Lerner shows, uncovering collective trauma's role in international politics is vital for two key reasons. First, it can help explain longstanding tensions between groups—an especially relevant topic as scholars examine the transnational resurgence of nationalism and populism. Second, it pushes the discipline of International Relations to more completely account for mass violence's true long-term costs, particularly as they become embedded in longstanding structural inequalities and injustices.

While IR scholarship has largely dismissed non-systematic, latent phenomena like trauma, Dr. Lerner argues that collective trauma can help draw the lines between international political groups and frame the logics of international political action. Drawing on three historical cases that uncover the impact of collective trauma in Indian, Israeli, and American foreign policymaking, From the Ashes of History demonstrates the broad utility of collective trauma as a theoretical lens for investigating how mass violence's legacy can resurge and dissipate over time.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan Wyrtzen, "Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East" (Columbia UP, 2022)

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

It is widely believed that the political problems of the Middle East date back to the era of World War I, when European colonial powers unilaterally imposed artificial borders on the post-Ottoman world in postwar agreements. This book offers a new account of how the Great War unmade and then remade the political order of the region. Ranging from Morocco to Iran and spanning the eve of the Great War into the 1930s, it demonstrates that the modern Middle East was shaped through complex and violent power struggles among local and international actors.

Jonathan Wyrtzen shows how the cataclysm of the war opened new possibilities for both European and local actors to reimagine post-Ottoman futures. After the 1914–1918 phase of the war, violent conflicts between competing political visions continued across the region. In these extended struggles, the greater Middle East was reforged. Wyrtzen emphasizes the intersections of local and colonial projects and the entwined processes through which states were made, identities transformed, and boundaries drawn. This book’s vast scope encompasses successful state-building projects such as the Turkish Republic and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as well as short-lived political units—including the Rif Republic in Morocco, the Sanusi state in eastern Libya, a Greater Syria, and attempted Kurdish states—that nonetheless left traces on the map of the region. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East (Columbia UP, 2022) retells the origin story of the modern Middle East.

Ronay Bakan is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael O'Hanlon, "The Art of War in an Age of Peace: U.S. Grand Strategy and Resolute Restraint" (Yale UP, 2021)

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In The Art of War in an Age of Peace: U.S. Grand Strategy and Resolute Restraint (Yale University Press, 2021) Dr. Michael O’Hanlon presents an informed modern plan for post-2020 American foreign policy that avoids the opposing dangers of retrenchment and overextension.

Russia and China are both believed to have “grand strategies”—detailed sets of national security goals backed by means, and plans, to pursue them. In the United States, policymakers have tried to articulate similar concepts but have failed to reach a widespread consensus since the Cold War ended. While the United States has been the world’s prominent superpower for over a generation, much American thinking has oscillated between the extremes of isolationist agendas versus interventionist and overly assertive ones.

Drawing on historical precedents and weighing issues such as Russia’s resurgence, China’s great rise, North Korea’s nuclear machinations, and Middle East turmoil, Dr. O’Hanlon presents a well-researched, ethically sound, and politically viable vision for American national security policy. He also proposes complementing the Pentagon’s set of “4+1” pre-existing threats with a new “4+1”: biological, nuclear, digital, climatic, and internal dangers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fritz Bartel, "The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Mon, 05 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Why did the Cold War come to a peaceful end? And why did neoliberal economics sweep across the world in the late twentieth century? In this pathbreaking study, Fritz Bartel argues that the answer to these questions is one and the same. The Cold War began as a competition between capitalist and communist governments to expand their social contracts as they raced to deliver their people a better life. But the economic shocks of the 1970s made promises of better living untenable on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Energy and financial markets placed immense pressure on governments to discipline their social contracts. Rather than make promises, political leaders were forced to break them.

In a sweeping narrative, The Triumph of Broken Promises (Harvard University Press, 2022) tells the story of how the pressure to break promises spurred the end of the Cold War. In the West, neoliberalism provided Western leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher with the political and ideological tools to shut down industries, impose austerity, and favor the interests of capital over labor. But in Eastern Europe, revolutionaries like Lech Walesa in Poland resisted any attempt at imposing market discipline. Mikhail Gorbachev tried in vain to reform the Soviet system, but the necessary changes ultimately presented too great a challenge.

Faced with imposing economic discipline antithetical to communist ideals, Soviet-style governments found their legitimacy irreparably damaged. But in the West, politicians could promote austerity as an antidote to the excesses of ideological opponents, setting the stage for the rise of the neoliberal global economy.

Fritz Bartel is Assistant Professor of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tommi Koivula and Heljä Ossa, "NATO’s Burden-Sharing Disputes: Past, Present and Future Prospects" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

Thu, 01 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In NATO’s Burden-Sharing Disputes: Past, Present and Future Prospects (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Dr. Tommi Koivula & Heljä Ossa argues that burden-sharing is one of the most persisting sources for tension and disagreement within NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation). It also belongs to one of the most studied issues within NATO with distinguishable traditions and schools of thought. However, this pertinent question has been rarely discussed extensively by academics. The key idea of the book is to make burden-sharing more understandable as a historical, contemporary and future phenomenon. The authors take a comprehensive look at what is actually meant with burden-sharing and how it has evolved as a concept and a real-life phenomenon through the 70 years of NATO’s existence.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vietnam and China: Strange Bedfellows in the Era of Strategic Competition

Thu, 01 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

As the Asia-Pacific becomes the central stage of the US-China rivalry, Vietnam has emerged as one of the key countries to watch. While Vietnam has positioned itself as a critical player in the United States’ Indo-Pacific strategy, and Hanoi’s distrust of China has grown in response to Beijing’s increasingly aggressive stance in the South China Sea, the Vietnam-China relationship transcends mere geopolitical binaries.

Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Nguyen Khac Giang discusses Vietnam and China’s complex relationship, reflecting on the intimate ideological links, economic dependency, and security concerns that link the two countries. He discusses some of the key strategic challenges faced by Vietnam, how they can be negotiated, and whether it is possible for Hanoi to leverage relations with both China and the United States to minimise the potential geo-political risks associated with great power competition.

About Nguyen Khac Giang:

Nguyen Khac Giang is a research fellow at Vietnam Centre for Economic and Strategic Studies (VESS). Giang is currently a PhD candidate at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where he compares the Vietnamese and Chinese political developments. His academic work appears in, among others, the Asian Journal of Political Science, Contemporary Southeast Asia, the Constitutional Political Economy, and the Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies. Giang is a frequent commentator on Vietnamese affairs and writes extensively for major Vietnamese and English news outlets such as the Saigon Times, The Diplomat, VnExpress, and the East Asia Forum.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Meighen McCrae, "Coalition Strategy and the End of the First World War: The Supreme War Council and War Planning, 1917-1918" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Thu, 01 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

When the Germans requested an armistice in October 1918, it was a shock to the Allied political and military leadership. They had been expecting, and planning for, the war to continue into 1919, the year they hoped to achieve a complete military victory over the Central Powers.

In Coalition Strategy and the End of the First World War: The Supreme War Council and War Planning, 1917-1918" (Cambridge UP, 2019), Meighen McCrae illuminates how, throughout this planning process, the Supreme War Council evolved to become the predominant mechanism for coalition war-making. She analyses the Council's role in the formulation of an Allied strategy for 1918-1919 across the various theatres of war and compares the perspectives of the British, French, Americans and Italians. In doing so we learn how, in an early example of modern alliance warfare, the Supreme War Council had to coordinate national needs with coalition ones.

Alex Beckstrand is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Connecticut, an officer in the Marine Corps Reserves, and works in the aerospace industry. Email: alex.beckstrand@uconn.edu Twitter: @AlexBeckstrand.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Future of the European Union: A Discussion with Luuk van Middelaar

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Brexit debate has been so all-consuming and filled with so much misinformation that many Brits and others can overlook some the challenges facing the European Union itself. Looked at in broad terms, it has been an astonishingly successful political project, having delivered 70 years of peace and prosperity. But what lies ahead? What issues does it need to tackle to maintain that kind of success? Luuk van Middelaar is a Dutch historian, Professor of EU law at Leiden University. He has worked at the heart of EU institutions and give his observations and analysis of the underlying tensions in the EU and what lies ahead.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nathaniel Jarrett, "The Lion at Dawn: Forging British Strategy in the Age of the French Revolution, 1783–1797" (U Oklahoma Press, 2022)

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In February 1793, in the wake of the War of American Independence and one year after British prime minister William Pitt the Younger had predicted fifteen years of peace, the National Convention of Revolutionary France declared war on Great Britain and the Netherlands. France thus initiated nearly a quarter century of armed conflict with Britain. During this fraught and still-contested period, historian Nathaniel Jarrett suggests, Pitt and his ministers forged a diplomatic policy and military strategy that envisioned an international system anticipating the Vienna settlement of 1815.

Examining Pitt’s foreign policy from 1783 to 1797—the years before and during the War of the First Coalition against Revolutionary France—Jarrett considers a question that has long vexed historians: Did Pitt adhere to the “blue water” school, imagining a globe-trotting navy, or did he favor engagement nearer to shore and on the European Continent? And was this approach grounded in precedent, or was it something new? While acknowledging the complexities within this dichotomy, The Lion at Dawn: Forging British Strategy in the Age of the French Revolution, 1783–1797 (U Oklahoma Press, 2022) argues that the prime minister consistently subordinated colonial to continental concerns and pursued a new vision rather than merely honoring past glories. Deliberately, not simply in reaction to the French Revolution, Pitt developed and pursued a grand strategy that sought British security through a novel collective European system—one ultimately realized by his successors in 1815.

The Lion at Dawn opens a critical new perspective on the emergence of modern Britain and its empire and on its early effort to create a stable and peaceful international system, an ideal debated to this day.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bert Becker, "France and Germany in the South China Sea, c. 1840-1930: Maritime Competition and Imperial Power" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

France and Germany in the South China Sea, c. 1840-1930 Maritime Competition and Imperial Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) explores imperial power and the transnational encounters of shipowners and merchants in the South China Sea from 1840 to 1930. With British Hong Kong and French Indochina on its northern and western shores, the ‘Asian Mediterranean’ was for almost a century a crucible of power and an axis of economic struggle for coastal shipping companies from various nations. Merchant steamers shipped cargoes and passengers between ports of the region. Hong Kong, the global port city, and the colonial ports of Saigon and Haiphong developed into major hubs for the flow of goods and people, while Guangzhouwan survived as an almost forgotten outpost of Indochina. While previous research in this field has largely remained within the confines of colonial history, this book uses the examples of French and German companies operating in the South China Sea to demonstrate the extent to which transnational actors and business networks interacted with imperial power and the process of globalisation.

Bert Becker is Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author, amongst other publications, of biographies of Georg Michaelis and Michael Jebsen. His work has also appeared in a range of academic journals, including Cross-Currents and Modern Asian Studies.

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, Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870–1919, is was recently published by Cambridge University Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brian Brege, "Tuscany in the Age of Empire" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

A new history explores how one of Renaissance Italy's leading cities maintained its influence in an era of global exploration, trade, and empire. The Grand Duchy of Tuscany was not an imperial power, but it did harbor global ambitions. After abortive attempts at overseas colonization and direct commercial expansion, as Brian Brege shows, Tuscany followed a different path, one that allowed it to participate in Europe's new age of empire without establishing an empire of its own.

The first history of its kind, Tuscany in the Age of Empire (Harvard UP, 2021) offers a fresh appraisal of one of the foremost cities of the Italian Renaissance, as it sought knowledge, fortune, and power throughout Asia, the Americas, and beyond. How did Tuscany, which could not compete directly with the growing empires of other European states, establish a global presence? First, Brege shows, Tuscany partnered with larger European powers. The duchy sought to obtain trade rights within their empires and even manage portions of other states' overseas territories. Second, Tuscans invested in cultural, intellectual, and commercial institutions at home, which attracted the knowledge and wealth generated by Europe's imperial expansions. Finally, Tuscans built effective coalitions with other regional powers in the Mediterranean and the Islamic world, which secured the duchy's access to global products and empowered the Tuscan monarchy in foreign affairs. These strategies allowed Tuscany to punch well above its weight in a world where power was equated with the sort of imperial possessions it lacked. By finding areas of common interest with stronger neighbors and forming alliances with other marginal polities, a small state was able to protect its own security while carving out a space as a diplomatic and intellectual hub in a globalizing Europe.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emizet F. Kisangani and Jeffrey Pickering, "African Interventions: State Militaries, Foreign Powers, and Rebel Forces" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Foreign military intervention has had a profound impact on post-colonial African history and politics. Interventions have destabilized borderlands, overthrown governments, and taken a devastating toll on populations. In African Interventions: State Militaries, Foreign Powers, and Rebel Forces (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Dr. Emizet F. Kisangani and Dr. Jeffrey Pickering advance a new theoretical framework and combine quantitative, qualitative, and historical methods to shed fresh light on these important but understudied events.

Their detailed analysis brings understanding to supportive and hostile interventions and to interventions by former colonial states, non-colonial foreign actors, and African countries. Dr. Kisangani and Dr. Pickering also analyse military incursions into ungoverned territories and lands engulfed in civil war. Showcasing a variety of examples from the Second Congo War to the Ethiopian-Eritrean conflict, the book offers a rich and accessible examination of military intervention on the continent.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James Lacey, "Rome: Strategy of Empire" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Wed, 17 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

From Octavian's victory at Actium (31 B.C.) to its traditional endpoint in the West (476), the Roman Empire lasted a solid 500 years -- an impressive number by any standard, and fully one-fifth of all recorded history. In fact, the decline and final collapse of the Roman Empire took longer than most other empires even existed. Any historian trying to unearth the grand strategy of the Roman Empire must, therefore, always remain cognizant of the time scale, in which she is dealing. Although the pace of change in the Roman era never approached that of the modern era, it was not an empire in stasis. While the visible trappings may have changed little, the challenges Rome faced at its end were vastly different than those faced by Augustus and the Julio-Claudians. Over the centuries, the Empire's underlying economy, political arrangements, military affairs, and, most importantly, the myriad of external threats it faced were in constant flux, making adaptability to changing circumstances as important to Roman strategists as it is to strategists of the modern era.

Yet the very idea of Rome having a grand strategy, or what it might be, did not concern historians until Edward Luttwak wrote The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the Third forty years ago. Although the work generated much debate, it failed to win over many ancient historians, in part because of its heavy emphasis on military force. By mostly neglecting any considerations of diplomacy, economics, politics, culture, or even the changing nature of the threats Rome faced, Luttwak tells only a portion of what should have been a much more wide-ranging narrative.

For this and other reasons, such as its often dull presentation, it left an opportunity for another account of the rise and fall of Rome from a strategy perspective. Through a more encompassing definition of strategy and by focusing much of the narrative on crucial historical moments and the personalities involved, Rome: Strategy of Empire (Oxford UP, 2022) promises to provide a more persuasive and engaging history than Luttwak's. It aims not only to correct Luttwak's flaws and omissions, but will also employ the most recent work of current classical historians and archeologists to present a more complete and nuanced narrative of Roman strategic thinking and execution than is currently available.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eva-Maria Muschik, "Building States: The United Nations, Development, and Decolonization, 1945–1965" (Columbia UP, 2022)

Tue, 16 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Postwar multilateral cooperation is often viewed as an attempt to overcome the limitations of the nation-state system. However, in 1945, when the United Nations was founded, large parts of the world were still under imperial control. Building States investigates how the UN tried to manage the dissolution of European empires in the 1950s and 1960s—and helped transform the practice of international development and the meaning of state sovereignty in the process.

In Building States: The United Nations, Development, and Decolonization, 1945–1965 (Columbia University Press, 2022) Dr. Eva-Maria Muschik argues that the UN played a key role in the global proliferation and reinvention of the nation-state in the postwar era, as newly independent states came to rely on international assistance. Drawing on previously untapped primary sources, she traces how UN personnel—usually in close consultation with Western officials—sought to manage decolonization peacefully through international development assistance.

Examining initiatives in Libya, Somaliland, Bolivia, the Congo, and New York, Dr. Muschik shows how the UN pioneered a new understanding and practice of state building, presented as a technical challenge for international experts rather than a political process. UN officials increasingly took on public-policy functions, despite the organization’s mandate not to interfere in the domestic affairs of its member states. These initiatives, Dr. Muschik suggests, had lasting effects on international development practice, peacekeeping, and post-conflict territorial administration. Casting new light on how international organizations became major players in the governance of developing countries, Building States has significant implications for the histories of decolonization, the Cold War, and international development.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrew Bacevich and Daniel A. Sjursen, "Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America's Forever Wars" (Metropolitan Books, 2022)

Wed, 10 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Compiled by New York Times bestselling author Andrew Bacevich and retired army officer Danny A. Sjursen, Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America’s Misguided Wars (Metropolitan Books, 2022) collects provocative essays from American military veterans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, offering firsthand testimony that illuminates why the Forever Wars lasted so long while producing so little of value. In the wake of 9/11, the United States embarked upon a Global War on Terrorism aimed at using American military power to transform the Greater Middle East.

Twenty years later, the ensuing forever wars have produced little tangible success while exacting enormous harm. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has sustained tens of thousands of casualties while expending trillions of dollars and inflicting massive suffering on populations that we sought to “liberate.” In Washington and across the nation at large, the inclination to forget these wars and move on is palpable. In fact, there is much to be learned and those who served and fought in these wars are best positioned to teach. The first book of its kind since the Vietnam era, Paths of Dissent gathers original essays from American veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, drawn from all services, ranks, and walks of life, who have come out in opposition to these conflicts. Selected for their honesty and eloquence by fellow veterans Andrew Bacevich and Danny A. Sjursen, these outspoken critics describe not only their motivations for serving, but also for taking the path of dissent—disappointment and disillusionment; the dehumanizing impact of combat; the loss of comrades to friendly fire; the persistence of xenophobia and racism—all of these together exposing the mendacity that has pervaded the Global War on Terrorism from its very outset. Combining diverse, critical perspectives with powerful personal testimony, Paths of Dissent sheds light on the myriad factors that have made America’s post-9/11 wars costly and misguided exercises in futility.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Blake Whitaker, "Built on the Ruins of Empire: British Military Assistance and African Independence" (UP of Kansas, 2022)

Wed, 10 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

During the Cold War, the British government oversaw the transition to independence of dozens of colonies. Often the most challenging aspect of this transition was the creation of a national army from colonial forces. In Built on the Ruins of Empire: British Military Assistance and African Independence (University Press of Kansas, 2022), Dr. Blake Whitaker examines this process in Kenya and Zambia and how it set the course for the creation of the army in Zimbabwe. He also looks at three themes as they intersect in African military history: British decolonization, race relations, and the Cold War.

While the transition to independence was a difficult process in places such as Ghana and Nigeria, it was compounded by the racial tensions in Kenya, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. All three were settler colonies home to a sizable community of white Europeans who controlled the levers of power and economic prosperity. Built on the Ruins of Empire focuses on the difficulties that arose in creating a cohesive and apolitical military force in these racially charged Cold War environments and demonstrates that the challenges faced by the British training missions in Kenya and Zambia taught London important lessons about the emerging postcolonial world.

Dr. Whitaker uniquely analyzes the successes and failures of the British military assistance programs and their quest to solidify British influence while examining how Britain’s position and influence in the wider world was fading just as Zimbabwe was achieving independence.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ariane Knüsel, "China's European Headquarters: Switzerland and China During the Cold War" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Mon, 08 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

During the Cold War, the People's Republic of China used Switzerland as headquarters for its economic, political, intelligence, and cultural networks in Europe. Based on extensive research in Western and Chinese archives, China's European Headquarters: Switzerland and China during the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Ariane Knüsel charts not only how Switzerland came to play this role, but also how Chinese networks were built in practice, often beyond the public face of official proclamations and diplomatic interactions.

By tracing the development of Sino-Swiss relations in the Cold War, Dr. Knüsel sheds new light on the People's Republic of China's formulation and implementation of foreign policy in Europe, Latin America and Africa and Switzerland's efforts to align neutrality, humanitarian engagement, and economic interests.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emma Ashford, "Oil, the State, and War: The Foreign Policies of Petrostates" (Georgetown UP, 2022)

Fri, 05 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Oil, the State, and War: The Foreign Policies of Petrostates (Georgetown University Press, 2022) by Dr. Emma Ashford presents a comprehensive challenge to prevailing understanding of international implications of oil wealth that shows why it can create bad actors.

In a world where oil-rich states are more likely to start war than their oil-dependent counterparts, it's surprising how little attention is still paid to these so-called petrostates. These states' wealth props up the global arms trade, provides diplomatic leverage, and allows them to support violent and nonviolent proxies. In this book, Dr. Ashford explores the many potential links between domestic oil production and foreign policy behavior and how oil production influences global politics.

Not all petrostates have the same characteristics or capabilities. To help us conceptualize these differences, Dr. Ashford creates an original classification of three types of petrostates: oil-dependent states (those weakened by the resource curse), oil-wealthy states (those made rich by oil exports), and super-producer states (those that form the backbone of the global oil market). Through a combination of case studies and analysis, she illustrates how oil shapes petrostates' behavior, filling a major gap in our understanding of the international implications of oil wealth. Experts have too often treated oil-rich states as passive objects, subject to the energy security needs of Western importing states. Instead, this book highlights the agency and power enjoyed by petrostates.

As the oil market undergoes a period of rapid change, Oil, the State, and War sheds light on the diversity of petrostates and how they shape international affairs.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nicholas Ferns, "Australia in the Age of International Development, 1945–1975: Colonial and Foreign Aid Policy in Papua New Guinea and Southeast Asia" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)

Fri, 05 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In the voluminous literature on the history of modernisation theory and its associated concept of development since the end of World War II, much of the focus lies on the efforts undertaken by developed nations—most notably the United States and Soviet Union—to establish a model for developing countries to build not just their economies but their nations as well. Eschewing this paradigm, Dr Nicholas Ferns’ excellent monograph Australia in the Age of International Development, 1945-1975: Colonial and Foreign Aid Policy in Papua New Guinea and Southeast Asia (published by Routledge in 2020) provides a rich and important intervention that highlights how the ideas and practices that underpinned international development were shaped not only by the Cold War superpowers but by middle powers like Australia as well. Focussing particularly on Australia’s development aid efforts in Papua New Guinea and Southeast Asia through its own formulation of the ‘New Deal’ for the former and the Colombo Plan for the latter, Ferns brings to light the complexity of a country caught in the middle of its own perception as being between a developed and developing nation, between British and American economic and developmental influences, and between serving as a colonial power in its own right while also supporting anti-colonial movements.

Bernard Z. Keo is Lecturer in Asian History at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia who specialises in decolonisation and nation-building in Southeast Asia. He can be contacted at: b.keo@latrobe.edu.au.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Juan Pablo Scarfi and David M. K. Sheinin, "The New Pan-Americanism and the Structuring of Inter-American Relations" (Routledge, 2022)

Wed, 03 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In The New Pan-Americanism and the Structuring of Inter-American Relations (Routledge, 2022), David Sheinin and Juan Pablo Scarfi bring together articles that reconsider many aspects of U.S.-Latin American history. Pan-Americanism, a late nineteenth and early twentieth century movement that attempted to foster closer relations among the nations of the Western Hemisphere, serves as the unifying thread. Historians have traditionally studied Pan-Americanism as a diplomatic framework that allowed the United States to maintain and expand its power throughout Latin America. A recent wave of work, well-represented in this new volume, tries to present a more nuanced view of Pan-Americanism. Rather than focusing exclusively on how the movement served U.S. empire, this edited collection shows how Latin American diplomats and other historical actors deployed Pan-Americanism to challenge U.S. power and champion their own national interests. But in doing so, it avoids merely reducing this complicated history to a story of “resistance” or “agency.” Instead, the volume’s eight chapters parse the individual and collective motivations that drove Latin American policymakers, scholars, architects, and many others, to engage with a framework that had for years been linked to U.S. imperialism.

Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD Candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. You can reach him at steven.p.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Megan Threlkeld, "Citizens of the World: U. S. Women and Global Government" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Citizens of the World: U.S. Women and Global Government (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), Megan Threlkeld profiles nine American women in the first half of the 20th century who invoked world citizenship as they promoted world government. These women agreed neither on the best form for such a government nor on the best means to achieve it, and they had different definitions of peace and different levels of commitment to genuine equality. But they all saw themselves as part of a global effort to end war that required their participation in the international body politic. This book argues that the phrase “citizen of the world” was not simply a rhetorical flourish; it represented a demand to participate in shaping the global polity and an expression of women's obligation to work for peace and equality. It gave them a language with which to advocate for international cooperation. Citizens of the World not only provides a more complete understanding of the kind of world these women envisioned, it also draws attention to the ways in which they were excluded from international institution-building and to the critiques many of them leveled at those institutions. Women's arguments for world government and their practices of world citizenship represented an alternative reaction to the crises of the first half of the twentieth century, one predicated on cooperation and equality rather than competition and force.

Rebecca Turkington is a PhD Candidate in History at Cambridge University studying transnational women’s networks.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Benjamin R. Young, "Guns, Guerillas, and the Great Leader: North Korea and the Third World" (Stanford UP, 2021)

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Far from always having been an isolated nation and a pariah state in the international community, North Korea exercised significant influence among Third World nations during the Cold War era. With one foot in the socialist Second World and the other in the anticolonial Third World, North Korea occupied a unique position as both a postcolonial nation and a Soviet client state, and sent advisors to assist African liberation movements, trained anti-imperialist guerilla fighters, and completed building projects in developing countries. State-run media coverage of events in the Third World shaped the worldview of many North Koreans and helped them imagine a unified anti-imperialist front that stretched from the boulevards of Pyongyang to the streets of the Gaza Strip and the beaches of Cuba.

Guns, Guerillas, and the Great Leader: North Korea and the Third World (Stanford University Press, 2022) by Dr. Benjamin Young tells the story of North Korea's transformation in the Third World from model developmental state to reckless terrorist nation, and how Pyongyang's actions, both in the Third World and on the Korean peninsula, ultimately backfired against the Kim family regime's foreign policy goals. Based on multinational and multi-archival research, this book examines the intersection of North Korea's domestic and foreign policies and the ways in which North Korea's developmental model appealed to the decolonizing world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Future of Korea: A Discussion with Eugene Y. Park

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

There have been times when Korea has lived in periods of prolonged stability and tranquillity. But there have also been times, such as now, when it seems to have an outsized influence on global affairs – as is certainly the case of North Korea the influence of which is far bigger than its GDP figures would suggest it might have. With is nuclear capability and ruthless authoritarianism, North Korea has engaged Beijing and Washington as the highest level. And the economic miracle in the south as well as the democratic development there have generated their own waves in global politics. Owen Bennett Jones been speaking to Eugene Park who has recently written Korea: A History (Stanford UP, 2022).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cécile Fabre, "Spying Through a Glass Darkly: The Ethics of Espionage and Counter-Intelligence" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

On its face, spying and counter-intelligence activities seem morally suspect. They tend to involve sneaking, deceiving, and manipulating, as well as various forms of betrayal, treachery, and disloyalty. Yet intelligence and counter-intelligence operations are mainstays of any modern state. Are we to conclude that these activities are wrong, but nonetheless necessary, given the realities of modern politics?

In Spying Through a Glass Darkly: The Ethics of Espionage and Counter-Intelligence (Oxford UP, 2022), Cécile Fabre develops an intricate account of the morality of spying and counter-intelligence activities. She argues that routine espionage activities are morally justified – and sometimes obligatory – as a means to thwart violations of fundamental rights. However, she also argues that familiar forms of mass surveillance are unjustified.

Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Implications of the Ukrainian War for Taiwan’s Relations with China

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Is a Chinese invasion on Taiwan a storm on the horizon when the West is busy with the Ukrainian war? Will Nancy Pelosi’s plan to visit Taiwan in August, the first by a Speaker of the US House of Representatives since 1997, escalate tensions between China and Taiwan?

Joining us Julie Chen to talk about this hot topic is Sean King, senior vice president at Park Strategies, a New York business advisory firm which has undertaken research and analysis on Taiwan and its neighborly relations. He is also an Affiliated Scholar at the University of Notre Dame Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies. Based on his experience in the government and business sectors, Sean King believes that Russia’s Ukraine invasion was not a prelude to China's moving on Taiwan. The two situations are very different. In Sean’s view, visits by US officials to Taiwan are not without precedent and Nancy Pelosi’s visit should not be viewed as a provocation by the United States or Taiwan.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vanda Wilcox, "The Italian Empire and the Great War" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Italian Empire and the Great War (Oxford UP, 2021) by Vanda Wilcox brings an imperial and colonial perspective to the Italian experience of the First World War. Italy's decision for war in 1915 built directly on Italian imperial ambitions from the late nineteenth century onwards, and its conquest of Libya in 1911–12. The Italian empire was conceived both as a system of overseas colonies under Italian sovereignty, and as an informal global empire of emigrants; both were mobilized to support the war in 1915–18. The war was designed to bring about 'a greater Italy' both literally and metaphorically.

In pursuit of global status, Italy fought a global war, sending troops to the Balkans, Russia, and the Middle East, though with limited results. Italy's newest colony, Libya, was also a theatre of the war effort, as the anti-colonial resistance there linked up with the Ottoman Empire, Germany, and Austria to undermine Italian rule. Italian race theories underpinned this expansionism: the book examines how Italian constructions of whiteness and racial superiority informed a colonial approach to military occupation in Europe as well as the conduct of its campaigns in Africa. After the war, Italy's failures at the Peace Conference meant that the 'mutilated victory' was an imperial as well as a national sentiment. Events in Paris are analysed alongside the military occupations in the Balkans and Asia Minor as well as efforts to resolve the conflicts in Libya, to assess the rhetoric and reality of Italian imperialism. Lastly, Vanda has answered a few questions about Italy in the war and General Cadorna.

Roberto Mazza is visiting professor at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard Middleton, "Cornwallis: Soldier and Statesman in a Revolutionary World" (Yale UP, 2022)

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Charles, First Marquis of Cornwallis (1738-1805), was a leading figure in late eighteenth-century Britain. His career spanned the American War of Independence, Irish Union, the French Revolutionary Wars, and the building of the Second British Empire in India--and he has long been associated with the unacceptable face of Britain's colonial past.

In Cornwallis: Soldier and Statesman in a Revolutionary World (Yale UP, 2022), Richard Middleton shows that this portrait is far from accurate. Cornwallis emerges as a reformer who had deep empathy for those under his authority, and was clear about his obligation to govern justly. He sought to protect the population of Bengal with a constitution of written laws, insisted on Catholic emancipation in Ireland, and recognized the limitations of British power after the American war. Middleton reveals how Cornwallis' rewarding of merit, search for economy, and elimination of corruption helped improve the machinery of British government into the nineteenth century.

Richard Middleton is an independent scholar and was formerly associate professor of American history at Queen's University Belfast. He is the author of The Bells of Victory, Colonial America, Pontiac's War, and The War of American Independence.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Didac Queralt, "Pawned States: State Building in the Era of International Finance" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

How foreign lending weakens emerging nations In the nineteenth century, many developing countries turned to the credit houses of Europe for sovereign loans to balance their books and weather major fiscal shocks such as war. This reliance on external public finance offered emerging nations endless opportunities to overcome barriers to growth, but it also enabled rulers to bypass critical stages in institution building and political development.

Pawned States: State Building in the Era of International Finance (Princeton University Press, 2022)' reveals how easy access to foreign lending at early stages of state building has led to chronic fiscal instability and weakened state capacity in the developing world. Drawing on a wealth of original data to document the rise of cheap overseas credit between 1816 and 1913, Didac Queralt shows how countries in the global periphery obtained these loans by agreeing to “extreme conditionality,” which empowered international investors to take control of local revenue sources in cases of default, and how foreclosure eroded a country’s tax base and caused lasting fiscal disequilibrium. Queralt goes on to combine quantitative analysis of tax performance between 1816 and 2005 with qualitative historical analysis in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, illustrating how overreliance on external capital by local leaders distorts their incentives to expand tax capacity, articulate power-sharing institutions, and strengthen bureaucratic apparatus. Panoramic in scope, Pawned States sheds needed light on how early and easy access to external finance pushes developing nations into trajectories characterized by fragile fiscal institutions and autocratic politics.

Javier Mejia is an economist teaching at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anthony Pagden, "The Pursuit of Europe: A History" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The European Union, we are told, is facing extinction. Most of those who believe that, however, have no understanding of how, and why, it become possible to imagine that the diverse peoples of Europe might be united in a single political community.

The Pursuit of Europe: A History (Oxford UP, 2022) tells the story of the evolution of the "European project", from the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which saw the earliest creation of a "Concert of Europe", right through to Brexit. The question was how, after centuries of internecine conflict, to create a united Europe while still preserving the political legal and cultural integrity of each individual nation. The need to find an answer to this question became more acute after two world wars had shown that if the nations of Europe were to continue to play a role in the world they could now only do so together.

To achieve that, however, they had to be prepared to merge their zealously-guarded sovereign powers into a new form of trans-national constitutionalism. This the European Union has tried to do. In the process it has created not, as its enemies have claimed, a "super-state" but a new post-national order united in a political life based, not upon the old shibboleths of nationalism and patriotism, but upon a common body of values and aspirations.

It is this, argues Anthony Pagden, that will allow the Union to defeat its political enemies from within, and to overcome the difficulties, from mass migration to the pandemic, which it faces from without. But it will only succeed in doing so if it also continues to evolve as it has over the past

two centuries.

Anthony Pagden is Professor of Political Science and History, at The University of California, Los Angeles. He was educated in Chile, Spain, and France, and at Oxford. In the past two decades, he has been the reader in intellectual history at Cambridge, a fellow of King's College, a visiting professor at Harvard, and Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert W. Tomlinson, "The Influence of Foreign Wars on U.S. Domestic Military Policy: The Case of the Yom Kippur War" (Lexington, 2022)

Wed, 27 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

How do military organizations learn? Robert W. Tomlinson's book The Influence of Foreign Wars on U.S. Domestic Military Policy (Lexington, 2022) covers an important instance of military learning in which the United States military systematically examined the lessons of Israel's decisive victory in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and applied those lessons towards major doctrinal and equipment changes. The book relies heavily on Paul Senge’s model of learning organizations outlined in his seminal work, The Fifth Dimension. Using Senge’s model, the book examines the Departments of the Army, Air Force, and Navy’s reactions to the Yom Kippur War and how they organizationally incorporated—or ignored—the lessons of the conflict within their force. Using source documents, including personal memoirs, doctrinal publications, and individual reflections, the book offers a vital examination of how militaries can use foreign conflicts to make substantive and necessary organizational changes. The Yom Kippur War, particularly the Israeli experience in that conflict, provided the American military a battle laboratory in which to develop new warfighting concepts and assess new weapons acquisitions. In its conclusion, the book offers a cautionary tale that suggests learning and change do not come automatically to military organizations. If they are to be successful in the future, military organizations must embrace learning structures.

Dr. Robert W. Tomlinson is an associate dean at the Naval War College.

The views expressed in this podcast by both participants are their own, and do not reflect the official position of any organization with which they are affiliated.

Sam Canter is a policy and strategy analyst, PhD candidate, and Army Reserve intelligence officer.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kathryn E. Stoner, "Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Tue, 26 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Too often, we are told that Russia plays a weak hand well. But, perhaps the nation's cards are better than we know. Russia ranks significantly behind the US and China by traditional measures of power: GDP, population size and health, and military might. Yet 25 years removed from its mid-1990s nadir following the collapse of the USSR, Russia has become a supremely disruptive force in world politics. Kathryn E. Stoner assesses the resurrection of Russia and argues that we should look beyond traditional means of power to assess its strength in global affairs. Taking into account how Russian domestic politics under Vladimir Putin influence its foreign policy, Stoner explains how Russia has battled its way back to international prominence.

From Russia's seizure of the Crimea from Ukraine to its military support for the Assad regime in Syria, the country has reasserted itself as a major global power. Stoner examines these developments and more in tackling the big questions about Russia's turnaround and global future. Stoner marshals data on Russia's political, economic, and social development and uncovers key insights from its domestic politics. Russian people are wealthier than the Chinese, debt is low, and fiscal policy is good despite sanctions and the volatile global economy. Vladimir Putin's autocratic regime faces virtually no organized domestic opposition. Yet, mindful of maintaining control at home, Russia under Putin also uses its varied power capacities to extend its influence abroad. While we often underestimate Russia's global influence, the consequences are evident in the disruption of politics in the

US, Syria, and Venezuela, to name a few. Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order (Oxford UP, 2020) is an eye-opening reassessment of the country, identifying the actual sources of its power in international politics and why it has been able to redefine the post-Cold War global order.

Kathryn E. Stoner is the Deputy Director at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, all at Stanford University. She is the author orco-editor of five books, including Transitions to Democracy: A Comparative Perspective, written and edited with Ambassador Michael A. McFaul, and Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Olena Palko and Constantin Ardeleanu, "Making Ukraine: Negotiating, Contesting, and Drawing the Borders in the Twentieth Century" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)

Tue, 26 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine have brought scholarly and public attention to Ukraine's borders. Making Ukraine aims to investigate the various processes of negotiation, delineation, and contestation that have shaped the country's borders throughout the past century. Essays by contributors from various historical fields consider how, when, and under what conditions the borders that historically define the country were agreed upon. A diverse set of national and transnational contexts are explored, with a primary focus on the critical period between 1917 and 1954. Chapters are organized around three main themes: the interstate treaties that brought about the new international order in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the world wars, the formation of the internal boundaries between Ukraine and other Soviet republics, and the delineation of Ukraine's borders with its western neighbours. Investigating the process of bordering Ukraine in the post-Soviet era, contributors also pay close attention to the competing visions of future relations between Ukraine and Russia. Through its broad geographic and thematic coverage, Olena Palko and Constantin Ardeleanu's Making Ukraine: Negotiating, Contesting, and Drawing the Borders in the Twentieth Century (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022) illustrates that the dynamics of contemporary border formation cannot be fully understood through the lens of a sole state, frontier, or ideology and sheds light on the shared history of territory and state formation in Europe and the wider modern world.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sergei Zhuk, "KGB Operations Against the USA and Canada in Soviet Ukraine 1953-1991" (Routledge, 2022)

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Oriented for a general reading audience, Sergei Zhuk's book KGB Operations Against the USA and Canada in Soviet Ukraine 1953-1991 (Routledge, 2022) gives a unique and rare perspective on the KGB special operations in Soviet Ukraine, which targeted especially the USA and Canada, using issues related to Soviet Ukrainian identity and cultural diplomacy of Soviet Ukraine after Stalin's death in 1953 until the perestroika of the 1980s.

Concentrating on the period of the Cold War after Stalin and combining the counterintelligence documents from the KGB archive in Kyiv, Ukraine, with the official KGB correspondence and reports to the political leadership of Soviet Ukraine, this book offers an experimental view of the political and cultural history of relations between Soviet Ukraine and capitalist America through the prism of KGB operations against the US and Canada. Written from a hidden perspective of KGB operations from 1953 to the end of the 1980s, this book covers intelligence and counter-intelligence operations and the active measures of the KGB, but also various problems of anti-American cultural campaigns in Soviet Ukraine, sponsored by the KGB, involving the issues of cultural consumption, knowledge production, youth culture and national identity.

Using carefully researched archive materials, this is an invaluable resource for scholars and advanced students of KGB operations, the Cold War, counterintelligence and political and cultural history of the relations between Soviet Ukraine and the United States and Canada, and a role of cultural consumption in this history.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jennifer Lin, "Beethoven in Beijing: Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra's Historic Journey to China" (Temple UP, 2022)

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In 1973, the Philadelphia Orchestra boarded a Pan Am 707 plane in Philadelphia for a once-in-a-lifetime journey: a multi-city tour of Maoist China, months after Nixon’s history-making visit.

There was drama immediately after they landed in Shanghai. Chinese officials asked for a last-minute change to the program: Beethoven’s Sixth. After protests that the Orchestra didn’t bring scores with them, officials returned with copies haphazardly sourced from across the country, with different notations and different notes, forcing the orchestra to make do.

That’s just one of the stories recounted in Jennifer Lin’s book, Beethoven in Beijing: Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra's Historic Journey to China (Temple University Press: 2022). The book stems from the work Lin did in putting together a documentary film on the Philadelphia Orchestra’s trip; with so much left on the cutting room floor, she decided to turn it into an oral history.

Jennifer Lin is an award-winning journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker. She produced and codirected the feature-length documentary, Beethoven in Beijing, which premiered on PBS’s Great Performances in 2021. For 31 years, she worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer as a reporter, including posts as a foreign correspondent in China, a financial correspondent on Wall Street, and a national correspondent in Washington, DC. She is the author of Shanghai Faithful: Betrayal and Forgiveness in a Chinese Christian Family (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers: 2017), and coauthor of Sole Sisters: Stories of Women and Running (Andrews McMeel Publishing: 2006). Her current documentary project is Beyond Yellowface about two New York City dancers trying to rid ballet of offensive Asian stereotypes.

In this interview, Jennifer and I talk about the opening of China, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and how that 1973 visit still resonates today.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Beethoven in Beijing. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Mandelbaum, "The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy: Weak Power, Great Power, Superpower, Hyperpower" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The United States is now nearly 250 years old. It arose from humble beginnings, as a strip of mostly agrarian and sparsely populated English colonies on the northeastern edge of the New World, far removed from the centers of power in Europe. Today, it is the world's most powerful country, with its largest economy and most powerful military. How did America achieve this status?

In The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy: Weak Power, Great Power, Superpower, Hyperpower (Oxford University Press, 2022), Michael Mandelbaum offers a new framework for understanding the evolution of the foreign policy of the United States. He divides that evolution into four distinct periods, with each defined by the consistent increase in American power relative to other countries. His history of the four periods features engaging accounts of the major events and important personalities in the foreign policy of each era. Throughout, Mandelbaum highlights fundamental continuities in the goals of American foreign policy and in the way that policy was adopted and implemented.

Michael Mandelbaum is the Christian A. Herter Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John F. Sears, "Refuge Must Be Given: Eleanor Roosevelt, the Jewish Plight, and the Founding of Israel" (Purdue UP, 2021)

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Refuge Must Be Given: Eleanor Roosevelt, the Jewish Plight, and the Founding of Israel (Purdue UP, 2021) details the evolution of Eleanor Roosevelt from someone who harbored negative impressions of Jews to become a leading Gentile champion of Israel in the United States. The book explores, for the first time, Roosevelt's partnership with the Quaker leader Clarence Pickett in seeking to admit more refugees into the United States, and her relationship with Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, who was sympathetic to the victims of Nazi persecution yet defended a visa process that failed both Jewish and non-Jewish refugees.

