New Books In World Affairs

We are living in an age of addiction, from compulsive gaming and binge eating to pornography and opioid abuse. Today I talked with historian David Courtwright about the global nature of pleasure, vice, and capitalism. His new book is called The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business (Harvard University Press, 2019). During our discussion, Courtwright walks us through the emergence of the worldwide commodification of vice and shares his views on "limbic capitalism," the network of competitive businesses targeting the brain pathways responsible for feeling, motivation, and long-term memory. The book is equally interesting and disturbing. And Courtwright offers timely recommendations about how we can understand and address the Age of Addiction. Coming from one of the world's leading experts on the history of drugs and addiction, this important work raises stimulating and sobering questions about consumption and free will. Courtwright is the author of Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Mod

Lindsey N. Kingston’s new book, Fully Human: Personhood, Citizenship, and Rights (Oxford University Press, 2019) interrogates the idea of citizenship itself, what it means, how it works, how it is applied and understood, and where there are clear gaps in that application. This is a wide-ranging, rigorously researched examination of citizenship, statelessness, and human movement. And it is vitally relevant to contemporary discussions of immigration, supranationalism, understandings of national borders, and concepts of belonging. Not only does Kingston delve into theoretical concepts of citizenship and statelessness, she also integrates analyses of various kinds of hierarchies of personhood in context of these broader issues. The research also includes explorations of nomadic people, indigenous nations, and "second class" citizens in the United States within this theoretical framework of citizenship and statelessness. This careful and broad analysis defines the novel idea of ‘functional citizenship’, which is b

We are fed a steady stream of doom and gloom—terrorist attacks, erosion of democracy, robots taking our jobs. But Michael A. Cohen and his co-author Mich Zenko argue in Clear and Present Safety: The World Has Never Been Better and Why That Matters to Americans (Yale University Press, 2019) that our world has never been “more peaceful, freer, healthier, better educated, and wealthier,” and we only feel otherwise because of “threat inflation” that sensationalizes relatively minor threats.  In our discussion, Cohen readily acknowledges serious problems remain, such as climate change and gun violence, but urges us to recognize how much progress has been made and apply the lessons that have been learned. Moreover, he asks us to beware the “threat-industrial complex” of military agencies, special interest groups and the media that distort our understanding of the world we live in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Moral and political theorists have paid a healthy amount of attention to states’ rights to determine who may reside within their territory.  Accordingly, there’s a large literature on immigration, borders, asylum, and refugees.  However, relatively little work has been done on questions concerning how refugees are treated once they have gained access to a new country; and from these questions emerge additional issues concerning the repatriation of refugees.  As it turns out, there are several global organizations involved in efforts to make repatriation accessible to refugees.  However, it is frequently the case that repatriation is dangerous and risky; and often the refugees’ desire to repatriate is arguably non-voluntary.  Distinctive moral concerns quickly into view. In The Ethics and Practice of Refugee Repatriation (University of Edinburgh Press, 2018), Mollie Gerver systematically addresses these distinctive moral questions.  Combining philosophical analysis with testimonial data from extensive field wo

Are you tired of the constant refrain from our campus radicals and their bien-pensant allies in the intelligentsia that the United States and the United Kingdom, AKA the American and the British empires are the source of all the problems in the world, past and present?  Do you not regard Sir Winston Churchill and other heroic figures of the recent and not so recent Anglo-American past as villains and racists to boot? If so University of Exeter Professor of History, Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian writing in the Anglophone world to-day has the very book that you are looking for, Imperial Legacies: The British Empire Around the World (Encounter Books, 2019). Professor Black, in his usual mandarin style, shows the reader how criticisms of the legacy of the British Empire are, in part, criticisms of the reality of American power today. He emphasizes the prominence of imperial rule in history and in the world today as well, and the selective manner in which certain countries are castigated or not castiga

In The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World (MIT Press, 2018), Dr. Christopher Preston argues that what is most startling about the Anthropocene -- our period in time where there are no longer places on Earth untouched by humans -- is not only how much impact humans have had, but how much deliberate shaping humans will do. To help us understand the Synthetic Age, Dr. Preston details the emerging fields of study and accompanying technologies that may allow for a world designed by humans. He walks us through the advent of nano-scale technologies to the possibilities of deliberate marco-level ecosystem and atmospheric management. What’s more, we’re not only faced with a plethora of possibility, but journey through historical and ongoing debates regarding the ethics of it all. In fact, The Synthetic Age, is part history of emerging technologies, part mini-biography of all the key persons involved, and part window into the continued ethical debate among enthusias