After the war, as a member of the American delegation to the United Nations, Eleanor Roosevelt slowly came to the conclusion that the partition of Palestine was the only solution both for the Jews in the displaced persons camps in Europe, and for the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews. When Israel became a state, she became deeply involved in supporting the work of Youth Aliyah and Hadassah, its American sponsor, in bringing Jewish refugee children to Israel and training them to become productive citizens. Her devotion to Israel reflected some of her deepest beliefs about education, citizenship, and community building. Her excitement about Israel's accomplishments and her cultural biases, however, blinded her to the impact of Israel's founding on the Arabs. Visiting the new nation four times and advocating on Israel's behalf created a warm bond not only between her and the people of Israel, but between her and the American Jewish community.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kevin Ruane and Matthew Jones, "Anthony Eden, Anglo-American Relations and the 1954 Indochina Crisis" (Bloomsbury, 2019)

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In the spring of 1954, after eight years of bitter fighting, the war in Vietnam between the French and the communist-led Vietminh came to a head. With French forces reeling, the United States planned to intervene militarily to shore-up the anti-communist position. Turning to its allies for support, first and foremost Great Britain, the US administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower sought to create what Secretary of State John Foster Dulles called a "united action" coalition. In the event, Winston Churchill's Conservative government refused to back the plan. Fearing that US-led intervention could trigger a wider war in which the United Kingdom would be the first target for Soviet nuclear attack, the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, was determined to act as Indochina peacemaker - even at the cost of damage to the Anglo-American "special relationship".

In Anthony Eden, Anglo-American Relations and the 1954 Indochina Crisis (Bloomsbury, 2019), Kevin Ruane and Matthew Jones revisit a Cold War episode in which British diplomacy played a vital role in settling a crucial question of international war and peace. Eden's diplomatic triumph at the 1954 Geneva Conference on Indochina is often overshadowed by the 1956 Suez Crisis which led to his political downfall. This book, however, recalls an earlier Eden: a skilled and experienced international diplomatist at the height of his powers who may well have prevented a localised Cold War crisis escalating into a general Third World War.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Future of Hong Kong: A Discussion with Ho-Fung Hung

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Hong Kong has always existed on the edge of empires, providing services and capabilities to powerful nations. And even to this day when the one country two systems idea is all but defunct, Beijing still needs Hong Kong to provide China with access to world markets – especially financial ones. But what next? Ho Fung Hung, Professor in Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University and author of City on the Edge: Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule (Cambridge UP, 2022) discusses the future of Hong Kong.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jayita Sarkar, "Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Mon, 11 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) by Jayita Sarkar challenges this received wisdom by narrating a global story of India's nuclear program during its first forty years. The book foregrounds the program's civilian and military features by probing its close relationship with the space program. Through nuclear and space technologies, India's leaders served the technopolitical aims of economic modernity and the geopolitical goals of deterring adversaries.

The politically savvy, transnationally connected scientists and engineers who steered the program obtained technologies, materials, and information through a variety of state and nonstate actors from Europe and North America, including both superpowers. They thus maneuvered around Cold War politics and the choke points of the nonproliferation regime. Hyperdiversification increased choices for the leaders of the nuclear program but reduced democratic accountability at home. The nuclear program became a consensus-enforcing device in the name of the nation.

Ploughshares and Swords is a provocative new history with global implications. It shows how geopolitical and technopolitical visions influence decisions about the nation after decolonization.

Thanks to generous funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellopen.org) and other repositories. You can access the ebook here.

Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University Of Glasgow and the Founding Director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. Follow her on Twitter @DrJSarkar or check out her website (www.JayitaSarkar.com).

Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Finnish Maritime Interaction with China in the 18th Century

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

As COVID-19 disrupted maritime trade with China, the world was again reminded of the importance of shipping in global commerce. The roots of Nordic maritime trade relations with Asia go back centuries, and this history reveals interesting details about early Finnish interaction with China. For example, the Swedish East India Company’s 18th century trade voyages produced the first-ever Finnish academic dissertation on China, which was defended by Cadet Israel Reinius in Turku in 1749. In this episode, Dr. Erja Kettunen-Matilainen from the University of Turku introduces us to this fascinating but somewhat less known historical aspect of Finnish relations with China.

Dr. Erja Kettunen-Matilainen is a Senior Research Fellow in Economic Geography and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Marketing and International Business at the University of Turku. She has written about Cadet Israel Reinius and Finland’s first China-related dissertation from 1749 as well as the participation of Finns in the Swedish East India Company’s trade voyages in the 18th century (in Finnish).

Ari-Joonas Pitkänen is a Doctoral Researcher at the Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lucia M. Rafanelli, "Promoting Justice Across Borders: The Ethics of Reform Intervention" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Thu, 07 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In her new book, Promoting Justice Across Borders: The Ethics of Reform Intervention (Oxford UP, 2021) political scientist Lucia M. Rafanelli develops an ethical theory of global reform intervention, arguing that new theories are necessary as increasing global interconnection continues and expands around the world. Rafanelli classifies global reform intervention as any attempt to promote justice in a society other than one’s own. This loose definition means that there are several variations of these actions: the degree of control held by the interveners; how interveners interact with recipients; existing political institutions; the context surrounding the action, and the risks intervention poses to the recipients of that intervention. Promoting Justice Across Borders argues that there are components within these dimensions that pollute the moral permissibility of reform intervention. Once the malleability of these actions becomes evident, it also becomes clear that there are ethical ways to go about (and not go about) such an action. When studying examples of reform interventions, it is clear that there are some interveners who disrespect and essentially ignore the recipients and treat them with intolerance. But not all interveners treat recipients this way, many treat the recipients of intervention with respect for the legitimate political institutions, working to establish collective self-determination, thus providing a blueprint for moral action. It is through these particular examples that Rafanelli creates an ethical framework through which reform intervention is analyzed with the goal of global justice.

Promoting Justice Across Borders combines philosophical analysis of justice and morality with a case-by-case investigation of real-life events, in an attempt to identify which kinds of reform intervention are not subject to ethical objection. The analysis redefines the ordinary boundaries of global politics with the values of toleration, legitimacy, and collective self-determination. Rafanelli explains how vital it is for interveners to avoid subjecting recipients to neocolonial power dynamics or making their institutions more responsive to the intervener’s interests at the expense of the recipient’s interests in order to maintain this framework of global collectivism. A qualification of reform intervention is not to undermine the self-determination of the recipients; in fact, it may bolster it and re-affirm the recipient’s independence in the name of justice. Promoting such justice, unfortunately, takes place in a non-ideal world, and Rafanelli discusses how these theories can be put into practice in this context. To prevent negative consequences from the most well-principled interventions, diverse global oversight of such actions is an important component of the process, as well as ensuring that interveners favor interventions where they exert less rather than more control over recipients. Priority must be given to interventions that challenge current and historical power hierarchies. Humanity’s collective purpose of pursuing justice can be reshaped and better applied according to the analysis in Promoting Justice Across Borders, but the approach and process needs to be reconfigured to avoid reinscribing past problematic applications of these reform interventions.

Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Florian Wagner, "Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Thu, 07 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Florian Wagner about his new book Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982 (Cambridge UP, 2022).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nick Sharman, "Britain’s Informal Empire in Spain, 1830-1950: Free Trade, Protectionism and Military Power| (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)

Tue, 05 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Based on five years of archival research, Britain's Informal Empire in Spain, 1830-1950: Free Trade, Protectionism and Military Power offers a radical reinterpretation of Britain and Spain’s relationship during the growth, apogee and decline of the British Empire. It shows that from the early nineteenth century Britain turned Spain into an ‘informal’ colony, using its economic and military dominance to achieve its strategic and economic ends. Britain’s free trade campaign, which aimed to tear down the legal barriers to its explosive trade and investment expansion, undermined Spain’s attempts to achieve industrial take-off, demonstrating that the relationship between the two countries was imperial in nature, and not simply one of unequal national power. Exploring five key moments of crisis in their relations, from the First Carlist War in the 1830s to the Second World War, the author analyses Britain’s use of military force in achieving its goals, and the consequences that this had for economic and political policy-making in Spain. Ultimately, the Anglo-Spanish relationship was an early example of the interaction between industrial power and colonies, formal and informal, that characterised the post-World War Two period. An insightful read for anyone researching the British Empire and its colonies, this book offers an innovative perspective by closely examining the volatile relationship between two European powers.

Dr Nick Sharman is a Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham, Department of Modern Languages and Cultures. His subject is the economic and political relationship between Britain and Spain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has had a career in business and local and regional government and is currently a Councillor in the London Borough of Hackney, where he chairs the Audit Committee. Nick has a PhD from the University of Nottingham, an honours degree in economics and politics from Trinity College, Dublin, an MPhil in town planning from University College London, an MBA from Henley Management College and an MA in history from Royal Holloway University of London. He has written widely on strategic and regeneration issues in local and regional Government and, more recently, on the history of the Anglo-Spanish relationship. His book, Britain's Informal Empire in Spain, 1830-1950: Free Trade, Protectionism and Military Power, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in late 2021.

Luka Haeberle is an enthusiastic student of Latin American and economic history. His main areas of interest are political economy, labor history and political theory. You can find him on Twitter: @ChepoteLuka

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Future of Erdogan: A Discussion with Dimitar Bechev

Tue, 05 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Reccep Tayyib Erdogan is towering politician. He has dominated Turkey for 20 years and is now being compared to Ataturk as a man who has changed the direction of Turkish society. And he matters not only to Turkey but to the international community more generally partly because of Turkey’s geo-strategic position but also because he has the power to influence the future direction of political Islam - so what has he done, what does it signify and is he fearful of being imprisoned if he lost power? Owen Bennett-Jones discusses Erdogan with Dimitar Bechev who has studied the man for his book Turkey Under Erdogan: How a Country Turned from Democracy and the West (Yale University Press, 2022).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vanessa Walker, "Principles in Power: Latin America and the Politics of U.S. Human Rights Diplomacy" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sophie Haspeslagh, "Proscribing Peace: How Listing Armed Groups as Terrorists Hurts Negotiations" (Manchester UP, 2021)

Mon, 27 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Proscribing Peace: How Listing Armed Groups as Terrorists Hurts Negotiations (Manchester UP, 2021), Dr. Sophie Haspeslagh offers a systematic examination of the impact of proscription on peace negotiations. With rare access to actors during the Colombian negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia People's Army (FARC), Dr. Haspeslagh shows how proscription makes negotiations harder and more prolonged.

By introducing the concept of 'linguistic ceasefire', Dr. Haspeslagh adds to our understanding of the timing and sequencing of peace processes in the context of proscription. Linguistic ceasefire has three main components: first, recognise the conflict; second, discard the 'terrorist' label, and third, uncouple the act and the actor. These measures remove the symbolic impact of proscription, even where de-listing is not possible ahead of negotiations. With relevance for more than half of the conflicts around the world in which an armed group is listed as a terrorist organisation, 'linguistic ceasefire' helps to explain why certain conflicts remain stuck in the 'terrorist' framing, while others emerge from it.

International proscription regimes criminalise both the actor and the act of terrorism. The book calls for an end to the amalgamation between acts and actors. By focussing on the acts instead, Dr. Haspeslagh argues, international policy would be better able to consider the violent actions both of armed groups and those of the state. By separating the act and the actor, change - and thus peace - become possible.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Japan’s Reaction to Russia’s War in Ukraine

Fri, 24 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Russia’s aggression in Ukraine has dramatically affected international politics, and the effects are also felt in East Asia. We have heard a lot about China’s position regarding the war, but the situation has also affected security and defense calculations in Japan, one of the key allies of the West in Asia. How did Japan react to the war, what has it meant for Japan's own territorial dispute with Russia, and how do the evolving East Asian, Indo-Pacific, and European security environments look from a Japanese perspective? In this episode, Ari-Joonas Pitkänen is joined by two specialists on Japanese society and politics, Dr. Kamila Szczepanska and Dr. Silja Keva, to answer these questions.

Dr. Kamila Szczepanska is a University Lecturer at the Centre for East Asian Studies and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Political Science and Contemporary History at the University of Turku. Dr. Silja Keva is a University Teacher at the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku.

Ari-Joonas Pitkänen is a Doctoral Researcher at the Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christopher Blattman, "Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace" (Viking, 2022)

Thu, 23 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace (Viking, 2022), Chris Blattman explains the five reasons why conflict (rarely) blooms into war, and how to interrupt that deadly process. It's easy to overlook the underlying strategic forces of war, to see it solely as a series of errors, accidents, and emotions gone awry. It's also easy to forget that war shouldn't happen-and most of the time it doesn't. Around the world, there are millions of hostile rivalries, yet only a tiny fraction erupt into violence. Too many accounts of conflict forget this. With a counterintuitive approach, Blattman reminds us that most rivals loathe one another in peace. That's because war is too costly to fight. Enemies almost always find it better to split the pie than spoil it or struggle over thin slices. So, in those rare instances when fighting ensues, we should ask: what kept rivals from compromising?

Why We Fight draws on decades of economics, political science, psychology, and real-world interventions to lay out the root causes and remedies for war, showing that violence is not the norm; that there are only five reasons why conflict wins over compromise; and how peacemakers turn the tides through tinkering, not transformation. From warring states to street gangs, ethnic groups and religious sects to political factions, there are common dynamics to heed and lessons to learn. Along the way, we meet vainglorious European monarchs, African dictators, Indian mobs, Nazi pilots, British football hooligans, ancient Greeks, and fanatical Americans. Realistic and optimistic, this is a book that lends new meaning to the old adage, "Give peace a chance."

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peter Oborne, "The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam" (Simon and Schuster, 2022)

Thu, 23 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Peter Oborne’s The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam (Simon and Schuster 2022) is as much a history of US, British, and French attitudes towards Islam and Muslims as it is about a relationship that was almost doomed from the outset. Not because of inherent problems with either the essence of the West or the essence of Islam but due to prejudice, bias, and, certainly in the 21st century, politicisation and weaponization of religion on both sides of the divide. Nonetheless, the book sketches how many of the Western and non-Western policy assumptions about Islam echo past fears, prejudices, and debates that that have fuelled a widening gap and Islamophobia.

Oborne, the scion of a military and old-style politically conservative family, is passionate but well-documented, well-researched, and well-argued, in his description of the United States, France, and Britain’s encounters with Islam and Muslims, who initially were either subjects with very different experiences of colonialism or slaves. Although these encounters vary widely, Islam, whose adherents were often not granted full and equal recognition in society, has in Oborne’s telling in the 21th century replaced replaced communism as the enemy in the post-Cold War and post 9/11 era.

Based on extensive historical research and investigative journalism, Oborne debunks myths and distortions of the truth. In doing so, he is clear about where he stands in the debate on whether non-violent political Islam poses a threat. Terms that have become fashionable such as Islamism and non-violent extremism constitute in his mind part of the vocabulary developed to force Muslims into a cultural straight jacket.

With a well-put together list for further reading and spiced with historical nuggets, Oborne’s book is a valuable and important contribution to discussions about Islamophobia, political Islam, and the relationship between the United States, European countries, and Islam – a relationship that is likely to co-shape the 21st century world order.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning journalist and scholar, a Senior Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and the author of the syndicated column and blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joshua D. Zimmerman, "Jozef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Thu, 23 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Karène Sanchez Summerer and Sary Zananiri, "European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine, 1918–1948: Between Contention and Connection" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)

Wed, 22 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine (1918-1948) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) investigates the transnationally connected history of Arab Christian communities in Palestine during the British Mandate (1918-1948) through the lens of the birth of cultural diplomacy. Relying predominantly on unpublished sources, it examines the relationship between European cultural agendas and local identity formation processes and discusses the social and religious transformations of Arab Christian communities in Palestine via cultural lenses from an entangled perspective.

The 17 chapters reflect diverse research interests, from case studies of individual archives to chapters that question the concept of cultural diplomacy more generally. They illustrate the diversity of scholarship that enables a broad-based view of how cultura l diplomacy functioned during the interwar period, but also the ways in which its meanings have changed. The book considers British Mandate Palestine as an internationalized node within a transnational framework to understand how the complexity of cultural interactions and agencies engaged to produce new modes of modernity. With the editors, Karene Sanches Summerer and Sary Zananiri, we discussed the term cultural diplomacy and its varied definition by the contributors of this volume. The book, divided in three parts, looks at various forms of cultural diplomacy, its indigenization, cultural diplomacy as an hegemonic force and lastly a number of scholars discussed a variety of examples of cultural diplomacy as intended by European countries.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nathan A. Kurz, "Jewish Internationalism and Human Rights after the Holocaust" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Wed, 22 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Jewish Internationalism and Human Rights after the Holocaust (Cambridge UP, 2020), Nathan A. Kurz charts the fraught relationship between Jewish internationalism and international rights protection in the second half of the twentieth century. For nearly a century, Jewish lawyers and advocacy groups in Western Europe and the United States had pioneered forms of international rights protection, tying the defense of Jews to norms and rules that aspired to curb the worst behavior of rapacious nation-states. In the wake of the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel, however, Jewish activists discovered they could no longer promote the same norms, laws, and innovations without fear they could soon apply to the Jewish state. Using previously unexamined sources, Nathan Kurz examines the transformation of Jewish internationalism from an effort to constrain the power of nation-states to one focused on cementing Israel's legitimacy and its status as a haven for refugees from across the Jewish diaspora.

Amber Nickell is Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies, Ukrainian Studies, and Eastern Europe.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Moses E. Ochonu, "Emirs in London: Subalteran Travel and Nigeria's Modernity" (Indiana UP, 2022)

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Emirs in London: Subalteran Travel and Nigeria's Modernity (Indiana UP, 2022) recounts how Northern Nigerian Muslim aristocrats who traveled to Britain between 1920 and Nigerian independence in 1960 relayed that experience to the Northern Nigerian people.

Moses E. Ochonu shows how rather than simply serving as puppets and mouthpieces of the British Empire, these aristocrats leveraged their travel to the heart of the empire to reinforce their positions as imperial cultural brokers, and to translate and domesticate imperial modernity in a predominantly Muslim society.

Emirs in London explores how, through their experiences visiting the heart of the British Empire, Northern Nigerian aristocrats were enabled to define themselves within the framework of the empire. In doing so, the book reveals a unique colonial sensibility that complements rather than contradicts the traditional perspectives of less privileged Africans toward colonialism.

Moses E. Ochonu is Professor of African History at Vanderbilt University. He is author of Africa in Fragments: Essays on Nigeria, Africa, and Global Africanity; Colonialism by Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt Consciousness in Nigeria, which was named finalist for the Herskovits Prize; and Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression. He is editor of Entrepreneurship in Africa: A Historical Approach.

Sara Katz is a Postdoctoral Associate in the History Department at Duke University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ukrainian Nationalism in Historical Context

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In the midst of the ongoing war between the Russian Federation and Ukraine, it is vital that the lay-educated public understand the historical origins of the conflict. It is with this in mind, that this episode of ‘Arguing History’, takes a look at the subject of ‘Ukrainian Nationalism and the Russian / Soviet state’. To guide us in this intricate and not well know matter, are three superb historians: John-Paul Himka, Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Alberta; David R. Stone, is a Professor in Russian Studies in the United States, Naval War College; Alexander Watson is Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London.

John-Paul Himka is an American-Canadian historian and retired professor of history of the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Himka received his BA in Byzantine-Slavonic Studies and Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan in 1971 and 1977 respectively. The title of his Ph.D. dissertation was Polish and Ukrainian Socialism: Austria, 1867–1890. He received numerous awards for both excellence in teaching and in research. His work on Ukrainian history has been subject to widespread debate and discussion in Ukraine.

David R. Stone, the William E. Odom Professor of Russian Studies at the Naval War College, joined the Strategy and Policy Department in 2015. He received a B.A. from Wabash College and a Ph.D. in history from Yale. He previously taught at Kansas State University. His book “Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union” (2000) won the Shulman Prize of ASEEES and the Best First Book Prize of the Historical Society. He has also published “A Military History of Russia” (2006) and “The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914-1917” (2015). He edited “The Soviet Union at War, 1941-1945” (2010). He is the author of several dozen articles on Russian military history and foreign policy.

Alexander Watson is Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London. His latest book is The Fortress. The Great Siege of Przemysl (London: Allen Lane, 2019). This is the story of the First World War’s longest siege, and of the opening of the brutal tragedy which befell East-Central Europe during the twentieth century. It follows a ragtag Habsburg garrison of old soldiers as they desperately defend Central Europe from Russian invasion, and recounts the vicious fighting, starvation and anti-Semitic ethnic cleansing which began in the region already in 1914. The book won a Society for Military History 2021 Distinguished Book Award and was a BBC History Magazine and Financial Times ‘Book of the Year’. The Times newspaper praised it as ‘a masterpiece’. ‘Vividly written and well researched …it deserves to become a classic of military history.’ His two prior books were also award winners.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrew Monaghan, "Russian Grand Strategy in the Era of Global Power Competition" (Manchester UP, 2022)

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The status of Russia as a world power has been fiercely debated since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although often ignored, Russia came back into the international limelight in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and recently in 2022 with the war in Ukraine. However, what are the underlining precepts behind Russian behavior on the international stage, and how do Russian leaders perceive their country’s place in the world? To answer these questions is Russian Grand Strategy in the Era of Global Power Competition (Manchester University Press, 2022) edited by Andrew Monaghan.

Dr. Andrew Monaghan is a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London. This spring he was a George F Kennan Fellow at the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute. He is the author of a number of books on Russia, including Dealing with the Russians.

Stephen Satkiewicz is independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Big History, Historical Sociology, War studies, as well as Russian and East European history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matthew Specter, "The Atlantic Realists: Empire and International Political Thought Between Germany and the United States" (Stanford UP, 2022)

Thu, 16 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In The Atlantic Realists: Empire and International Political Thought Between Germany and the United States (Stanford UP, 2022), intellectual historian Matthew Specter offers a boldly revisionist interpretation of "realism," a prevalent stance in post-WWII US foreign policy and public discourse and the dominant international relations theory during the Cold War. Challenging the common view of realism as a set of universally binding truths about international affairs, Specter argues that its major features emerged from a century-long dialogue between American and German intellectuals beginning in the late nineteenth century. Specter uncovers an "Atlantic realist" tradition of reflection on the prerogatives of empire and the nature of power politics conditioned by fin de siècle imperial competition, two world wars, the Holocaust, and the Cold War. Focusing on key figures in the evolution of realist thought, including Carl Schmitt, Hans Morgenthau, and Wilhelm Grewe, this book traces the development of the realist worldview over a century, dismantling myths about the national interest, Realpolitik, and the "art" of statesmanship.

Sean T. Byrnes is a writer, teacher, and historian who lives in middle Tennessee. He is the author of Disunited Nations: US Foreign Policy, Anti-Americanism, and the Rise of the New Right, from LSU Press. Tweet at him @ByrnesSean.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shiv Kunal Verma, "1965: A Western Sunrise--India's War with Pakistan" (Aleph Book Company, 2021)

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The history of India and Pakistan since Partition has been marked by countless skirmishes–and four major wars. The second conflict–the 1965 war between India and Pakistan along the long land border–featured some of the largest tank battles since the Second World War and some of the first skirmishes between the Indian and Pakistani air forces. It reshaped regional and global geopolitics, pushing India closer to the Soviet Union and Pakistan closer to China.

But the war didn’t arise from nowhere, as Shiv Kunal Verma notes in his newest history 1965: A Western Sunrise (Aleph Book Company: 2021) The book notes the timeline leading up to the war, including the 1962 war with China and the skirmish in the Rann of Kutch months before Operation Gibraltar in Kashmir. Nor did it end with a great deal of finality, with months of conflict following a ceasefire—and instability that again erupted in war in 1971.

Shiv Kunal Verma is a military historian and filmmaker, working with all three branches of the Indian armed forces. ces. He helped to write The Long Road to Siachen: The Question Why (Rupa & Co.: 2010) and Courage & Conviction (Aleph Book Company: 2013), the autobiography of General VK Singh. His latest book, 1962: The War That Wasn’t (Aleph Book Company: 2016) has been hailed as one of the most definitive works on the Indo-China conflict.

In this interview, Kunal and I talk about the 1965 India-Pakistan War–how the 1962 war with China helped to set the stage for the 1965 war, the breadth of the conflict along the India-Pakistan border, and how the ‘65 war has repercussions that can still be seen today.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of 1965: A Western Sunrise. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Zarina Burkadze, "Great Power Competition and the Path to Democracy: The Case of Georgia, 1991-2020" (U Rochester Press, 2022)

Wed, 08 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In her book Great Power Competition and the Path to Democracy: The Case of Georgia, 1991-2020 (University of Rochester Press, 2022), Zarina Burkadze argues that great power competition may distribute political power in a way that causes a democratic regime to emerge, supporting her argument with evidence from an impressive array of archival sources as well as from sixty-six interviews with state officials, opposition leaders, foreign diplomats, media and nongovernmental representatives, and other experts. While the case study of Georgia is the central concern of the narrative, the book’s final chapter provides an important cross-case comparison of democratization efforts in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, and Ukraine.

Zarina Burkadze is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Ilia State University. She did her postdoctoral studies as a Fulbright scholar at George Washington University and earned her doctoral degree in political science at the University of Zurich. Her research interests include democratization, democracy, and autocracy promotion.

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

Jeffrey Herf, "Israel's Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945–1949" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Thu, 02 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Israel's Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945–1949 (Cambridge UP, 2021) is a major new account of how a Jewish state came to be forged in the shadow of World War Two and the Holocaust and the onset of the Cold War. Drawing on new research in government, public and private archives, Jeffrey Herf exposes the political realities that underpinned support for and opposition to Zionist aspirations in Palestine. In an unprecedented international account, he explores the role of the United States, the Arab States, the Palestine Arabs, the Zionists, and key European governments from Britain and France to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Poland. His findings reveal a spectrum of support and opposition that stood in sharp contrast to the political coordinates that emerged during the Cold War, shedding new light on how and why the state of Israel was established in 1948 and challenging conventional associations of left and right, imperialism and anti-imperialism, and racism and anti-racism.

Nicholas Misukanis is a doctoral candidate in the history department at the University of Maryland - College Park. He studies modern European and Middle Eastern history with a special emphasis on Germany and the role energy autonomy played in foreign and domestic German politics.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Erin Murphy, "Burmese Haze: US Policy and Myanmar's Opening--And Closing" (Association for Asian Studies, 2022)

Thu, 02 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Myanmar—or Burma, if that’s the name you prefer—is one of a small set of countries: nations that, despite natural bounty and a vibrant population, remain underdeveloped due to conflict, economic mismanagement and international isolation.

Yet Myanmar has a habit of enchanting those who have the opportunity to visit the country. One such person was Erin Murphy, author of Burmese Haze: US Policy and Myanmar’s Opening—and Closing (Association for Asian Studies: 2022). Erin had a front-row seat to the major changes in U.S. policy towards Myanmar under the Obama Administration, in reaction to the country’s opening and democratic reform, a process halted by the 2021 coup.

Erin Murphy has worked on Asia issues since 2001. She has spent her career in several public and private sector roles, including as an analyst on Asian political, foreign policy, and leadership issues at the Central Intelligence Agency, a director for Indo-Pacific with a development finance agency, leading her boutique advisory firm focused on Myanmar, and as an English teacher with the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program in Saga ken, Japan. Erin can be followed on Twitter.

In this interview, Erin and I talk about Myanmar, what drove its brief reopening, how U.S. policy towards the country changed—and whether Myanmar’s experience is valuable to us today, at a time when sanctions are back in the news.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Burmese Haze. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pierre Penet and Juan Flores Zendejas, "Sovereign Debt Diplomacies: Rethinking Sovereign Debt from Colonial Empires to Hegemony" (Oxford UP. 2021)

Tue, 31 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Pierre Penet and Juan Flores Zendejas' book Sovereign Debt Diplomacies: Rethinking Sovereign Debt from Colonial Empires to Hegemony (Oxford UP. 2021) aims to revisit the meaning of sovereign debt in relation to colonial history and postcolonial developments. It offers three main contributions. The first contribution is historical. The volume historicizes a research field that has so far focused primarily on the post-1980 years. A focus on colonial debt from the 19th century building of colonial empires to the decolonization era in the 1960s-70s fills an important gap in recent debt historiographies. Economic historians have engaged with colonialism only reluctantly or en passant, giving credence to the idea that colonialism is not a development that deserves to be treated on its own. This has led to suboptimal developments in recent scholarship.

The second contribution adds a 'law and society' dimension to studies of debt. The analytical payoff of the exercise is to capture the current developments and functional limits of debt contracting and adjudication in relation to the long-term political and sociological dynamics of sovereignty. Finally, Sovereign Debt Diplomacies imports insights from, and contributes to the body of research currently developed in the Humanities under the label 'colonial and postcolonial studies'. The emphasis on 'history from below' and focus on 'subaltern agency' usefully complement the traditional elite-perspective on financial imperialism favored by the British school of empire history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Audrey L. Comstock, "Committed to Rights: UN Human Rights Treaties and Legal Paths for Commitment and Compliance" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Mon, 30 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

International treaties are the primary means for codifying global human rights standards. However, nation-states are able to make their own choices in how to legally commit to human rights treaties. A state commits to a treaty through four commitment acts: signature, ratification, accession, and succession. These acts signify diverging legal paths with distinct contexts and mechanisms for rights change reflecting legalization, negotiation, sovereignty, and domestic constraints. How a state moves through these actions determines how, when, and to what extent it will comply with the human rights treaties it commits to. Using legal, archival, and quantitative analysis Committed to Rights: UN Human Rights Treaties and Legal Paths for Commitment and Compliance (Cambridge UP, 2021) shows that disentangling legal paths to commitment reveals distinct and significant compliance outcomes. Legal context matters for human rights and has important implications for the conceptualization of treaty commitment, the consideration of non-binding commitment, and an optimistic outlook for the impact of human rights treaties.

Audrey L. Comstock is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University and Interim Director of the ASU Global Human Rights Hub. She received a PhD in Government from Cornell University. Her research focuses on the United Nations, international human rights law, negotiations, women's rights, and sexual exploitation and abuse.

Lamis Abdelaaty is an assistant professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, "Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World" (Oneworld, 2021)

Mon, 30 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World (Oneworld, 2021), Dr. Clive Hamilton and Dr. Mareike Ohlberg explores how the Chinese Communist Party is determined to reshape the world in its image.

The book details China’s decades-long infiltration of the West threatens democracy, human rights, privacy, security and free speech. Throughout North America and Europe, political and business elites, Wall Street, Hollywood, think tanks, universities and the Chinese diaspora are being manipulated with money, pressure and privilege. In this book, the authors reveal the myriad ways the CCP is fulfilling its dream of undermining liberal values and controlling the world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan Fulton, "Routledge Handbook on China–Middle East Relations" (Routledge, 2021)

Fri, 27 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Have you ever read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises? When asked how he went bankrupt, a character replies, “Gradually, then suddenly.”

In this conversation, Julie Yu-Wen Chen, professor of Chinese studies at the University of Helsinki, discusses with Jonathan Fulton about his newly edited Routledge Handbook on China–Middle East Relations. Jonathan Fulton is assistant professor of political science at Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates and a senior non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council.

According to Fulton, China’s emergence as an important actor in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) brings to mind this piece of dialogue from Hemingway’s work. “Those of us watching China’s growing presence in the region have seen a gradual expansion of China’s influence and interests over the past decade, but those not paying attention would understandably be surprised by the apparent sudden depth and breadth of its presence”, explained Fulton. The Routledge Handbook on China-Middle East Relations brings together a mix of established and emerging international scholars to provide valuable analytical insights into how China’s growing Middle East presence affects intra-regional development, trade, security, and diplomacy. As the largest extra-regional economic actor in the Middle East, China is the biggest source of foreign direct investment into the region and the largest trading partner for most Middle Eastern states. This portends a larger role in political and security affairs, as the value of Chinese assets combined with a growing expatriate population in the region demands a more proactive role in contributing to regional order.

Julie Yu-Wen Chen is professor of Chinese studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland). Dr. Chen serves as one of the editors of the Journal of Chinese Political Science (Springer, SSCI). Formerly, she was chair of the Nordic Association of China Studies (NACS) and editor-in-chief of Asian Ethnicity (Taylor & Francis). You can find her on the University of Helsinki Chinese Studies’ website, Youtube and Facebook, and her personal Twitter.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ehud Olmert, "Searching for Peace: A Memoir of Israel" (Brookings Institution, 2022) Part 2 of 2

Fri, 27 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

NB: This is part 2 of a two part interview with Ehud Olert. Part 1 is here.

Written almost entirely from inside a prison cell, Searching for Peace: A Memoir of Israel (Brookings Institution, 2022) is the compelling memoir of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert.

The child of parents who were members of the Irgun, the paramilitary group that fought for the establishment of Israel, Olmert became the youngest member of the Israeli Knesset in 1973, serving in the right-wing Likud party. He rose quickly in the party, serving in national government before being elected mayor of Jerusalem in 1993.

As mayor he overcame decades of municipal malaise, inertia, and waves of terror attacks to bring huge improvements in the city's infrastructure, education, and welfare. Although a child of the Israeli right, it was during his mayoralty that he realized the inevitability of compromise and the need to divide the city in any future peace agreement with the Palestinians.

Olmert rejoined the national government in 2003 as a top aide to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. After Sharon suffered a debilitating stroke in 2006, Olmert took over as acting prime minister, then led Sharon's new centrist party Kadima to victory in elections. Heading a coalition government, Olmert led Israel through the war with Lebanon in July 2006 and approved the dramatic strike on Syria's nuclear reactor the following year.

From late 2006 through 2008, Olmert engaged in some three dozen negotiations with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. The talks, Olmert says, came "within a hair's breadth" of reaching a comprehensive peace deal.

At the same time, Olmert was fighting allegations that he had illegally accepted large sums of money from a well-connected American businessman. He was acquitted of all but a minor charge against him, but in 2014 he was convicted on charges of taking $15,000 in bribes involving the construction of an industrial park while he served as Minister of Industry and Trade. He served 16 months in prison, using his time to write these memoirs.

Searching for Peace offers a riveting political story and an unparalleled window into Israeli history, peacemaking, politics, U.S.-Israel relations, and the future of the Middle East.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stefan Auer, "European Disunion: Democracy, Sovereignty and the Politics of Emergency" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Thu, 26 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

"With the eurozone crisis going back to 2010, the refugee crisis that culminated in 2015, the crisis of the EU-Russia relationship going back to the Ukrainian Maidan revolution of 2013-14, to the Covid-19 crisis in 2020, the EU has struggled to live up to the expectations it raised both in relation to its own people and neighbouring countries. This is not an accident".

Could this really be by design? In European Disunion: Democracy, Sovereignty and the Politics of Emergency (Hurst in the UK, OUP in the US, 2022), Stefan Auer argues that the EU's hybrid form – falling somewhere between a multinational state and a multilateral organisation – comes closest to the ideals of Germany, its most powerful member. This attempt to bypass politics has weakened the EU in the many emergencies it has faced over the last 15 years. Today, he says, "Europeans do not have the luxury of living in a politics-less world".

Stefan Auer is an Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong, having previously taught in Melbourne and Dublin and twice held Jean Monnet chairs. A prolific contributor to political science journals, he won the 2005 UACES Best Book in European Studies prize for his Liberal Nationalism in Central Europe (Routledge, 2004).

*The authors' own book recommendations are: After Europe by Ivan Krastev (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) and Time of the Magicians: The Great Decade of Philosophy, 1919-1929 by Wolfram Eilenberger (2022).

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

The Association for Diplomatic Studies & Training: A Discussion with Susan Rockwell Johnson and Margery B. Thompson

Wed, 25 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

ADST has the world’s largest collection of U.S. diplomatic oral history. They have over 2,500 oral histories at ADST.org

Susan Rockwell Johnson is the president of ADST since November 2016. She is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service (retired) with over three decades of distinguished service in a broad range of bilateral and multilateral assignments in and out of the State Department.

Margery B. Thompson directs ADST’s book-related programs, advises diplomats and others on editing and publishing matters, and coordinates the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Series. Before joining ADST in 1995, she was director of publications and editor at the Georgetown University Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (ISD) from 1980 to 1994.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrew D. Morris, "Defectors from the PRC to Taiwan, 1960-1989: The Anti-Communist Righteous Warriors" (Routledge, 2022)

Fri, 20 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Defections from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were an important part of the narrative of the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan during the Cold War, but their stories have previously barely been told, less still examined, in English.

During the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the ROC government paid much special attention to these anti-communist heroes (fangong yishi). Their choices to leave behind the turmoil of the PRC were a propaganda coup for the Nationalist one-party state in Taiwan, proving the superiority of the "Free China" that they had created there.

In Defectors from the PRC to Taiwan, 1960-1989: The Anti-Communist Righteous Warriors (Routledge, 2022), Morris looks at the stories behind these headlines, what the defectors understood about the ROC before they arrived, and how they dealt with the reality of their post-defection lives in Taiwan. He also looks at how these dramatic individual histories of migration were understood to prove essential differences between the two regimes, while at the same time showing important continuities between the two Chinese states.

A valuable resource for students and scholars of 20th century China and Taiwan, and of the Cold War and its impact in Asia.

Andrew D. Morris is Professor of History at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and studies the modern histories of Taiwan and China. He is the author of Colonial Project, National Game: A History of Baseball in Taiwan (University of California Press, 2010) and Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China (University of California Press, 2004). He edited the volume Japanese Taiwan: Colonial Rule and Its Contested Legacy (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), and co-edited the volume The Minor Arts of Daily Life: Popular Culture in Taiwan (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004, with David K. Jordan and Marc L. Moskowitz).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeff D. Colgan, "Partial Hegemony: Oil Politics and International Order" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Tue, 10 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

When and why does international order change? The largest peaceful transfer of wealth across borders in all of human history began with the oil crisis of 1973. OPEC countries turned the tables on the most powerful businesses on the planet, quadrupling the price of oil and shifting the global distribution of profits. It represented a huge shift in international order. Yet, the textbook explanation for how world politics works-that the most powerful country sets up and sustains the rules of international order after winning a major war-doesn't fit these events, or plenty of others.

Instead of thinking of the international order as a single thing, Jeff Colgan explains how it operates in parts, and often changes in peacetime. Partial Hegemony: Oil Politics and International Order (Oxford University Press, 2021) offers lessons for leaders and analysts seeking to design new international governing arrangements to manage an array of pressing concerns ranging from US-China rivalry to climate change, and from nuclear proliferation to peacekeeping. A major contribution to international relations theory, this book promises to reshape our understanding of the forces driving change in world politics.

Jeff D. Colgan is Richard Holbrooke Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University and the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs. He is also author of Petro-Aggression: When Oil Causes War.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Louis Fishman, "Jews and Palestinians in the Late Ottoman Era, 1908-1914: Claiming the Homeland" (Edinburgh UP. 2021)

Tue, 10 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Uncovering a history buried by different nationalist narratives (Jewish, Israeli, Arab and Palestinian) the book by Louis Fishman looks at how the late Ottoman era set the stage for the on-going Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This work presents an innovative analysis of the struggle in its first years, when Palestine was still an integral part of the Ottoman Empire. Fishman argues that in the late Ottoman era, Jews and Palestinians were already locked in conflict: the new freedoms introduced by the Young Turk Constitutional Revolution exacerbated divisions (rather than serving as a unifying factor). Offering an integrative approach, it considers both communities, together and separately, in order to provide a more sophisticated narrative of how the conflict unfolded in its first years.

Jews and Palestinians in the Late Ottoman Era, 1908-1914: Claiming the Homeland (Edinburgh UP. 2021) draws on a large range of sources and offers a very interesting look at a specific episode, the Haram al-Sharif incident of 1911, well known to archaeologists but less to historians and certainly the larger public. Fishman both in the book and the podcast takes the audience through the details of this episode and its legacy both in historiographical and political terms. Ultimately Fishman contends that the late Ottoman era and many of the neglected episodes that unfolded in Palestine set the stage for the conflict that lasted for over a century and it is an essential component in the understanding of how the two communities were set on a collision course.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Geoff Pigman, "Negotiating Our Economic Future: Trade, Technology, and Diplomacy" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2020)

Mon, 09 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Tariffs and trade barriers are rising, and major diplomatic institutions that have long promoted liberal trade are coming under attack as impending trade wars threaten global trade and global value chains. At the root of this crisis, argues Geoffrey Pigman, is accelerating technological change. Negotiating Our Economic Future: Trade, Technology, and Diplomacy (McGill-Queen's UP, 2020) traces the impact of today's major technological transformations on global trade and the diplomacy that makes trade possible. Not only is global trade changing, in terms of what is traded and how, but diplomacy in the digital age is changing as well. Arguing that we must think differently about trade and diplomacy, Pigman proposes pragmatic policy approaches for the diplomatic management of a challenging and potentially dangerous future.

Leo Nasskau writes and thinks about leadership and change, exploring how leaders can build societies fit for the 21st century. We face change in our economic, social, and political worlds; it is the role of leaders, in business, society, and politics, to ensure that this change manifests as opportunities rather than challenges. He blogs at empoweredbelonging.substack.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Megan Brown, "The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community" (Harvard UP, 2022)Megan Brown, "The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Fri, 06 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ehud Olmert, "Searching for Peace: A Memoir of Israel" (Brookings Institution, 2022)

Thu, 05 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Written almost entirely from inside a prison cell, Searching for Peace: A Memoir of Israel (Brookings Institution, 2022) is the compelling memoir of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert.

Searching for Peace offers a riveting political story and an unparalleled window into Israeli history, peacemaking, politics, U.S.-Israel relations, and the future of the Middle East.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christine Leuenberger and Izhak Schnell, "The Politics of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of Israel/Palestine" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Wed, 04 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan Valley has been one of the most disputed territories in history. Since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Palestinians and Israelis have each sought to claim the national identity of the land through various martial, social, and scientific tactics, but no method has offered as much legitimacy and national controversy as that of the map.

In The Politics of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of Israel/Palestine (Oxford University Press, 2020), Dr. Christine Leuenberger and Dr. Izhak Schnell delve beneath the battlefield to unearth the cartographic strife behind the Israel/Palestine conflict. Blending science and technology studies, sociology, and geography with a host of archival material, in-depth interviews and ethnographies, this book explores how the geographical sciences came to be entangled with the politics, territorial claim-making, and nation-state building of Israel/Palestine. Chapters chart the cartographic history of the region, from the introduction of Western scientific and legal paradigms that seemingly legitimized and depoliticized new land regimes to the rise of new mapping technologies and software that expanded access to cartography into the public sphere. Maps produced by various sectors like the "peace camps" or the Jewish community enhanced national belonging, while others, like that of the Green Line, served largely to divide.

The stories of Israel's many boundaries reveal that there is no absolute, technocratic solution to boundary-making. As boundaries continue to be controversial and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains intractable and unresolved,The Politics of Maps uses nationally-based cartographic discourses to provide insight into the complexity, fissures, and frictions within internal political debates, illuminating the persistent power of the nation-state as a framework for forging identities, citizens, and alliances.

Unfortunately, due to technical issues, Dr. Izhak Schnell was not able to join the audio interview about this book. His written answers to the questions are here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ban Wang, "China in the World: Culture, Politics, and World Vision" (Duke UP, 2022)

Tue, 03 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Ban Wang's book China in the World: Culture, Politics, and World Vision (Duke University Press, 2022), traces the evolution of modern China from the late nineteenth century to the present. With a focus on tensions and connections between national formation and international outlooks, Wang shows how ancient visions persist even as China has adopted and revised the Western nation-state form. The concept of tianxia, meaning “all under heaven,” has constantly been updated into modern outlooks that value unity, equality, and reciprocity as key to overcoming interstate conflict, social fragmentation, and ethnic divides. Instead of geopolitical dominance, China’s worldviews stem as much from the age-old desire for world unity as from absorbing the Western ideas of the Enlightenment, humanism, and socialism. Examining political writings, literature, and film, Wang presents a narrative of the country’s pursuits of decolonization, national independence, notions of national form, socialist internationalism, alternative development, and solidarity with Third World nations. Rather than national exceptionalism, Chinese worldviews aspire to a shared, integrated, and equal world.

Ban Wang is the William Haas Endowed Chair Professor in Chinese Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His major publications include The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford UP 1997), Illuminations from the Past (Stanford UP 2004), History and Memory (in Chinese, Oxford UP, 2004), and Narrative Perspective and Irony in Chinese and American Fiction (2002). He edited Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution (Brill, 2010); Chinese Visions of World Order (Duke UP 2017). He co-edited Trauma and Cinema (Hong Kong UP, 2004), The Image of China in the American Classroom (Nanjing UP, 2005), China and New Left Visions (Lexington, 2012), and Debating Socialist Legacy in China (Palgrave, 2014).

Linshan Jiang is Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests are modern and contemporary literature, film, and popular culture in mainland China, Taiwan and Japan; trauma and memory studies; gender and sexuality studies; queer studies; as well as comparative literature and translation studies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fiona De Londras, "The Practice and Problems of Transnational Counter-terrorism" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Wed, 27 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The attacks of 9/11 changed the course of the global counter-terrorism order which has entrenched a system of global governance. This institutional creep is arguably eroding national borders, spheres of domestic governance, human rights, and seeps into the daily lives of ordinary citizens in largely unforeseen aspects. Perhaps just as alarming, there is limited accountability on the part of either international institutions, state or private actors of who are instigators in this ever-expansive transnational counter-terror framework.

In this conversation, Professor Fiona de Londras and I discuss these and other issues in her latest book, The Practice and Problems of Transnational Counter-Terrorism, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. This is serious stuff, which is relevant to international lawyers, constitutional law experts, human rights activists and anyone who is concerned about the implications of the expanding sphere of the institution of transnational counter-terrorism and how it impacts the day to day lives of every person.

Professor Fiona de Londras is the Chair of Global Legal Studies at the University of Birmingham Law School, at The University of Birmingham. Her research concerns constitutionalism, human rights, transnationalism, reproductive rights (especially abortion law), and the development and domestic impacts of the European Convention on Human Rights. Her work has been funded by the European Commission, the British Academy, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, and the Leverhulme Trust. In 2017 she was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize in law, awarded to recognise the achievement of outstanding researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising.

Listen here to a previous interview for the New Books Network with Professor de Londras and Associate Professor Cora Chan on their edited volume, China's National Security: Endangering Hong Kong's Rule of Law?

Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David P. Forsythe, "Advanced Introduction to the Politics of International Human Rights" (Edward Elgar, 2021)

Mon, 25 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

“Human rights in public policy are constructed by diplomats and politicians in an international legislative process, not discovered amongst the clouds of metaphysics.” In "Advanced Introduction to the Politics of International Human Rights (Edward Elgar, 2021), David P. Forsythe, general editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Human Rights (5 vol.) and pioneer of the field of human rights and international relations studies distills insights gained over his long career about the progress and challenges of the human rights enterprise in a world that remains structured by a life-and-death competition between territorial states.

A self-defined “liberal realist” Forsythe believes that “individuals can make a difference in constructing a world sympathetic to human rights – up to a point”. In this slim volume, he stresses the difficulties of interjecting human rights into foreign policy and international politics, while recognising the considerable progress that has been made over time. Focusing on international organizations, states, corporations, and private advocacy groups, Forsythe addresses key themes including war, migration, climate change, and slavery.

Nicholas Bequelin is a human rights practitioner with a PhD in history and a scholarly bent. He has worked about 20 years for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, most recently as Regional director for Asia. He’s currently a Visiting Scholar and Lecturer at Yale Law School.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sam Lebovic, "A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Sam Lebovic’s A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization (University of Chicago Press, 2022) is an examination of how the postwar United States twisted its ideal of “the free flow of information” into a one-sided export of values and a tool with global consequences.

When the dust settled after World War II, the United States stood as the world’s unquestionably pre-eminent military and economic power. In the decades that followed, the country exerted its dominant force in less visible but equally powerful ways, too, spreading its trade protocols, its media, and—perhaps most importantly—its alleged values. In A Righteous Smokescreen, Dr. Lebovic homes in on one of the most prominent, yet ethereal, of those professed values: the free flow of information. This trope was seen as capturing what was most liberal about America’s self-declared leadership of the free world. But as Dr. Lebovic makes clear, even though diplomats and public figures trumpeted the importance of widespread cultural exchange, these transmissions flowed in only one direction: outward from the United States.

Whereas most scholars focus on grand problems of geopolitics and international finance to explore what sort of international order the US constructed after World War II, this book focuses instead on visa and passport regulations, the funding for educational exchange and school construction, the purchase of land for embassies, civil aviation agreements, the rights of international correspondents, and other equally pragmatic and practical problems of international relations…Detailing how cultural globalization was meant to work in practice therefore reveals a great deal about how the postwar order was actually supposed to operate.

Though other countries did try to promote their own cultural visions, Dr. Lebovic shows that the US moved to marginalize or block those visions outright, highlighting the shallowness of American commitments to multilateral institutions, the depth of its unstated devotion to cultural and economic supremacy, and its surprising hostility to importing foreign cultures. His book uncovers the unexpectedly profound global consequences buried in such ostensibly mundane matters as visa and passport policy, international educational funding, and land purchases for embassies. Even more crucially, A Righteous Smokescreen does nothing less than reveal that globalization was not the inevitable consequence of cultural convergence or the natural outcome of putatively free flows of information—it was always political to its core.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Harry Verhoeven and Anatol Lieven, "Beyond Liberal Order: States, Societies and Markets in the Global Indian Ocean" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

We often neglect the Indian Ocean when we talk about our macro-level models of geopolitics, global economics or grand strategy—often in favor of the Atlantic or the Pacific. Yet the Indian Ocean—along whose coasts live a third of humanity—may be a better vehicle to understand how our world is changing.

Globalization first began in the Indian Ocean with traders sailing between the Gulf, South Asia and Southeast Asia, spreading goods, cultures and ideas. And now, with no hegemon and an array of different states, governments, and economies, the world may look more like the Indian Ocean in the future.

Beyond Liberal Order: States, Societies and Markets in the Global Indian Ocean (Hurst: 2021 / Oxford University Press: 2022), edited by Harry Verhoeven and Anatol Lieven, studies the countries in the Indian Ocean—nations as as different as Singapore, Pakistan, and Somalia—to look at how our understanding of the post-Cold War world order doesn’t quite align with this part of the world.

Harry Verhoeven is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy, School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He is the Convenor of the Oxford University China-Africa Network and a Senior Adviser at the European Institute of Peace. He is the author of Water, Civilisation and Power in Sudan (Cambridge University Press: 2015) and Why Comrades Go To War (Oxford University Press: 2016) and the editor of Environmental Politics in the Middle East (Oxford University Press: 2018)

Anatol Lieven is a senior fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington DC, and was formerly a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and King's College London. In the 1980s and 1990s he worked as a British journalist in South Asia and the former Soviet Union, and is the author of several books on these regions including Pakistan: A Hard Country (PublicAffairs: 2012). His most recent book, Climate Change and the Nation State, appeared in paperback in 2021.

In this interview, the three of us talk about the Indian Ocean—and how it challenges the way we think about international relations and the international system.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Beyond Liberal Order. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Terry Lautz, "Americans in China: Encounters with the People's Republic" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Americans in China: Encounters with the People’s Republic (Oxford, 2022) tells the stories of men and women who have lived and worked in China from before the Communist era to the present. Their experiences provide unique insights and deeply human perspectives on issues that have shaped US engagement with the PRC: politics, diplomacy, education, science, business, art, law, journalism, and human rights. Looming over their narratives is the quandary of whether divergent Chinese and Western worldviews could find common ground.

Terry Lautz, former vice president of the Henry Luce Foundation, has chaired the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Lingnan Foundation, and the Yale-China Association. Dr. Lautz holds degrees from Harvard College and Stanford University and is the author of John Birch: A Life (Oxford, 2016).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mark R. Anderson, "Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians' First Battles in the Revolution" (U Oklahoma Press, 2021)

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In May 1776 more than two hundred Indian warriors descended the St. Lawrence River to attack Continental forces at the Cedars, west of Montreal. In just three days’ fighting, the Native Americans and their British and Canadian allies forced the American fort to surrender and ambushed a fatally delayed relief column. In Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians' First Battles in the Revolution (University of Oklahoma Press, 2022), Mark R. Anderson flips the usual perspective on this early engagement and focuses on its Native participants—their motivations, battlefield conduct, and the event’s impact in their world. In this way, Anderson’s work establishes and explains Native Americans’ centrality in the Revolutionary War’s northern theater.

Anderson’s dramatic, deftly written narrative encompasses decisive diplomatic encounters, political intrigue, and scenes of brutal violence but is rooted in deep archival research and ethnohistorical scholarship. It sheds new light on the alleged massacre and atrocities that other accounts typically focus on. At the same time, Anderson traces the aftermath for Indian captives and military hostages, as well as the political impact of the Cedars reaching all the way to the Declaration of Independence. The action at the Cedars emerges here as a watershed moment, when Indian neutrality frayed to the point that hundreds of northern warriors entered the fight between crown and colonies.

Adroitly interweaving the stories of diverse characters—chiefs, officials, agents, soldiers, and warriors—Down the Warpath to the Cedars produces a complex picture, and a definitive account, of the Revolutionary War’s first Indian battles, an account that significantly expands our historical understanding of the northern theater of the American Revolution.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeroen Koch et al., "The House of Orange in Revolution and War" (Reaktion Books, 2022)

Fri, 15 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Jeroen Koch, Senior Lecturer of European History at the University of Utrecht talks to Jana Byars about his 2018 book, The House of Orange in Revolution and War, just published in English (Reaktion Books, 2022). About half discussion about the importance of public intellectuals and popular history and half history lesson, this unusual and lively interview is sure to delight. An epic account of the House of Orange-Nassau over one hundred and fifty years of European history. Three rulers from the House of Orange-Nassau reigned over the Netherlands from 1813 to 1890: King William I from 1813 to 1840, King William II from 1840 to 1849, and King William III from 1849 to 1890. Theirs is an epic tale of joy and tragedy, progress and catastrophe, disappointment and glory--all set against the backdrop of a Europe plagued by war and revolution. The House of Orange in Revolution and War relates one and a half centuries of House of Orange history in a gripping narrative, leading the reader from the last stadholders of the Dutch Republic to the modern monarchy of the early twentieth century, from the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars to World War I and the European Revolutions that came after it.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matthew Alan Hill, "The Rise and Fall of Democracy Promotion in U.S. Foreign Policy: From Carter to Biden" (Routledge, 2022)

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Rise and Fall of Democracy Promotion in US Foreign Policy (Routledge, 2022) employs a transformational change framework to understand US democracy promotion from 1977 until the present day. American exceptionalism is a framework that has driven the US since the founding days of the republic, charging the US to promote the universal values of liberty and the pursuit of happiness around the world. Providing a frame of continuity for successive administrations, it reinforces the mythology of American exceptionalism in the eyes of the American people and the world. In different eras, different presidential worldviews, along with different international and domestic factors, have shaped how each administration has acted in the international arena and yet all have employed this language regardless of the policies pursued.

This timely volume maps out and interrogates through four key indicators the rise and fall of democracy promotion at the conceptualization, rhetorical, and implementation levels. It argues that there were two transformational changes during this period. The first was the expansion of democracy promotion in US foreign policy confirmed with the election of Jimmy Carter to the White House in 1977. The second was the rejection of liberal ideology and institutions confirmed with Donald Trump’s election in 2016. It is nuanced in that it shows how these changes in the acceptance and then rejection of democracy promotion as a foreign policy tool played out. In examining these two administrations, and those in-between, this work also observes that the rise and fall of democracy promotion as an effective foreign policy tool mirrored the relative dominance of the US in the international arena.

Matthew Hill is a Senior Lecturer in US History and International Relations at Liverpool John Moores University. He runs the International Relations and Politics discipline in the School of Humanities and Social Science.

Joe Renouard is Resident Professor of American Studies and Fei Yi-Ming Journalism Foundation Chair of American Government and Comparative Politics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Nanjing, China.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

India’s Ukrainian Dilemma

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Russian war in Ukraine has placed India in a difficult situation: how to retain the historically good relationship with Russia, without jeopardizing the increasingly important strategic partnership with the USA? In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen is joined by Ravinder Kaur, Henrik Chetan Aspengren and Sunniva Engh to analyze the diplomatic tightrope that India has had to walk over the war in Ukraine, and draw out the implications of India handling of its Ukrainian Dilemma for the country’s position in the world, and for global geopolitics more broadly.

Sunniva Engh is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Oslo.

Henrik Chetan Aspengren is a Research Fellow at the Asia Programme at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs.

Ravinder Kaur is an Associate Professor of Modern South Asian Studies and directs the Centre of Global South Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen is an Associate Professor at the dept. of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vicki Squire, "Europe's Migration Crisis: Border Deaths and Human Dignity" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Rejecting claims that migration is a crisis for Europe, Europe's Migration Crisis: Border Deaths and Human Dignity (Cambridge University Press, 2020) instead suggests that the 'migration crisis' reflects a more fundamental breakdown of a modern European tradition of humanism. Squire provides a detailed and broad-ranging analysis of the EU's response to the 'crisis', highlighting the centrality of practices of governing migration through death and precarity. Furthermore, she unpacks a series of pro-migration activist interventions that emerge from the lived experiences of those regularly confronting the consequences of the EU's response. By showing how these advance alternative horizons of solidarity and hope, Squire draws attention to a renewed humanism that is grounded both in a deepened respect for the lives and dignity of people on the move, and an appreciation of longer histories of violence and dispossession.

Vicki Squire is Professor of International Politics at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick. Her research explores the politics of migration, displacement, asylum and solidarity activism across various contexts. She is author of several books, including Reclaiming Migration (2021, Manchester University Press), Europe’s Migration Crisis (2020, Cambridge University Press), Post/Humanitarian Border Politics Between Mexico and the US (2015, Palgrave) and The Exclusionary Politics of Asylum (2009, Palgrave). She currently leads a large collaborative project, Data and Displacement, which explores the data-based humanitarian assistance to IDPs (internally displaced persons) in north-eastern Nigeria and South Sudan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Zoltán Biedermann, "(Dis)connected Empires: Imperial Portugal, Sri Lankan Diplomacy, and the Making of a Habsburg Conquest in Asia" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Fri, 08 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

(Dis)connected Empires: Imperial Portugal, Sri Lankan Diplomacy, and the Making of a Habsburg Conquest in Asia (Oxford University Press, 2019) takes the reader on a global journey to explore the triangle formed during the sixteenth century between the Portuguese empire, the empire of Kotte in Sri Lanka, and the Catholic Monarchy of the Spanish Habsburgs. It explores nine decades of connections, cross-cultural diplomacy, and dialogue, to answer one troubling question: why, in the end, did one side decide to conquer the other? To find the answer, Biedermann explores the imperial ideas that shaped the politics of Renaissance Iberia and sixteenth-century Sri Lanka. (Dis)connected Empires argues that, whilst some of these ideas and the political idioms built around them were perceived as commensurate by the various parties involved, differences also emerged early on. This prepared the ground for a new kind of conquest politics, which changed the inter-imperial game at the end of the sixteenth century. The transition from suzerainty-driven to sovereignty-fixated empire-building changed the face of Lankan and Iberian politics forever, and is of relevance to global historians at large. Through its scrutiny of diplomacy, political letter-writing, translation practices, warfare, cartography, and art, (Dis)connected Empires paints a troubling panorama of connections breeding divergence and leading to communicational collapse. It examines a key chapter in the pre-history of British imperialism in Asia, highlighting how diplomacy and mutual understandings can, under certain conditions, produce conquest.

Please also see this related article by Dr. Biedermann (which was mentioned during the interview): https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/714972

Dr. Zoltán Biedermann is Professor of Early Modern History in the School of European Languages, Culture and Society at University College London.

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

Piotr Puchalski, "Poland in a Colonial World-Order: Adjustments and Aspirations, 1918-1939" (Routledge, 2021)

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Poland in a Colonial World-Order: Adjustments and Aspirations, 1918-1939 (Routledge, 2021) is a study of the interwar Polish state and empire building project in a changing world of empires, nation-states, dominions, protectorates, mandates, and colonies.Drawing from a wide range of sources spanning two continents and five countries, Piotr Puchalski examines how Polish elites looked to expansion in South America and Africa as a solution to both real problems, such as industrial backwardness, and perceived issues, such as the supposed overrepresentation of Jews in "liberal professions." He charts how, in partnership with other European powers and international institutions such as the League of Nations, Polish leaders made attempts to channel emigration to South America, to establish direct trade with Africa, to expedite national minorities to far-away places, and to tap into colonial resources around the globe. Puchalski demonstrates the intersection between such national policies and larger processes taking place at the time, including the internationalist turn of colonialism and the global fascination with technocratic solutions.

Carefully researched, the volume is key reading for scholars and advanced students of twentieth-century European history.

Piotr Puchalski is Assistant Professor at the Institute of History and Archival Studies of the Pedagogical University of Kraków, Poland. His academic interests include Polish, French, British, and American diplomacy, as well as Western colonialism, totalitarian regimes, and modern ideologies.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan Fisher and Nina Wilén, "African Peacekeeping" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Mon, 04 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Melissa M. Lee, "Crippling Leviathan: How Foreign Subversion Weakens the State" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Mon, 04 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Policymakers worry that "ungoverned spaces" pose dangers to security and development. Why do such spaces exist beyond the authority of the state? Earlier scholarship—which addressed this question with a list of domestic failures—overlooked the crucial role that international politics play. In this shrewd book, Melissa M. Lee argues that foreign subversion undermines state authority and promotes ungoverned space. Enemy governments empower insurgents to destabilize the state and create ungoverned territory. This kind of foreign subversion is a powerful instrument of modern statecraft. But though subversion is less visible and less costly than conventional force, it has insidious effects on governance in the target state.

To demonstrate the harmful consequences of foreign subversion for state authority, Crippling Leviathan: How Foreign Subversion Weakens the State (Cornell University Press, 2020) marshals a wealth of evidence and presents in-depth studies of Russia's relations with the post-Soviet states, Malaysian subversion of the Philippines in the 1970s, and Thai subversion of Vietnamese-occupied Cambodia in the 1980s. The evidence presented by Lee is persuasive: foreign subversion weakens the state.

She challenges the conventional wisdom on statebuilding, which has long held that conflict promotes the development of strong, territorially consolidated states. Lee argues instead that conflictual international politics prevents state development and degrades state authority. In addition, Crippling Leviathan illuminates the use of subversion as an underappreciated and important feature of modern statecraft. Rather than resort to war, states resort to subversion. Policymakers interested in ameliorating the consequences of ungoverned space must recognize the international roots that sustain weak statehood.

Melissa M. Lee is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. She studies the international and domestic politics of statebuilding and state development. Lee is the author of Crippling Leviathan: How Foreign Subversion Weakens the State (Cornell University Press, 2020). Her work has received the American Political Science Association’s 2016 Helen Dwight Reid (now Merze Tate) award, APSA’s European Politics and Society Section 2020 Best Article Prize, and Perry World House’s Emerging Scholar Global Policy Prize. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steven J. Brady, "Chained to History: Slavery and US Foreign Relations to 1865" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Chained to History: Slavery and US Foreign Relations to 1865 (Cornell University Press, 2022), Dr. Steven J. Brady places slavery at the centre of the story of America's place in the world in the years prior to the calamitous Civil War. Beginning with the immediate aftermath of the War of the American Revolution, Brady follows the military, economic, and moral lines of the diplomatic challenges of attempting to manage, on the global stage, the actuality of human servitude in a country dedicated to human freedom.

Dr. Brady argues that “slavery was defined by policymakers and laypeople alike as central to US interactions with four continents—whether for good or bad. America’s security, prosperity, and geographical and political reach were all connected, in one way or another, with bonded labour. It is no surprise, then, that Americans looked on, and conducted, their relations with the world with a conviction that slavery was central to the nation’s international role.” He argues that this mindset around the centrality of American slavery therefore “forced the United States to act in the international sphere in ways that it otherwise would not have, and to interact with the Atlantic world in a more dynamic way than its leaders might have preferred.”

Dr. Brady highlights the limitations placed on American policymakers who, working in an international context increasingly supportive of abolition, were severely constrained regarding the formulation and execution of preferred policy. Policymakers were bound to the slave interest based in the Democratic Party and the tortured state of domestic politics bore heavily on the conduct of foreign affairs. As international powers not only abolished the slave trade but banned human servitude as such, the American position became untenable.

The book argues that the “proclivity of slavery to enmesh the nation with the wider world in unwanted ways was manifested again and again throughout the time period up to 1865. From vainly seeking the return of escaped slaves under President George Washington to the failed attempts of President Abraham Lincoln to settle their freed brethren somewhere—anywhere—else, one sees the real limits placed on the nation’s ability to shape and implement a consistent foreign policy…. Slavery was not the only factor that contributed to this frustration of American aims to conduct a largely unilateralist foreign policy in its early years. Nor was it the only reason why America frequently found itself unable to achieve its foreign relations goals. But it was among the most significant reasons.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jørgen Jensehaugen, "Arab-Israeli Diplomacy Under Carter: The US, Israel and the Palestinians" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The history of U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East is marked by numerous stark failures and a few ephemeral successes. Jimmy Carter's short-lived Middle East diplomatic strategy constitutes an exception in vision and approach. In this extensive and long-overdue analysis of Carter's Middle East policy, Jorgen Jensehaugen sheds light on this important and unprecedented chapter in U.S. regional diplomacy. Against all odds, including the rise of Menachem Begin's right-wing government in Israel, Carter broke new ground by demanding the involvement of the Palestinians in Arab-Israeli diplomatic negotiations.

Jørgen Jensehaugen's book Arab-Israeli Diplomacy Under Carter: The US, Israel and the Palestinians (Bloomsbury, 2020) assesses the president's 'comprehensive peace' doctrine, which aimed to encompass all parties of the conflict, and reveals the reasons why his vision ultimately failed. Largely based on analysis of newly-declassified diplomatic files and American, British, Palestinian and Israeli archival sources, this book is the first comprehensive examination of Jimmy Carter's engagement with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. At a time when U.S. involvement in the region threatens to exacerbate tensions further, Arab-Israeli Diplomacy under Carter provides important new insights into the historical roots of the ongoing unrest. The book will be of value to Middle East and International Relations scholars, and those researching U.S diplomacy and the Carter Administration.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ayşe Zarakol, "Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Ayse Zarakol, Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge, is the author of Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Before the West offers a grand narrative of (Eur)Asia as a space connected by normatively and institutionally overlapping successive world orders originating from the Mongol Empire. It uses that vast history to rethink the foundational concepts and debates of international relations, such as order and decline. How would the history of international relations in 'the East' be written if we did not always read the ending - the Rise of the West and the decline of the East - into the past? What if we did not assume that Asia was just a residual category, a variant of 'not-Europe', but saw it as a space with its own particular history and sociopolitical dynamics, not defined only by encounters with European colonialism? How would our understanding of sovereignty, as well as our theories about the causes of the decline of Great Powers and international orders, change as a result?

Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Security Dilemma in the Korean Peninsula: Foreign Policy of Yoon Seok-youl, the Incoming President of South Korea

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

South Korean presidential election ended and the conservative party candidate, Yoon Suk-yeol won the election. How will he balance the relationships between Korea and the US and China?

The current progressive Moon Jae-in administration has pursued strategic ambiguity in foreign policy, trying to maintain a strong alliance relationship with the US while pursuing an economic partnership with China. During the campaign, Yoon promised that he will reverse the Moon’s foreign policy and pursue strategic clarity, emphasizing security concerns in the Korean Peninsula. In this episode, Dr. Sungmin Cho shares his expertise on South and North Korea’s relations with China, North Korea’s newly posed threats this year, and the security dynamics surrounding the Korean Peninsula.

Dr. Sungmin Cho is a professor of the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, an academic institute of the US Department of Defense, based in Hawaii. His area of expertise covers China-Korean Peninsula relations, North Korea’s nuclear program, and the US alliance in East Asia. Dr. Cho has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals, including World Politics, The China Journal, Asian Security, Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs, and Korea Observer. His commentaries also appeared in Foreign Affairs, War on the Rocks, The Diplomat, and Defense One, among others. Prior to the academic career, Dr.Cho served in the Korean Army as an intelligence officer for three years, including seven-month deployment to Iraq. He received his PhD in Government from Georgetown University, his Master’s degree in International Relations from Peking University, and his B.A. in Political Science from Korea University.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in the podcast belong to the commentator.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

China’s International Relations and the Ukraine Crisis

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shaken the ground of global politics, and one of the key questions has been China’s position in the situation. In this episode, Dr. Matti Puranen analyses China’s international relations and strategic position in the context of the Ukraine crisis and China’s relationship with Russia. The newfound Western unity in response to the situation may also complicate China’s relations with Finland. According to Dr. Puranen, Finland’s traditionally good relationship with China has already shown some signs of cooling in recent years. We also discuss the implications of the current situation for Taiwan and China’s overall visions regarding the existing international order.

Read Dr. Puranen’s article “Sino-Russian Relations Already Bear Signs of a Military Alliance” (with Juha Kukkola) in the National Interest and his articles “Finland’s China Shift” (with Jukka Aukia) and “China-Finland: Beijing’s ‘Model Relationship’ in Europe?” in The Diplomat.

Matti Puranen is a Senior Researcher at the Department of Warfare of the Finnish National Defense University. His research focuses on strategy and international relations, particularly China and Chinese strategic thought.

Ari-Joonas Pitkänen is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeremy Friedman, "Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In the first decades after World War II, many newly independent Asian and African countries and established Latin American states pursued a socialist development model. In Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World (Harvard UP, 2022), Jeremy Friedman traces the socialist experiment over forty years through the experience of five countries: Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Iran.

These states sought paths to socialism without formal adherence to the Soviet bloc or the programs that Soviets, East Germans, Cubans, Chinese, and other outsiders tried to promote. Instead, they attempted to forge new models of socialist development through their own trial and error, together with the help of existing socialist countries, demonstrating the flexibility and adaptability of socialism. All five countries would become Cold War battlegrounds and regional models, as new policies in one shaped evolving conceptions of development in another. Lessons from the collapse of democracy in Indonesia were later applied in Chile, just as the challenge of political Islam in Indonesia informed the policies of the left in Iran. Efforts to build agrarian economies in West Africa influenced Tanzania’s approach to socialism, which in turn influenced the trajectory of the Angolan model.

Ripe for Revolution shows socialism as more adaptable and pragmatic than often supposed. When we view it through the prism of a Stalinist orthodoxy, we miss its real effects and legacies, both good and bad. To understand how socialism succeeds and fails, and to grasp its evolution and potential horizons, we must do more than read manifestos. We must attend to history.

Jeremy Friedman is Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. The former Associate Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University, he is the author of Shadow Cold War: The Sino–Soviet Competition for the Third World.

Thomas Kingston is currently a Huayu Enrichment Scholar, studying Mandarin Chinese at National Cheng Kung 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

Jonathan M. Katz, "Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire" (St. Martin's Press, 2022)

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Jonathan Katz’s Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire (St. Martin’s Press, 2022) tells the story of the birth and maturation of modern American imperialism, and its culmination in an alleged domestic coup attempt in 1934 led by a shadowy capitalist cabal and modeled on foreign interventions. The protagonist, Smedley Butler, is one of the most decorated war heroes in American history, a man with a singular legacy as a soldier that began when an idealistic 16-year-old boy from a privileged Quaker background joined the Marines to avenge the “sinking” of the USS Maine in 1899. From there, the career of the “Fighting Quaker” put Butler on the frontlines of nearly every important venue for the expansion of American formal and informal empire. Especially in the Caribbean―and above all in Haiti―he crushed local resistance and installed US-business friendly regimes and pioneered counterinsurgency and the so-called “banana republics” before bringing those hardnosed imperialist violent suppression tactics home to American shores as the chief of the Philadelphia police. Increasingly cynical, demoralized, and traumatized by what he had seen and done, Butler eventually became a great critic of the empire and imperialism he had devoted his life to, calling himself a “racketeer for capitalism.” As Katz writes, Butler’s “contradictions are America’s,” and these contradictions are on full display in Gangsters of Capitalism as Butler simultaneously killed and conquered for American interests and established despotic and pliable regimes in countries around the globe―Cuba, the Philippines, China, Nicaragua, Panama, Haiti―all while upholding the “principles of equality and fairness.”

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Future of Disorder: A Discussion with Helen Thompson

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In her book Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century (Oxford UP, 2022), Cambridge academic Helen Thompson gets beyond the ephemeral and analyses instead the role of more fundamental drivers of events – including the energy markets and the international monetary system. That’s one way in which her book is distinctive. It’s also a very broad book. While much of academic output has a very narrow focus, this book is unusual in attempting a sweeping overview of what’s happening in the world. What role has energy played in disrupting politics especially since the 1970s? How has the US dominance of the international financial system impacted international relations? And how has the EU influenced democratic development in Europe?

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Molly M. Melin, "The Building and Breaking of Peace: Corporate Activities in Civil War Prevention and Resolution" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Private corporations are rarely discussed as playing a role in efforts to curb civil violence, even though they often have strong interests in maintaining stability. Violence often damages the infrastructure necessary to deliver goods to market or may directly target companies. Corporations also have a normative obligation to conduct business in ways that promote peace. While there are historical examples of firm-instigated violence and firms reaping benefits from instability and conflict, there is also evidence that corporations proactively engage in peacebuilding. For example, firms devise programs to promote economic development, offer access to education, and employ former combatants.

In The Building and Breaking of Peace: Corporate Activities in Civil War Prevention and Resolution (Oxford UP, 2021), Molly M. Melin develops a theory of the conflicting roles corporations play in both building and preventing peace. Melin shows that corporations engage in peacebuilding when there is a gap in the state's capacity to enforce laws, but they also weigh the opportunity costs of peacebuilding, responding to the need for action when conditions enable them to do so. Firms are uniquely situated in their ability to raise the cost of violence, and proactive firms can increase the years of peace in a country. At the same time, an active private sector can make it harder for states with ongoing conflict to reach an agreement, as they act as an additional veto player in the bargaining process.

Including original cross-national data of peacebuilding efforts by firms in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa from 2000 to 2018, and in-depth case analyses of corporate actions and outcomes in Colombia, Northern Ireland, and Tunisia, Melin shows that corporations help to prevent violence but not resolve it. In examining the corporate motives for peacebuilding and the implications of these activities for preventing violence and conflict resolution, the book builds a more holistic picture of the peace and conflict process. The findings also help explain why armed civil conflicts persist despite the multitude of diverse actors working to end them.

Molly M. Melin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Loyola University Chicago. Her publications on third party interventions in international conflicts, the dynamics of conflict expansion, and peacekeeping operations have appeared in International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Conflict Management and Peace Science, and International Interactions.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kevin O'Sullivan, "The NGO Moment: The Globalisation of Compassion from Biafra to Live Aid" (Cambridge UP, 2021))

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode, Kevin O’Sullivan talks about his book on aid-focused NGOs from Ireland, Britain, and Canada in the 1960s-80s, The NGO Moment: The Globalisation of Compassion from Biafra to Live Aid (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He deems this era particularly crucial for the development of the NGO sector and its relationship to the Third World because it witnessed the internationalization of a particularly western form of compassion.

Professor O’Sullivan makes the claim that the years 1967 to 1985 witnessed an acceleration in the history of aid-focused NGOs. He highlights key crises (Biafra, East Pakistan, Cambodia, El Salvador, and Ethiopia) that gave NGOs access, legitimacy, and fame. He also dissects key intellectual approaches, as varied as liberation theology and Rawlsian liberalism, which influenced NGO operations, noting the process by which NGOs tended to domesticate radical theories and temper their more activist members. Kevin’s insightful analysis helps us understand how, despite much radical rhetoric and good intentions, aid-focused NGOs became part and parcel of a liberal international order that favors the salvation of biological life and market solutions to poverty over necessary structural reforms in the global economy.

Kevin O’Sullivan is lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy at the University of Galway in Ireland. He is an expert in humanitarianism, aid, development, human rights, and global history. His previous book is entitled Ireland, Africa and the End of Empire: Small State Identity in the Cold War, 1955-1975 (Manchester University Press, 2012). He is also the Editor of the Royal Irish Academy’s Documents on Irish Foreign Policy.

Felix A. Jimènez Botta is Associate Professor of History at Miyazaki International College in Japan. He can be reached at fjimenez@sky.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jane M. Ferguson, "Repossessing Shanland: Myanmar, Thailand, and a Nation-State Deferred" (U Wisconsin Press, 2021)

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Around five million people across Southeast Asia identify as Shan. Though the Shan people were promised an independent state in the 1947 Union of Burma constitution, successive military governments blocked their liberation. From 1958 onward, insurgency movements, including the Shan United Revolutionary Army, have fought for independence from Myanmar. Refugees numbering in the hundreds of thousands fled to Thailand to escape the conflict, despite struggling against oppressive citizenship laws there. Several decades of continuous rebellion have created a vacuum in which literati and politicians have constructed a virtual Shan state that lives on in popular media, rock music, and Buddhist ritual.

In Repossessing Shanland: Myanmar, Thailand, and a Nation-State Deferred (U Wisconsin Press, 2021), Jane M. Ferguson details the origins of these movements and tells the story of the Shan in their own voices. She shows how the Shan have forged a homeland and identity during great upheaval by using state building as an ongoing project of resistance, resilience, and accommodation within both countries. In avoiding a good/bad moral binary and illuminating cultural complexities, Repossessing Shanland offers a fresh perspective on identity formation, transformation, and how people understand and experience borderlands today.

Like this interview? If so, you might also be interested in:

Nick Enfield, The Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia
Anjalee Cohen, Youth Culture and Identity in Northern Thailand: Fitting in and Sticking Out
Tanya Jakimow, Susceptibility in Development: Micropolitics of Local Development in India and Indonesia
Nicole Curato, Democracy in a Time of Misery: From Spectacular Tragedies to Deliberative Action

Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carter R. Johnson, "Partition and Peace in Civil Wars: Dividing Lands and Peoples to End Ethnic Conflict" (Routledge, 2021)

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Partition and Peace in Civil Wars: Dividing Lands and Peoples to End Ethnic Conflict (Routledge, 2021), Dr. Carter Johnson examines whether partition is an effective means to resolve ethnic and sectarian civil wars. He argues that partition is unlikely to end ongoing ethnosectarian civil wars, but it can increase the likelihood of preventing civil war recurrence, as long as the partition separates civilians and militaries.

The book presents in-depth case studies of Georgia–Abkhazia and Moldova–Transnistria, in addition to cross-national comparisons of all ethnosectarian civil wars between 1945 and 2004. This analysis demonstrates when partitioning a country can help transform an identity-based civil war into a lasting peace.

Highlighting practical and moral challenges of separating ethnosectarian groups, Dr. Carter contends that complete partitions cannot be easily implemented by the international community, and this limits their applicability. He also demonstrates that ethnosectarian civil wars are driven less by inter-group antagonisms and more by state breakdown, meaning displaced minorities can reintegrate peacefully after partition as long as a minimal level of state-building has been completed. The book ends by examining whether partition would be useful for five contemporary conflicts: Iraq, Ukraine–Donbass, Afghanistan, Sudan–South Sudan, and Serbia–Kosovo.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Future of Africa: A Discussion with James A. Robinson

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Africa is often portrayed in terms of dictators, starvation, corruption, tribalism, war, disease, poverty and crime. In this podcast Professor James A. Robinson of the University of Chicago who is co-author (with Daron Acemoglu of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (Currency, 2013) explains why those stereotypes are often wrong and why he believes Africa has a brighter future than many think.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Togzhan Kassenova, "Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb" (Stanford UP, 2022)

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

This month we are delighted to host Togzhan Kassenova on our NBN Central Asian Studies podcast. Dr Kassenova is the author of the beautifully researched yet very readable Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb (Stanford University Press, 2022).

Atomic Steppe tells the untold true story of how Kazakhstan said no to the most powerful weapons in human history. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the newly independent Central Asian republic suddenly found itself with the world's fourth largest nuclear arsenal on its territory. Would it give up these fire-ready weapons--or try to become a Central Asian North Korea? This book takes us inside Kazakhstan's extraordinary and little-known nuclear history from the Soviet period to the present.

Equipped with intimate personal perspective and untapped archival resources, Togzhan Kassenova introduces us to the engineers turned diplomats, villagers turned activists, and scientists turned pacifists who worked toward disarmament. With thousands of nuclear weapons still present around the world, the story of how Kazakhs gave up their nuclear inheritance holds urgent lessons for global security.

Togzhan Kassenova is senior fellow at the University at Albany, SUNY and a nonresident fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Follow her on Twitter @tkassenova

Luca Anceschi is Professor of Eurasian Studies at the University of Glasgow, where he is also the editor of Europe-Asia Studies. Follow him on Twitter @anceschistan

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeremy Black, "The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Strategies for a World War" (Roman and Littlefield, 2022)

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The wars between 1792 and 1815 saw the making of the modern world, with Britain and Russia the key powers to emerge triumphant from a long period of bitter conflict. In his innovative book, The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Strategies for a World War (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022), master historian, Jeremy Black focuses on the strategic contexts and strategies involved, explaining their significance both at the time and subsequently. Reinterpreting French Revolutionary and Napoleonic warfare, strategy, and their consequences, he argues that Napoleon’s failure owed much to his limitations as a strategist. Black uses this framework as a foundation to assess the nature of warfare, the character of strategy, and the eventual ascendance of Britain and Russia in this period. Rethinking the character of strategy, this is the first history to look holistically at the strategies of all the leading belligerents from a global perspective. It will be an essential read for military professionals, students, and history buffs alike.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Edward Jones Corredera, "The Diplomatic Enlightenment: Spain, Europe, and the Age of Speculation" (Brill, 2021)

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The Diplomatic Enlightenment: Spain, Europe, and the Age of Speculation (Brill, 2021) reconfigures the study of the origins of the Enlightenment in the Spanish Empire. Challenging dominant interpretations of the period, this book shows that early eighteenth-century Spanish authors turned to Enlightenment ideas to reinvent Spain’s role in the European balance of power. And while international law grew to provide a legal framework that could safeguard peace, Spanish officials, diplomats, and authors, hardened by the failure of Spanish diplomacy, sought instead to regulate international relations by drawing on investment, profit, and self-interest. The book shows, on the basis of new archival research, that the Diplomatic Enlightenment sought to turn the Spanish Empire into a space for closer political cooperation with other European and non-European states and empires.

Edward Jones Corredera is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge in 2020.

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth. She tweets at @timetravelallie.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gardner Thompson, "Legacy of Empire: Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel" (Saqi, 2020)

Wed, 02 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In Legacy of Empire: Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel (Saqi Books, 2020), Gardner Thompson offers a clear-eyed review of political Zionism and Britain’s role in shaping the history of Palestine and Israel.

Thompson explores why the British government adopted Zionism in the early twentieth century, issuing the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and then retaining it as the cornerstone of their rule in Palestine after the First World War. Despite evidence and warnings, over the next two decades Britain would facilitate the colonisation of Arab Palestine by Jewish immigrants, ultimately leading to a conflict which it could not contain. Britain’s response was to propose the partition of an ungovernable land: a ‘two-state solution’ which – though endorsed by the United Nations after the Second World War – has so far brought into being neither two states nor a solution.

A highly readable and compelling account of Britain’s rule in Palestine, Legacy of Empire is essential for those wishing to better understand the roots of this enduring conflict.

Manamee Guha is a historian of 18th and 19th century British colonial practices as were institutionalized in the South Asian colonial state.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Boyd van Dijk, "Preparing for War: the Making of the 1949 Geneva Conventions" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The 1949 Geneva Conventions are the most important rules for armed conflict ever formulated. To this day they continue to shape contemporary debates about regulating warfare, but their history is often misunderstood. For most observers, the drafters behind these treaties were primarily motivated by liberal humanitarian principles and the shock of the atrocities of the Second World War. In Preparing for War: The Making of the Geneva Conventions (Oxford University Press, 2022), Dr. Boyd van Dijk “shows how the final text of the 1949 Conventions, far from being an unabashedly liberal blueprint, was the outcome of a series of political struggles among the drafters, many of whom were not liberal and whose ideas changed radically over time. Nor were they merely a product of idealism or even the shock felt in the wake of Hitler’s atrocities. Constructing the Conventions meant outlawing some forms of inhumanity while tolerating others. It concerned a great deal more than simply recognising the shortcomings of Internatinal law as revealed by the experience of the Second World War. In making the Conventions, drafters sought to contest European imperial rule, empower the ICRC, challenge state sovereignty, fight Cold War rivalries, ensure rights during wartime, reinvent the concept of war crimes and prepare for (civil) wars to come.”

Dr. van Dijk argues that to understand the politics and ideas of the Conventions' drafters is to see them less as passive characters responding to past events than as active protagonists trying to shape the future of warfare. In many different ways, they tried to define the contours of future battlefields by deciding who deserved protection and what counted as a legitimate target. Outlawing illegal conduct in wartime did as much to outline the concept of humanized war as to establish the legality of waging war itself.

Using never previously accessed archival materials, the book provides a comprehensive historical account of the Conventions' past and contributes to a deeper understanding of the most important treaty of humanitarian law. The book therefore presents an eye-opening account of the making of international law and offers both historians and legal scholars with detailed information about international law's origins.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mark Edele, "Stalinism at War: The Soviet Union in World War II" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Stalinism at War: The Soviet Union in World War II (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021) tells the epic story of the Soviet Union in World War Two.

Starting with Soviet involvement in the war in Asia and ending with a bloody counter-insurgency in the borderlands of Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics, the Soviet Union's war was both considerably longer and more all-encompassing than is sometimes appreciated. Here, acclaimed scholar Mark Edele explores the complex experiences of both ordinary and extraordinary citizens – Russians and Koreans, Ukrainians and Jews, Lithuanians and Georgians, men and women, loyal Stalinists and critics of his regime – to reveal how the Soviet Union and leadership of a ruthless dictator propelled Allied victory over Germany and Japan.