What role do visual media play in establishing a medical phenomenon? Who mobilizes these representations, and to what end? In Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic (Cambridge UP, 2018), Lukas Engelmann uses AIDS atlases to show how different kinds of visualization mapped on to different ideas of how to control the disease. By retelling the history of the most important epidemic of the twentieth century—which persists to this day—through clinical photographs, epidemiological maps, and the icon of the HIV virus, Engelmann reminds us that what often gets referred to in a monolithic sense as “knowledge production” is leveraged in local epistemic, cultural, and political contexts with major consequences. Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He works on computing, quantification, communication, and governance in modern America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In recent years, the concept of a ‘Cold War’ has been revived to describe the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the two most influential states occupying positions of geopolitical importance in the Persian Gulf, who lay claim to leadership over the Islamic world. In the years after the 1979 revolution in Iran, the two states became embroiled in a rivalry that risked consuming the region, dividing it along religious lines. Although latent for a good number of years, the rivalry has erupted in Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain, Syria and Yemen, since the Second Gulf War. With devastating consequences in the region as a whole. As a consequence of its escalation, a number of scholars have begun to explore this increasingly fractious rivalry. The latest piece of work has been undertaken by the prolific Indian émigré journalist Dilip Hiro, a long-time expert on Near & Middle East politics and the author of a large number of books and opinion pieces on the topic, among others. In Cold War in the Islamic World: Saudi Arabi

Christian Philip Peterson joins us today to talk about The Routledge History of World Peace since 1750 (Routledge, 2018), which he co-edited with William M. Knoblauch and Michael Loadenthal. The collection of essays examines the varied and multifaceted scholarship surrounding the topic of peace and engages in a fruitful dialogue about the global history of peace since 1750. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book includes contributions from authors working in fields as diverse as history, philosophy, literature, art, sociology, and Peace Studies. The book crosses the divide between historical inquiry and Peace Studies scholarship, with traditional aspects of peace promotion sitting alongside expansive analyses of peace through other lenses, including specific regional investigations of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and other parts of the world. Divided thematically into six parts that are loosely chronological in structure, the book offers a broad overview of peace issues such as peacebuilding, state

Of all the blank spots in the mental maps of many Americans, Africa is one of the largest. Informed by a number of misconceptions and popular myths, knowledge of the continent’s complexity is poorly understood not just by ordinary citizens but by policymakers as well. This ignorance informs foreign relations with African states: as Maxine Waters once put it, when it came to the Rwandan Genocide, she couldn’t tell whether the Hutus or the Tutsis were right, and because of that she couldn’t tell anybody else what to do. Consequently, the drivers of foreign intervention in Africa are often ill-informed about local contexts, and this has driven a number of disastrous foreign interventions that have rarely fixed the problems they set out to resolve. In Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War: Sovereignty, Responsibility, and the War on Terror (Ohio UP, 2018), Elizabeth Schmidt picks up where she left off in an earlier book and examines several different foreign interventions in Africa. Using a variety of

In the late second century BCE, a series of trading route developed between China in the east and Rome’s empire in the west. Craig Benjamin’s Empires of Ancient Eurasia: The First Silk Roads Era, 100 BCE-250 CE (Cambridge University Press, 2018) describes the emergence of these routes and the roles the empires of the era played in their development. Benjamin credits the pastoral nomadic tribes of the Xiongnu and the Yuezhi, with playing a key role in catalyzing the Silk Road, as their presence led the Chinese to undertake expeditions westward that brought them into direct contact with the peoples of the region. As both a commodity and a currency silk played an important role in the process of developing these links, and the fabric gradually made its way westward until the Romans in western Asia came into contact with it. Their fascination with silk ensured a continuous flow of commerce and ideas across Eurasia, until the problems faced by the Parthians and Kushan empires disrupted the trade in ways that broug

Tonight we are talking with Federico Varese about his new book Mafias on the Move: How Organized Crime Conquers New Territories (Princeton University Press, 2011). Whenever you read a book about transnational crime one of the themes will be about how globalisation has made it easier for organized crime groups to operate. You will also see another chapter about how large mafia style groups are spreading outside their traditional domains. But there have been very few studies, other than individual case studies, of how this occurs and what circumstances help or hinder this expansion of operation. Federico takes a rigorous approach to try and answer these questions. He not only looks at how groups expand but also compares successful expansion to unsuccessful cases. He asks what features of the social environment allowed one group to succeed and another to fail. His answers are surprising and they reveal some cumbersome characteristics of large, structured organised crime groups which make it difficult for them to

In his new book, Apartheid Guns and Money: A Tale of Profit(Hurst, 2019), Hennie van Vuuren examines the final decades of the apartheid regime in South Africa. He weaves together archival material, interviews and