In doing so, Edele weaves together material on the society and culture of the wartime years with high-level politics and unites the military, economic and political history of the Soviet Union with broader popular histories from below. The result is an engaging, intelligent and authoritative account of the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1949.

Amber Nickell is Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies and Eastern Europe.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anjali Kaushlesh Dayal, "Incredible Commitments: How UN Peacekeeping Failures Shape Peace Processes" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Thu, 24 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Why do warring parties turn to United Nations peacekeeping and peacemaking even when they think it will fail? In Incredible Commitments: How UN Peacekeeping Failures Shape Peace Processes (Cambridge UP, 2021), Dayal asks why UN peacekeeping survived its early catastrophes in Somalia, Rwanda, and the Balkans, and how this survival should make us reconsider how peacekeeping works. She makes two key arguments: first, she argues the UN's central role in peacemaking and peacekeeping worldwide means UN interventions have structural consequences – what the UN does in one conflict can shift the strategies, outcomes, and options available to negotiating parties in other conflicts. Second, drawing on interviews, archival research, and process-traced peace negotiations in Rwanda and Guatemala, Dayal argues warring parties turn to the UN even when they have little faith in peacekeepers' ability to uphold peace agreements – and even little actual interest in peace – because its involvement in negotiation processes provides vital, unique tactical, symbolic, and post-conflict reconstruction benefits only the UN can offer.

Anjali Dayal is an assistant professor of international politics at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wouter Werner, "Repetition and International Law" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Acts of repetition abound in international law. Security Council Resolutions typically start by recalling, recollecting, recognising or reaffirming previous resolutions. Expert committees present restatements of international law. Students and staff extensively rehearse fictitious cases in presentations for moot court competitions. Customary law exists by virtue of repeated behaviour and restatements about the existence of rules. When sources of international law are deployed, historically contingent events are turned into manifestations of pre-given and repeatable categories.

In Repetition and International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Dr. Wouter Werner studies the workings of repetition across six discourses and practices in international law. It links acts of repetition to similar practices in religion, theatre, film and commerce. Building on the dialectics of repetition as set out by Søren Kierkegaard, the book examines how repetition in international law is used to connect concrete practices to something that is bound to remain absent, unspeakable or unimaginable.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marc David Baer, "The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs" (Basic Books, 2021)

Thu, 17 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The Ottoman Empire has been many things throughout its long history. One of the greatest and gravest threats to Christian Europe. A source of inspiration for Renaissance and Reformation thinkers. An exoticized realm of sultans, slaves and harems. An equal and key partner in the European system of international relations. And, near its end, “the sick man of Europe”.

The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs (Basic Books, 2021) by Professor Marc David Baer charts the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire, not just dealing with its sultans and military expansion, but also a wide range of topics like the roles played by women and minorities in Ottoman society.

In this interview, Marc and I talk about the Ottoman empire’s rise and “fall”—a term that may actually mischaracterize how the Ottoman Empire transformed after its heights under Selim and Suleiman. We also talk about its legacy, both for Europe and the wider world.

Marc David Baer is professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of five books, including Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (Oxford University Press: 2011), which won the Albert Hourani Prize, and Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide (Indiana Univeristy Press: 2020), which won the Dr. Sona Aronian Book Prize for Excellence in Armenian Studies.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Ottomans. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nicholas Mulder, "The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War" (Yale UP, 2022)

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Economic sanctions dominate the landscape of world politics today. First developed in the early twentieth century as a way of exploiting the flows of globalization to defend liberal internationalism, their appeal is that they function as an alternative to war. This view, however, ignores the dark paradox at their core: designed to prevent war, economic sanctions are modeled on devastating techniques of warfare.

Tracing the use of economic sanctions from the blockades of World War I to the policing of colonial empires and the interwar confrontation with fascism, Nicholas Mulder uses extensive archival research in a political, economic, legal, and military history that reveals how a coercive wartime tool was adopted as an instrument of peacekeeping by the League of Nations. The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War (Yale University Press, 2022) casts an overdue light on why sanctions are widely considered a form of war, and why their unintended consequences are so tremendous.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anthony Tucker-Jones, "Churchill, Master and Commander: Winston Churchill at War 1895–1945" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

From his earliest days Winston Churchill was an extreme risk taker and he carried this into adulthood. Today he is widely hailed as Britain's greatest wartime leader and politician. Deep down though, he was foremost a warlord. Just like his ally Stalin, and his arch enemies Hitler and Mussolini, Churchill could not help himself and insisted on personally directing the strategic conduct of World War II. For better or worse he insisted on being political master and military commander. Again like his wartime contemporaries, he had a habit of not heeding the advice of his generals. The results of this were disasters in Norway, North Africa, Greece, and Crete during 1940-41. His fruitless Dodecanese campaign in 1943 also ended in defeat. Churchill's pig-headedness over supporting the Italian campaign in defiance of the Riviera landings culminated in him threatening to resign and bring down the British Government. Yet on occasions he got it just right, his refusal to surrender in 1940, the British miracle at Dunkirk and victory in the Battle of Britain, showed that he was a much-needed decisive leader. Nor did he shy away from difficult decisions, such as the destruction of the French Fleet to prevent it falling into German hands and his subsequent war against Vichy France.

In Churchill, Master and Commander: Winston Churchill at War 1895–1945 (Bloomsbury, 2021), acclaimed historian Anthony Tucker-Jones explores the record of Winston Churchill as a military commander, assessing how the military experiences of his formative years shaped him for the difficult military decisions he took in office. This book assesses his choices in the some of the most controversial and high-profile campaigns of World War II, and how in high office his decision making was both right and wrong.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Heather L. Dichter, "Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games: International Sport's Cold War Battle with NATO" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)

Fri, 11 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Today we are joined by Heather Dichter, Associate Professor of Sports History and Sports Management at the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University. She is also the author of Bidding for the 68 Olympic Games: International Sport’s Cold War Battle with NATO (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of the East German sporting travel ban, the NATO alliance and the competition to host the 1968 Summer and Winter Olympics, and the role of smaller NATO members in reshaping the alliance’s border and travel regulations.

In Bidding for the 68 Olympic Games, Dichter examines a little-known and understudied until now diplomatic conflict between NATO and the International Olympic Committee. In the 1950s and 1960s, NATO members struggled to balance their adherence to the Hallstein Doctrine – non-recognition of state-symbols of East Germany – with their participation in and desire to host sports mega-events. The Hallstein doctrine limited travel for East German athletes, who could only participate as members of a club or a German team, as well as banned the inclusion of the East German anthem or flag in public. The IOC’s strict claims to apoliticism and their demand that all athletes be allowed to travel to competitions made NATO’s obstruction of East German travel unpopular and untenable. In the press, NATO members pointed to the Berlin Wall as the ultimate barrier to free travel, but behind the scenes and then later in public, the alliance’s solidarity threatened to crumble as Canada, France, and the United States competed for the right to host the Olympic Games.

Although the East German travel ban featured in press commentary about the 1968 Olympics, most histories of Cold War sports overlook this crucial moment in European sport. Dichter’s work moves beyond previous histories through an extensive analysis of a wide range of archives across multiple countries, including the United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, Germany and Norway. Her research includes not only newspapers, but more importantly diplomatic documents from NATO, NATO alliance members, and the IOC that enable her to better understand the diplomatic strategies pursued by the competing interests: nation-states, military alliances, sporting bodies, athletic federations and even athletes. Only through this transnational and multi-archival approach can Dichter illustrate the importance that NATO members placed on sport and explain why sport proved so difficult for them to handle despite broad agreement in other diplomatic arenas.

The Bidding for the 68 Olympic Games is a fascinating account of a largely unknown and poorly understood conflict between NATO and a range of international sporting organizations, including the International Olympic Committee. It will appeal to people interested in sport, international diplomacy, and the Cold War.

Keith Rathbone is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, out now with Manchester University Press, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alexander Lanoszka, "Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century" (Polity Press, 2022)

Thu, 10 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Alliance politics is a regular headline grabber. When a possible military crisis involving Russia, North Korea, or China rears its head, leaders and citizens alike raise concerns over the willingness of US allies to stand together. As rival powers have tightened their security cooperation, the United States has stepped up demands that its allies increase their defense spending and contribute more to military operations in the Middle East and elsewhere. The prospect of former President Donald Trump unilaterally ending alliances alarmed longstanding partners, even as NATO was welcoming new members into its ranks.

Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century (Polity Press, 2022) is the first book to explore fully the politics that shape these security arrangements – from their initial formation through the various challenges that test them and, sometimes, lead to their demise. Across six thematic chapters, Alexander Lanoszka challenges conventional wisdom that has dominated our understanding of how military alliances have operated historically and into the present. Although military alliances today may seem uniquely hobbled by their internal difficulties, Lanoszka argues that they are in fact, by their very nature, prone to dysfunction.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Katherine Harvey, "A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The Saudi Struggle for Iraq" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Iraq has in the last year taken a lead in sponsoring talks between Middle Eastern arch-rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran in an effort to prevent tension in the region spinning out of control. The Iraqi role is remarkable given that Saudi Arabia for more than a decade after the 2003-led US invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein wanted nothing to do with the country’s post-Saddam leadership. Saudi perceptions of Iraq as an Iranian pawn persuaded it even to refuse reopening a diplomatic mission in Baghdad until 2019.

In Self-fulfilling Prophet: The Saudi Struggle for Iraq (Oxford University Press 2022), Katherine Harvey paints a fascinating picture of what happens when policy is crafted based on perception rather than fact. Harvey tells the story of a post-invasion Iraq that was systematically rebuffed by Saudi Arabia in its efforts to reintegrate into the predominantly Sunni Arab world. Iraq had been ostracized following its 1990 invasion of Kuwait and expulsion from the Gulf state in 1991 by a US-coalition.

Saudi King Abdullah, convinced that Iran had successfully infiltrated Iraq and that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was an Iranian stooge, blocked Iraq’s reaching out to the kingdom and eventually drove into the hands of Iran. In doing so, Saudi Arabia was standing up for its perceived interests that diverged from those of the United States. The US wanted the Saudis to engage with the Shiite Muslim majority that came to power in Iraq as a result of the US invasion.

As a result, Harvey’s well-documented book contributes to understanding the limits of US power in the Middle East and the significant perceptual gaps that Middle Eastern states need to bridge to ensure that a regional détente is sustainable.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michelle Jurkovich, "Feeding the Hungry: Advocacy and Blame in the Global Fight Against Hunger" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Mon, 07 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Food insecurity poses one of the most pressing development and human security challenges in the world. Feeding the Hungry: Advocacy and Blame in the Global Fight Against Hunger (Oxford UP, 2020) examines the social and normative environments in which international anti-hunger organizations are working and argues that despite international law ascribing responsibility to national governments to ensure the right to food of their citizens, there is no shared social consensus on who ought to do what to solve the hunger problem. The book provides a new analytic model of transnational advocacy. In investigating advocacy around a critical economic and social right — the right to food — the book challenges existing understandings of the relationships among human rights, norms, and laws. Most important, the book provides an expanded conceptual tool kit with which we can examine and understand the social and moral forces at play in rights advocacy.

Michelle Jurkovich is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She has served as a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, a Visiting Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, and an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science and Technology Fellow where she worked full-time for the Office of Food for Peace at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Her research interests include hunger and international food security, ethics, economic and social rights, and human security and her work has appeared in International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Review, and Global Governance, among other outlets.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marco Wyss, "Postcolonial Security: Britain, France, and West Africa's Cold War" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Mon, 07 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In light of the discrepancy between Britain’s and France’s postcolonial security roles in Africa, which seemed already determined half a decade after independence, this book studies the making of the postcolonial security relationship during the transfer of power and the early years of independence (1958-1966). It focuses on West Africa, and more specifically the newly independent states of Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire, which rapidly evolved into key players in the postcolonial struggle for Africa.

Based on research conducted in fourteen archives in Africa, Europe, and the United States, Postcolonial Security: Britain, France, and West Africa's Cold War (Oxford UP, 2021) comparatively investigates the establishment of formal defence relations, the disintegration of the Anglo-Nigerian ‘special relationship’ and the Franco-Ivorian ‘neo-colonial collusion’, the provision of British and French military assistance to their former colonies and the competition they faced from West Germany and Israel respectively, and the Anglo-American partnership in Nigeria and the Franco-American rivalry in Côte d’Ivoire. It demonstrates that whereas Britain was rapidly and increasingly pushed out of and replaced in the Nigerian security sector by western competitors, France succeeded in retaining its military foothold and pre-eminence in Côte d’Ivoire. Informed by postcolonial approaches, Postcolonial Security argues that while London’s Cold War blinkers and Paris’s neo-imperial agenda were part of the equation, the postcolonial security relationship was ultimately determined by the Nigerian and Ivorian elites, which in turn responded to their local and regional circumstances against the background of the Cold War in Africa.

Marco Wyss is a Reader in International History and Security at Lancaster University, a Research Fellow at the University of the Free State, and an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Micah Alpaugh, "Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Mon, 07 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

As the old cliché goes, “there must have been something in the water.” A new book by historian Micah Alpaugh, Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions (Cambridge UP, 2021), courses a thread through the various disorders that riddled the Atlantic World in the late-eighteenth century. Alpaugh searches for and brings to light commonalities that spread through regions circling the North Atlantic. From the Caribbean islands to Ireland; France, colonial America, and the United Kingdom, “Liberty” and “Freedom” conjoined a patchwork of disparate people who gave rise to social movements roughly at the same moment in history.

Alpaugh’s archival research is astounding and unearthed new ways of looking at eighteenth-century revolutions beginning with the United State and ending with Haiti. In Friends of Freedom, Alpaugh reconfigures Boston’s “Sons of Liberty” as a social leviathan that swept the eastern seaboard of North America thereby becoming emulated by similar clubs of men and women in Britain, France, and Ireland – i.e., “friends of freedom.” What Alpaugh proves, without a doubt, were the incredible transatlantic networks by which social movement spread, movements that inspired powerful forces on both sides of the Atlantic. The rise of abolitionism, for example, connected moral philosophers, clerics, and thinkers throughout this large ocean basin as the Enlightened values of liberty and freedom became haltingly extended to all ranks of Atlantic society.

Joseph Krulder is a historian of Britain's long eighteenth-century: cultural, social, military, and economic.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan R. Hunt and Simon Miles, "The Reagan Moment: America and the World in the 1980s" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In The Reagan Moment: America and the World in the 1980s (Cornell UP, 2021), the ideas, events, strategies, trends, and movements that shaped the 1980s are revealed to have had lasting effects on international relations: The United States went from a creditor to a debtor nation; democracy crested in East Asia and returned to Latin America; the People's Republic of China moved to privatize, decentralize, and open its economy; Osama bin Laden founded Al Qaeda; and relations between Washington and Moscow thawed en route to the Soviet Union's dissolution.

The Reagan Moment places US foreign relations into global context by examining the economic, international, and ideational relationships that bound Washington to the wider world. Editors Jonathan R. Hunt and Simon Miles bring together a cohort of scholars with fresh insights from untapped and declassified global sources to recast Reagan's pivotal years in power.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Simon Topping, "Northern Ireland, the United States and the Second World War" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In Northern Ireland, the United States and the Second World War (Bloomsbury, 2022), Dr. Simon Topping analyses the American military presence in Northern Ireland during the war, examining the role of the government at Stormont in managing this 'friendly invasion', the diplomatic and military rationales for the deployment, the attitude of Americans to their posting, and the effect of the US presence on local sectarian dynamics. He explores US military planning, the hospitality and entertainment provided for American troops, the renewal and reimagining of historic links between Ulster and the United States, the importation of 'Jim Crow' racism, 'Johnny Doughboys' marrying 'Irish Roses', and how all of this impacted upon internal, transatlantic and cross-border politics.

This study also draws attention to influential and understudied individuals such as Northern Ireland's Prime Minister Sir Basil Brooke and offers a reassessment of David Gray, America's minister to Dublin. As a result, it provides a comprehensive examination of largely overlooked aspects of the war and Northern Ireland more generally, and fills important gaps in the history of both.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ada Ferrer, "Cuba: An American History" (Scribner, 2021)

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD Candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. You can reach him at steven.p.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mohamed Zeeshan, "Flying Blind: India's Quest for Global Leadership" (Vintage Books, 2021)

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In recent years, India has repeatedly expressed its ambitions of becoming a global power – or ‘jagat guru.’ Yet, many believe that India’s economic troubles at home are far more pressing and that foreign policy aspirations can wait. But is a proactive foreign policy really a ‘luxury’ for India, to be postponed until the economy develops; or is it, in fact, a prerequisite for economic growth in a globalized world? Why should the average Indian citizen care about foreign policy – and how can a proactive foreign policy help Indians become more prosperous? Scanning our ever-changing world from East to West, and defining India’s national interests and needs, Mohamed Zeeshan’s Flying Blind: India’s Quest for Global Leadership (Vintage Books, 2021) passionately argues that India needs a more coherent strategy for its relations with the outside world. Through travels and debates across continents, Zeeshan lays out a vision for how India can champion the cause of global good.

Mohamed Zeeshan is an Indian journalist, columnist, and foreign policy commentator. He regularly writes for The Diplomat and The Deccan Herald, and he is the Founding Partner and Editor in Chief of Freedom Gazette, an independent media platform.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alexander Dukalskis, "Making the World Safe for Dictatorship" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In Making the World Safe for Dictatorship (Oxford University Press, 2021) Dr. Alexander Dukalskis looks at the tactics that authoritarian states use for image management and the ways in which their strategies vary from one state to another, using both "promotional" tactics of persuasion and "obstructive" tactics of repression. Using a diverse array of data, including interviews, cross-national data on extraterritorial repression, examination of public relations filings with the United States government, analysis of authoritarian propaganda, media frequency analysis, and speeches and statements by authoritarian leaders, Dukalskis looks at the degree to which some authoritarian states succeed in using image management to enhance their internal and external security, and, in turn, to make their world safe for dictatorship. The book looks closely at three cases, China, North Korea, and Rwanda, to understand in more detail how authoritarian states manage their image abroad using combinations of promotional and obstructive tactics.

Dukalskis also presents a new dataset--the Authoritarian Actions Abroad Database--that uses publicly available information to categorize nearly 1,200 instances in which authoritarian states repressed their critical exiles abroad, ranging from vague threats to confirmed assassinations. The database in freely available to researchers!

Dr. Alexander Dukalskis is an associate professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joseph W. Ho, "Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Joseph W. Ho’s book Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2021) offers a transnational cultural history of US and Chinese communities framed by missionary lenses through time and space―tracing the lives and afterlives of images, cameras, and visual imaginations from before the Second Sino-Japanese War through the first years of the People's Republic of China.

When American Protestant and Catholic missionaries entered interwar China, they did so with cameras in hand. Missions principally aimed at the conversion of souls and the modernization of East Asia, became, by virtue of the still and moving images recorded, quasi-anthropological ventures that shaped popular understandings of and formal foreign policy toward China. Portable photographic technologies changed the very nature of missionary experience, while images that missionaries circulated between China and the United States affected cross-cultural encounters in times of peace and war.

Ho illuminates the centrality of visual practices in the American missionary enterprise in modern China, even as intersecting modernities and changing Sino-US relations radically transformed lives behind and in front of those lenses. In doing so, Developing Mission reconstructs the almost-lost histories of transnational image makers, subjects, and viewers across twentieth-century China and the United States.

Dr. Joseph W. Ho is Assistant Professor of History at Albion College and Center Associate at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan. In addition to his current book, Dr. Ho is the coeditor of War and Occupation in China: The Letters of an American Missionary from Hangzhou, 1937-1938.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paweł Markiewicz, "Unlikely Allies: Nazi German and Ukrainian Nationalist Collaboration in the General Government During World War II" (Purdue UP, 2021)

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Unlikely Allies: Nazi German and Ukrainian Nationalist Collaboration in the General Government During World War II (Purdue UP, 2021) offers the first comprehensive and scholarly English-language analysis of German-Ukrainian collaboration in the General Government, an area of occupied Poland during World War II. Drawing on extensive archival material, the Ukrainian position is examined chiefly through the perspective of Ukrainian Central Committee head Volodymyr Kubiiovych, a prewar academic and ardent nationalist. The contact between Kubiiovych and Nazi administrators at various levels shows where their collaboration coincided and where it differed, providing a full understanding of the Ukrainian Committee's ties with the occupation authorities and its relationship with other groups, like Poles and Jews, in occupied Poland.

Ukrainian nationalists' collaboration created an opportunity to neutralize prewar Polish influences in various strata of social life. Kubiiovych hoped for the emergence of an autonomous Ukrainian region within the borders of the General Government or an ethnographic state closely associated with the Third Reich. This led to his partnership with the Third Reich to create a new European order after the war. Through their occupational policy of divide to conquer, German concessions raised Ukrainians to the position of a full-fledged ethnic group, giving them the respect they sought throughout the interwar period. Yet collaboration also contributed to the eruption of a bloody Polish-Ukrainian ethnic conflict. Kubiiovych's wartime experiences with Nazi politicians and administrators--greatly overlooked and only partially referenced today--not only illustrate the history of German-Ukrainian and Polish-Ukrainian relations, but also supply a missing piece to the larger, more controversial puzzle of collaboration during World War II.

Paweł Markiewicz is currently chief specialist analyst in the International Security Program at the Polish Institute of International Affairs in Warsaw, Poland. He has contributed articles and reviews to such journals as Slavonic and East European Review, Canadian Slavonic Papers, The Polish Review, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Dzieje Najnowsze, and Polski Przegląd Dyplomatyczny while providing commentaries, including to the Rzeczpospolita and Gazeta Wyborcza newspapers.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Katja Hoyer, "Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire" (Pegasus Books, 2021)

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Before 1871, Germany was not yet nation but simply an idea.

Its founder, Otto von Bismarck, had a formidable task at hand. How would he bring thirty-nine individual states under the yoke of a single Kaiser? How would he convince proud Prussians, Bavarians, and Rhinelanders to become Germans? Once united, could the young European nation wield enough power to rival the empires of Britain and France--all without destroying itself in the process?

In Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire (Pegasus Books, 2021), Katja Hoyer tells the story of the German Empire from its violent beginnings to its calamitous defeat in the First World War.

This often startling narrative is a dramatic tale of national self-discovery, social upheaval, and realpolitik that ended, as it started, in blood and iron.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Courtney Hillebrecht, "Saving the International Justice Regime: Beyond Backlash against International Courts" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Saving the International Justice Regime: Beyond Backlash against International Courts (Cambridge University Press, 2021) is at the forefront of a new conceptualization of backlash politics. Dr. Courtney Hillebrecht brings together theories, concepts and methods from the fields of international law, international relations, human rights and political science and case studies from around the globe to pose - and answer - three questions related to backlash against international courts: What is backlash and what forms does it take? Why do states and elites engage in backlash against international human rights and criminal courts? What can stakeholders and supporters of international justice do to meet these contemporary challenges?

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jason Pack, "Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Libya stands out as an example of a complex, internecine Middle Eastern and North African conflict in which regional and global powers as well as jihadists exploit tribal and sectarian rivalries. The rivalries fuel a seemingly endless wave of chaos and violence in a part of the world that is pockmarked by ungoverned spaces.

In Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder, Libya expert Jason Pack demonstrates that this tortured and war-ravaged, oil-rich North African nation is about much more. It is about the collapse of the post-World War Two and post-Cold War international order. Furthermore. it is about the free-for-all that emerges in the vacuum as the world struggles for a new equilibrium in which one or more new powers shape a new world order with or without the United States, the dominant power for the past seven decades.

Few people are better positioned to discuss Libya. Jason brings to the book not only the lens of a historian and a Middle East analyst but also a representative of US business interests in the North African country. As a business association executive, he learns that protection of vested company interests trumps the US-Libya Business Association’s declared goal of expanding US market share by opening the country to more US companies.

Engagingly written, Jason’s book contributes to understanding Middle East volatility, the struggle to shape a new world order and its impact on the Middle East, and the often self-serving protection of vested interests by allegedly allied nations, rival bureaucracies within their national governments, and major corporations.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning journalist, and a Senior Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute, and the author of the syndicated column and blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard Bellamy et al., "Flexible Europe: Differentiated Integration, Democracy, and Domination" (Bristol UP, 2022)

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The past decade has been pivotal in the development of the European Union.

The single currency has been tested to the limits by successive crises in the financial system, public-debt sustainability and public health. A migration crisis stress-tested the EU's free-travel area and its under-developed refugee and asylum policies. The Hungarian and Polish governments are backsliding on the union's foundational commitments to democracy and rule of law and, for the first time in the Communities' six-decade history, a full member state has left altogether.

The weaknesses of the EU’s part-federal, part-intergovernmental design have been exposed but so has its resilience through flexibility. Flexible Europe: Differentiated Integration, Fairness, and Democracy (Bristol University Press, 2022) explores this design and its "demoicratic" (not democratic) nature. Differentiated integration, the co-writers conclude, is “not only functionally necessary but also normatively desirable given the ineliminable diversity and pluralism of any union as large as the EU”.

Richard Bellamy is professor of political science at University College London and founder of its European Institute. Sandra Kröger is associate professor of political science at the University of Exeter and Director of its Centre for European Studies. Marta Lorimer is a fellow in European Politics at the London School of Economics’ European Institute.

*The authors' own book recommendations are: Worldmaking after Empire by Adom Getachew (Princeton University Press, 2020), Europa by Tim Parks (Vintage, 1998), The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Profile Books, 2019), Where You Come From by Saša Stanišić (Jonathan Cape, 2021 - translated by Damion Searls), The Struggle for EU Legitimacy by Claudia Sternberg (Palgrave Macmillan; 2013), and The Moon and the Bonfires by Cesare Pavese (first published in 1949 - latest English version from Penguin Modern Classics, 2021 translated by Tim Parks).

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

Jeremy Black, "A Short History of War" (Yale UP, 2021)

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Throughout history, warfare has transformed social, political, cultural, and religious aspects of our lives. We tell tales of wars--past, present, and future--to create and reinforce a common purpose.

In A Short History of War (Yale UP, 2021), Jeremy Black examines war as a global phenomenon, looking at the First and Second World Wars as well as those ranging from Han China and Assyria, Imperial Rome, and Napoleonic France to Vietnam and Afghanistan. Black explores too the significance of warfare more broadly and the ways in which cultural understandings of conflict have lasting consequences in societies across the world. Weaponry, Black argues, has had a fundamental impact on modes of war: it created war in the air and transformed it at sea. Today, as twentieth-century weapons are challenged by drones and robotics, Black examines what the future of warfare looks like.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Heidi Wang-Kaeding, "China's Environmental Foreign Relations" (Routledge, 2021)

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Environmental protection and climate actions has embedded in China’s foreign policy and the Chinese government has recently pledged to make the Belt and Road Initiative “open, green, and clean”. How far is this an agenda designed primarily for international consumption? How do domestic interest groups respond to China’s environmental foreign relations? To what extent can they influence and shape China’s domestic and international environmental discourse?

In this episode, Heidi Wang-Kaeding talks to Vorawan Wannalak about her recently published book China’s Environmental Foreign Policy (2021, Routledge), which explores China’s attempts to assert alternative norms – “Ecological Civilization” - in the global environmental governance and highlights the importance of domestic forces as a key factor that influence diverse and contradictory environmental behaviors of China at international levels.

Over recent decades, China has moved from being a follower towards taking on a leadership role in global environmental governance. This book discusses this important development. It examines the key role of Chinese interest groups, showing how through various domestic dynamics they have influenced how China has approached issues such as climate change and the environment. Focusing on examples of multilateral environmental treaties, bilateral cooperation, and the proposition of alternative norms – the idea of China as an "ecological civilisation" – the book provides crucial insights on the evolution of China’s approach to international relations and engagement with global environmental governance, and contributes to the discussion of what kind of power China is poised to become.

Dr. Heidi Wang-Kaeding is a lecturer in International Relations at Keele University and a co-founder of the Hong Kong Studies Association, based in the UK.

Vorawan Wannalak is a PhD student at the University of Potsdam. She was a 2021 Virtual SUPRA Fellow at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies..

You may also be interested in another Nordic Asia Podcast mentioned by Heidi, in which Mette Halskov Hansen discusses the concept of ecological civilization here.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sumantra Bose, "Kashmir at the Crossroads: Inside a 21st-Century Conflict" (Yale UP, 2021)

Thu, 13 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

“Kashmir” carries the burden of being known as one of the world’s biggest flashpoints. If a novel, TV show, or video game wants an easy international crisis, there’s a good chance Kashmir will be the crisis of choice.

But while Kashmir is globally known, few understand the roots of the conflict—or what the people that live in Kashmir actually think.

For those that do, Professor Sumantra Bose’s Kashmir at the Crossroads: Inside a 21st-Century Conflict (Yale University Press, 2021) walks readers through the origins, developments, and potential future of the situation in Jammu and Kashmir, going right to the present day with the Modi administration’s turning of the state into two Union territories.

In this interview, we run through the history of Kashmir, and how we should think about recent developments in this part of the world.

Sumantra Bose is one of the world’s foremost experts on the Kashmir conflict. He is the author of seven previous books including Contested Lands: Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia, Cyprus and Sri Lanka (Harvard University Press: 2007) and Secular States, Religious Politics: India, Turkey, and the Future of Secularism (Cambridge University Press: 2018).

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Kashmir at the Crossroads. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

E. Natalie Rothman, "The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Routes of Orientalism" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Fri, 24 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Routes of Orientalism (Cornell UP, 2021) is a fascinating study of a crucial early modern cadre of "go-betweens:" the Istanbul-based diplomatic translator-interpreters, known as the dragomans. Blending a creative mix of quantitative methods, prosopography, and the systematic close reading of texts produced or translated by the dragomans, the book shows how, far from being simple intermediaries, the dragomans actively engaged Ottoman elites in the study of the Ottoman Empire, refracting the knowledge thus acquired across Europe.

The book takes a three-pronged approach: it first focuses on the dragomans themselves, exploring how, particularly Venetian dragomans, were recruited, trained, and eventually grew to create an influential cast of subordinate elites enmeshed in both Ottoman and Veneto-Habsburg patterns of representation and consumption. The book then delves into different texts translated or produced by dragomans (relationi, translations of Ottoman charters, grammar books, and even pictorial representations) to examine the self-representation and mediation strategies developed by this specialized cast of interpreters. The final chapters of the book explore the legacy of the dragomans, notably how they contributed to the definition, in Europe, of a Turkish canon of letters that would coalesce into the discipline known as Orientalism.

The Dragoman Renaissance offers two substantial contributions to our understanding of diplomacy, mediation, and even incipient Orientalism in the early modern Mediterranean. First, it challenges Eurocentric assumptions still pervasive in Renaissance studies by showing the centrality of Ottoman imperial culture to the articulation of European knowledge about the Ottomans. By studying the sustained interactions between dragomans and Ottoman courtiers in this period, Rothman, therefore, disrupts common ideas about a singular moment of "cultural encounter," as well as about a "docile" and "static" Orient, acted upon by extraneous imperial powers. Second, Rothman creatively uncovers how dragomans mediated Ottoman ethno-linguistic, political, and religious categories to European diplomats and scholars, showing how these intermediaries did not simply circulate fixed knowledge. Rather, their engagement of Ottoman imperial modes of inquiry and social reproduction shaped the discipline of Orientalism for centuries to come.

Thanks to the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, the e-book editions of The Dragoman Renaissance are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open and other repositories.

Natalie Rothman, associate professor at the University of Toronto, specializes in early modern Mediterranean history, the history of cultural mediation, genealogies of Orientalism, and the relationship between translation and empire. She is currently continuing her research on intermediaries on The Dragoman Renaissance research platform

Ian F. Hathaway, a postdoctoral fellow at the Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte (IEG), focuses on mobility, identification, and cross-cultural diplomacy in the early modern Mediterranean.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Noah Weisbord, "The Crime of Aggression: The Quest for Justice in an Age of Drones, Cyberattacks, Insurgents, and Autocrats" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Fri, 24 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

On July 17, 2018, starting an unjust war became a prosecutable international crime alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Instead of collective state responsibility, our leaders are now personally subject to indictment for crimes of aggression, from invasions and preemptions to drone strikes and cyberattacks. Noah Weisbord, The Crime of Aggression: The Quest for Justice in an Age of Drones, Cyberattacks, Insurgents, and Autocrats (Princeton UP, 2019) is Noah Weisbord’s riveting insider’s account of the high-stakes legal fight to enact this historic legislation and hold politicians accountable for the wars they start.

Weisbord, a key drafter of the law for the International Criminal Court, takes readers behind the scenes of one of the most consequential legal dramas in modern international diplomacy. Drawing on in-depth interviews and his own invaluable insights, he sheds critical light on the motivations of the prosecutors, diplomats, and military strategists who championed the fledgling prohibition on unjust war—and those who tried to sink it. He untangles the complex history behind the measure, tracing how the crime of aggression was born at the Nuremberg trials only to fall dormant during the Cold War, and he draws lessons from such pivotal events as the collapse of the League of Nations, the rise of the United Nations, September 11, and the war on terror.

The power to try leaders for unjust war holds untold promise for the international order, but also great risk. In this incisive and vitally important book, Weisbord explains how judges in such cases can balance the imperatives of justice and peace, and how the fair prosecution of aggression can humanize modern statecraft.

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

Mark S. Berlin, "Criminalizing Atrocity: The Global Spread of Criminal Laws Against International Crimes" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Thu, 23 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Political Scientist Mark Berlin’s new book, Criminalizing Atrocity: The Global Spread of Criminal Laws Against International Crimes (Oxford UP, 2020), examines the process through which laws against international crimes are established and integrated into the legal regimes of nations. One of the initial questions Berlin hoped to answer with his work was why do countries choose to pass and implement laws about genocide and atrocities—noting that there was no clear tracing of patterns around the world when he first started his research. It becomes clear that there are two prongs to this question, in terms of the answers: how do countries establish and integrate these laws, and why do they choose to do so. Criminalizing Atrocity outlines the answers to these questions, explaining that either countries take up a wholesale reform of their criminal codes, and in the process integrate laws against genocide and atrocities, or countries pass and implement specific laws targeted to atrocities and genocide. Berlin’s research also indicates that the regime type or a regime’s propensity for war do not matter in terms of how these laws are passed and put into action.

While there has been codifications and work done in this realm of law for some time, much activity in this area followed World War II and the Nuremberg trials. Criminalizing Atrocity explores this postwar period, when experts in this realm were working to develop legal regimes to address genocide and atrocity crimes. While this postwar period brought some attention to these criminal codes, much more happened as the Cold War came to a conclusion and many countries integrated atrocity laws into their legal regimes. Berlin examines all of this through a multi-method approach, compiling extensive data on individual country’s legal regimes as part of the research, alongside interviews, archival work, and analysis of primary sources.

Criminalizing Atrocity will be of interest to a large cross section of scholars, including those who study international law, comparative politics, legal studies, genocide and war crimes, governmental reform, and historians.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alan Allport, "Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941" (Knopf, 2020)

Wed, 22 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Here is the many-faceted, world-historically significant story of Britain at war. In looking closely at the military and political dimensions of the conflict's first crucial years, Alan Allport tackles questions such as: Could the war have been avoided? Could it have been lost? Were the strategic decisions the rights ones? How well did the British organize and fight? How well did the British live up to their own values? What difference did the war make in the end to the fate of the nation?

In answering these and other essential questions he focuses on the human contingencies of the war, weighing directly at the roles of individuals and the outcomes determined by luck or chance. Moreover, he looks intimately at the changes in wartime British society and culture. Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941 (Knopf, 2020) draws on a large cast of characters--from the leading statesmen and military commanders who made the decisions, to the ordinary men, women, and children who carried them out and lived through their consequences--in a comprehensible and compelling single history of forty-six million people. For better or worse, much of Britain today is ultimately the product of the experiences of 1938-1941.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Luis Lobo-Guerrero et al., "Mapping, Connectivity, and the Making of European Empires" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021)

Wed, 22 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Luis Lobo-Guerrero is one of the three editors of this volume—Mapping, Connectivity, and the Making of European Empires—and one of the six contributing authors. He wrote the preface, “Poseidonians and the Tragedy of Mapping European Empires,” and the first two chapters, “Mapping and the Making of Imperial European Connectivity” and “Mapping and the Invention of the Early ‘Spanish’ Empire.” In this interview, Professor Lobo-Guerrero discusses the role of the map in imperial imagination over time. Thinking in terms of connectivity, Lobo-Guerrero discusses the new empires that leapt the Atlantic (or rather, “Ocean Sea”) into the unknown, and later dominated our world. In this conversation, Lobo-Guerrero relates the example of Juan de la Cosa’s 1500 mappa mundi and how this extraordinary specimen of cartography reveals the mentality of its makers and their understanding of the world.

Here's a link to a high quality image of the map discussed.

Here's a link to the previous interview with Lobo-Guerrero on his first book in the series.

Dr. Lobo-Guerrero is professor of History and Theory of International Relations at the University of Groningen. His works in post-structuralist thought, the history of early modern science, historical epistemology, and geopolitics—including topics of biopolitics and security and the big questions of globality and connectivity. He has written Insuring Security: Biopolitics, Security and Risk (2012), Insuring War: Sovereignty, Security and Risk (2013), and Insuring Life: Value, Security and Risk (2016), as well as two edited volumes, Imaginaries of Connectivity (2019), and Mapping, Connectivity, and the Making of European Empires (2021), the book he discusses today.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Spanish Empire, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Luke Glanville, "Sharing Responsibility: The History and Future of Protection from Atrocities" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Tue, 21 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

The idea that states share a responsibility to shield people everywhere from atrocities is presently under threat. Despite some early twenty-first century successes, including the 2005 United Nations endorsement of the Responsibility to Protect, the project has been placed into jeopardy due to catastrophes in such places as Syria, Myanmar, and Yemen; resurgent nationalism; and growing global antagonism. In Sharing Responsibility: The History and Future of Protection from Atrocities (Princeton UP, 2021), Luke Glanville seeks to diagnose the current crisis in international protection by exploring its long and troubled history. With attention to ethics, law, and politics, he measures what possibilities remain for protecting people wherever they reside from atrocities, despite formidable challenges in the international arena.

With a focus on Western natural law and the European society of states, Glanville shows that the history of the shared responsibility to protect is marked by courageous efforts, as well as troubling ties to Western imperialism, evasion, and abuse. The project of safeguarding vulnerable populations can undoubtedly devolve into blame shifting and hypocrisy, but can also spark effective burden sharing among nations. Glanville considers how states should support this responsibility, whether it can be coherently codified in law, the extent to which states have embraced their responsibilities, and what might lead them to do so more reliably in the future.

Sharing Responsibility wrestles with how countries should care for imperiled people and how the ideal of the responsibility to protect might inspire just behavior in an imperfect and troubled world.

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

Yeling Tan, "Disaggregating China, Inc.: State Strategies in the Liberal Economic Order" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Tue, 21 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Once you understand that markets require public institutions of governance and regulation in order to function well, and further, you accept that nations may have different preferences over the shape that those institutions and regulations should take, you have started to tell a story that leads you to radically different endings.

– Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox (2011)

Influenced by Dani Rodrik’s research and teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Yeling Tan, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon, and non-resident scholar at UCSD’s 21st Century China Center, has written a book that brings together her interest and expertise in China’s political economy: Disaggregrating China, Inc.: State Strategies in the Liberal Economic Order (Cornell University Press, 2021).

As you will hear, Professor Tan is interested in the dynamics of international and domestic politics with a focus on the tensions involving policy change within political economies. The development and the role of institutions especially with regard to China, given its political structure and economic governance, has provided just such an intriguing case for Tan who has been immersed in PRC-related study since graduate school.

The book frames the story of China’s WTO entry and assesses its impact on the country’s complex and sprawling structures of economic governance with the kind of inspiration that makes well-written and researched economic history as compelling as it is empirically rigorous. Professor Tan’s analysis and argument fits within the interdisciplinary sphere most aptly described as political economy as she systematically ‘disaggregates’ China’s institutional response as a one-party state to the globalizing effects of WTO engagement. Her book draws upon a rich research literature including the post-Mao reform and opening period to frame her research questions before moving into her own theory, methods, and findings – a unique contribution to the field filling the lack of studies focused on external institutional influences on the political economy of China.

As such, she moves us beyond the caricatured and monolithic simplifications underlying the bipartisan, ideologically driven interpretations reassessing the outcome of China’s WTO entry and subsequent trade policy. To liberally paraphrase a key source of her intellectual inspiration, Rodrik’s The Globalization Paradox: acknowledging the role of public institutions and the various value preferences of nations to help shape well-performing markets will lead you, as with Tan’s story, to the start of an understanding of the relationship of markets and institutions with a radically different ending in the China context.

Yeling Tan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon.

Keith Krueger lectures at the SILC Business School in Shanghai University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ryan D. Griffiths, "Secession and the Sovereignty Game: Strategy and Tactics for Aspiring Nations" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Secession and the Sovereignty Game: Strategy and Tactics for Aspiring Nations offers a strategic theory for how secessionist movements attempt to win independence. The rules and informal practices of sovereign recognition create a strategic playing field between existing states and aspiring nations, i.e., "the sovereignty game." To win sovereign statehood, all secessionist movements have to maneuver on the same strategic playing field while varying their tactics according to local conditions. To obtain recognition, secessionist movements use tactics of electoral capture, nonviolent civil resistance, and violence. To persuade the home state and the international community, they appeal to normative arguments regarding earned sovereignty, decolonization, the right to choose, inherent sovereignty, and human rights. The book combines original data analysis, fieldwork, interviews with secessionist leaders, and case studies on Catalonia, the Murrawarri Republic, West Papua, Bougainville, New Caledonia, and Northern Cyprus

Ryan Griffiths is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Syracuse University. His research focuses on the dynamics of secession and the study of sovereignty, state systems, and international orders. His most recent book is Secession and the Sovereignty Game: Strategy and Tactics for Aspiring Nations (Cornell University Press, 2021). His previous posts include the University of Sydney, Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and the Barcelona Institute for International Studies (IBEI). He completed his PhD at Columbia University in 2010.

Aditya Srinivasan assisted with this episode.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrew Gilbert, "International Intervention and the Problem of Legitimacy: Encounters in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Fri, 17 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In International Intervention and the Problem of Legitimacy (Cornell UP, 2020) Andrew C. Gilbert, who is assistant professor in anthropology at the University of Toronto-Mississauga, argues for an ethnographic analysis of international intervention as a series of encounters, focusing on the relations of difference and inequality, and the question of legitimacy that permeate such encounters. He discusses the transformations that happen in everyday engagements between intervention agents and their target populations, and also identifies key instabilities that emerge out of such engagements. Gilbert highlights the struggles, entanglements and inter-dependencies between and among foreign agents, and the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina that channel and shape intervention and how it unfolds.

Drawing upon nearly two years of fieldwork studying in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, Gilbert’s probing analysis identifies previously overlooked sites, processes, and effects of international intervention, and suggests new comparative opportunities for the study of transnational action that seeks to save and secure human lives and improve the human condition.

Above all, Gilbert’s book foregrounds and analyzes the open-ended, innovative, and unpredictable nature of international intervention that is usually omitted from the ordered representations of the technocratic vision and the confident assertions of many critiques.

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

Yossi Alpher, "Death Tango: Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, and Three Fateful Days in March" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021)

Fri, 17 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Death Tango: Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, and Three Fateful Days in March (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021) traces the Middle East dynamic back to the events of March 27-29, 2002. March 27, Passover Eve, witnessed the most bloody and traumatic Arab terrorist attack in Israel's history, the Park Hotel bombing in Netanya. On March 28, an Arab League summit in Beirut adopted the Arab Peace Initiative, the most far-reaching Arab attempt to set parameters for ending the Israel-Arab conflict. The next day, Israel invaded and reoccupied the West Bank in Operation Defensive Shield. Alpher illustrates the interaction between these three critical events and depicts the key personalities--politicians, generals, and a star journalist--involved on all sides. It moves from a suicide bombing to the deliberations of Arab leaders; from the Israel Prime Minister's Office--where Ariel Sharon fulminated against Yasser Arafat--to Washington, where the United States fumbled and misunderstood the dynamics at work; and on to the Jenin refugee camp, where Israeli soldiers won a bloody military battle but Israel lost the media battle of public opinion. Based on extensive interviews and his deep personal knowledge, Alpher analyzes the three days in late March 2002 as a catalyst of extensive change in the Middle East, concluding that Arabs and Israelis are dancing a kind of "death tango."

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr., "Aid Imperium: United States Foreign Policy and Human Rights in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia" (U Michigan Press, 2021)

Wed, 15 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

The United States is the world's largest donor of foreign aid, and in this profound analysis, Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr. demonstrates the links between human rights protections and the provision of US strategic aid in recipient countries. In Aid Imperium: United States Foreign Policy and Human Rights in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia (University of Michigan Press, 2021), Professor Regilme puts forward a "theory of interest convergence" which draws out the way that shared strategic interests between donor and recipient countries have the power to strengthen the legitimacy of domestic recipient governments, but not necessarily in ways that protect physical integrity rights of citizens. Presenting two case studies from The Phillipines and Thailand during the post-cold-war period and also during the global war on terror periods, the book provides a richly researched, intricate understanding of the way that authoritarian governments have continued to benefit from the provision of US aid, while not necessarily improving their human rights records.

Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr. is a Tenured University Lecturer of International Relations at Leiden University, The Netherlands. Find him on twitter @santinoregilme, check out his latest book @AidImperium

Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Edmond Smith, "Merchants: The Community That Shaped England's Trade and Empire, 1550-1650" (Yale UP, 2021)

Mon, 13 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In the century following Elizabeth I's rise to the throne, English trade blossomed as thousands of merchants launched ventures across the globe. Through the efforts of these "mere merchants," England developed from a peripheral power on the fringes of Europe to a country at the center of a global commercial web, with interests stretching from Virginia to Ahmadabad and Arkhangelsk to Benin.

In Merchants: The Community That Shaped England's Trade and Empire, 1550-1650 (Yale UP, 2021), Edmond Smith traces the lives of English merchants from their earliest steps into business to the heights of their successes. Smith unpicks their behavior, relationships, and experiences, from exporting wool to Russia, importing exotic luxuries from India, and building plantations in America. He reveals that the origins of "global" Britain are found in the stories of these men whose livelihoods depended on their skills, entrepreneurship, and ability to work together to compete in cutthroat international markets. As a community, their efforts would come to revolutionize Britain's relationship with the world.

Joseph Krulder is a historian of Britain's long eighteenth-century: cultural, social, military, and economic.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amish Raj Mulmi, "All Roads Lead North: China, Nepal and the Contest for the Himalayas" (Context, 2021)

Thu, 09 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

On the sidelines of COP26, Nepali Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba met his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi as part of an effort to find a way to rebuild ties between Kathmandu and New Delhi--which had grown sour in the recent years, with a boundary dispute between the two as its low point. Around the same time, China trumpeted a donation of 1.6 million COVID vaccine doses to Nepal, as the country stays around a 30% vaccination rate.

Discussions of Nepal often reduce it to a country sitting between two great powers—especially as relations between those two great powers worsen. Or, perhaps, as a strategically important country—but one whose history and people are rarely brought up.

Amish Raj Mulmi’s All Roads Lead North: Nepal’s Turn to China (Context, 2021) published internationally by Hurst early next year, helps to fill in these critical details. Combining insights from centuries of history, to on-the-ground reporting along the China-Nepal border, Mulmi gives a full representation of Nepal’s long relationship with its neighbors.

Helen Li, freelance writer and journalist, joins Amish and me for this interview. Helen was stranded in Nepal during the COVID pandemic, and saw firsthand the interconnected between Nepal, India and China.

In this interview, Amish, Helen and I talk about Nepal and China: what connects their countries, their economies, and their peoples. We talk about historical links, Tibetan exiles, investment, and what India thinks about all this.

Amish Raj Mulmi's writings have been published in The Himalayan Arc: Journeys East of South- east and The Best Asian Speculative Fiction 2018; and Al Jazeera; Roads & Kingdoms; Himal Southasian; India Today; The Kathmandu Post and The Record.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of All Roads Lead North. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Timur Dadabaev, "Decolonizing Central Asian International Relations: Beyond Empires" (Routledge, 2021)

Tue, 07 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

This month we discuss the post-coloniality of Central Asia's International relations with Timur Dadabaev, the author of Decolonizing Central Asian International Relations: Beyond Empire (Routledge, 2021). This book, which brings together new writing and other material previously published by Dadabaev, re-reads the international politics of Central Asia through a very original post-colonial lens. Dadabaev, a Japan-based scholar who hails from the region himself, engages with the existing literature to depict and explain existing inter-state relations in Central Asia, to ultimately construct fairer International Relations along the Silk Road. There is plenty of empirical grounding for the alternative views illustrated by Dadabaev, who suggests that Western International Relations, when studying Central Asia, repeated the same mistakes that Russian Marxists made when they attributed a narrative of modernity along the lines of the progress made in Germany and Russia. The book does also engage critically with Uzbekistan’s foreign policy and also sheds lights on the prospects of coordinated development of Central Asia and Afghanistan. A very topical reading, which we're very pleased to discuss on NBN Central Asian Studies.

Timur Dadabaev is Profess of International Relation in the Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences at the University of Tsukuba in Japan. His latest books include Transcontinental Silk Road Strategies. Comparing China, Japan and South Korea in Uzbekistan [Routledge 2019] and Japan in Central Asia. Strategies, Initiatives, and Neighboring Powers [Palgrave MacMillan 2016].

Luca Anceschi is Professor of Eurasian Studies at the University of Glasgow, where he is also the editor of Europe-Asia Studies. Follow him on Twitter @anceschistan

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Samuel Moyn, "Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War" (FSG, 2021)

Mon, 06 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Is it possible that efforts to make war more humane can actually make it more common and thus more destructive?

This tension at the heart of this query lies at the heart of Samuel Moyn's new book

Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2021). He draws fascinating connections between literary figures such as Tolstoy and Bertha von Suttner, civil society organizations such as the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch, and politicans and military figures to try to understand a central question: why, when we have done so much to limit the violence inherent in war, has war remained so common. His answer is counterintuitive and challenging--it is precisely the limitations on violence that have taken some of the urgency out of the effort to eliminate war itself. The result, he suggests, is as series of forever wars.

Moyn's anaylsis is fascinating. But Moyn also reminds the reader about historical figures and movements widely known at the time but largely ignored in recent times. The result is a fascinating survey of the history of anti-war movements and the debates within them as they tried to imagine and create a world in soldiers, or some of them, put down their weapons, or some of them, to end the violence, or as much of it as they could.

Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rethinking China's Humanitarian Diplomacy before and during Covid-19

Fri, 03 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

As the Covid-19 pandemic spread to Europe and other parts of the globe in spring of 2020, the Chinese government started reporting donations of Personal Protective Equipment as well as other medical supplies to areas experiencing severe shortage. Listen to Dr. Lauri Paltemaa and Dr. Hermann Aubié discuss their research on the exact nature of China's so-called Mask Diplomacy. How did the recent situation differ from past examples of Chinese humanitarian aid and disaster relief? What are the difficulties in obtaining hard data about the donations? Dr. Paltemaa and Dr. Aubié explain the multiple players that have participated in providing China's international humanitarian aid, as well as the symbolic significance of such aid.

Dr. Lauri Paltemaa is professor and director of the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Dr. Hermann Aubié is a senior researcher at CEAS.

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael S. Neiberg, "When France Fell: The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Alliance" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Fri, 03 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

According to US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, the "most shocking single event" of World War II was not the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but rather the fall of France in spring 1940. Michael Neiberg offers a dramatic history of the American response--a policy marked by panic and moral ineptitude, which placed the United States in league with fascism and nearly ruined the alliance with Britain.

The successful Nazi invasion of France destabilized American planners' strategic assumptions. At home, the result was huge increases in defense spending, the advent of peacetime military conscription, and domestic spying to weed out potential fifth columnists. Abroad, the United States decided to work with Vichy France despite its pro-Nazi tendencies. The US-Vichy partnership, intended to buy time and temper the flames of war in Europe, severely strained Anglo-American relations. American leaders naively believed that they could woo men like Philippe Pétain, preventing France from becoming a formal German ally. The British, however, understood that Vichy was subservient to Nazi Germany and instead supported resistance figures such as Charles de Gaulle. After the war, the choice to back Vichy tainted US-French relations for decades.

Our collective memory of World War II as a period of American strength overlooks the desperation and faulty decision making that drove US policy from 1940 to 1943. Tracing the key diplomatic and strategic moves of these formative years, When France Fell: The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Alliance (Harvard UP, 2021) gives us a more nuanced and complete understanding of the war and of the global position the United States would occupy afterward.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shawn F. McHale, "The First Vietnam War: Violence, Sovereignty, and the Fracture of the South, 1945-1956" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Wed, 01 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

When people think of the “Vietnam War” they usually think of the hugely devastating and divisive conflict between North Vietnam and a United States-backed South Vietnam that finally ended in 1975. We know much less about the earlier conflict, often referred to as the “First Indochina War”, from 1946 to 1954, which ended almost a century of French colonial rule and brought about the division of the country into North and South Vietnam. In his new book, The First Vietnam War: Sovereignty and the Fracture of the South, 1945-1956 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Shawn McHale examines this earlier conflict, focussing on the complex and diverse society of south Vietnam. The book begins with a provocative question: why did the communist-led resistance against French colonial rule in Vietnam fail in the south? This is an exhaustively researched book which does a lot to change our understanding of how south Vietnam became independent, and helps explain what came after the end of the “first Vietnam War”.

Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Raymond C. Kuo, "Following the Leader: Alliance Design, Security Strategies, and Institutional Emulation" (Stanford UP, 2021)

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Nations have powerful incentives to ensure that their military alliances are well-structured. Successful military alliances set long-lasting foundations for global and regional order, while unsuccessful ones can perpetuate and widen conflict. In Following the Leader: International Order, Alliance Strategies, and Emulation (Stanford UP, 2021), Kuo argues that nations do not consistently construct contextually appropriate military alliances. Rather, they often ignore their own security interests and follow the dominant alliance strategy. The author uses case studies and advanced statistical analysis to evaluate the period between 1815 and 2003, finding that hegemons who emerge after each collapse of the international system set up core military partnerships to target their key enemies. Secondary and peripheral countries, instead of forging novel alliances of their own, emulate the template set by the hegemon, thereby demonstrating their need for credibility and status.

Dr. Raymond Kuo is an expert in international security and East Asia. He is currently a Political Scientist with the RAND Corporation. He has published two books this year: Following the Leader on military alliances and Contests of Initiative on China's maritime gray zone strategy. Dr. Kuo was a tenure-track professor at Fordham University and the University at Albany, SUNY. He previously worked for the United Nations, the National Democratic Institute, and the Democratic Progressive Party (Taiwan). He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Aditya Srinivasan assisted with this episode.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robin J. Hayes, "Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground" (U Washington Press, 2021)

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

During the height of the Cold War, passionate idealists across the US and Africa came together to fight for Black self-determination and the antiracist remaking of society. Beginning with the 1957 Ghanaian independence celebration, the optimism and challenges of African independence leaders were publicized to African Americans through community-based newspapers and Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Inspired by African independence--and frustrated with the slow pace of civil rights reforms in the US--a new generation of Black Power activists embarked on nonviolent direct action campaigns and built alternative institutions designed as spaces of freedom from racial subjugation.

In Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground (U Washington Press, 2021), Robin Hayes reveals how Black Power and African independence activists created a diaspora underground, characterized by collaboration and reciprocal empowerment. Together, they redefined racial discrimination as an international human rights issue requiring education, sustained collective action, and global solidarity--laying the groundwork for future transnational racial justice movements, such as Black Lives Matter.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Lee, "The Right of Sovereignty: Jean Bodin on the Sovereign State and the Law of Nations" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Wed, 24 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Sovereignty is the vital organizing principle of modern international law. Daniel Lee's book The Right of Sovereignty: Jean Bodin on the Sovereign State and the Law of Nations (Oxford UP, 2021) examines the origins of that principle in the legal and political thought of its most influential theorist, Jean Bodin (1529/30-1596). As the author argues in this study, Bodin's most lasting theoretical contribution was his thesis that sovereignty must be conceptualized as an indivisible bundle of legal rights constitutive of statehood. While these uniform 'rights of sovereignty' licensed all states to exercise numerous exclusive powers, including the absolute power to 'absolve' and release its citizens from legal duties, they were ultimately derived from, and therefore limited by, the law of nations. The book explores Bodin's creative synthesis of classical sources in philosophy, history, and the medieval legal science of Roman and canon law in crafting the rules governing state-centric politics.

The Right of Sovereignty is the first book in English on Bodin's legal and political theory to be published in nearly a half-century and surveys themes overlooked in modern Bodin scholarship: empire, war, conquest, slavery, citizenship, commerce, territory, refugees, and treaty obligations. It will interest specialists in political theory and the history of modern political thought, as well as legal history, the philosophy of law, and international law.

Tejas Parasher is Junior Research Fellow in Political Thought and Intellectual History at King’s College, University of Cambridge.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christopher Coker, "The Rise of the Civilizational State" (Polity Press, 2019)

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In recent years the resurgence of great power competition has gripped the headlines, with new emerging powers (such as Russia and China) seeking to challenge the American and Western hegemony that has prevailed since the end of the Cold War. While the geopolitics of the Cold War era were based on ideology, the current geopolitics appear to be based more on cultural and civilizational identities. In his pioneering book The Rise of the Civilizational State (Polity Press, 2019), renowned political philosopher Christopher Coker examines in depth how Xi Jinping’s China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia not only seek to challenge Western powers, but also operate under very different conceptions of how the world should be structured. Instead of the standard nation-state and liberal internationalism that Western power operate under, both powers insist more on the civilizational basis of both the state and world order.

Christopher Coker is Director of the London School of Economics’ foreign policy think tank LSE Ideas. He was Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics, retiring in 2019. He is a former twice serving member of the Council of the Royal United Services Institute, a former NATO Fellow and a regular lecturer at Defense Colleges in the United Kingdom, United States, Rome, Singapore, Tokyo, Norway and Sweden.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anders Persson, "EU Diplomacy and the Israeli-Arab Conflict, 1967-2019" (Edinburgh UP, 2020)

Thu, 18 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ambrogio A. Caiani, "To Kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII" (Yale UP, 2021)

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In the wake of the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of France, and Pope Pius VII shared a common goal: to reconcile the Catholic church with the French state. But while they were able to work together initially, formalizing a Concordat in 1801, relations between them rapidly deteriorated. In 1809, Napoleon ordered the Pope’s arrest.

Dr. Ambrogio Caiani, Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Kent, in his book, To Kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII (Yale University Press, 2021), provides a pioneering account of the tempestuous relationship between the emperor and his most unyielding opponent. Drawing on original source materials in the Vatican and other European archives, Dr. Caiani uncovers the nature of Catholic resistance against Napoleon’s empire; charts Napoleon’s approach to Papal power; and reveals how the Emperor attempted to subjugate the church to his vision of modernity. Gripping and vivid, this splendid book shows the struggle for supremacy between two great individuals—and sheds new light on the conflict that would shape relations between the Catholic church and the modern state for centuries to come.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mark Mazower, "The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe" (Penguin, 2021)

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In the exhausted, repressive years that followed Napoleon's defeat in 1815, there was one cause that came to galvanize countless individuals across Europe and the United States: freedom for Greece.

Mark Mazower's wonderful The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe (Penguin, 2021) recreates one of the most compelling, unlikely and significant events in the story of modern Europe. In the face of near impossible odds, the people of the villages, valleys and islands of Greece rose up against Sultan Mahmud II and took on the might of the imperial Ottoman armed forces, its Turkish cavalrymen, Albanian foot soldiers and the fearsome Egyptians. Despite the most terrible disasters, they held on until military intervention by Russia, France and Britain finally secured the kingdom of Greece.

Mazower brilliantly brings together the different strands of the story. He takes us into the minds of revolutionary conspirators and the terrors of besieged towns, the stories of itinerant priests, sailors and slaves, ambiguous heroes and defenceless women and children struggling to stay alive amid a conflict of extraordinary brutality. Ranging across the Eastern Mediterranean and far beyond, he explores the central place of the struggle in the making of Romanticism and a new kind of politics that had volunteers flocking from across Europe to die in support of the Greeks. A story of how statesmen came to terms with an even more powerful force than themselves - the force of nationalism - this is above all a book about how people decided to see their world differently and, at an often terrible cost to themselves and their families, changed history.

Mark Mazower is the Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University. He is the author of Governing the World, Hitler’s Empire and The Balkans: A Short History, winner of the Wolfson Prize for History, among other books. He lives in New York City.

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

Samuel Moyn, "Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War" (FSG, 2021)

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Geographic and temporal limits have typically contained modern wars—rulers can ask their populace to risk lives and treasure for so long before losing legitimacy. But wars have also been horrifyingly unlimited in cruelty. Over the course of the past two decades, American activists and government officials have sought to make war less cruel and more humane. The consequence of this, Samuel Moyn argues in his well-reasoned and polemical book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, has been the elimination of those earlier geographic and temporal guardrails on war. And the evidence isn’t hard to find. The contemporary US military may leave a smaller body count than it did during, say, the Vietnam War, but it has also entered the third decade of a War on Terror across a so-called “global battlefield.” This scope is unprecedented.

Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (FSG, 2021) is a book about war and peace, specifically about how Americans have “made a moral choice to prioritize humane war,” rather than a “peaceful globe.” And, as the United States wraps up its occupation of Afghanistan but continues to pursue its global War on Terror, this is a choice that Americans need to grapple with. In my conversation with Moyn, we discuss everything from Tolstoy’s critique of humane war and the rise of the peace movement to the Obama administration’s role in smashing the geographic and temporal limits of war.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anna Saunders et al., "Revolutions in International Law: The Legacies of 1917" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Tue, 09 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In 1917, the adoption of the revolutionary Mexican Constitution and the October Revolution shook the foundations of international order in profound, unprecedented and lasting ways. These events posed fundamental challenges to international law, particularly to foundational concepts of property, statehood and non-intervention, and the role of law itself.

Revolutions in International Law: The Legacies of 1917 (Cambridge UP, 2021) asks what we might learn about international law from analysing how its various sub-fields have remembered, forgotten, imagined, incorporated, rejected or sought to manage the revolutions of 1917. It shows that those revolutions had wide-ranging repercussions for the development of laws relating to intervention, human rights, investment, alien protection and state responsibility, and for the global economy subsequently enabled by international law and overseen by international institutions. The varied legacies of 1917 play an ongoing role in shaping political struggle, global anti-imperialist and anti-racism movements to this day. Listen in and see how these complex events shaped international law, human rights and anti-imperialist movements globally.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yuri Kostenko, "Ukraine's Nuclear Disarmament: A History" (HURI, 2020)

Tue, 09 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Yuri Kostenko’s Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament: A History (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2020) is a meticulous account of how the Ukrainian government made a decision in the 1990s to give up the nuclear status. The book includes unique documents from the private archive, which Yuri Kostenko shares with the readers. Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament provides not only an account of nuclear weapons elimination in Ukraine, but also offers a broader picture of the political environment in which Ukraine found itself after the fall of the USSR. What political players participated in the construction of the newly formed independent state? What challenges did the country face? In addition to this retrospective approach, the book also provides insights into the present moment, particularly in terms of the ongoing armed conflict initiated by Russia in 2014. Yuri Kostenko mentions that the occupation of the Crimea and the subsequent Russian military aggression against Ukraine were not a surprise to him. The book engages with the consequences of the nuclear disarmament and prompts the readers to draw parallels between the decisions that were made in the 1990s and the current international position that was created for Ukraine.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Theresa Keeley, "Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns: The Catholic Conflict Over Cold War Human Rights Policy in Central America" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Tue, 09 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Julia E. Ault, "Saving Nature Under Socialism: Transnational Environmentalism in East Germany, 1968-1990" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Tue, 09 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

When East Germany collapsed in 1989-1990, outside observers were shocked to learn the extent of environmental devastation that existed there. The communist dictatorship, however, had sought to confront environmental issues since at least the 1960s. Through an analysis of official and oppositional sources, Saving Nature Under Socialism: Transnational Environmentalism in East Germany, 1968-1990 (Cambridge UP, 2021) complicates attitudes toward the environment in East Germany by tracing both domestic and transnational engagement with nature and pollution. The communist dictatorship limited opportunities for protest, so officials and activists looked abroad to countries such as Poland and West Germany for inspiration and support. Julia Ault outlines the evolution of environmental policy and protest in East Germany and shows how East Germans responded to local degradation as well as to an international moment of environmental reckoning in the 1970s and 1980s. The example of East Germany thus challenges and broadens our understanding of the 'greening' of post-war Europe, and illuminates a larger, central European understanding of connection across the Iron Curtain.

Julie Ault is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Utah. She completed her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2015 before joining the faculty at Utah. She is currently a faculty fellow at the University of Utah’s Tanner Humanities Center with the goal of developing her second book project, tentatively entitled Solidarity & Socialist Riches: East German Diplomacy, Environment & Technology, 1949-1989. Her research interests include the environment, transnational networks, social movements, socialism, and the Cold War.

Leslie Waters is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso and author of Borders on the Move: Territorial Change and Ethnic Cleansing in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands, 1938-1948 (University of Rochester, 2020). Email her at lwaters@utep.edu or tweet to @leslieh2Os.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jussi M. Hanhimäki, "Pax Transatlantica: America and Europe in the Post-Cold War Era" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Thu, 04 Nov 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Is the West finished as a political idea? In recent years, observers have begun pointing to signs that the transatlantic community is eroding. When the European Union expanded, the classic European nation state was in decline. Now, nationalism is on the rise. Furthermore, nations within the EU are less willing to cooperate with the US on policies that require sacrifice and risks, such as using military force alongside the US. Today, following the twin shocks of Brexit and Trump’s election, the concept of a unified Western transatlantic community seems to be a relic. But, in Pax Transatlantica: America and Europe in the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford UP, 2021) the international historian Jussi Hanhimäki explains why the West is far from over.

Hanhimäki argues that despite Trump’s inflammatory, dismissive rhetoric, NATO continues to provide robust security for its member states. NATO has survived by expanding its remit and scope, and it is viewed favorably by member states overall. Moreover, the transatlantic relationship boasts the richest and most closely connected transcontinental economy in the world. Despite the potential fallout from current trade wars—especially between the US and China—and the rise of economic nationalism, the West still benefits from significant transatlantic trade and massive investment flows. Lastly, Hanhimäki traces the parallel evolution of domestic politics on both sides of the Atlantic, focusing on the rise of populism. He contends that populism is not causing a rift between the US and Europe. Rather, the spread of populism evinces that their politics are in fact closely integrated.

Shifts and even crises abound in the history of the transatlantic relationship. Still, the West endures. Conflicts, rather than undermining the relationship, illustrate its resilience. Hanhimäki shows that the transatlantic relationship is playing out this cycle today. Not only will the "Pax Transatlantica" continue to exist, Hanhimäki concludes, it is likely to thrive in the future.

Jussi Hanhimaki is Professor of International History and co-director of the History and Policy Initiative at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. He is the author of many books, including the award-winning The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (2004) and The Rise and Fall of Détente: American Foreign Policy and the Transformation of the Cold War (2013).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tobias Hof, "Galeazzo Ciano: The Fascist Pretender" (U Toronto Press, 2021)

Tue, 02 Nov 2021 08:00:00 -0000

He was the son of a prominent politician, Benito Mussolini’s son-in-law, and viewed by many as the Duce’s likely successor, only to die before a fascist firing squad near the end of the Second World War. In Galeazzo Ciano: The Fascist Pretender (U Toronto Press, 2021), Tobias Hof examines Ciano’s career for the many insights it has to offer into Italian fascism and Italian politics during the years of its dominance. As Hof explains, Ciano benefited considerably both from his father Costanzo’s political connections during the early part of his career and from his 1930 marriage to Mussolini’s daughter Edda. During the 1930s Ciano enjoyed a rapid ascent to high office, which fueled the belief that he was being groomed to succeed his father-in-law. Yet Hof demonstrates how Ciano’s positions and bourgeois public persona often were at odds with the views of committed fascists, and that he enjoyed little support from either the monarchy or the Catholic Church. Instead, Ciano found himself increasingly marginalized once Italy entered the war in 1940, while his vote to oust Mussolini from his position as prime minister led to his trial and execution less than a year later.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Antony Best, "British Engagement with Japan, 1854-1922: The Origins and Course of an Unlikely Alliance" (Routledge, 2020)

Wed, 27 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Antony Best's British Engagement with Japan, 1854-1922: The Origins and Course of an Unlikely Alliance (Routledge, 2020) reconsiders the circumstances which led to the unlikely alliance of 1902 to 1922 between Britain, the leading world power of the day and Japan, an Asian, non-European nation which had only recently emerged from self-imposed isolation. Based on extensive original research, the book not only provides an overview of Anglo-Japanese relations between the 1850s and 1920s, but also goes beyond existing accounts which concentrate on high politics, strategy and simple assertions about the two countries’ similarities as island empires. It brings into the picture cultural factors, particularly the ways in which Japan was portrayed in Britain, and ambivalent British attitudes to race and supposed European superiority which were overcome but remained difficulties. It charts how the relationship developed as events unfolded, including Japan’s wars against China and Russia, and in addition looks at royal diplomacy, where the Japanese Court came eventually to be treated as a respected equal. Overall, the book provides a major reassessment of this important subject.

Antony Best is a professor of international history at the London School of Economics (LSE).

Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation project explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sam Wineburg, "Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone)" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Thu, 21 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

We are surrounded by more readily available information than ever before. And a huge percentage of it is inaccurate. Some of the bad info is well-meaning but ignorant. Some of it is deliberately deceptive. All of it is pernicious.

With the internet always at our fingertips, what’s a teacher of history to do? In Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) (U Chicago Press, 2018), Sam Wineburg offers answers, beginning with this: We definitely can’t stick to the same old read-the-chapter-answer-the-questions-at-the-back snoozefest we’ve subjected students to for decades!

If we want to educate citizens who can sift through the mass of information around them and separate fact from fake, we must explicitly work to give them the necessary critical thinking tools. Historical thinking has nothing to do with test prep–style ability to memorize facts. Instead, it’s an orientation to the world that we can cultivate, one that encourages reasoned skepticism, discourages haste, and counters our tendency to confirm our biases. Wineburg draws on surprising discoveries from an array of research and experiments to paint a picture of a dangerously mine-filled landscape, but one that, with care, attention, and awareness, we can all learn to navigate.

It’s easy to look around at the public consequences of historical ignorance and despair. Wineburg is here to tell us it doesn’t have to be that way.

The future of the past may rest on our screens. But its fate rests in our hands.

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 reneeg@vanleer.org.il

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beyond a Shadow: Southeast Asia Transcending US-China Rivalries

Fri, 15 Oct 2021 04:00:00 -0000

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).

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

Cecelia Lynch, "Interpreting International Politics" (Routledge, 2014)

Thu, 14 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

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

Jessica M. Kim, "Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865–1941" (UNC Press, 2019)

Thu, 14 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Between 1865 and 1900, the population of Los Angeles grew from around 5,000 people to over 100,000. With population growth that explosive came the opportunity for vast riches to be made. In Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865–1941 (UNC Press, 2019), Dr. Jessica Kim, an associate professor of history at the University of Southern California, traces that wealth southward, arguing that the growth of Los Angeles from a hamlet to the second largest city in the nation is rooted in imperialist acquisition of capital from Mexico. Kim builds on recent borderlands histories to show that not only did people regularly cross borders in the late 19th and early 20th century American West, but so too did wealth and capital. So great was the draining of Mexican wealth to fuel Los Angeles, that when the Mexican Revolution began in 1910, Americans, many of them Los Angelinos, owned over 1/3 of all Mexican land. That kind of wealth disparity was a feature, not a bug, of Los Angeles' position as a borderland metropolis and outpost of empire.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ozan Ozavci, "Dangerous Gifts: Imperialism, Security, and Civil Wars in the Levant, 1798-1864" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

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

Lorena De Vita, "Israelpolitik: German-Israeli Relations, 1949-69" (Manchester UP, 2021)

Thu, 07 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Timon Screech, "The Shogun's Silver Telescope: God, Art, and Money in the English Quest for Japan, 1600-1625" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Thu, 07 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

An English mission to Japan arrives in 1613 with all the standard English commodities, including wool and cloth: which the English hope to trade for Japanese silver. But there’s a gift for the Shogun among them: a silver telescope.

As Timon Screech explains in his latest book, The Shogun’s Silver Telescope: God, Art, and Money in the English Quest for Japan, 1600-1625 (Oxford University Press, 2020), there was a lot of meaning behind that telescope. It represented an English state trying to chart its own part as a Protestant country, denoting their support for science and a more open culture in the face of a more backward Catholic Europe. Screech’s book charts the background behind this simple gift and what it meant for both Japan and England.

In this interview, Timon and I follow the English journeys to Japan, the reasons for these trips, and what the English encountered when they got there. And we’ll think about what we learn from this—ultimately failed—effort to start a trading relationship between these two islands.

Professor Timon Screech is Professor at Nichibunken or the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, after thirty years at SOAS. He is the author of at least a dozen books on the visual culture of the Edo period, including perhaps his best-known work Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700-1820 (University of Hawaii Press, 1999). His other most recent book (and previous interview subject) is Tokyo Before Tokyo: Power and Magic in the Shogun’s City of Edo (Reaktion Books: 2020). In 2019, he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Shogun’s Silver Telescope. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sean Andrew Wempe, "Revenants of the German Empire: Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Wed, 06 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

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

Mark Atwood Lawrence, "The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Wed, 06 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Histories of the Vietnam War are not in short supply. In U.S. history, it ranks alongside the Civil War and World War Two in terms of author coverage. The aftermath of the war has received a similar amount of attention, with historians noting the effect that the end of the war had on domestic politics and U.S. foreign policy. But what about shifts during the war itself? While the war dominated thinking in the Johnson Administration and overshadowed a whole host of other foreign policy issues, it did not cause them to simply disappear. Quite the opposite: Lyndon Johnson was confronted by a multitude of issues during his time in office, and the fact that those issues occurred in tandem with the Vietnam War shaped the U.S. response to them.

In The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era (Princeton UP, 2021), Mark Atwood Lawrence fills in some of the gaps about U.S. foreign policy during the Vietnam War. While historians have noted that U.S. foreign policy became markedly less ambitious under Richard Nixon, Lawrence notes through five different country case studies that U.S. foreign policy began to shift dramatically under Lyndon Johnson, a shift that eschewed transformative foreign policy and emphasized caution. Lawrence illustrates how the Vietnam War wrought a transformation in U.S. foreign policy whose ramifications can still be felt in the present day.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Larsen, "Plotting for Peace: American Peacemakers, British Codebreakers, and Britain at War, 1914–1917" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Thu, 30 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

With Britain by late 1916 facing the prospect of an economic crisis and increasingly dependent on the US, rival factions in Asquith's government battled over whether or not to seek a negotiated end to the First World War. In this riveting new account, Plotting for Peace: American Peacemakers, British Codebreakers, and Britain at War, 1914–1917 (Cambridge UP, 2021) by Daniel Larsen tells the full story for the first time of how Asquith and his supporters secretly sought to end the war. He shows how they supported President Woodrow Wilson's efforts to convene a peace conference and how British intelligence, clandestinely breaking American codes, aimed to sabotage these peace efforts and aided Asquith's rivals. With Britain reading and decrypting all US diplomatic telegrams between Europe and Washington, these decrypts were used in a battle between the Treasury, which was terrified of looming financial catastrophe, and Lloyd George and the generals. This book's findings transform our understanding of British strategy and international diplomacy during the war.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Shovlin, "Trading with the Enemy: Britain, France, and the 18th-Century Quest for a Peaceful World Order" (Yale UP, 2021)

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Britain and France waged war eight times in the century following the Glorious Revolution, a mutual antagonism long regarded as a "Second Hundred Years' War." Yet officials on both sides also initiated ententes, free trade schemes, and colonial bargains intended to avert future conflict. What drove this quest for a more peaceful order?

In Trading with the Enemy: Britain, France, and the 18th-Century Quest for a Peaceful World Order (Yale UP, 2021), John Shovlin reveals the extent to which Britain and France sought to divert their rivalry away from war and into commercial competition. The two powers worked to end future conflict over trade in Spanish America, the Caribbean, and India, and imagined forms of empire-building that would be more collaborative than competitive. They negotiated to cut cross-channel tariffs, recognizing that free trade could foster national power while muting enmity. This account shows that eighteenth-century capitalism drove not only repeated wars and overseas imperialism but spurred political leaders to strive for global stability.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Samuel Foster, "Yugoslavia in the British Imagination: Peace, War and Peasants Before Tito" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Mon, 27 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Despite Britain's entering the 20th century as the dominant world power, its public discourses were imbued with cultural pessimism and rising social anxiety. Samuel Foster is a Visiting Academic at the University of East Anglia. His first monograph, Yugoslavia in the British Imagination: Peace, War and Peasants before Tito (Bloomsbury, 2021), explores how this changing domestic climate shaped perceptions of other cultures, and Britain's relationship to them, focusing on those Balkan territories that formed the first Yugoslavia from 1918 to 1941. The book examines these connections and demonstrates how the popular image of the region's peasantry evolved from that of foreign 'Other' to historical victim - suffering at the hand of modernity's worst excesses and symbolizing Britain's perceived decline. This coincided with an emerging moralistic sense of British identity that manifested itself during the First World War. Consequently, Yugoslavia was legitimized as the solution to peasant victimization and, as Foster's nuanced analysis reveals, enabled Britain's imagined (and self-promoted) revival as civilization's moral arbiter. Drawing on a range of previously unexplored archival sources, this compelling transnational analysis is an important contribution to the study of British social history and the nature of statehood in the modern Balkans.

Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Grace C. Huang, "Chiang Kai-Shek's Politics of Shame: Leadership, Legacy, and National Identity in China" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Fri, 24 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nikki Hessell, "Sensitive Negotiations: Indigenous Diplomacy and British Romantic Poetry" (SUNY Press, 2021)

Tue, 21 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Diplomatic relationships between Indigenous sovereigns and colonial and settler governments were defined by language. In some cases, cultural divides were narrowed using common metaphors. In others, objects such as wampum belts were employed as visual records of past agreements. Speeches were carefully recorded, copied, and cited in later negotiations; treaties were ‘signed’ using symbols of name, clan or nation. The treaty texts themselves sit within a constellation of other texts; this is a large, complex and still understudied archive. In Sensitive Negotiations: Indigenous Diplomacy and British Romantic Poetry (SUNY Press, 2021), Nikki Hessell reveals the ways in which poetic texts figure in diplomacy in the 19th and 20th centuries. The book ranges across the colonial world, from the Grand River Six Nations, the Native South, to the Great Lakes ‘middle ground’. It then turns to South Africa and New Zealand. It is deeply researched and powerfully contextual. It is also reflective, challenging those of us who work on Indigenous / settler relations to position ourselves in relation to the history and texts we study.

Nikki Hessell is Associate Professor at Victoria University in Wellington New Zealand.

Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), where he co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster. His latest publication is Settlers in Indian Country (Cambridge University Press).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emmanuel Navon, "The Star and the Scepter: A Diplomatic History of Israel" (Jewish Publication Society, 2020)

Thu, 16 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The first all-encompassing book on Israel’s foreign policy and the diplomatic history of the Jewish people, The Star and the Scepter: A Diplomatic History of Israel (Jewish Publication Society, 2020) retraces and explains the interactions of Jews with other nations from the ancient kingdoms of Israel to modernity.

Starting with the Hebrew Bible, Emmanuel Navon argues that one cannot grasp Israel’s interactions with the world without understanding how Judaism’s founding document has shaped the Jewish psyche. He sheds light on the people of Israel’s foreign policy through the ages: the ancient kingdoms of Israel, Jewish diasporas in Europe from the Middle Ages to the emancipation, the emerging nineteenth-century Zionist movement, and Zionist diplomacy following World War I and surrounding World War II.

Navon elucidates Israel’s foreign policy from the birth of the state in 1948 to our days: the dilemmas and choices at the beginning of the Cold War; Israel’s attempts to establish periphery alliances; the Arab-Israeli conflict; Israel’s relations with Europe, the United States, Russia, Asia, Africa, Latin America, the United Nations, and the Jewish diasporas; and how twenty-first-century energy geopolitics is transforming Israel’s foreign relations today.

Navon’s analysis is rooted in two central ideas, represented by the Star of David (faith) and the scepter (political power). First, he contends that the interactions of Jews with the world have always been best served by combining faith with pragmatism. Second, Navon shows how the state of Israel owes its diplomatic achievements to national assertiveness and hard power—not only military strength but economic prowess and technological innovation. Demonstrating that diplomacy is a balancing act between ideals and realpolitik, The Star and the Scepter draws aspirational and pragmatic lessons from Israel’s exceptional diplomatic history.

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

Elizabeth Borgwardt et al., "Rethinking American Grand Strategy" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

What is grand strategy? What does it aim to achieve? And what differentiates it from normal strategic thought--what, in other words, makes it "grand"? In answering these questions, most scholars have focused on diplomacy and warfare, so much so that "grand strategy" has become almost an equivalent of "military history." The traditional attention paid to military affairs is understandable, but in today's world it leaves out much else that could be considered political, and therefore strategic. It is in fact possible to consider, and even reach, a more capacious understanding of grand strategy, one that still includes the battlefield and the negotiating table while expanding beyond them. Just as contemporary world politics is driven by a wide range of non-military issues, the most thorough considerations of grand strategy must consider the bases of peace and security--including gender, race, the environment, and a wide range of cultural, social, political, and economic issues.

Rethinking American Grand Strategy (Oxford UP, 2021) assembles a roster of leading historians to examine America's place in the world. Its innovative chapters re-examine familiar figures, such as John Quincy Adams, George Kennan, and Henry Kissinger, while also revealing the forgotten episodes and hidden voices of American grand strategy. They expand the scope of diplomatic and military history by placing the grand strategies of public health, race, gender, humanitarianism, and the law alongside military and diplomatic affairs to reveal hidden strategists as well as strategies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Giles Tremlett, "The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Fri, 10 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alex Hochuli et al., "The End of the End of History: Politics in the Twenty-First Century" (Zero Books, 2021)

Fri, 03 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

We live in strange times. Politics around the world seem to be transforming into something new and often frightening. But this process has a history. In 1989, the bi-polar certainties of the Cold War gave way to a neo-liberal consensus, what Francis Fukuyama termed “the End of History”. Yet with BREXIT and Trump in 2016, the End of History seemed to be coming to an end itself. The current COVID crisis has only accelerated this process. To make sense of this Gramscian interregnum and its great variety of morbid symptoms, Alex Hochuli, George Hoare, and Philip Cunliffe started the Aufhebunga Bunga podcast in April 2017. Billing itself as the “global political podcast at the end of the end of history”, the podcast offers theoretically informed and often provocative analysis and commentary. The podcast has led to a book, The End of the End of History: Politics in the Twenty-First Century, out with Zero Books in 2021.

In our discussion, these three scholars lay out their defense of the concept of the End of History, discuss post-politics and anti-politics, and explain how politics are back. They also diagnose the pandemic of Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome and explain which demographic groups are most susceptible to NOBS. Drawing from the recent history of the USA and UK, as well as Italy and Brazil, Hochuli, Hoare, and Cunliffe offer an analysis of our world and make some bleak predictions for what is to come in terms of future ideological formations.

Alex Hochuli is a writer and translator living in Sao Paolo, Brazil, George Hoare is a political consultant in London, and Philip Cunliffe is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Kent.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philippe Vonnard, "Creating a United Europe of Football: The Formation of UEFA (1949–1961)" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

Tue, 31 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Today we are joined by Philippe Vonnard, Senior SNSF Researcher at the University de Lausanne, and the author of Creating a United Europe of Football: The Formation of UEFA (1949-1961) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed the role UEFA played in the production of European identity, the global origins of the European confederation, and how European sports bureaucrats were able to navigate the Cold War.

In Creating a United Europe of Football, Vonnard explains the rise of UEFA through a close examination of the rarely utilized UEFA archives. His work pushes past a prosopography of European football bureaucrats – such as Stanley Rous, Ottorino Barassi, Ernst Thommen – and instead situates UEFA’s emergence in the rise of the global football and the Cold War. He argues that rather than simply a movement of European football officials, UEFA was also inspired by the South American confederation (CONMEBOL, founded 1916) provided an impetus and model for UEFA.

Vonnard does not shy away from the details of the FIFA Executive: he shows how debates over the reorganization of FIFA necessitated the creation of a European confederation to promote officers to the Executive Committee. A new cadre of European football officials, however, opted for a more expansive confederation with independent financial resources rather than a minimalist association organized only to decide that limited question. A more extensive UEFA fought alongside and with FIFA as a major sports stakeholder.

UEFA’s professionalism and scope expanded over the 1950s as it responded to issues and opportunities. As UEFA organized a ever wider series of competitions, it crowded out nascent challenges to its control over European football. It succeeded where other political, cultural, and economic unions failed, producing a genuine European-wide organization that formed and operated successfully across the Cold War East-West divide. Vonnard explains the qualities of leadership and strategies that made possible their achievements.

Creating a United Europe of Football is a fascinating work from an important francophone sports historian. Now in English translation it provides a compelling read for people interested in the continental conversations about football’s role in European identity and the rise of sports diplomacy during the Cold War.

There is also a free French version pour les francophones. https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/65151

Keith Rathbone is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mark P. Bradley and Mary L. Dudziak, "Making the Forever War: Marilyn Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)

Mon, 30 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Making the Forever War: Marilyn Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021) is a timely collection of articles and essays by Marilyn B Young, edited by Mark P. Bradley and Mary L. Dudziak. In this interview, Mark Bradley joined me to discuss Marilyn Young's life and legacy, the impetus for assembling the book, and the relevance of her work in the present moment.

The late historian Marilyn B. Young, a preeminent voice on the history of U.S. military conflict, spent her career reassessing the nature of American global power, its influence on domestic culture and politics, and the consequences felt by those on the receiving end of U.S. military force. At the center of her inquiries was a seeming paradox: How can the United States stay continually at war, yet Americans pay so little attention to this militarism? Making the Forever War brings Young's articles and essays on American war together for the first time, including never before published works. Moving from the first years of the Cold War to Korea, Vietnam, and more recent "forever" wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Young reveals the ways in which war became ever-present, yet more covert and abstract, particularly as aerial bombings and faceless drone strikes have attained greater strategic value. For Young, U.S. empire persisted because of, not despite, the inattention of most Americans. The collection concludes with an afterword by prominent military historian Andrew Bacevich.

Marilyn B Young (1937-2017) was a renowned historian of American foreign relations and a longtime professor of history at New York University. Her landmark book The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 remains a defining work in the field.

Mark P Bradley (interviewee and co-editor of Making the Forever War) is Bernadotte E Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor of International History and the College at the University of Chicago and author of The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century.

Mary L Dudziak (co-editor of Making the Forever War) is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory University and author of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences.

Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security, subjectivity and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office; she has previously published on US Africa Command and the 2013-16 Ebola epidemic. She can be reached by email or on Twitter.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Karen Gram-Skjoldager et al., "Organizing the 20th-Century World: International Organizations and the Emergence of International Public Administration, 1920-1960s" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Mon, 30 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

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

Stephen Biddle, "Nonstate Warfare: The Military Methods of Guerillas, Warlords, and Militias" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Fri, 27 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

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

Victoria Basualdo et al., "Big Business and Dictatorships in Latin America: A Transnational History of Profits and Repression" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

Wed, 25 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

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

Naphtaly Shem-Tov, "Israeli Theatre: Mizrahi Jews and Self-Representation" (Routledge, 2021)

Wed, 25 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Naphtaly Shem-Tov's book Israeli Theatre: Mizrahi Jews and Self-Representation (Routledge, 2021) introduces readers to the stagecraft produced by Mizrahi (Middle Eastern Jewish) directors and artists. Describing the work of Yemenite, Iraqi, Moroccan and other minorities whose trauma was represented on Israeli stages, dramaturgy known to local Israeli audiences is made known to readers through this monograph. This book draws on the theoretical insights Israeli directors who theorized their philosophies of community-based theatre, while drawing on the work of W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon and African-American theorists of aesthetic self-representation. This book will appeal to readers in Israel Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Jewish Studies, Aesthetics and Performing Arts.

Ari Barbalat holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of California in Los Angeles. He lives in Toronto with his family.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joseph Stieb, "The Regime Change Consensus: Iraq in American Politics, 1990-2003" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Fri, 20 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Why did the United States invade Iraq, setting off a chain of events that profoundly changed the Middle East and the US global position? In The Regime Change Consensus: Iraq in American Politics, 1990-2003 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Joseph Stieb offers a compelling look at how the United States pivoted from a policy of containment to regime change in Iraq after September 11, 2001. Starting with the Persian Gulf War, the book traces how a coalition of political actors argued with increasing success that the totalitarian nature of Saddam Hussein's regime and the untrustworthy behavior of the international coalition behind sanctions meant that containment was a doomed policy. By the end of the 1990s, a consensus belief emerged that only regime change and democratization could fully address the Iraqi threat. Through careful examination, Stieb expands our understanding of the origins of the Iraq War while also explaining why so many politicians and policymakers rejected containment after 9/11 and embraced regime change.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeremy Black, "How the Army Made Britain a Global Power: 1688-1815" (Casemate, 2021)

Thu, 19 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In the new book, How the Army Made Britain a Global Power: 1688-1815, published by Casemate, acclaimed historian and commentator Professor Jeremy Black, looks at this neglected, but ultra-important topic. Between 1760 and 1815, British troops campaigned from Manila to Montreal, Cape Town to Copenhagen, Washington to Waterloo. The naval dimension of Britain's expansion has been superbly covered by a number of excellent studies, but there has not been a single volume that does the same for the army and, in particular, looks at how and why it became a world-operating force, one capable of beating the Marathas as well as the French. This book will both offer a new perspective, one that concentrates on the global role of the army and its central part in imperial expansion and preservation, and as such will be a major book for military history and world history. There will be a focus on what the army brought to power equations and how this made it a world-level force.

The multipurpose character of the army emerges as the key point, one seen in particular in the career of Wellington: while referred to disparagingly by Napoleon as a 'sepoy general,' Wellington's ability to operate successfully in India and Europe was not only impressive but also reflected synergies in experience and acquired skill that characterized the British army. No other army matched this. The closest capability was that of Russia able, in 1806-14, to defeat both the Turks and Napoleon, but without having the transoceanic capability and experience enjoyed by the British army. The experience was a matter in part of debate, including over doctrine, as in the tension between the 'Americans' and 'Germans,' a reference to fields of British campaigning concentration during the Seven Years War. This synergy proved best developed in the operations in Iberia in 1809-14, with logistical and combat skills utilized in India employed in a European context in which they were of particular value.

The book aims to further address the question of how this army was achieved despite the strong anti-army ideology/practice derived from the hostile response to Oliver Cromwell and to James II. Thus, perception and politics are both part of the story, as well as the exigencies and practicalities of conflict, including force structure, command issues, and institutional developments. At the same time, there was no inevitability about British success over this period, and it is necessary to consider developments in the context of other states and, in particular, the reasons why British forces did well and that Britain was not dependent alone on naval effectiveness.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeremy Black, "Strategy and the Second World War: How the War Was Won, and Lost" (Robinson, 2021)

Wed, 18 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

A concise, accessible account of strategy and the Second World War, Strategy and the Second World War: How the War Was Won, and Lost (Robinson, 2021), by renowned Historian Jeremy Black offers up a new look at this somewhat tired subject. In 1941, the Second World War became global, when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union; Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor; and Germany declared war on the United States. In this timely book, which fills a real gap, Black engages with the strategic issues of the time - as they developed chronologically, and interacted - and relates these to subsequent debates about the choices made, revealing their continued political resonances. Beginning with Appeasement and the Soviet-German pact as key strategic means, Black examines the consequences of the fall of France for the strategies of all the powers. He shows how Allied strategy-making was more effective at the Anglo-American level than with the Soviet Union, not only for ideological and political reasons, but also because the Americans and British had a better grasp of the global dimension. He explores how German and Japanese strategies evolved as the war went badly for the Axis powers, and discusses the extent to which seeking to mold the post-war world informed Allied strategic choices from 1943 onwards, and the role these played in post-war politics, notably in the Cold War. Strategy was a crucial tool not only for conducting the war; it remains the key to understanding it today. In short, Strategy and the Second World War is both educational and enjoyable look at this always interesting topic. A book for both the academic and the lay educated public.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tom Phuong Le, "Japan's Aging Peace: Pacifism and Militarism in the Twenty-First Century" (Columbia UP, 2021)

Wed, 18 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Since the end of World War II, Japan has not sought to remilitarize, and its postwar constitution commits to renouncing aggressive warfare. Yet many inside and outside Japan have asked whether the country should or will return to commanding armed forces amid an increasingly challenging regional and global context and as domestic politics have shifted in favor of demonstrations of national strength.

Tom Phuong Le offers a novel explanation of Japan’s reluctance to remilitarize that foregrounds the relationship between demographics and security. Japan's Aging Peace: Pacifism and Militarism in the Twenty-First Century (Columbia UP, 2021) demonstrates how changing perceptions of security across generations have culminated in a culture of antimilitarism that constrains the government’s efforts to pursue a more martial foreign policy. Le challenges a simple opposition between militarism and pacifism, arguing that Japanese security discourse should be understood in terms of “multiple militarisms,” which can legitimate choices such as the mobilization of the Japan Self-Defense Forces for peacekeeping operations and humanitarian relief missions. Le highlights how factors that are not typically linked to security policy, such as aging and declining populations and gender inequality, have played crucial roles. He contends that the case of Japan challenges the presumption in international relations scholarship that states must pursue the use of force or be punished, showing how widespread normative beliefs have restrained Japanese policy makers. Drawing on interviews with policy makers, military personnel, atomic bomb survivors, museum coordinators, grassroots activists, and other stakeholders, as well as analysis of peace museums and social movements, Japan’s Aging Peace provides new insights for scholars of Asian politics, international relations, and Japanese foreign policy.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bogdan C. Iacob et al., "1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Mon, 16 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

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

Margarita M. Balmaceda, "Russian Energy Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union" (Wilson Center, 2021)

Fri, 13 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Margarita Balmaceda’s Russian Energy Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union (Columbia University Press, 2021) is a meticulous exploration of a complex system of energy supplies involving Russia, Ukraine, and the European Union. While originating in Russia, energy supplies, as the author asserts, undergo changes and transformations when being delivered to various destinations. What do these changes inform about the nature of both energy resources and power? Offering an insightful framework in which the two concepts can be understood, Russian Energy Chains complicates the issue of energy supplies that are inextricable from the dynamics of power relations on the interstate level. In addition to acute commentaries on the current role and status of Russia in the energy market, Margarita Balmaceda offers references to various time periods to illustrate how politically and geographically entangled energy systems are. Russian Energy Chains provides a detailed account of the development of the energy power that Russia seems to both offer and usurp; the book guides the reader through the complexity of power relations that include Ukraine and the European Union and helps better understand the current debate about Nord Stream-2. On a larger level, Margarita Balmaceda invites the discussion of the future of the energy market in terms of domestic and international policies.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan Haslam, "The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Thu, 12 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ian Ona Johnson, "Faustian Bargain: The Soviet-German Partnership and the Origins of the Second World War" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

German Ambassador Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau believed that Germany and the Soviet Union were locked together in a Schicksalgemienshaft, or “community of fate.” The interaction of these two nations, Brockdorff-Rantzau thought, would decide the course of history, in Europe and beyond. Anyone familiar with the history of German-Soviet relations in the twentieth century might be inclined to agree with the ambassador’s assessment; though they might find his use of the word “community,” with all its positive connotations, somewhat out of place. For if the Germans and Soviets built any community at all, the evidence suggests it was not built on mutual respect and cooperation. Rather it was built on hate—vicious, unbridled, unrelenting hate.

Hate, however, can unite as powerfully as it divides. Ideologically, politically, culturally, economically, and socially, the Germans and the Soviets were diametrically opposed. But for a brief period during the interwar years, their mutual hatred of the post-First World War order overcame their mutual distrust to bring these two powers together in an uncharacteristic, but highly consequential, economic, technologic, and military partnership. Formalized with the signing of the Treaty of Ropallo in April 1922, this uneasy alliance saw the Soviet Union provide a safe haven for German rearmament in return for German investment, trade, and military assistance. German officers, businessmen, industrialists, and engineers relocated to secret sites throughout the Soviet Union to work on the design of tanks and aircraft, develop new chemical weapons capabilities, and train a new generation of German military leaders away from the prying eyes of the Allied powers. Simultaneously, Soviet officers learned the art of war from their German counterparts, while their country acquired the industrial base, manufacturing expertise, and military hardware it believed necessary to advancing the Communist cause.

Understanding the grave significance of that exchange is the object of military historian Ian Ona Johnson’s recent work, Faustian Bargain: The Soviet-German Partnership and the Origins of the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 2021). The Ropallo relationship, Johnson convincingly argues, can explain not only the outbreak of the Second World War, but also its conduct, especially on the Eastern Front. Germany’s rapid rearmament, the Nazification of the Reichswar, the Soviet military purges of the 1930s, and even British and French appeasement, Johnson maintains, can all trace their roots to the Ropallo era. Without the Soviet Union’s assistance, Germany would not have been able to so easily violate the Versailles treaty; nor would the German military have been able to so rapidly rearm. Close contact between German officers and the Soviet regime, Johnson observes, radicalized many in the Reichswar’s upper echelons, driving them into the open embrace of the National Socialists. Contact between these two groups also troubled Stalin, who feared Red Army officers were becoming contaminated by German ideology and culture. That fear, Johnson contends, resulted in the disastrous Red Army purges of 1936. And, Johnson argues, had the Germany Army not stolen a technological night march on the British and the French, appeasement may not have been as attractive a posture. Without Ropallo, Hitler’s early advances may have been more forcefully checked.

Faustian Bargain is an insightful, incisive, exhaustively researched, and incredibly accessible look at a critical period in the lead up to the Second World War. Johnson provides a fresh lens through which to examine the most important questions surrounding the war, its origins, and its conduct. In doing so, Johnson reminds us that the story of the Second World War is in fact, as Brockdorff-Rantzau might have stated, the story of the the complex relationships built by an international “community of fate.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nina Trige Andersen, "Labor Pioneers: Economy, Labor, and Migration in Filipino-Danish Relations, 1950-2015" (Ateneo de Manila UP, 2019)

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

What happened to the Filipinas who migrated to Denmark to staff iconic new international hotels in the 1960s and 1970s? Why did the Philippine government encourage so many talented people to leave the country? How did Danes react to this influx of lively Southeast Asians? What was the impact on the Danish labor movement? And why did so many lives change forever?

In this conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo, Danish journalist and researcher Nina Trige Andersen discusses both the socio-economic context for the influx of Philippine workers in postwar Denmark, and the individual stories she chronicles in her meticulously-researched book Labor Pioneers: Economy, Labor, and Migration in Filipino-Danish Relations, 1950-2015 (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2019).

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

Patricia Owens and Katharina Rietzler, "Women's International Thought: A New History" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Wed, 04 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Women’s International Thought: A New History (Cambridge University Press, 2021) is the first cross-disciplinary history of women's international thought. Bringing together some of the foremost historians and scholars of international relations working today, this book recovers and analyzes the path-breaking work of eighteen leading thinkers of international politics from the early to mid-twentieth century. Recovering and analyzing this important work, the essays offer revisionist accounts of IR's intellectual and disciplinary history and expand the locations, genres, and practices of international thinking. Systematically structured, and focusing in particular on Black diasporic, Anglo-American, and European historical women, it does more than 'add women' to the existing intellectual and disciplinary histories from which they were erased. Instead, it raises fundamental questions about which kinds of subjects and what kind of thinking constitutes international thought, opening new vistas to scholars and students of international history and theory, intellectual history and women's and gender studies.

Patricia Owens is Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include twentieth-century international history and theory, historical and contemporary practices of Anglo-American counterinsurgency and military intervention, and disciplinary history and the history of international and political thought. Her most recent book, Economy of Force, published by Cambridge University Press, won, among others, the 2016 Susan Strange Prize for the Best Book in international studies and the 2016 International Studies Association Theory Section Best Book Award. Owens’s first book was Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt, published by Oxford University Press in 2007.

Katharina Rietzler teaches American, women's and international history at the University of Sussex, UK. Her work has appeared in journals such as Modern Intellectual History, the Journal of Global History, Diplomatic History, Diplomacy and Statecraft, Global Society and in several edited collections. Rietzler’s main research interest is the history of international thought and internationalism in its social, political, economic and legal dimensions from the 1910s to the 1960s. She is currently completing a book on 20th-century US philanthropy, international thought and the "problem of the public."

Zifeng Liu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University. His dissertation examines Black left feminism and Mao’s China.

Kelvin Ng is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James E. Lindsay and Suleiman Mourad, "Muslim Sources of the Crusader Period: An Anthology" (Hackett, 2021)

Wed, 04 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In the West, the study of the phenomenon known as the Crusades has long been dominated by European concerns: European periodization, European selection of important moments and personages, and, most of all, European sources. In recent years, scholars such as Carole Hillenbrand, Paul Cobb, and Michael Lower have mined Arabic-language material with the purpose of creating a more balanced view of the Crusades--one that gives the Muslim experiences a voice in the English language. Now, Dr. Suleiman Mourad, Professor of Religion at Smith College, and Dr. James Lindsay, Professor of History at Colorado State University, have produced an anthology known as Muslim Sources of the Crusader Period: An Anthology (Hackett, 2021). Covering a wide range of topics and a diverse set of sources, Muslim Sources of the Crusader Period makes new translations of primary source material available to English-speaking students and scholars of the Crusades.

In our conversation, Jim, Suleiman and I touch upon how the Crusades are perceived differently in Muslim sources than they are in European sources; how to categorize an anthology, and what sort of sources to include; and the importance of establishing the diversity of opinion even within the Muslim sources.

Aaron M. Hagler is an associate professor of history at Troy University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brian Masaru Hayashi, "Asian American Spies: How Asian Americans Helped Win the Allied Victory" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Tue, 03 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Jessica Moloughney is a public librarian in New York and a recent graduate of Queens College with a Master’s Degree in History and Library Science.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brendan Goff, "Rotary International and the Selling of American Capitalism" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Tue, 03 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In Rotary International and the Selling of American Capitalism (Harvard University Press, 2021), Professor Brendan Goff traces the history of Rotary International from its origins in Chicago in 1905 to its rapid growth during the first four decades of the twentieth century. In doing so, Goff places U.S. power at the center of his analysis. He argues that Rotary International was able to succeed where Wilsonian internationalism was not by strategically distancing itself from the state. Rotarians advanced their own “civic internationalism” that emphasized the organization’s non-profit status, identify as a non-governmental organization, and commitment to the community-minded principle of “service above self.” This version of internationalism, and the rhetoric that supported it, allowed Rotary International to deflect criticisms of mere boosterism or intervention by other means. Goff’s nuanced and critical analysis of Rotary International’s history provides a new way of thinking about the role of U.S. cities in the expansion of U.S capital and consumer culture abroad, the many inflections of interwar internationalism, and the use of racialized power in creating and structuring connections between businesspeople in the United States and the rest of the world.

Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD Candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. You can reach him at steven.p.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Riaz Dean, "Mapping the Great Game: Explorers, Spies & Maps in 19th Century-Central Asia, India and Tibet" (Casemate, 2019)

Thu, 29 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

“A map is the greatest of all epic poems, its lines and colors show the realization of great dreams.” --Gilbert Grosvenor

The Great Game raged through the wilds of Central Asia during the nineteenth century, as Imperial Russia and Great Britain jostled for power. Tsarist armies gobbled up large tracts of Turkestan, advancing inexorably towards their ultimate prize, India.

These rivals understood well that the first need of an army in a strange land is a reliable map, prompting desperate efforts to explore and chart out uncharted regions. Two distinct groups would rise to this challenge: a band of army officers, who would become the classic Great Game players; and an obscure group of natives employed by the Survey of India, known as the Pundits.

While the game played out, a self-educated cartographer named William Lambton began mapping the Great Arc, attempting to measure the actual shape of the Indian subcontinent. The Great Arc would then be lauded as one of the most stupendous works in the whole history of science.

Meanwhile, the Pundits, travelling entirely on foot and with meagre resources, would be among the first to enter Tibet and reveal the mysteries of its forbidden capital, Lhasa. Featuring forgotten, enthralling episodes of derring-do combined with the sincerest efforts to map India’s boundaries, Riaz Dean's book Mapping the Great Game: Explorers, Spies & Maps in 19th Century Central Asia, India and Tibet (Casemate, 2019) is the thrilling story of espionage and cartography which shrouded the Great Game and helped map a large part of Asia as we know it today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chris Miller, "We Shall Be Masters: Russian Pivots to East Asia from Peter the Great to Putin" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Thu, 29 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Russia’s position between Europe and Asia has led to differing conceptions of “what Russia is” to its leaders. Russia’s vast holdings east of the Urals have often inspired those who led Russia to look eastward for national glory, whether through trade, soft power, or outright force. Yet these Russian “pivots to Asia” often ended soon after they began, with outcomes far more limited than what those who launched them hoped to achieve.

Chris Miller’s We Shall Be Masters: Russian Pivots to East Asia from Peter the Great to Putin (Harvard University Press, 2021) studies many attempts to chart an Asian policy—from bold imperial dreams of a thriving Russian Far East to Soviet efforts to inspire the developing world through soft power—and why all these policies ended up disappointing their drafters.

In this interview, Chris and I talk about Russia’s engagement with the Far East, stretching from its initial forays on the Pacific Coast of North America through to the present day. We talk about why “pivots to Asia” are so hard: both for the Russians, and perhaps for other great powers considering the same policy.

Chris Miller is an assistant professor of international history at The Fletcher School at Tufts University and co-director of the school's Russia and Eurasia Program. He is the author of Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) and The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). He has previously served as the associate director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, a lecturer at the New Economic School in Moscow, a visiting researcher at the Carnegie Moscow Center, a research associate at the Brookings Institution, and as a fellow at the German Marshall Fund's Transatlantic Academy. He can be followed on Twitter at @crmiller1.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of We Shall Be Masters. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Veevers, "The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600–1750" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Wed, 28 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

This is an important, revisionist account of the origins of the British Empire in Asia in the early modern period. In The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), David Veevers uncovers a hidden world of transcultural interactions between servants of the English East India Company and the Asian communities and states they came into contact with, revealing how it was this integration of Europeans into non-European economies, states and societies which was central to British imperial and commercial success rather than national or mercantilist enterprise. As their servants skillfully adapted to this rich and complex environment, the East India Company became enfranchised by the eighteenth century with a breadth of privileges and rights – from governing sprawling metropolises to trading customs-free. In emphasizing the Asian genesis of the British Empire, this book sheds new light on the foreign frameworks of power which fueled the expansion of Global Britain in the early modern world.

David Veevers is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. He has published articles in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History and the Journal of Global History, and won the Royal Historical Society's Alexander Prize in 2014. He is co-editor of The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c.1550 to 1750 (2018).

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. You can find him on twitter @ssiddiqui83

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michal Kšiňan, "Milan Rastislav Štefánik: The Slovak National Hero and Co-Founder of Czechoslovakia" (Routledge, 2021)

Tue, 27 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Michal Kšiňan’s Milan Rastislav Štefánik: The Slovak National Hero and Co-Founder of Czechoslovakia is the first scientific biography of Milan Rastislav Štefánik (1880–1919) that is focused on analyzing the process of how he became the Slovak national hero.

Although he is relatively unknown internationally, his contemporaries compared him “to Choderlos de Laclos for the use of military tactics in love affairs, to Lawrence of Arabia for vision, to Bonaparte for ambition ... and to one of apostles for conviction.” He played a key role in founding an independent Czechoslovakia in 1918 through his relentless worldwide travels during the First World War in order to create the Czechoslovak Army: he visited Serbia and Romania on the eve of invasion by the Central Powers, Russia before the February revolution, the United States after it declared war on Germany, Italy dealing with the consequences of defeat in the Caporetto battle, and again when Russia plunged into Civil War.

Several historical methods are used to analyze the aforementioned central research question of this biography such as social capital to explain his rise in French society, the charismatic leader to understand how he convinced and won over a relatively large number of people; more traditional political, military, and diplomatic history to show his contribution to the founding of Czechoslovakia, and memory studies to analyze his extraordinary popularity in Slovakia. By mapping his intriguing life, the book will be of interest to scholars in a broad range of areas including history of Central Europe, especially Czechoslovakia, international relations, social history, French society at the beginning of the 20th century and biographical research.

Michal Kšiňan is a senior researcher at the Institute of History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tonio Andrade, "The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Thu, 22 Jul 2021 04:00:00 -0000

On January 10th, 1795, a very tired caravan arrives in Beijing. The travelers have journeyed from Canton on an accelerated schedule through harsh terrain in order to make it to the capital in time for the Qianlong Emperor’s sixtieth anniversary of his reign. The group is led by two Dutchmen: Isaac Titsingh and Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest, who are there to represent the interests of the Dutch Republic at the imperial court. It’s a momentous occasion, especially after the disastrous British Embassy from George Macartney two years earlier.

Little did they know that their embassy would be the last by Westerners in the traditional Chinese court. Their journey is the subject of Professor Tonio Andrade’s The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China (Princeton University Press, 2021), published earlier this year: a rich and readable volume that tells the story of an event long-neglected by history and historians.

In this interview, Tonio and I talk about the Dutch Embassy, its protagonists and the nature of the imperial court. We discuss the perilous and rushed journey the ambassadors made to Beijing, and what their experience tells us about the nature of diplomacy.

Tonio Andrade is professor of Chinese and global history at Emory University. His books include The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (Princeton University Press, 2017), Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China's First Great Victory over the West (Princeton University Press, 2011), and How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century (Columbia University Press, 2007).

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Last Embassy. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Phillip T. Lohaus, "Power and Complacency: American Survival in an Age of International Competition" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Why has the United States, the world’s premier military and economic power, struggled recently to achieve its foreign policy desiderata? How might America’s leaders reconsider the application of power for a world of asymmetric and unconventional threats? In his new book, Power and Complacency: American Survival in an Age of International Competition (Potomac Books, 2021), American Enterprise Institute Visiting Fellow Philip Lohaus explores the roots of America’s “efficacy deficit” and offers recommendations for how the United States can ensure a favorable place on an increasingly crowded global stage.

Lohaus argues that the American way of competition, rooted in a black-and-white approach to conflict and an overreliance on technology, impedes effectiveness in the amorphous landscape of the 21st-century conflict. By tracing the geographic and historical development of the United States, China, Russia, and Iran, Lohaus shows that America’s principal competitors have developed more dynamic approaches to competition and conflict outside of warfare. Unless the United States adapts, Lohaus writes, it will find itself on the path to decline.

Before joining the American Enterprise Institute, Lohus previously served as an Intelligence Analyst in the US Department of Defense, where he deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. He is currently a Reserve Officer in the US Navy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Benjamin Allen Coates, "Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Thu, 15 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

It might seem somewhat paradoxical that in the Wars of 1898 and their aftermath—the era in which the United States expanded its imperial reach deep into the Caribbean and Pacific—international law became a feature of US foreign policy. In the midst of all of the militarism (think of Teddy Roosevelt’s roughriders storming Cuba), colonial conquest, and the use of torture to quash Philippine resistance to US colonial rule, the US government sought to make its empire legalistic and to help build a broader international legal order. Benjamin Coates, in his book Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford UP, 2019), ably dissects this project, and, in the process, helps illuminate aspects of the United States’ overseas empire that other scholars have overlooked.

Coates, an associate professor at Wake Forest University, explores the many ways in which international law bolstered imperial rule and interimperial relations. International-law arguments, for example, helped justify the seizure of the Panama Canal Zone. In Coates’ telling, then, it was not a coincidence that the US foreign-policy apparatus lawyered up—filling the State Department’s ranks with a multitude of international lawyers—at the same moment that it began to administer colonial populations abroad. I hope you enjoy our discussion!

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

Ruth Ahnert et al., "The Network Turn: Changing Perspectives in the Humanities" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Wed, 14 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

We live in a networked world. Online social networking platforms and the World Wide Web have changed how society thinks about connectivity. Because of the technological nature of such networks, their study has predominantly taken place within the domains of computer science and related scientific fields. But arts and humanities scholars are increasingly using the same kinds of visual and quantitative analysis to shed light on aspects of culture and society hitherto concealed. Written by Ruth Ahnert, Sebastian Ahnert, Nicole Coleman, and Scott Weingart, The Network Turn: Changing Perspectives in the Humanities (Cambridge UP, 2021) contends that networks are a category of study that cuts across traditional academic barriers, uniting diverse disciplines through a shared understanding of complexity in our world. Moreover, we are at a moment in time when it is crucial that arts and humanities scholars join the critique of how large-scale network data and advanced network analysis are being harnessed for the purposes of power, surveillance, and commercial gain.

Ruth Ahnert is Professor of Literary History and Digital Humanities, Queen Mary University of London.

Sebastian Ahnert is University Lecturer, Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Cambridge.

Nicole Coleman is Digital Research Architect, Stanford University Libraries.

Scott Weingart is Director of the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship at the University of Notre Dame.

Katie McDonough is Senior Research Associate, The Alan Turing Institute.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nick Lloyd, "The Western Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918" (Liveright, 2021)

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The Western Front evokes images of mud-spattered men in waterlogged trenches, shielded from artillery blasts and machine-gun fire by a few feet of dirt. This iconic setting was the most critical arena of the Great War, a 400-mile combat zone stretching from Belgium to Switzerland where more than three million Allied and German soldiers struggled during four years of almost continuous combat. It has persisted in our collective memory as a tragic waste of human life and a symbol of the horrors of industrialized warfare. In this history, military historian Nick Lloyd captures the horrific fighting in The Western Front: A History of the First World War (Liveright, 2021). As Lloyd reveals, far from a site of attrition and stalemate, the Western Front was dynamic and defined by extraordinary scientific and tactical innovation. It was on the Western Front that the modern technologies—machine guns, mortars, grenades, and howitzers—were refined and developed into effective killing machines. It was on the Western Front that chemical warfare, in the form of poison gas, was first unleashed. And it was on the Western Front that tanks and aircraft were introduced, causing a dramatic shift away from nineteenth-century bayonet tactics toward modern combined arms, reinforced by heavy artillery, that forever changed the face of war.

Douglas Bell received his PhD in history at Texas A&M University and was recently the Postdoctoral Fellow at the US Army Heritage an Education Center.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cees Heere, "Empire Ascendant: The British World, Race, and the Rise of Japan, 1894-1914" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In 1902, the British government concluded a defensive alliance with Japan, a state that had surprised much of the world with its sudden rise to prominence. For the next two decades, the Anglo-Japanese alliance would hold the balance of power in East Asia, shielding Japan as it cemented its regional position, and allowing Britain to concentrate on meeting the German challenge in Europe. Yet it was also a relationship shaped by its contradictions.

Empire Ascendant: The British World, Race, and the Rise of Japan, 1894-1914 (Oxford UP, 2020) examines how officials and commentators across the British imperial system wrestled with the implications of Japan's unique status as an Asian power in an international order dominated by European colonial empires. On the settlement frontiers of Australasia and North America, white colonial elites formulated their own responses to the growth of Japan's power, charged by the twinned forces of colonial nationalism and racial anxiety, as they designed immigration laws to exclude Japanese migrants, developed autonomous military and naval forces, and pressed Britain to rally behind their vision of a 'white empire'. Yet at the same time, the alliance legitimised Japan's participation in great-power diplomacy, and worked to counteract racist notions of a 'yellow peril'.

By the late 1900s, Japan stood at the centre of a series of escalating inter-imperial disputes over foreign policy, defence, migration, and ultimately, over the future of the British imperial system itself. This account weaves together studies of diplomacy, strategy, and imperial relations to pose searching questions about how Japan's entry into the 'family of civilised nations' shaped, and was shaped by, ideologies of race.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Susan Eisenhower, "How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions" (Thomas Dunne, 2020)

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Few people have made decisions as momentous as Eisenhower, nor has one person had to make such a varied range of them. From D-Day to Little Rock, from the Korean War to Cold War crises, from the Red Scare to the Missile Gap controversies, Ike was able to give our country eight years of peace and prosperity by relying on a core set of principles. These were informed by his heritage and upbringing, as well as his strong character and his personal discipline, but he also avoided making himself the center of things. He was a man of judgment, and steadying force. He sought national unity, by pursuing a course he called the Middle Way that tried to make winners on both sides of any issue.

Ike was a strategic, not an operational leader, who relied on a rigorous pursuit of the facts for decision-making. His talent for envisioning a whole, especially in the context of the long game, and his ability to see causes and various consequences, explains his success as Allied Commander and as President. After making a decision, he made himself accountable for it, recognizing that personal responsibility is the bedrock of sound principles.

Susan Eisenhower's How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions (Thomas Dunne, 2020) shows us not just what a great American did, but why--and what we can learn from him today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sinja Graf, "The Humanity of Universal Crime: Inclusion, Inequality, and Intervention in International Political Thought" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Thu, 01 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

We often hear or read the phrase “crimes against humanity” when we learn about the Holocaust, or genocide in places like Rwanda or Serbia. And just as often, we don’t reflect on what this phrase means because it seems to simply encompass horrific actions by individuals or groups, directed towards specific ethnic, religious, or cultural groups. Sinja Graf’s new book, The Humanity of Universal Crime: Inclusion, Inequality, and Intervention in International Political Thought (Oxford UP, 2021), helps us to consider what this terminology actually means and how we can and should think about both the crimes themselves and the humanity of the victims and the perpetrators. As Graf explains in the book and in our conversation, once we start to unpack this term and our conceptualization of it, the complexity of truly understanding “universal crimes” becomes starkly clear. It is also clear that this is an understudied realm within contemporary political theory. The Humanity of Universal Crime seeks to explore this complexity and to provide a path to think about and consider both the idea itself and how it is has been used in politics and processes over the past centuries.

Graf knits together this exploration and understanding across disciplines, weaving in concepts from international law, political theory, colonial studies, and human rights. In the initial section of the book, John Locke’s engagement with this idea of universal crime is traced and explored to understand how Locke, who was so influential to the establishment of classical liberal thought and structures, saw the place and role of universal crime in context of the coercive power of the state. The next section of the book, which is both historical and theoretical, examines the way that colonialism created fragmentation within concepts of humanity, determining that there were those who are included under this umbrella of humanity, and, as a result, get to enjoy the protections and rights associated with being included. And there are those who were considered not fully human, and thus could be excluded from this umbrella category. As with so much else that was part of western imperial colonialism and 19th century eurocentrism, these distinctions fell along racial, religious, national, and ethnic lines. Graf’s research examines this normative fracturing of humanity during this period. The final section of The Humanity of Universal Crime is focused on more contemporary debates about distinctions between war and policing, especially in the context of the post-Cold War world. In this more recent period, structures and processes have been established and developed to legally respond to “crimes against humanity.” But Graf notes that, even so, these international systems do not necessarily have clear understandings of humanity – and how the perpetrators and the victims are both included under that umbrella category. The Humanity of Universal Crime is a keen investigation of these complex concepts and how they have been put into effect, and what we really understand about crimes against humanity and what we still need to consider.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christopher Grey, "Brexit Unfolded: How No One Got What They Wanted (and Why They Were Never Going To)" (Biteback, 2021)

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In 2020-21, the UK left first the EU and then the 30-nation European Economic Area. Much of the impact has been masked by the coronavirus pandemic but, as that lifts, there will be profound effects on patterns of employment, national strategic positioning, political cleavages and even on the continued cohesion of the kingdom itself.

This did not have to be the case. Short of never leaving the EU, there were less disruptive exit models available. Why weren’t they taken and why did the Brexit process radicalise between 2016 and 2019?

These are the questions Christopher Grey explores in Brexit Unfolded: How No One Got What They Wanted (and Why They Were Never Going To) (Biteback, 2021). Emeritus Professor of Organisation Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London, Chris Grey previously taught at Leeds, Cambridge and Warwick and is the author and co-author of nine other books. He stumbled into the Brexit debate during the referendum campaign and started writing a blog (Brexit and Beyond) that soon turned into a must-read - propelling him into the front rank of Brexitologists and earning @chrisgreybrexit 54,000 Twitter followers.

*The author's own book recommendations are Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain by Fintan O'Toole (Apollo, 2019) and A Question Of Loyalties by Allan Massie (Canongate Books, 2002 - first published in 1989)

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marie Favereau, "The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Tue, 29 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The Mongols are widely known for one thing: conquest. Through the ages, word "horde" has entered the English lexicon with a negative connotation, conjuring up images of warriors on horseback, sweeping across the plain--a virtual human flood destroying everything in its path and then receding, leaving a wave of devastation and grief.

Such is often the popular perception of the Mongol empire under Chingghis Khan and his successors, who came to control much of Eurasia in the mid-thirteenth century. In the past few decades, scholarship has started emphasizing other aspects of the three hundred year Mongol project--after all, waves of destruction don't tend to also be referred to by names like "Pax Mongolica," or "the Mongolian Peace."

In this majestic new study, Marie Favereau (Paris Nanterre University) takes us inside one of the most powerful sources of cross-border integration in world history. For three centuries, the Mongol Empire was no less a force for global development than the Roman Empire. The Horde--ulus Jochi, one of the four divisions of Chingghis Khan's Empire--was the central node in the Eurasian commercial boom of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Its unique political regime--a complex power-sharing arrangement among the khan and the nobility--reswarded skillful administrators and diplomats and fostered an economic order that was mobile, organized, and innovative.

The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World (Harvard UP, 2021) is an ambitious, accessible, beautifully written portrait of an empire little understood tand too readily dismissed. Challenging conceptions of nomads as peripheral to history, Marie Favereau makes clear that we live in a world inherited from the Mongol moment.

Christopher S Rose is a social historian of medicine focusing on Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean in the 19th and 20th century. He currently teaches History at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Giovanni Mantilla, "Lawmaking Under Pressure: International Humanitarian Law and Internal Armed Conflict" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Fri, 25 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Giovanni Mantilla’s new book, Lawmaking under Pressure: International Humanitarian Law and Internal Armed Conflict (Cornell University Press, 2020), traces the origins and development of the international humanitarian treaty rules that now exist to regulate internal armed conflict, and explores the global politics and diplomatic dynamics that led to the creation of such laws in 1949 and in the 1970s. In this conversation with Yi Ning Chang, Giovanni reflects on history and theory in the study of international relations and international law, on the nature of norms and power in the international sphere, and on “theorizing possibility” in international politics. Readers in the US may use the code “09FLYER” for a 30% discount through Cornell University Press, while those outside the US may use “CSF21PSA”, also for a 30% discount, through Combined Academic Publishers.

Awarded the prestigious Francis Lieber Prize for outstanding book in the field of the law of armed conflict in 2021, Lawmaking under Pressure analyzes the origins and development of the international humanitarian treaty rules that now exist to regulate internal armed conflict. Until well into the twentieth century, states allowed atrocious violence as an acceptable product of internal conflict. Why have states created international laws to control internal armed conflict? Why did states compromise their national security by accepting these international humanitarian constraints? Why did they create these rules at improbable moments, as European empires cracked, freedom fighters emerged, and fears of communist rebellion spread? Mantilla explores the global politics and diplomatic dynamics that led to the creation of such laws in 1949 and in the 1970s.

By the 1949 Diplomatic Conference that revised the Geneva Conventions, most countries supported legislation committing states and rebels to humane principles of wartime behavior and to the avoidance of abhorrent atrocities, including torture and the murder of non-combatants. However, for decades, states had long refused to codify similar regulations concerning violence within their own borders. Diplomatic conferences in Geneva twice channeled humanitarian attitudes alongside Cold War and decolonization politics, even compelling reluctant European empires Britain and France to accept them. Lawmaking under Pressure documents the tense politics behind the making of humanitarian laws that have become touchstones of the contemporary international normative order.

Mantilla not only explains the pressures that resulted in constraints on national sovereignty but also uncovers the fascinating international politics of shame, status, and hypocrisy that helped to produce the humanitarian rules now governing internal conflict.

Yi Ning Chang is a PhD student in political theory at the Department of Government at Harvard University. She works on the history of contemporary political thought, postcolonial theory and race, and the global histories of anticolonialism and anti-imperialism in Southeast Asia. Yi Ning can be reached at yiningchang@g.harvard.edu.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philip Zelikow, "The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917" (PublicAffairs, 2021)

Thu, 24 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

During a pivotal few months in the middle of the First World War all sides-Germany, Britain, and America-believed the war could be concluded. Peace at the end of 1916 would have saved millions of lives and changed the course of history utterly.

Two years into the most terrible conflict the world had ever known, the warring powers faced a crisis. There were no good military options. Money, men, and supplies were running short on all sides. The German chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, secretly sought President Woodrow Wilson's mediation to end the war, just as British ministers and France's president also concluded that the time was right. The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917 (PublicAffairs, 2021), by renowned author and former government official, Philip Zelikow, Professor of History at the University of Virginia, describes how tantalizingly close these far-sighted statesmen came to ending the war, saving millions of lives, and avoiding the total war that dimmed hopes for a better world.

Theirs was a secret battle that is only now becoming fully understood, a story of civic courage, awful responsibility, and how some leaders rose to the occasion while others shrank from it or chased other ambitions. "Peace is on the floor waiting to be picked up!" pleaded the German ambassador to the United States. This book explains both the strategies and fumbles of people facing a great crossroads of history. Professor Zelikow, has written revisionist history at its very best: over-turning old paradigms and interpretations and offering up a new way of seeing the historical canvas.

The Road Less Traveled reveals one of the last great mysteries of the Great War: that it simply never should have lasted so long or cost so much.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sean McMeekin, "Stalin's War: A New History of World War II" (Basic Books, 2021)

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

This unreciprocated American generosity gave Stalin’s armies the mobile striking power to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ecological Civilization: Chinese Dream or Global Strategy?

Fri, 18 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

How seriously should take the Chinese government’s discourse about ‘ecological civilization’? Mette Hansen argues that whatever the shortcomings of this rather grandiose notion, it offers an invaluable means of engaging China in important global debates about the future of the planet – and should not simply be glibly dismissed as an exercise in green-washing. She finds particular hope in pop-up local environmental initiatives that deploy the official discourse creatively to advance a green agenda.

Mette Halskov Hansen is professor of China studies at the University of Oslo

Her latest book is the The Great Smog of China (Association for Asian Studies, 2020, co-authored with Anna L. Ahlers and Rune Svarverud).

This podcast is one of a series recorded with the keynote speakers from the Fourteenth Annual Nordic NIAS Council Conference ‘China’s Rise/Asia’s Responses’ held on 10–11 June 2021, in collaboration with the Nordic Association for China Studies and the University of Helsinki.

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

Gender and Diplomacy in the Time of COVID-19

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced people indoors and has moved even important businesses and interactions online. Diplomatic interactions are no exception.

In the second episode of our new themed series Across the Rainbow, we speak with Dr. Ann Towns, Professor of Political Science at the University of Gothenberg, and Dr. Katarzyna Jezierska, Associate Professor of Political Science at University West, both co-authors of the article “COVID-19 and Gender: A Necessary Connection in Diplomatic Studies”.

Drs. Towns and Jezierska explore how the move online has changed gender dynamics in diplomatic practices and how interactions between diplomats and civil society actors have altered, making a case for why gender needs to be a key focus area in diplomacy research in the time of COVID-19.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Colin Calloway, "The Chiefs Now in This City: Indians and the Urban Frontier in Early America" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Tue, 15 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

During the years of the Early Republic, prominent Native leaders regularly traveled to American cities--Albany, Boston, Charleston, Philadelphia, Montreal, Quebec, New York, and New Orleans--primarily on diplomatic or trade business, but also from curiosity and adventurousness. They were frequently referred to as "the Chiefs now in this city" during their visits, which were sometimes for extended periods of time. Indian people spent a lot of time in town. Colin Calloway, National Book Award finalist and one of the foremost chroniclers of Native American history, has gathered together the accounts of these visits and from them created a new narrative of the country's formative years, redefining what has been understood as the "frontier."

Calloway's The Chiefs Now in This City: Indians and the Urban Frontier in Early America (Oxford UP, 2021) captures what Native peoples observed as they walked the streets, sat in pews, attended plays, drank in taverns, and slept in hotels and lodging houses. In the Eastern cities they experienced an urban frontier, one in which the Indigenous world met the Atlantic world. Calloway's book reveals not just what Indians saw but how they were seen. Crowds gathered to see them, sometimes to gawk; people attended the theatre to watch “the Chiefs now in this city” watch a play.

Their experience enriches and redefines standard narratives of contact between the First Americans and inhabitants of the American Republic, reminding us that Indian people dealt with non-Indians in multiple ways and in multiple places. The story of the country's beginnings was not only one of violent confrontation and betrayal, but one in which the nation's identity was being forged by interaction between and among cultures and traditions.

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

William A. Callahan, "Sensible Politics: Visualizing International Relations" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

How can we theorize international relations by looking at how nose sizes are depicted in Asian art and literature? Why are Vietnamese immigration officials furious about the maps that appear in Chinese passports? What do Japanese gardens tell us about how nation-states are constructed and defined? And how we could re-imagine border walls as sites of creative destruction, illuminating the sublime?

Anyone who knows the work of William Callahan professor of international relations at the London School of Economics), will be familiar with his playful juxtapositions and his relentless determination to break down simplistic categories. In this animated conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo, Bill explains how his latest book Sensible Politics expands the idea of visual politics to embrace a wider range of artifacts, while also challenging what he views as the Eurocentrism of the larger “visual turn” in IR.

Bill also discusses the making of his own films including the recent Great Walls (2020) and the extremely popular Mearsheimer vs. Nye on the Rise of China (2015)

This podcast is one of a series recorded with the keynote speakers from the Fourteen Annual Nordic NIAS Council Conference ‘China’s Rise/Asia’s Responses’ (https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/conferences/chinas-riseasias-responses) held on 10-11 June 2021 in collaboration with the Nordic Association for China Studies and the University of Helsinki.

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

Andrei P. Tsygankov, "Russia and America: The Asymmetric Rivalry" (Polity, 2019)

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In recent times, US-Russia relations have deteriorated to what both sides acknowledge is an “all time low.” Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election and Putin’s continued support for the Assad regime in Syria have placed enormous strain on this historically tense and complex relationship. In Russia and America: The Asymmetric Rivalry (Polity, 2019), Andrei Tsygankov challenges the dominant view that US-Russia relations have entered a new Cold War phase. Russia’s US strategy, he argues, can only be understood in the context of a changing international order. While America strives to preserve its global dominance, Russia—the weaker power—exploits its asymmetric capabilities and relations with non-Western allies to defend and promote its interests, and to avoid yielding to US pressures. Focusing on key areas of conflict and mutual convergence—from European security to China and the Middle East, as well as cyber, nuclear, and energy issues—Tsygankov paints a nuanced and unsentimental picture of two countries whose ties are likely to remain marked by suspicion and conflict for years to come.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lamis Elmy Abdelaaty, "Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Mon, 07 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

States face choices when people forced to leave their states due to persecution or violence seek refuge. They may assert their sovereignty by either granting or denying entry or they may delegate refugee protection to an international organization. Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford UP, 2021) asks “why do states sometimes assert their sovereignty vis-aá-vis refugee rights and at other times seemingly cede it? Dr. Abdelaaty develops a two-part theoretical framework in which policymakers in refugee-receiving countries weigh international and domestic concerts. At the international level, policymakers consider relations with the refugee-sending country. At the domestic level policymakers consider political competition among ethnic groups. When these international and domestic incentives conflict, shifting responsibility to the UN allows policymakers to placate both refugee-sending countries and domestic constituencies. In short, foreign policy and ethnic identity shapes states’ reactions to refugees.

Dr. Lamis Abdelaaty is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, and Senior Research Associate at the Campbell Public Affairs Institute. Her interests include international relations, human rights and humanitarianism, and asylum and migration. In forthcoming research for the International Journal of Human Rights, she provides a statistical analysis on the relationship between government respect for human rights and treatment of refugees.

Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and “Sensitive Places: Originalism, Gender, and the Myth Self-Defense in District of Columbia v. Heller” can be found in July 2021’s Polity. Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeremy Black, "To Lose an Empire: British Strategy and Foreign Policy, 1758-90" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Wed, 02 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Bringing strategy, foreign policy, domestic and imperial politics together, this book challenges the conventional understanding as to why the British Empire, at perhaps the height of its power, lost control of its American colonies. Critiquing the traditional emphasis on the value of alliance during the Seven Years' War, and the consequences of British isolation during the War of American Independence, Professor of History Emeritus Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian writing in the Anglophone world to-day, shows that this rests on a misleading understanding of the relationship between policy and strategy.

Encompassing both the Seven Years' War and the American War of Independence and grounded in archival research, this book considers a violent and contentious period which was crucial to the making of Second British Empire and its role in the wider world. Offering a reinterpretation of British strategy and foreign policy throughout the period, To Lose an Empire: British Strategy and Foreign Policy, 1758-90 (Bloomsbury, 2021) interweaves British domestic policy with diplomatic and colonial developments to show the impact this period and its events had on British strategy and foreign policy for years to come.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christoph Brumann, "The Best We Share: Nation, Culture and World-Making in the UNESCO World Heritage Arena" (Berghahn, 2021)

Tue, 25 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The UNESCO World Heritage Convention is one of the most widely ratified international treaties, and a place on the World Heritage List is a widely coveted mark of distinction. Building on ethnographic fieldwork at Committee sessions, interviews and documentary study,

Christoph Brumann's book The Best We Share: Nation, Culture and World-Making in the UNESCO World Heritage Arena (Berghahn, 2021) links the change in operations of the World Heritage Committee with structural nation-centeredness, vulnerable procedures for evaluation, monitoring and decision-making, and loose heritage conceptions that have been inconsistently applied. Through richly textured ethnography that goes into the inner workings of one of the most powerful international organisations, The Best We Share is one of the most ambitious studies of the World Heritage arena and a crucial reading for anthropologists and scholars interested in the notion of ‘world-making’ and workings behind global governance.

Dr. Suvi Rautio is an anthropologist specializing in Chinese society and history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

R. J. B. Bosworth, "Mussolini and the Eclipse of Italian Fascism: From Dictatorship to Populism" (Yale UP, 2021)

Tue, 25 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

A new and incisive account of how Mussolini pioneered policies which we would not label ‘populism’ in reaction to Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 —and thereby reinforced his role as a model for later authoritarian leaders

On the tenth anniversary of his rise to power in 1932, Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) seemed to many the “good dictator.” He was the first totalitarian and the first fascist in modern Europe. But a year later Hitler’s entrance onto the political stage signaled a German takeover of the fascist ideology.

In this definitive account, eminent historian, Professor of History R.J.B. Bosworth charts Mussolini’s leadership in reaction to Hitler. Professor Bosworth shows how Italy’s decline in ideological pre-eminence, as well as in military and diplomatic power, led Mussolini to pursue a more populist approach: angry and bellicose words at home, violent aggression abroad, and a more extreme emphasis on charisma. In his embittered efforts to bolster an increasingly hollow and ruthless regime, it was Mussolini, rather than Hitler, who offered the model for all subsequent authoritarians. In short, Mussolini and the Eclipse of Italian Fascism: From Dictatorship to Populism (Yale University Press), is a must read for any scholar or lay educated reader interested in Mussolini and his regime.

R.J.B. Bosworth is Emeritus Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. He is a leading authority on Mussolini & 20th century Italian history and is the author of more than two dozen books on fascism and Italy’s twentieth-century experience. He lives in Oxford, UK.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How China Loses: A Discussion with Luke Patey

Mon, 17 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Western media accounts often suggest that China is rising inexorably as a global economic and political powerhouse. A new book by Luke Patey offers a more nuanced picture, focusing on the growing backlash against Chinese aspirations. Author Luke Patey, a senior researcher from the Danish Institute for International Studies, discusses his new book How China Loses: The Pushback against Chinese Global Ambitions (Oxford University Press, 2021) with Andreas Bøje Forsby from NIAS. Their conversation covers a wide range of topical issues in the current debate about the rise of China, including China’s economic coercion, the dependency myth and specific manifestations of pushback against China.

How China Loses is a critical look at how the world is responding to China's rise, and what this means for America and the world. China is advancing its own interests with increasing aggression. From its Belt and Road Initiative linking Asia and Europe, to its "Made in China 2025" strategy to dominate high-tech industries, to its significant economic reach into Africa and Latin America, the regime is rapidly expanding its influence around the globe. Many fear that China's economic clout, tech innovations, and military power will allow it to remake the world in its own authoritarian image. But despite all these strengths, a future with China in charge is far from certain. Rich and poor, big and small, countries around the world are recognizing that engaging China produces new strategic vulnerabilities to their independence and competitiveness.

How China Loses tells the story of China's struggles to overcome new risks and endure the global backlash against its assertive reach. Combining on-the-ground reportage with incisive analysis, Luke Patey argues that China's predatory economic agenda, headstrong diplomacy, and military expansion undermine its global ambitions to dominate the global economy and world affairs. In travels to Africa, Latin America, East Asia and Europe, his encounters with activists, business managers, diplomats, and thinkers reveal the challenges threatening to ground China's rising power.

At a time when views are fixated on the strategic competition between China and the United States, Patey's work shows how the rest of the world will shape the twenty-first century in pushing back against China's overreach and domineering behavior. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries began to confront their political differences and economic and security challenges with China and realize the diversity and possibility for cooperation in the world today.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Odd Arne Westad, "Empire and Righteous Nation: 600 Years of China-Korea Relations" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Fri, 07 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Being arguably each side’s most enduring international bond, the China-Korea relationship has long been of great practical and symbolic importance to both. Moreover, as Odd Arne Westad observes in his new book, this has in many ways also been a paradigmatic kind of tie between a large ‘empire’ and smaller (though by no means small) ‘nation’, and thus has much to teach us about past and present international relationships in East Asia and beyond.

Westad’s Empire and Righteous Nation: 600 Years of China-Korea Relations (Harvard UP, 2021) is both a highly readable survey of a special dynamic between polities and cultures, and an argument for the important continuities and trends running throughout six centuries of tumultuous Ming, Choson, Qing, Japanese, Soviet, American, Republican, Nationalist and Communist history. As this book convincingly shows, in all its mutual admiration, suspicion, hierarchy and compromise, this has been a deeply revealing relationship and one which – as scholars in both countries would themselves agree – it would benefit today’s world to understand in greater historical context.

Ed Pulford is a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shivshankar Menon, "India and Asian Geopolitics" (Brookings, 2021)

Mon, 03 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

A clear-eyed look at modern India's role in Asia and the broader world. One of India's most distinguished foreign policy thinkers addresses the many questions facing India as it seeks to find its way in the increasingly complex world of Asian geopolitics. A former Indian foreign secretary and national security adviser, Shivshankar Menon traces India's approach to the shifting regional landscape since its independence in 1947. From its leading role in the "nonaligned" movement during the cold war to its current status as a perceived counterweight to China, India often has been an after-thought for global leaders--until they realize how much they needed it.

In India and Asian Geopolitics (Brookings, 2021), Menon focuses in particular on India's responses to the rise of China, as well as other regional powers. Menon also looks to the future and analyzes how India's policies are likely to evolve in response to current and new challenges. As India grows economically and gains new stature across the globe, both its domestic preoccupations and international choices become more significant. India itself will become more affected by what happens in the world around it. Menon makes a powerful geopolitical case for an India increasingly and positively engaged in Asia and the broader world in pursuit of a pluralistic, open, and inclusive world order.

Medha Prasanna is an MA candidate at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. Her current research focuses on International Organizations and Human Rights Law. You can learn more about her here or email her medp16@gwu.edu

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stella Ghervas, "Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Wed, 28 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Stella Ghervas's Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union (Harvard University Press, 2021) is a bold new look at war and diplomacy in Europe that traces the idea of a unified continent in attempts since the eighteenth century to engineer lasting peace.

Political peace in Europe has historically been elusive and ephemeral. Stella Ghervas shows that since the eighteenth century, European thinkers and leaders in pursuit of lasting peace fostered the idea of European unification.

Bridging intellectual and political history, Ghervas draws on the work of philosophers from Abbé de Saint-Pierre, who wrote an early eighteenth-century plan for perpetual peace, to Rousseau and Kant, as well as statesmen such as Tsar Alexander I, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Robert Schuman, and Mikhail Gorbachev. She locates five major conflicts since 1700 that spurred such visionaries to promote systems of peace in Europe: the War of the Spanish Succession, the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Each moment generated a "spirit" of peace among monarchs, diplomats, democratic leaders, and ordinary citizens. The engineers of peace progressively constructed mechanisms and institutions designed to prevent future wars.

Arguing for continuities from the ideals of the Enlightenment, through the nineteenth-century Concert of Nations, to the institutions of the European Union and beyond, Conquering Peace illustrates how peace as a value shaped the idea of a unified Europe long before the EU came into being. Today the EU is widely criticized as an obstacle to sovereignty and for its democratic deficit. Seen in the long-range perspective of the history of peacemaking, however, this European society of states emerges as something else entirely: a step in the quest for a less violent world.

Stella Ghervas is Professor of Russian History at Newcastle University (UK) and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is also an Associate of the History Department at Harvard University and Visiting Professor at Harvard Summer School since 2015. Her main interests are in intellectual and international history of modern Europe, with special reference to the history of peace and peace-making, and in Russia’s intellectual and maritime history.

She is the author of Alexandre Stourdza (1791-1854): Un intellectuel orthodoxe face à l’Occident (1999), Réinventer la tradition: Alexandre Stourdza et l’Europe de la Sainte-Alliance (which won several book prizes, including the Guizot Prize from the Académie Française, 2008) and Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union (2021), and the editor of Penser l’Europe – Quarante ans d’études européennes à Genève (2003), Lieux d’Europe: Mythes et limites (2008) and A Cultural History of Peace in the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomsburg, with David Armitage, 2020).

Her website is at https://www.ghervas.net/ and you can follow her on Twitter @StellaGhervas

Steven Seegel, Professor of History, University of Northern ColoradoMaphead, Founding Board @H__Ukraine, Borderologist, Translator for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Podcast Host, Proud Slow Runner, Dog Valet

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Ferris, "Behind the Enigma: The Authorized History of GCHQ, Britain’s Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Wed, 28 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

For more than a hundred years, Britain’s signals intelligence agency, GCHQ, has played a central role in the conduct of British statecraft. But the organization has traditionally operated from the shadows, leaving many questions about its internal operations and its impact on policy.

Now, the story of GCHQ can be told with greater clarity: A few years ago, GCHQ opened parts of its archive to John Ferris, a Professor of History at the University of Calgary, and asked him to write an authoritative history of the intelligence agency. The result is Ferris’s monumental new book, Behind the Enigma: The Authorized History of GCHQ, Britain’s Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020).

On this episode, I talk with Professor Ferris about the origins of British signals intelligence, its impact on British policy in World War I and World War II, the type of people who have filled the organization’s ranks over time, and how GCHQ is adapting to the “second age” of computerized signals intelligence.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Erik Grimmer-Solem, "Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Wed, 28 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The First World War marked the end point of a process of German globalization that began in the 1870s, well before Germany acquired a colonial empire or extensive overseas commercial interests. Structured around the figures of five influential economists who shaped the German political landscape, Professor of History, Erik Grimmer-Solem’s Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), explores how their overseas experiences shaped public perceptions of the world and Germany's place in it. These men helped define a German liberal imperialism that came to influence the 'world policy' (Weltpolitik) of Kaiser Wilhelm, Chancellor Bülow, and Admiral Tirpitz. They devised naval propaganda, reshaped Reichstag politics, were involved in colonial and financial reforms, and helped define the debate over war aims in the First World War. Looking closely at German worldwide entanglements, Learning Empire recasts how we interpret German imperialism, the origins of the First World War, and the rise of Nazism, inviting reflection on the challenges of globalization in the current century. Grimmer-Solem, has written an imaginative and first-rate account of several aspects of Kaiserreich Germany’s politics. No one will in the future look at Germany in this period without referencing this book.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Douglas M. O'Reagan, "Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science after the Second World War" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)

Fri, 23 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In his new book Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science After the Second World War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), Douglas O’Reagan describes how the Western Allies gathered teams of experts to scour defeated Germany, seeking industrial secrets and the technical personnel who could explain them. Swarms of investigators invaded Germany's factories and research institutions, seizing or copying all kinds of documents, from patent applications to factory production data to science journals. They questioned, hired, and sometimes even kidnapped hundreds of scientists, engineers, and other technical personnel. They studied technologies from aeronautics to audiotapes, toy making to machine tools, chemicals to carpentry equipment. They took over academic libraries, jealously competed over chemists, and schemed to deny the fruits of German invention to any other land—including that of other Allied nations.

Drawing on declassified records, O'Reagan looks at which techniques worked for these very different nations, as well as which failed—and why. Most importantly, he shows why securing this technology, how the Allies did it, and when still matters today. He also argues that these programs did far more than spread German industrial science: they forced businessmen and policymakers around the world to rethink how science and technology fit into diplomacy, business, and society itself.

Douglas M. O'Reagan is a historian of technology, industry, and national security. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Hosaflook (trans.), "The Siege of Shkodra: Albania's Courageous Stand Against Ottoman Conquest, 1478" (2017)

Thu, 15 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Mehmet the Conqueror shook Europe to its foundations when he captured Constantinople in 1453 and, over the next decades, the Ottoman sultan continued his westward advance through the Balkans and the Mediterranean. But one Albanian fortress became an “unexpected bone in Mehmed’s throat” (xviii). David Hosaflook’s The Siege of Shkodra is the first English rendition of Marin Barleti’s 1504 eye-witness account of that standoff that includes the Christian victory in 1474 and subsequent defeat in 1479. The year after that, the Turks were in Italy (Otranto, 1480), though they would not keep it their foothold. This volume includes Barleti’s compelling story, essays that place it in historical and cultural context, and a number of Ottoman sources that corroborate or contrast with the Christian version. Barleti is also important today as “the first Albanian author” and thus an important national figure in the last century since the end of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War.

In the discussion today, Professor Hosaflook explains the siege, its political and strategic importance, and the Albanian position between the Ottoman Empire, Venice, and the Christian West. He talks about Early Modern Mediterranean slavery, religion, and diplomacy. In addition, he discusses the military lessons we find in this primary source, and his own exploration of castle ruins. He also reflects on his scholarship and three decades of living in a rapidly-changing Albania.

David Hosaflook is a professor of European History, Intercultural Studies, Philosophy of Religion, and Christianity. He’s also the cofounder and executive director of the Institute of Albanian and Protestant Studies. In 2019, he became laureate of the (first annual) ‘22nd of November Prize’ from the Republic of North Macedonia.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Europe and the Atlantic World, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stefano Marcuzzi, "Britain and Italy in the Era of the First World War: Defending and Forging Empires" (Cambridge UP, 2020).

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

This is a reassessment of British and Italian grand strategies during the First World War. Dr. Stefano Marcuzzi, Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, tries to shed new light on a hitherto overlooked but central aspect of Britain and Italy's war experiences: the uneasy and only partial overlap between Britain's strategy for imperial defense and Italy's ambition for imperial expansion in his book: Britain and Italy in the Era of the First World War: Defending and Forging Empires (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Taking Anglo-Italian bilateral relations as a special lens through which to understand the workings of the Entente in World War I, Dr. Marcuzzi reveals how the ups-and-downs of that relationship influenced and shaped to a limited degree Allied grand strategy. Dr. Marcuzzi considers three main issues – war aims, war strategy and peace-making – and examines how, under the pressure of divergent interests and wartime events, the Anglo-Italian 'traditional friendship' turned increasingly into competition by the end of the war, casting a shadow on Anglo-Italian relations both at the Peace Conference and in the interwar period.

While not everyone will be convinced by some of his arguments and propositions (such as the partial rehabilitation of such rightly discredited figures as Salandra and Sonnino), that does not take away from the great effort that Dr. Marcuzzi has made.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anne Searcy, "Ballet in the Cold War: A Soviet-American Exchange" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Fri, 09 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

During the Cold War, cultural diplomacy was one way that the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union tried to cultivate goodwill towards their countries. As Anne Searcy explains in her book, Ballet in the Cold War: A Soviet-American Exchange (Oxford University Press, 2020), dance was part of this effort. She focuses on two tours of the USSR undertaken by American troupes when the American Ballet Company visited the Soviets in 1960, and when choreographer George Balanchine returned to the country of his birth in 1962 with his New York City Ballet Company. These popular tours functioned as an important symbolic meeting point for Soviet and American officials, creating goodwill and normalizing relations between the two countries in an era when nuclear conflict was a real threat. Although geo-political tensions feature in the book, Searcy is just as concerned with the reception of these tours by Soviet and American critics, and how they filtered their opinions on the dances and performers they saw through local aesthetic debates, tinged by political realities.

Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christopher R. Dietrich, "A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations: Colonial Era to the Present" (John Wiley & Sons, 2020)

Thu, 08 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The field of US foreign-relations history is not what it used to be, and that’s a good thing. Earlier historians narrowly defined the field as diplomatic history and kept vast swathes of the United States’ interactions with the world from being explored. In the middle of the 1990s, for example, even the very consideration of gender in the history of US foreign policy could cause controversy (as demonstrated in the 1997 H-Diplo listserv feud about a ground-breaking article on the role of gender in US Cold War strategy). Today, however, gender is a key object of study in the history of US foreign relations, along with race, the environment, globalization, technology, and a myriad of other topics.

Thankfully, we now have an edited volume that comprehensively catalogues the current field’s exciting diversity of approaches and subjects. Entitled A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations: Colonial Era to the Present, it was published last year by Wiley-Blackwell and was edited by the indefatigable Christopher Dietrich. I spoke with Dietrich, as well two of the contributors, Emily Conroy-Krutz and Megan Black, about the Companion and about the study of the history of US foreign relations more broadly. Our conversation will hopefully provide some guidance through the volume’s impressive 1100-plus pages.

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

Elisabeth Piller, "Selling Weimar: German Public Diplomacy and the United States, 1918-1933" (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2020)

Wed, 24 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In the decade after World War I, German-American relations improved swiftly. While resentment and bitterness ran high on both sides in 1919, Weimar Germany and the United States managed to forge a strong transatlantic partnership by 1929. But how did Weimar Germany overcome its post-war isolation so rapidly? How did it regain the trust of its former adversary? And how did it secure U.S. support for the revision of the Versailles Treaty? Elisabeth Piller, winner of the Franz Steiner Preis für Transatlantische Geschichte 2019, explores these questions not from an economic, but from a cultural perspective.

In Selling Weimar: German Public Diplomacy and the United States, 1918-1933 (Franz Steiner Verlag/German Historical Institute, 2020), she illustrates how German state and non-state actors drew heavily on cultural ties - with German Americans, U.S. universities and American tourists - to re-win American trust, and even affection, at a time when traditional foreign policy tools had failed to achieve similar successes. Contrary to common assumptions, Weimar Germany was never incapable of selling itself abroad. In fact, it pursued an innovative public diplomacy campaign to not only normalize relations with the powerful United States, but to build a politically advantageous transatlantic friendship.

Dr. Elisabeth Piller is Assistant Professor of Transatlantic and North American History at the University of Freiburg in Germany. Her Ph.D. dissertation on which the book is based won three prestigious prizes: the Ifa-Forschungspreis Auswärtige Kulturpolitik (2018), the Franz Steiner Preis für Transatlantische Geschichte (2019), and the Friedrich-Ebert-Preis (2020). She works on U.S. and German foreign policy, the history of diplomacy and modern humanitarianism, and transatlantic relations in the 19th and 20th century.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oya Dursun-Özkanca, "Turkey–West Relations: The Politics of Intra-alliance Opposition" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Mon, 22 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

How do we make sense of Turkey’s recent turn against the West – after decades of Turkish cooperation and desire to be integrated into the European and wider Western community in terms of foreign policy? Dr. Oya Dursun-Özkanca’s new book Turkey-West Relations: The Politics of Intra-alliance Opposition (Cambridge UP, 2019) interrogates the dynamics of the relationship between Turkey and the West, particularly the EU, NATO, and the United States. The compelling book develops a framework of intra-alliance opposition to explain this shift from Turkey’s engagement with the West as a desirable ally to Turkey’s increasingly hostility to the West after 2010. Moving beyond the power and personality of Erdogan, Dursun-Özkanca develops an analytical framework of the politics of intra-alliance opposition and provides a comprehensive and nuanced account of how and why Turkish foreign policy has changed within the transatlantic alliance. She offers three categories of intra-alliance opposition behavior: boundary testing; boundary challenging; boundary breaking. She deploys these categories to differentiate between the motivations behind the use of each tool – providing an analysis of Turkey that can also be exported to other cases. This extensively researched book depends upon extensive fieldwork and more than 200 semi-structured elite interviews conducted with government officials, diplomats, academics, officials, and journalists in Turkey, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, the UK, Germany, and the U.S. The book provides 6 case studies (Turkey’s pragmatic foreign policy in the Western Balkans, the Turkish vote over the EU-NATO security exchange, the EU-Turkey deal on the refugee crisis, Turkey’s energy policies, Turkish rapprochement with Russia in security and defense and Turkish foreign policy on Syria and Iraqi) that demonstrate the 3 categories. The book concludes three possible alternative futures for Turkey’s relations with the West and the podcast includes an analysis of what the change in U.S. leadership (Biden-Blinken) might mean for Turkish-Western relations.

Dr. Dursun-Özkanca is the Endowed Chair of International Studies and Professor of Political Science at Elizabethtown College. She has edited two books – The European Union as an Actor in Security Sector Reform (Routledge, 2014) and External Interventions in Civil Wars (co-edited with Stefan Wolff, Routledge, 2014) – and has a forthcoming book entitled The Nexus Between Security Sector Reform/Governance and Sustainable Development Goal-16: An Examination of Conceptual Linkages and Policy Recommendations, forthcoming by Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance (DCAF) (London: Ubiquity Press).

Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists recently appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” was published in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tansen Sen and Brian Tsui, "Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and India, 1840s-1960s" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Mon, 22 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

What were the stories of modern China-India relations in the age of empires? How did India and China engage with each other beyond pan-Asianist and anti-colonialist interactions?

In Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and India, 1840s-1960s (Oxford UP, 2020), fifteen diverse scholars attempt to answer these questions through analyses on literature, religion, diplomacy, intelligence, political activism, nationalism, and more. Together, the chapters of the book argue for a need to understand China-India relations in the period between 1840s to 1960s beyond idealist perceptions of Asian unity. They question the use of fixed periodization and geographically constrained understandings of China-India interactions, at the same time reminding us of the complexities of political transitions and the various roles of mediators.

This edited volume also actively engages with existing frameworks for understanding China-India relations, such as ‘Pan-Asianism’ and ‘China/India as method’ in different ways. Some contributors converge with these frameworks to show how thinkers from India and China tried to imagine alternatives to global imperialism and capitalism. Other contributors suggest that state-driven geopolitical designs and desires to overcome the nation-state system cannot be neatly demarcated.

Prasenjit Duara, in the epilogue of the volume, points out that “India-China studies of the modern period have been largely confined either to the study of ancient civilizational exchanges or to contemporary realpolitik competitions.” He argues, “…what is not mentioned in these formulations is the extent to which these obscuring strategies are themselves an effect of postcolonial Asian societies participating in and even dominating the capitalist nation-state system for control of global resources.” Utilizing new and diverse archival materials in various languages, Beyond Pan-Asianism attempts to address these issues and highlights that modern China-India ties indeed went beyond, if not challenged, the capitalist nation-state system but also reinforced it.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

T. G. Otte, "Statesman of Europe: A Life of Sir Edward Grey" (Penguin, 2020)

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 09:00:00 -0000

'The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our life-time.' The words of Sir Edward Grey, looking out from the windows of the Foreign Office in early August 1914, are amongst the most famous in European history, and encapsulate the impending end of the nineteenth-century world.

The man who spoke them was Britain's longest-ever serving Foreign Secretary (in a single span of office) and one of the great figures of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Statesman of Europe: A Life of Sir Edward Grey (Penguin, 2020) is a magnificent portrait of an age and describes the three decades before the First World War through the prism of his biography, which is based almost entirely on archival sources and presents a detailed account of the main domestic and international events, and of the main personalities of the era. In particular, it presents a fresh understanding of the approach to war in the years and months before its outbreak, and Grey's role in the unfolding of events. Thomas Otte, Professor of Diplomatic History at the University of East Anglia, one of the leading, if not the leading historian dealing with 19th and early 20th century Diplomatic and International politics has written a thoroughly splendid book which will provide both the academic and the lay educated reader with a mine of historical information and insights. By all means do read a book which has been named the New Statesman’s book of the Year for 2020 and which Martin Pugh in the TLS calls ‘a magisterial account that is unlikely to be bettered

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philip Mansel, "King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV" (U of Chicago Press, 2019).

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Philip Mansel, a trustee of the Society for Court Studies and President of the Research Center of the Chateau de Versailles, has written a one-volume biography of the life and times of Louis XIV, King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV (The University of Chicago Press, 2019).

One of the longest reigning monarchs in Europe’s history, from 1643 to 1715, Louis XIV left a mark upon France for good and ill. He expanded the country’s borders but left it in horrible financial shape. He was a valuable patron of the arts and architecture, but wreaked havoc on some of his nation’s citizens, especially French Protestants.

He reaped the glory associated with imperial policy and dynastic intermarriages throughout Europe, but brought destruction to the lives, fortunes, and cities of his enemies. Mansel brings the court of Louis XIV alive, paying special attention to the daily personal life of the king and his associates. He reviews France’s effects on the politics of Europe and provides a detailed history of the key project of Louis’ life: the palace of Versailles.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alexander Morrison, "The Russian Conquest of Central Asia: A Study in Imperial Expansion, 1814–1914" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Alexander Morrison’s study of the conquest of Central Asia offers new perspectives on a topic long obscured by misleading grand narratives. Based on years of research in several countries, The Russian Conquest of Central Asia (Cambridge UP, 2020) not only outright debunks many of these older narratives, but also provides us a detailed military and diplomatic history of the conquest, one which pays specific attention to the contingency and logistics of its multi-stage process. Based on an enormous number of Russian-language materials and supplemented with Persianate chronicles, this work is essential reading for anyone interested in Russian and Central Asian history, military history, or the history of colonialism and comparative empires.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fiona Greenland, "Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Raiders, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy" (U of Chicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 04:00:00 -0000

Today we are joined by Fiona Greenland, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, to talk about her new book, Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Raiders, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

Through much of its history, Italy was Europe’s heart of the arts, an artistic playground for foreign elites and powers who bought, sold, and sometimes plundered countless artworks and antiquities. This loss of artifacts looted by other nations once put Italy at an economic and political disadvantage compared with northern European states. Now, more than any other country, Italy asserts control over its cultural heritage through a famously effective art-crime squad that has been the inspiration of novels, movies, and tv shows. In its efforts to bring their cultural artifacts home, Italy has entered into legal battles against some of the world’s major museums, including the Getty, New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and the Louvre. It has turned heritage into patrimony capital—a powerful and controversial convergence of art, money, and politics.

In 2006, the then-president of Italy declared his country to be “the world’s greatest cultural power.” With Ruling Culture, Fiona Greenland traces how Italy came to wield such extensive legal authority, global power, and cultural influence—from the nineteenth century unification of Italy and the passage of novel heritage laws, to current battles with the international art market. Today, Italy’s belief in its cultural superiority is evident through interactions between citizens, material culture, and the state—crystallized in the Art Squad, the highly visible military-police art protection unit. Greenland reveals the contemporary actors in this tale, taking a close look at the Art Squad and state archaeologists on one side and unauthorized excavators, thieves, and smugglers on the other. Drawing on years in Italy interviewing key figures and following leads, Greenland presents a multifaceted story of art crime, cultural diplomacy, and struggles between international powers.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John D. Wilsey, "God's Cold Warrior: The Life and Faith of John Foster Dulles" (Eardmans, 2021)

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

When John Foster Dulles died in 1959, he was given the largest American state funeral since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s in 1945. President Eisenhower called Dulles—his longtime secretary of state—“one of the truly great men of our time,” and a few years later the new commercial airport outside Washington, DC, was christened the Dulles International Airport in his honor. His star has fallen significantly since that time, but his influence remains indelible—most especially regarding his role in bringing the worldview of American exceptionalism to the forefront of US foreign policy during the Cold War era, a worldview that has long outlived him.

God's Cold Warrior: The Life and Faith of John Foster Dulles (Eardmans, 2021) recounts how Dulles’s faith commitments from his Presbyterian upbringing found fertile soil in the anti-communist crusades of the mid-twentieth century. After attending the Oxford Ecumenical Church Conference in 1937, he wrote about his realization that “the spirit of Christianity, of which I learned as a boy, was really that of which the world now stood in very great need, not merely to save souls, but to solve the practical problems of international affairs.” Dulles believed that America was chosen by God to defend the freedom of all those vulnerable to the godless tyranny of communism, and he carried out this religious vision in every aspect of his diplomatic and political work. He was conspicuous among those US officials in the twentieth century that prominently combined their religious convictions and public service, making his life and faith key to understanding the interconnectedness of God and country in US foreign affairs from World War I to Vietnam.

Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rachel Applebaum, "Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephen Wall, "Reluctant European: Britain and the European Union from 1945 to Brexit" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In 2016, the voters of the United Kingdom decided to leave the European Union. The majority for 'Leave' was small. Yet, in more than 40 years of EU membership, the British had never been wholeheartedly content. In the 1950s, governments preferred the Commonwealth to the Common Market. In the 1960s, successive Conservative and Labour administrations applied to join the European Community because it was a surprising success, whilst the UK's post-war policies had failed. But the British were turned down by the French. When the UK did join, more than 10 years after first asking, it joined a club whose rules had been made by others and which it did not much like. At one time or another, Labour and Conservative were at war with each other and internally. In 1975, the Labour government held a referendum on whether the UK should stay in. Two thirds of voters decided to do so. But the wounds did not heal. Europe remained 'them', 'not 'us'. The UK was on the front foot in proposing reform and modernisation and on the back foot as other EU members wanted to advance to 'ever closer union'.

As a British diplomat from 1968, Stephen Wall observed and participated in these unfolding events and negotiations. He worked for many of the British politicians who wrestled to reconcile the UK's national interest in making a success of our membership with the skeptical, even hostile, strands of opinion in parliament, the press and public opinion. Reluctant European: Britain and the European Union from 1945 to Brexit (Oxford UP, 2020) tells the story of a relationship rooted in a thousand years of British history, and of our sense of national identity in conflict with our political and economic need for partnership with continental Europe.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amit Bein, "Kemalist Turkey and the Middle East: International Relations in the Interwar Period" (Cambridge UP, 2017)

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 04:00:00 -0000

To better understand the lasting legacy of international relations in the post-Ottoman Middle East, Amit Bein's Kemalist Turkey and the Middle East: International Relations in the Interwar Period (Cambridge University Press, 2017), reexamines Turkey’s engagement with the region during the interwar period.

Long assumed to be a period of deliberate disengagement and ruptured ties between Turkey and its neighbors, the volatile 1930s, Bein argues, was instead a period during which Turkey was in fact perceived as taking steps toward increasing its regional prominence.

Bein examines the unstable situation along Turkey’s Middle Eastern borders, the bilateral diplomatic relations Ankara established with fledgling governments in the region, grand plans for transforming Turkey into a major transit hub for Middle Eastern and Eurasian transportation and trade, and Ankara’s effort to enhance its image as a model for modernization of non-Western societies. Through this, he offers a fresh, enlightening perspective on the Kemalist legacy, which still resonates in the modern politics of the region today.

Reuben Silverman is a PhD candidate at University of California, San Diego

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael R. Auslin, "Asia's New Geopolitics: Essays on Reshaping the Indo-Pacific" (Hoover Institution Press, 2020)

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 04:00:00 -0000

Is the Indo-Pacific already the most dominant in terms of global power, politics, and wealth? In his newest book, Michael R. Auslin considers the key issues facing the Indo-Pacific which have ramifications for the entire world. Geopolitical competition in the region threatens stability not just in Asia, but globally.

In a series of essays, Asia's New Geopolitics: Essays on Reshaping the Indo-Pacific (Hoover Institution Press, 2020) Auslin examines the key issues that are changing the balance of power in Indo-China and globally. He examines China's aggressive global policies and strategies, and its attempts to bend the world to its wishes.

He argues that the global focus on the Sino-US competition for power has obscured "Asia's other great game" - the rivalry between long-time foes, China and Japan. He questions whether Kim-Jong-un can control his nuclear weaponry and the implications for safety if he cannot.

Auslin examines the plight of women in India and asks whether its "missing women" are potentially hampering any role that India might play on the global stage. Underlying these concerns, the book analyses U.S. strategy in region. If there is be a shift in the global balance of power, what role can and should the U.S. take in limiting China's hegemony?

The dramatic final chapter paints a bleak picture of a Sino-American Littoral war in the very near future. Is this the geopolitical trajectory in the Indo-Pacific? Michael R. Auslin offers a "future-history" of what soon could be.

Michael Auslin, PhD, is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. A historian by training, he specializes in US policy in Asia and geopolitical issues in the Indo-Pacific region.

Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Frank L. Jones, "Sam Nunn: Statesman of the Nuclear Age" (UP Kansas, 2020)

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steven Press, "Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe's Scramble for Africa" (Harvard UP, 2017)

Tue, 02 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Steven Press is an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. His marvelous first book, Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe’s Scramble for Africa (Harvard University Press, 2017), is an incredibly well-documented monograph that follows a paper trail of questionable treaties to discover the rogues or confidence men whose actions touched off the Scramble for Africa in the 1880s. Dr. Press shows in captivating detail how private European businessmen and firms produced hundreds of deeds purporting to buy political rights from indigenous African leaders whose understanding of these agreements was usually deemed irrelevant. A system of privately governed empires, some spanning hundreds of thousands of square miles, promptly sprang up in the heart of Africa. These experiments in governance quickly attracted notice in European capitals. The book portrays how the whole dubious enterprise came to a head at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, when international diplomacy embraced rogue empires as legal precedents for new colonial agendas, opening up a host of dilemmas about the nature of modern statehood and sovereignty.

Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thomas C. Field, "From Development to Dictatorship: Bolivia and the Alliance for Progress in the Kennedy Era" (Cornell UP, 2014)

Fri, 29 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

How do ideologies of development shape the perceptions of security threats of US foreign policymakers and the political and military leaders of developing countries? What is the relationship between development, democracy, and military coups? How does US foreign aid affect political stability in recipient countries? These are some of the questions addressed in Thomas Field’s fantastic book

From Development to Dictatorship: Bolivia and the Alliance for Progress in the Kennedy Era (Cornell UP, 2014).The book focuses on the relationship between the Kennedy administration and the Bolivian government headed by Victor Paz Estenssoro, a former hero of the Bolivian Revolution, as it attempted to generate economic development and built a centralized state in the vast, landlocked, geographically and ethnically diverse country. Field shows how US support for economic restructuring in the mining sector created clashes between the government and labor unions that undermined Paz’s legitimacy, and how Paz government’s reliance on the military to build infrastructure and execute development programs in the countryside -- a strategy that US policymakers supported wholeheartedly -- increased the political profile of the military and made a military coup increasingly likely. The book ends with Paz’s overthrow in a coup in 1964.

Thomas Field Jr. is an Associate Professor of Global Security and Intelligence at Emory-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona. He holds a Master’s degree from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a PhD in international history from the London School of Economics. Most recently, he co-edited a volume called Latin America’s Cold War, which examines how the Cold War international system interacted with regional and national political dynamics (and was also the subject of a New Books Network interview).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bill Sewell, "Constructing Empire: The Japanese in Changchun, 1905-45" (UBC Press, 2019)

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

What happens to everyday-life in a city when it becomes subsumed into an empire? Who becomes responsible for the everyday building and management of the new imperial enclave? How do local residents and colonial settlers manage to live side-by-side in new imperial arrangements?

In Constructing Empire: The Japanese in Changchun, 1905-45 (University of British Columbia Press 2019), Bill Sewell examines how Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and other civilians in northeast Asia sought to inscribe Manchuria as theirs, and how Japanese imperial architects and civilians in Changchun engaged in diverse empire-building efforts that transformed the city into a modern urban capital for the puppet state of Manchukuo. Sewell argues that "Constructing empire was a mundane and popularly imagined affair as well as a diplomatic, political, and military one." Although studies on empire tend to focus on elite decisions or actions, Sewell contends that "popular dimensions must also be considered to grasp fully empire's nature."

Constructing Empire also reminds us that Changchun, a city in northeast China and today's Jilin province, was a regional trade hub in Qing Inner Asia before the arrival of foreign empire builders. Although the land on which the city was built originally belonged to the Mongolian Front Gorlos Banner, Changchun's first cityscape was constructed by its Chinese settlers in the Qing. After the Russo-Japanese War, Changchun became a boundary between the Russian and Japanese spheres of influence in northeast China and a transfer point for travel between Europe and Asia.

Although the Japanese presence in Manchuria was initially under military authority following the Russo-Japanese War, Sewell observes that the presence of Japanese civilians became increasingly strong after the South Manchuria Railway Company (Mantetsu) established transportation infrastructures, coal mines, power-generation facilities, factories, experimental farms, and railway-zone towns.

Under Japanese occupation, Changchun was renamed Xinjing (J: Shinkyō) and became the capital of the puppet state of Manchukuo. Sewell shows that constructing empire in Xinjing occurred in diverse contexts and was motivated by colonial imaginaries that allowed Japanese civilians to perceive the urban city and its spaces as places of work, worship, recreation, and residence.

Residents of Xinjing were also segregated between the Chinese, Koreans, and the Japanese, with access to spaces and resources in the city unequally distributed. Sewell points out that behind the façades of Pan-Asianism, the Japanese recreated in Xinjing much of the lifestyle that characterized life back home, demonstrating that "there was a closer allegiance to Japanese customs and society than to anything broadly Pan-Asia."

Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vanessa Mongey, "Rogue Revolutionaries: The Fight for Legitimacy in the Greater Caribbean" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020)

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

The University of Pennsylvania describes Mongey's work as follows. "When we think of the Age of Revolutions, George Washington, Robespierre, Toussaint Louverture, or Simon Bolivar might come to mind. But Rogue Revolutionaries: The Fight for Legitimacy in the Greater Caribbean (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020) recovers the interconnected stories of now forgotten "foreigners of desperate fortune" who dreamed of overthrowing colonial monarchy and creating their own countries. They were not members of the political and economic elite; rather, they were ship captains, military veterans, and enslaved soldiers. As a history of ideas and geopolitics grounded in narratives of extraordinary lives, Rogue Revolutionaries shows how these men of different nationalities and ethnicities claimed revolution as a universal right and reimagined notions of sovereignty, liberty, and decolonization."

This book is an innovative transnational history drawn on multilingual sources. Review the digital companion that includes the cast of characters, original sources, maps, and an archive research guide available at https://mongey.fr/.

Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis and the author of The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeremy Pressman, "The Sword is Not Enough: Arabs, Israelis, and the Limits of Military Force" (Manchester UP, 2020)

Thu, 07 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Jeremy Pressman is Associate Professor of Political Science and the Director of Middle East Studies at the University of Connecticut. Jeremy is the author of The Sword is Not Enough: Arabs, Israelis, and the Limits of Military Force (Manchester UP, 2020), an exploration of the dominance of military force as the go-to option for political and social leaders on both sides of the Arab Israeli conflict. In our discussion, Jeremy and I discuss why violence is the default preference among some actors not just in the Arab Israeli conflict but in the realm of international relations. We talk about what can and cannot be achieved by violence, and also discuss why violence will never provide a resolution to the conflict. We also discuss the ideologically air-tight explanations upon which each side can draw that can convince people that the other side can never be trusted, and some of the steps that leaders can take to counteract this dangerous fear. The Sword is Not Enough is published by Manchester University Press in 2020.

Aaron M. Hagler is an associate professor of history at Troy University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vernon Bogdanor, "Britain and Europe in a Troubled World" (Yale UP, 2019)

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Is Britain a part of Europe? The British have been ambivalent on this question since the Second World War, when the Western European nations sought to prevent the return of fascism by creating strong international ties throughout the Continent. Britain reluctantly joined the Common Market, the European Community, and ultimately the European Union, but its decades of membership never quite led it to accept a European orientation. In the view of the distinguished political scientist Vernon Bogdanor, the question of Britain’s relationship to Europe is rooted in “the prime conflict of our time,” the dispute between the competing faiths of liberalism and nationalism. Britain and Europe in a Troubled World (Yale UP, 2019) provides concise, expertly guided tour provides the essential background to the struggle over Brexit.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, "War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-right Circle of Global Power Brokers" (Dey Street Books, 2020)

Mon, 28 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

An explosive and unprecedented inside look at Steve Bannon's entourage of global powerbrokers and the hidden alliances shaping today's geopolitical upheaval.

In 2015, Bloomberg News named Steve Bannon “the most dangerous political operative in America.” Since then, he has grown exponentially more powerful—and not only in the United States. In this groundbreaking and urgent account, award-winning scholar of the radical right Benjamin Teitelbaum takes readers behind-the-scenes of Bannon's global campaign against modernity in War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers (Dey Street Books, 2020).

Inspired by a radical twentieth-century ideology called Traditionalism, Bannon and a small group of right-wing powerbrokers are planning new political mobilizations on a global scale—discussed and debated in secret meetings organized by Bannon in hotel suites and private apartments in DC, Europe and South America. Their goal? To upend the world order and reorganize geopolitics on the basis of archaic values rather than modern ideals of democracy, freedom, social progress, and human rights. Their strenuous efforts are already producing results, from the fortification of borders throughout the world and the targeting of immigrants, to the undermining of the European Union and United States governments, and the expansion of Russian influence.

Drawing from exclusive interviews with Bannon’s hidden network of far-right thinkers, years of academic research into the radical right, and with unprecedented access to the esoteric salons where they meet, Teitelbaum exposes their considerable impact on the world and their radical vision for the future.

Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mark Cornwall, "Sarajevo 1914: Sparking the First World War" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. This key event in 20th-century history continues to fascinate the public imagination, yet few historians have examined in depth the regional context which allowed this assassination to happen or the murder's ripples which quickly spread out across the Balkans, Austria-Hungary and Europe as a whole. In Sarajevo 1914: Sparking the First World War (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Professor Mark Cornwall, a Central European specialist at the University of Southampton, has gathered an impressive cast of contributors from a 2014 history conference to explore the causes of the Sarajevo assassination and its consequences for the Balkans in the context of the First World War.

With Professor Cornwall writing a highly informative introductory essay, this volume assesses from a variety of regional perspectives how the 'South Slav Question' destabilized the empire's southern provinces, provoking violent discontent in Croatia and Bosnia, and exacerbating the empire's relations with Serbia, regarded by Austria-Hungary as a dangerous state. It then explores the ripples of the Sarajevo event, from its evolution into a European crisis to the creation of a new independent state of Yugoslavia.

Bringing together fresh perspectives by historians from Austria, Croatia, Slovenia and Serbia, as well as leading British historians of Austria-Hungary, this book published by Bloomsbury Academic is essential reading for anyone, either specialists or the educated lay reader, who wants to understand the Sarajevo violence and how it shaped modern Balkan history and indeed world history,

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alan McPherson, "Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet's Terror State to Justice" (UNC Press, 2019)

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

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

Heather L. Dichter, "Soccer Diplomacy: International Relations and Football since 1914" (UP of Kentucky, 2020)

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Today we are joined by Heather Dichter, Associate Professor of Sports History and Sports Management at DeMontfort University and fellow at the international Centre for Sports History and Culture. She is also an author in and the editor of Soccer Diplomacy: International Relations and Football since 1914 (University Press of Kentucky, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of soccer diplomacy, the diplomatic role of different actors (including large and small states, international sporting organizations, and individual athletes), and whether winning matters for sports diplomats.

In Soccer Diplomacy, Dichter joins ten other scholars in a critical examination of soccer diplomacy and soccer-as-diplomacy, tracing out the ways that soccer provided a space for international exchange and how states have proactively promoted soccer to achieve diplomatic aims. Dichter shot for a wide geographic spread and each article in the book details a different angle of sports diplomacy from around the world, including some of the usual powerhouses such as Brazil, or historiographically important ones including South Africa, but more commonly from unusual places such as Iceland, Chile, and Australia.

They uncover a range of successful and failed diplomatic projects, illustrating not only the way that sports contributed to the cultural brand of a country, but more importantly the way that soccer could be mobilized by states, organizations, and even individuals to achieve particular diplomatic goals. Surprisingly, many of the diplomatic ventures initially began as sporting ones; governments only joined in reluctantly once their diplomatic possibilities became evident. Others however were whole cloth inventions of states that saw sports diplomacy as one of the few ways they could achieve their geopolitical aims.

Each of the essays in this volume offers insights into soccer’s diplomatic potential and scholars interested in sport diplomacy should read it.

Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. It will come out with Manchester University Press in 2021. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eric Zolov, "The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties" (Duke UP, 2020)

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties (Duke UP, 2020), Professor Eric Zolov retells the history of 1960s Mexico by focusing on the way that Mexican political leaders pursued a paradoxical foreign policy agenda. This agenda consisted reaffirming Mexico’s close and amicable relationship with the United States, while, at the same time, aggressively asserting a much more radical, anti-US conception of hemispheric and international relations. Zolov resolves this foreign policy paradox by setting this period of Mexican history within the larger framework of the global Cold War. In Zolov’s account, Mexico emerges not as a peripheral actor, but a leading voice in the reconfiguration of global alliances during this period. He shows that Mexican policymakers were able to skillfully draw on Mexico’s close relationship with the United States during the 1950s and 1960s while also satisfying the more radical demands of the New Left in Mexico in order to reposition the country as a leading geopolitical actor within an emerging global solidarity movement between nations of the third world. This richly textured and well-argued monograph reinterprets many aspects of Mexican, Latin American, and international history through a skillful re-reading of familiar sources, as well an impressive incorporation new sources.

Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD Candidate in history at Vanderbilt University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Timothy P. Storhoff, "Harmony and Normalization: US-Cuban Musical Diplomacy" (UP of Mississippi, 2020)

Tue, 08 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Dr. Timothy Storhoff is an orchestra administrator, fundraiser, and ethnomusicologist in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oluwakemi M. Balogun, "Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation" (Stanford UP, 2020)

Fri, 04 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Even as beauty pageants have been critiqued as misogynistic and dated cultural vestiges of the past in the US and elsewhere, the pageant industry is growing in popularity across the Global South, and Nigeria is one of the countries at the forefront of this trend. In a country with over 1,000 reported pageants, these events are more than superficial forms of entertainment.

Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation (Stanford UP, 2020) takes us inside the world of Nigerian beauty contests to see how they are transformed into contested vehicles for promoting complex ideas about gender and power, ethnicity and belonging, and a rapidly changing articulation of Nigerian nationhood. Drawing on four case studies of beauty pageants, this book examines how Nigeria's changing position in the global political economy and existing cultural tensions inform varied forms of embodied nationalism, where contestants are expected to integrate recognizable elements of Nigerian cultural identity while also conveying a narrative of a newly-emerging, globally-relevant Nigeria. Oluwakemi M. Balogun critically examines Nigerian pageants in the context of major transitions within the nation-state, using these events as a lens through which to understand Nigerian national identity and international relations.

Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Brenes, "For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Donald Trump campaigned on a great many things in 2016, but one of the issues he used to criticize Democrats was their role in supporting sequestration and cuts to the military budget. While partisan rhetoric about the country being unsafe or the military being underfunded plays well, it obscures an important reality about the relative size of U.S. military funding. The United State spends more than the next ten leading countries combined. The Democratic Party, while often criticized as soft on defense, generally supports high military spending. This seems to contradict many statements made by politicians, and it also confounds expectations about where one might expect the Democrats’ priorities to lay. How did it get to be this way, with Democrats and Republicans supporting high military spending?

Michael Brenes’ For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy explains this contradictory history. Brenes argues that after the beginning of the Cold War, defense spending became an important part of the federal social safety net, winning over adherents from both parties who sought guaranteed employment. This blurred lines between Republicans and Democrats, instead creating a “Cold War Coalition” that was propped up by anticommunists and liberals. While occasionally challenged by progressives and the left or by libertarian-minded conservatives, this coalition has persisted to the present and explains why bipartisan support for the military-industrial complex remains so strong.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Covell F. Meyskens, "Mao's Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In 1964, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) made a momentous policy decision. In response to rising tensions with the United States and Soviet Union, a top-secret massive military industrial complex in the mountains of inland China was built, which the CCP hoped to keep hidden from enemy bombers. Mao named this the Third Front. The Third Front received more government investment than any other developmental initiative of the Mao era, and yet this huge industrial war machine, which saw the mobilization of fifteen million people, was not officially acknowledged for over a decade and a half. In Mao's Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China (Cambridge UP, 2020), Covell Meyskens provides the first history of the Third Front campaign. He shows how the militarization of Chinese industrialization linked millions of everyday lives to the global Cold War, merging global geopolitics with local change.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Charles A. Kupchan, "Isolationism: A History of America's Efforts to Shield Itself from the World" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In the past few years isolationism, which had long been derided in the national discourse, has been making a comeback as a political force. In Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World (Oxford University Press, 2020), Charles A. Kupchan traces the history of the concept in American politics and considers its future influence on American foreign policy. As he demonstrates, isolationism was long dominant in shaping American foreign policy, as for decades political leaders heeded George Washington’s advice to steer clear of entangling alliances. By the end of the 19th century, however, America’s growing engagement with the world sparked policy shifts as various forms of internationalism were introduced. Though isolationism remained a powerful influence on foreign policy, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 publicly discredited isolationism for millions of Americans, paving the way for the adoption of Franklin Roosevelt’s approach of “liberal internationalism.” While this remained the consensus approach through the Cold War, Kupchan shows how the post-Cold War overreach of American foreign policy offered new life to isolationist concepts, giving it a renewed influence shaping America’s relationship with the world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paul Jankowski, "All Against All: The Long Winter of 1933 and the Origins of the Second World War" (Harper, 2020)

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In his latest monograph, All Against All: The Long Winter of 1933 and The Origins of the Second World War (Harper, 2020), Professor Paul Jankowski (Brandeis University) provides a wide-angled account of a critical period of world history, the interwar years, in which the world transitioned from postwar to the prewar and saw the disintegration of collective security and international institutions created after the First World War. Drawing on international history’s methodology of multi-archival research, Jankowski constructs an elegantly written and deeply researched narrative history of this decline by looking at both high-level diplomacy and the changing popular mentalities that influenced many of the decisions of policymakers.

Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the history of Latin American student migration to the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. You can reach him at steven.p.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeremy Black, "Geopolitics and the Quest for Dominance" (Indiana UP, 2016)

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

History and geography delineate the operation of power, not only its range but also the capacity to plan and the ability to implement. Approaching state strategy and policy from the spatial angle, Jeremy Black argues that just as the perception of power is central to issues of power, so place, and its constraints and relationships, is partly a matter of perception, not merely map coordinates. Geopolitics, he maintains, is as much about ideas and perception as it is about the actual spatial dimensions of power. Black's study Geopolitics and the Quest for Dominance (Indiana UP, 2015) ranges widely, examining geography and the spatial nature of state power from the 15th century to the present day. He considers the rise of British power, geopolitics and the age of Imperialism, the Nazis and World War II, and the Cold War, and he looks at the key theorists of the latter 20th century, including Henry Kissinger, Francis Fukuyama and Samuel P. Huntington, Philip Bobbitt, Niall Ferguson, and others.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Victoria Phillips, "Martha Graham's Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Dr. Victoria Phillips adeptly tells the story of Martha Graham's role as diplomat, arts innovator, and dancer. Her book Martha Graham's Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy (Oxford UP, 2019) is a look at the years that her company toured the world as an example of American democracy and freedom. Martha Graham's Cold War frames the story of Martha Graham and her particular brand of dance modernism as pro-Western Cold War propaganda used by the United States government to promote American democracy. Representing every seated president from Dwight D. Eisenhower through Ronald Reagan, Graham performed politics in the global field for over thirty years. This fascinating story takes you through the world of Martha Graham and her famous dancer as they circle the globe promoting American values and artistic ingenuity.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sebastian Strangio, "In the Dragon's Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century" (Yale UP, 2020)

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

For centuries Southeast Asia has enjoyed a relatively pleasant relationship with China, its massive neighbor to the north. While Chinese merchants and laborers were common throughout the region, with exception of a 1,000-year occupation of northern Vietnam, China has rarely attempted to exercise control over Southeast Asia. However, in the past two decades, as the Chinese economy has grown by leaps and bounds, the People’s Republic of China has begun to play an increasingly assertive role in mainland and maritime Southeast Asia. President Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative and Maritime Silkroad project seek to build infrastructure throughout the region; Chinese investors have built casinos in Cambodia and Laos, drawing gamblers south; China’s navy has been building bases on tiny islands, shoals, and reefs in the disputed South China Sea; and citizens from the People’s Republic of China have started to move to Malaysia and Singapore to escape east China’s infamous pollution. Meanwhile, Sinophobia remains a potent force in Indonesian and Malaysian politics; Thai and Khmer social media is full of reports and rumors of bad behavior by Chinese tourists; nationalist mobs in Vietnam have attacked Chinese owned businesses; and Chinese dams are creating an environmental disaster for the lower Mekong Basin. Sebastian Strangio’s In the Dragon’s Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century (Yale UP, 2020) carefully dissects the People’s Republic of China’s complicated relationships with its southern neighbors.

Sebastian Strangio is the Southeast Asia editor for The Diplomat. Since 2008, his work has been published in Foreign Policy, The New York Times, The Economist, The New Republic, Forbes, Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, The Phnom Penh Post, and many other publications. In addition to living and working in Cambodia, he has reported from the various ASEAN nations, Russia, South Korea, and Bangladesh. His first book, Hun Sen’s Cambodia was first published by Yale University Press and Silkworm Books in 2014. It was named as one of the 2015 Books of the Year by Foreign Affairs. Yale University Press has just issued a revised and updated paperback edition of the book under the title Cambodia: From Pol Pot to Hun Sen And Beyond.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

J. E. Peterson, "The Emergence of the Gulf States: Studies in Modern History" (Bloomsbury, 2016)

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

The Emergence of the Gulf States: Studies in Modern History (Bloomsbury, 2016) offers an overview of the history of Saudi Arabia and the five Persian/Arabian Gulf states that emerged from British rule between 1961 and 1971--including Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.

The book synthesized the works of many academics, all experts in their field to bring forward a book that is as comprehensive as possible about the history of the region. It has 11 chapter and all but one chapter are organized into two sections. The first section provides a narrative of the the topic and the second a bibliographic overview.

The scope of the book is vast but predominantly focus on the the history of the gulf from the 1800s to roughly the 1970s and in some cases the 80s. A general theme that the book centers around is that historically speaking, the gulf was interconnected within itself, as Arabs and Persians and other respective ethnic groups, intermixed, traded, fought and married within themselves. Hence the creation of the nation states politically, economically, socially and academically disconnected the region, changing the way people interacted with each other and the outside world as well as shaping the way in which academics studies them.

J. E. Peterson is affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona, USA. He has been a Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (Philadelphia) and the Middle East Institute (Washington, D.C.), and an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (Washington, D.C.). Until 1999, he served as the Historian of the Sultan's Armed Forces in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister for Security and Defence in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman, and spent 2000-2001 at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

Yasmine Al Bastaki is a Masters Student at the Emirates Diplomatic Academy studying International Affairs and Diplomacy. She has a general interest in M.E.N.A studies and issues of Identity. She can be reached at yasminebastaki@yahoo.com. Listener’s feedback, questions and book suggestions are most welcome.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Luke A. Nichter, "The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and the Making of the Cold War" (Yale UP, 2020)

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Few have ever enjoyed the degree of foreign-policy influence and versatility that Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the grand-son of Woodrow Wilson’s senatorial antagonist, did. In the postwar era, perhaps only George Marshall, Henry Kissinger, and James Baker. Cabot Lodge, however, had the distinction of wielding that influence under presidents of both parties. For three decades, he was at the center of American foreign policy, serving as advisor to five presidents, from Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald Ford, and as ambassador to the United Nations, Vietnam, West Germany, and presidential envoy to the Vatican.

Cabot Lodge’s political influence was at times immense. He was the first person, in 1943, to see Eisenhower as a potential presidential material; he entered Eisenhower in the 1952 New Hampshire primary without the candidate’s knowledge, crafted his political positions, and managed his campaign. As UN ambassador in the 1950s, Cabot Lodge was effectively at times a second secretary of state. In the 1960s, he was called twice, by John F. Kennedy and by Lyndon Johnson, to serve in the toughest position in the State Department’s portfolio, as ambassador to South Vietnam. In the 1970s, he paved the way for permanent American ties with the Holy See. Over his career, beginning with his arrival in the U.S. Senate at age thirty-four in 1937, when there were just seventeen Republican senators, he did more than anyone else to transform the Republican Party from a regional, isolationist party into the nation’s dominant force in foreign policy, a position it held from Eisenhower’s time until the twenty-first century.

In this book, The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and the Making of the Cold War (Yale University Press, 2020) historian Luke A. Nichter professor of history at Texas A & M University–Central Texas, coeditor (with Douglas Brinkley) of the New York Times bestselling book The Nixon Tapes: 1971–1972, gives us a outstanding narrative of Cabot Lodge’s extraordinary and consequential life. Cabot Lodge was among the last of the well-heeled Eastern Establishment Republicans who put duty over partisanship and saw themselves as the hereditary captains of the American state. Unlike many who reach his position, Cabot Lodge took his secrets to the grave—including some that, revealed here for the first time, will force historians to rethink their understanding of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

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 recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christopher J. Lee, "Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives" (Ohio UP, 2019)

Tue, 17 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In April 1955, twenty-nine countries from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East came together for a diplomatic conference in Bandung, Indonesia, intending to define the direction of the postcolonial world. Ostensibly representing two-thirds of the world’s population, the Bandung conference occurred during a key moment of transition in the mid-twentieth century—amid the global wave of decolonization that took place after the Second World War and the nascent establishment of a new Cold War world order in its wake.

Participants such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Zhou Enlai of China, and Sukarno of Indonesia seized this occasion to attempt the creation of a political alternative to the dual threats of Western neocolonialism and the Cold War interventionism of the United States and the Soviet Union.

The essays collected in Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Ohio University Press) explore the diverse repercussions of this event, tracing diplomatic, intellectual, and sociocultural histories that ensued as well as addressing the broader intersection of postcolonial and Cold War history.

With a new foreword by Vijay Prashad and a new preface by the editor, Christopher Lee, Making a World After Empire speaks to contemporary discussions of decolonization, Third Worldism, and the emergence of the Global South, thus reestablishing the conference’s importance in twentieth-century global history.

Contributors: Michael Adas, Laura Bier, James R. Brennan, G. Thomas Burgess, Antoinette Burton, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Julian Go, Christopher J. Lee, Jamie Monson, Jeremy Prestholdt, and Denis M. Tull.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Southeast Asian Performance, Ethnic Identity and China’s Soft Power: A Discussion with Dr Josh Stenberg

Thu, 12 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

From glove puppets of Chinese origin and Hakka religious processions, to wartime political theatre and contemporary choirs and dance groups, the diverse performance practices of ethnic Chinese communities throughout Southeast Asia highlight the complexity of minority self-representation and sense of identity of a community that is often considered solely in socioeconomic terms. Each performance form is placed in its social and historical context, highlighting how Sino-Southeast Asian groups and individuals have represented themselves locally and nationally to the region's majority populations as well as to state power.

In this episode, Dr Josh Stenberg talks to Dr Natali Pearson about Sino-Southeast Asian self-representation in performance arts, and challenges essentialist readings of ethnicity or minority. In showing the fluidity and adaptability of Sino-Southeast Asian identities as expressed in performance and public display, Dr Stenberg enriches our understanding of Southeast Asian cultures and art forms, Southeast Asian Chinese identities, and transnational cultural exchanges.

Dr Josh Stenberg is a Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney. A scholar of Sino-Southeast Asian performance and literature, he examines the intersection of ethnic and political identity through the cultural performance of minority ethnic communities. He is the author of Minority Stages: Sino-Indonesian Performance and Public Display (University of Hawaii Press, 2019). In 2020, Dr Stenberg was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) to conduct further research into the reception of China's state-funded cultural diplomacy initiatives among Overseas Chinese communities in multicultural societies.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Deudney, "Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Thu, 12 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Space is again in the headlines. E-billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are planning to colonize Mars. The Trump Administration has created a "Space Force" to achieve "space dominance" with expensive high-tech weapons. The space and nuclear arms control regimes are threadbare and disintegrating. Would-be asteroid collision diverters, space solar energy collectors, asteroid miners, and space geo-engineers insistently promote their Earth-changing mega-projects. Given our many looming planetary catastrophes (from extreme climate change to runaway artificial superintelligence), looking beyond the earth for solutions might seem like a sound strategy for humanity. And indeed, bolstered by a global network of fervent space advocates-and seemingly rendered plausible, even inevitable, by oceans of science fiction and the wizardly of modern cinema-space beckons as a fully hopeful path for human survival and flourishing, a positive future in increasingly dark times.

But despite even basic questions of feasibility, will these many space ventures really have desirable effects, as their advocates insist? In the first book to critically assess the major consequences of space activities from their origins in the 1940s to the present and beyond, Daniel Deudney argues in Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity (Oxford UP, 2020) that the major result of the "Space Age" has been to increase the likelihood of global nuclear war, a fact conveniently obscured by the failure of recognize that nuclear-armed ballistic missiles are inherently space weapons. The most important practical finding of Space Age science, also rarely emphasized, is the discovery that we live on Oasis Earth, tiny and fragile, and teeming with astounding life, but surrounded by an utterly desolate and inhospitable wilderness stretching at least many trillions of miles in all directions. As he stresses, our focus must be on Earth and nowhere else. Looking to the future, Deudney provides compelling reasons why space colonization will produce new threats to human survival and not alleviate the existing ones. That is why, he argues, we should fully relinquish the quest. Mind-bending and profound, Dark Skies challenges virtually all received wisdom about the final frontier.

This is a provocative and exceptionally well-researched book that represents a must-read for anyone interested in space exploration and the growth of the space industry.

John W. Traphagan is a professor in Department of Religious Studies and Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations at the University of Texas at Austin.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ken Tully and Chad Leahy, "Jerusalem Afflicted: Quaresmius, Spain, and the Idea of a 17th-century Crusade" (Routledge, 2019)

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

On Good Friday, 1626, Franciscus Quaresmius delivered a sermon in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem calling on King Philip IV of Spain to undertake a crusade to 'liberate' the Holy Land. Jerusalem Afflicted: Quaresmius, Spain, and the Idea of a 17th-century Crusade (Routledge, 2019) introduces readers to this unique call to arms with the first-ever edition of the work since its publication in 1631. Aside from an annotated English translation of the sermon, this book also includes a series of introductory chapters providing historical context and textual commentary, followed by an anthology of Spanish crusading texts that testify to the persistence of the idea of crusade throughout the 17th century.

Quaresmius' impassioned and thoroughly reasoned plea is expressed through the voice of Jerusalem herself, personified as a woman in bondage. The friar draws on many of the same rhetorical traditions and theological assumptions that first launched the crusading movement at Clermont in 1095, while also bending those traditions to meet the unique concerns of 17th-century geopolitics in Europe and the Mediterranean. Quaresmius depicts the rescue of the Holy City from Turkish abuse as a just and necessary cause. Perhaps more unexpectedly, he also presents Jerusalem as sovereign Spanish territory, boldly calling on Philip as King of Jerusalem and Patron of the Holy Places to embrace his royal duty and reclaim what is rightly his on behalf of the universal faithful. Quaresmius' early modern call to crusade ultimately helps us rethink the popular assumption that, like the chivalry imagined by Don Quixote, the crusades somehow died along with the middle ages.

Elizabeth Spragins is assistant professor of Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross. Her current book project is on corpses in early modern Mediterranean narrative. You can follow her on Twitter @elspragins.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joanne Paul, "Counsel and Command in Early Modern English Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

While it has often been recognized that counsel formed an essential part of the political discourse in early modern England, the precise role that it occupied in the development of political thinking has remained obscure. Counsel and Command in Early Modern English Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2020) establishes the importance of the relationship between political counsel and the discourse of sovereignty. Tracing the changes and evolution of writings on political counsel during the “monarchy of counsel,” from the end of the Wars of the Roses to the end of the English Civil War, Joanne Paul examines English thought in its domestic and transnational context, providing an original account of the relationship between counsel and emerging conceptions of sovereignty. Formed at the conjunction of the history of political thought and English political history, this book grounds textual analysis within the context of court politics, intellectual and patronage networks, and diplomacy.

Ryan Tripp is an adjunct for universities and California community colleges.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Vitalis, "Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security That Haunt U.S. Energy Policy" (Stanford UP, 2020)

Tue, 10 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Freeing ourselves from the spell of oilcraft won't be easy. But the benefits of doing so, and the drawbacks of not, make it essential.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Agnès Delahaye, "Settling the Good Land: Governance and Promotion in John Winthrop’s New England" (Brill, 2020)

Wed, 04 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Agnès Delahaye’s new book, Settling the Good Land: Governance and Promotion in John Winthrop’s New England (Brill, 2020), is the story of John Winthrop’s tenure as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630’s. In a correction to the prevailing narrative of Puritans alone in the New England wilderness, Professor Delahaye shows the colonists’ commercial connections to the Old England and the Atlantic World and how earnestly the magistrates of the Massachusetts Bay Company maintained these through promotional writing, where their particular, innovative project of permanent settlement can be traced and contextualized.

John Winthrop’s Journal reveals a deep desire for economic independence, or “competency,” born of his frustrations with his limited options in a cramped England, which he played out in a New World—a Promised Land—that he considered to be boundlessly fertile with possibility. Always expanding, Winthrop competed ruthlessly with the indigenous Americans in a “continuous process of rumors, intimidation, conflicts and negotiations, which Winthrop navigated with unwavering confidence in his own racial superiority” (p. 261). Settling the Good Land is a remarkable and magisterial study of a man who simultaneously held (and realized) these ambitions with one hand and to the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the other. Yet, he saw no conflict in them but rather the “fulfillment of his religious and personal calling” (p. 121).

Professor Delahaye teaches in Lyon at Université Lumière Lyon II and is a member of the interdisciplinary Triangle Research Group which combines “action, discourses, economic and political thought” to better understand the meeting of political ideas and consequences. Last year she received the rank of habilitation to direct doctoral theses, the highest rank in the French academic system.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Europe and the Atlantic World, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ian Buruma, "The Churchill Complex" (Penguin Press, 2020)

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 09:00:00 -0000

From one of its keenest observers, The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, from Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit (Penguin Press) is a brilliant, witty journey through the "Special Relationship" between Britain and America that has done so much to shape the world, from World War II to Brexit.

It's impossible to understand the last 75 years of American history, through to Trump and Brexit, without understanding the Anglo-American relationship, and specifically the bonds between presidents and prime ministers. FDR of course had Churchill; JFK famously had Macmillan, his consigliere during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reagan found his ideological soul mate in Thatcher, and George W. Bush found his fellow believer, in religion and in war, in Tony Blair. And now, of course, it is impossible to understand the populist uprising in either country, from 2016 to the present, without reference to Trump and Boris Johnson, though ironically, they are also the key to understanding the special relationship's demise.

There are few things more certain in politics than that at some point, facing a threat to national security, a leader will evoke Winston Churchill to stand for brave leadership (and Neville Chamberlain to represent craven weakness). As Ian Buruma shows, in his dazzling short tour de force of storytelling and analysis, the mantle has in fact only grown more oppressive as nuanced historical understanding fades and is replaced by shallow myth. Absurd as it is to presume to say what Churchill would have thought about any current event, it's relatively certain he would have been horrified by the Iraq War and Brexit, to name two episodes dense with "Finest Hour" analogizing.

But The Churchill Complex is much more than a reflection on the weight of Churchill's legacy and its misuses. At its heart is a series of shrewd and absorbing character studies of the president-prime minster dyads, which in Ian Buruma's gifted hands serve as a master class in politics, diplomacy and abnormal psychology. It's never been a relationship of equals: from Churchill's desperate cajoling and conniving to keep FDR on side in the war on, British prime ministers have put much more stock in the relationship than their US counterparts did.

For England, resigned to the loss of its once-great empire and the diminishment of its power, its close kinship to the world's greatest superpower would give it continued relevance, and serve as leverage to keep continental Europe in its place. As Buruma shows, this was almost always fool's gold. And now, even as the links between the Brexit vote and the 2016 US election are coming into sharper focus, the Anglo-American alliance has floundered on the rocks of the isolationism that is one of 2016's signal legacies.

The Churchill Complex may not have a happy ending, but as with Ian Buruma's other works, piercing lucidity and elegant prose is its own form of lasting comfort.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Zoellick, "America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy" (Twelve, 2020)

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Ranging from Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson to Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, and James Baker, America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy (Twelve, 2020), tells the delightful story of the history of American diplomacy since 1776.

Recounting in a superb fashion the leading actors and events of U.S. foreign policy, Robert Zoellick, former President of the World Bank, Deputy Secretary of State and Deputy White House chief of Staff, identifies the five traditions that have emerged from America's encounters with the world: the importance of North America; the special roles trading, transnational, and technological relations play in defining ties with others; changing attitudes toward alliances and ways of ordering connections among states; the need for public support, especially through Congress; and the belief that American policy should serve a larger purpose. These traditions frame a closing review of post-Cold War presidencies, which Zoellick foresees serving as guideposts for the future of American diplomacy.

Both a sweeping work of history and an insightful guide to U.S. diplomacy past and present, America in the World serves as an informative companion and practical adviser to readers seeking to understand the strategic and immediate challenges of U.S. foreign policy during an era of transformation and change. All by one of the leading practitioners of American diplomacy of our era. Perfect reading for the lay educated reader who has an interest in either American history or contemporary events.

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 recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Martyn Rady, "The Habsburgs: To Rule the World" (Basic Books, 2020)

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In The Habsburgs: To Rule the World (Basic Books, 2020), Martyn Rady, Masaryk Professor of Central European History at University College London, tells the epic story of a dynasty and the world it built -- and then lost -- over nearly a millennium. From modest origins in what is to-day southern Germany and Switzerland, the Habsburgs gained control first of Austria in the 12th century and then the Holy Roman Empire in the fifteenth century. Then, in just a few decades, their possessions rapidly expanded to take in a large part of Europe, stretching from Hungary to Spain, and parts of the New World and the Far East. The Habsburgs continued to dominate Central Europe through the First World War.

Historians often depict the Habsburgs as leaders of a ramshackle empire. But in this wide-ranging view of their past, Professor Rady reveals Habsburg’s enduring power, driven by the belief that they were destined to rule the world as defenders of the Roman Catholic Church, guarantors of peace, and patrons of learning. The Habsburgs is a highly interesting and readable history of a remarkable dynasty that forever changed Europe and the world. A perfect book for the lay educated reader who has heard of the dynasty but wants to know more.

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 recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Walzer, "A Foreign Policy for the Left" (Yale UP, 2018)

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In my old age, I try to argue more quietly, though I still believe that sharp disagreement is a sign of political seriousness. What engaged citizens think and say matters; we should aim to get it right and to defeat those who get it wrong. I understand the very limited impact of what I write, but I continue to believe that the stakes are high.

– Michael Walzer (2018)

These thoughts, from the preface of A Foreign Policy for the Left (Yale University Press, 2018), reflect the understated wisdom of a highly regarded 85-year old political theorist, Michael Walzer. His many books include the influential Just and Unjust Wars, and others mentioned in this interview including: Thick and Thin – Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, Spheres of Justice – A Defense of Pluralism and Equality, and Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War and Citizenship – the last one being published in 1970 at the height of the divisive Vietnam War era when Walzer was teaching at Harvard.

Much of the material for Michael’s books derives from his long affiliation with Dissent magazine – he apprenticed as a young leftist partisan under the prolific Irving Howe whose writing, social role and politics helped shape the young Walzer. Evidence of Michael’s current and ongoing political engagement, as well as the clarity of his thought and seriousness of his message can be seen here: ‘A Note on Racial Capitalism’ from Dissent in July 2020. In his note Michael references K. Sabeel Rahman’s Dissent article ‘Dismantle Racial Capitalism’ in his first paragraph; a month later two scholars write ‘A Reply to Michael Walzer’ from which comes: ‘A Reply to Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Liam Kofi Bright’.

Professor Walzer published his first Dissent article in 1956 which provides some timeline context for one of the first questions in this interview about whether the Hiss-Chambers testimonies before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (1948) might represent the opening confrontation of our polarizing culture wars. As you will hear, Michael thinks it could date back further; and shares a few thoughts on teaching at Harvard in the sixties, and pivotal moments in his career as a young leftist partisan. He comments about scholars like Rawls, Nozick and Geertz; and offers opinions related to our current polarization including a recent Rolling Stone article, the origins of resentment, engaged citizenship and voting, 9/11 and its aftermath, justice, ‘complex equality’, ‘formative’ books and a poet.

An overview of Michael’s life and work, Justice is Steady Work – A Conversation on Political Theory (Polity Press 2020) with Astrid von Busekist at SciencesPo (originally published in French) out soon.

Michael Walzer is professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and editor emeritus at Dissent magazine. Professor Walzer studied on a Fulbright Fellowship at Cambridge and completed his PhD in government at Harvard University.

Keith Krueger lectures at the SHU-UTS Business School in Shanghai.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chris Fenton, "Feeding the Dragon: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, and American Business" (Post Hill Press, 2020)

Mon, 05 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

For seventeen years, Chris Fenton served as the president of DMG Entertainment Motion Picture Group, a multi-billion-dollar global media company headquartered in Beijing. He has produced or supervised twenty-one films, grossing $2 billion in worldwide box-office.

In his new book, Feeding the Dragon: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, & American Business (Post Hill Press, 2020), Fenton shares not only his journey from waiting tables at the Olive Garden to producing some of the most recognizable Hollywood blockbuster movies. And, in the process, he discovers his diplomatic mission: connecting the US and China through commerce and culture:

I felt a sense of mission that went far beyond box-office numbers. US-China relations were on the line. We all knew it. We had to make it work. But as an American, something bigger was at stake. We were pulling a rival country’s culture into our own. We were doing more than opening a market or making nice with China. We were bridging a cultural gap, making the world smaller, more stable, less contentious, and much safer. Failure would surely result in the opposite effect.

Fenton conveys not only the regulatory obstacles that U.S. movies face when entering the Chinese market but also the cultural barriers. For the media to be successful in China, it needs to be relevant to Chinese audiences. But, while facing challenges in Asia, DMG also found trouble in the U.S. when the Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation of their dealings in China

Like the blockbuster movies Fenton produces (and talks of a cinematic adaption of Feeding the Dragon are underway), this book has broad appeal. It is a gripping page-turner, a glimpse into the regulatory complexity of the Chinese entertainment market, and an introduction into what Fenton calls “film diplomacy.” Punctuated by succinct chapters, the book is an easy read, mixing a compelling story with rich insights.

Like the blockbuster movies Fenton produces (and talks of a cinematic adaption are underway), Feeding the Dragon has broad appeal. It is a gripping page-turner, a glimpse into the regulatory complexity of the Chinese entertainment market, and an introduction into what Fenton calls “film diplomacy.” Punctuated by succinct chapters, the book is an easy read, mixing a compelling story with rich insights.

Nick Pozek is Assistant Director of the Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law at Columbia University and a host of New Books in Law.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Denise E. Bates, "Basket Diplomacy: Leadership, Alliance-Building, and Resilience among the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, 1884-1984" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)

Fri, 02 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Before the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana became one of the state’s top private employers—with its vast landholdings and economic enterprises—they lived well below the poverty line and lacked any clear legal status.

After settling in the Bayou Blue in 1884, they forged friendships with their neighbors, sparked local tourism, and struck strategic alliances with civic and business leaders, aid groups, legislators, and other tribes. Coushattas also engaged the public with stories about the tribe’s culture, history, and economic interests that intersected with the larger community, all while battling legal marginalization exacerbated by inconsistent government reports regarding their citizenship, treaty status, and eligibility for federal Indian services.

Well into the twentieth century, the tribe had to overcome several major hurdles, including lobbying the Louisiana legislature to pass the state’s first tribal recognition resolution (1972), convincing the Department of the Interior to formally acknowledge the Coushatta Tribe through administrative channels (1973), and engaging in an effort to acquire land and build infrastructure.

Basket Diplomacy: Leadership, Alliance-Building, and Resilience among the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, 1884-1984 (University of Nebraska Press) demonstrates how the Coushatta community worked together—each generation laying a foundation for the next—and how they leveraged opportunities so that existing and newly acquired knowledge, timing, and skill worked in tandem.

Denise E. Bates is a historian and an assistant professor of leadership and interdisciplinary studies at Arizona State University.

David Dry is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lorenz M. Lüthi, "Cold Wars: Asia, the Middle East, Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

What was the Cold War that shook world politics for the second half of the twentieth century? Standard narratives focus on Soviet-American rivalry as if the superpowers were the exclusive driving forces of the international system. Lorenz M. Lüthi, Associate Professor of History at McGill University in his new book Cold Wars: Asia, the Middle East, Europe (Cambridge UP, 2020), offers a radically different account, restoring agency to regional powers in Asia, the Middle East and Europe and revealing how regional and national developments shaped the course of the global Cold War. Despite their elevated position in 1945, the United States, Soviet Union and United Kingdom quickly realized that their political, economic, and military power had surprisingly tight limits given the challenges of decolonization, Asian-African internationalism, pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, Arab–Israeli antagonism, and European economic developments. A series of Cold Wars ebbed and flowed as the three world regions underwent structural changes that weakened or even severed their links to the global ideological clash, leaving the superpower Cold War as the only major conflict that remained by the 1980s. While not everyone will necessarily agree with all aspects of this at times hyper-revisionist account of the conflict that we call the Cold War, scholars and lay person alike will be ultra-impressed by the wide range of this narrative history, as well as the breath of research displayed by Professor Luthi. In short this is a book that is required reading for anyone interested in, or specializing in the Cold War.

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 recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Learning from Rwanda: How 100 Days of Mass Killing Finally Led to International Reform (Part 2)

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Rwanda witnessed a 100-day mass genocide back in 1994, when the ethnic Hutu government and its supporters led a campaign that left around 800,000 people, including Tutsis and moderate Hutus, dead. And while, shockingly, the event was not given enough attention by the international community at the time, Rwanda’s genocide later led to reform and innovation in order to prevent and respond to such crises and to help the recovery of societies post conflicts.

In this episode, Dr. Philip Drew, Associate Professor at Australia National University and Assistant Dean of Faculty of Law at Queens University, and Dr. Bruce Oswald, Professor at Melbourne Law School talk about what led to the events of 1994 and how it generated more focus on international communities’ responses to government-sponsored violence in the future. This discussion is an extension of a special issue of Brill’s Journal of International Peacekeeping, called “Rwanda Revisited: Genocide, Civil War, and the Transformation of International Law.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Justin Q. Olmstead, "The United States' Entry into the First World War: The Role of British and German Diplomacy" (Boydell Press, 2019)

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The complicated situation which led to the American entry into the First World War in 1917 is often explained from the perspective of public opinion, US domestic politics, or financial and economic opportunity. In this new book, The United States' Entry into the First World War: The Role of British and German Diplomacy (Boydell Press, 2019), by Associate Professor of History at the University of Central Oklahoma, Justin Quinn Olmstead, however, reasserts the importance of diplomats and diplomacy. Based on original research, the book provides a look at British, German, and American diplomacy in the period 1914-17. It argues that British and German diplomacy in this period followed the same patterns as had been established in the preceding decades. It goes on to consider key issues which concerned diplomats, including the international legality of Britain's economic blockade of Germany, Germany's use of unrestricted submarine warfare, peace initiatives, and Germany's attempt to manipulate in its favour the long history of distrust in Mexican-American relations. Overall, the book demonstrates that diplomats and diplomacy played a key role, thereby providing a fresh and original approach to this crucially important subject. To top it off, the author finishes the text with a truly splendid bibliographic essay on the historical literature dealing with this ultra-important subject.

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 recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Victor McFarland, "Oil Powers: A History of the US-Saudi Alliance" (Columbia UP, 2020)

Thu, 17 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia is a critical feature of the modern international system. It binds the global hegemon to a region on the other side of the planet. And it has facilitated capitalist-led globalization. However, as both the US and and Saudi governments have tried to hide the relationship from their respective citizens, it also has been poorly understood.

Victor McFarland, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Missouri, has sorted through the secrecy and head-spinning complexities of the US-Saudi relationship, examining everything from petrodollars to military contracting. His new book, Oil Powers: A History of the US-Saudi Alliance (Columbia University Press) is a testament to that hard work.

In Oil Powers, McFarland, traces the history of the US-Saudi alliance across the twentieth century. He shows how the alliance contributed to financialization; how it helped entrench a world order based on oil; and how it tugged both countries rightward in the 1970s, both in economic and foreign policy. As can be surmised from this sample of the book’s arguments, McFarland makes our contemporary moment a lot more comprehensible.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices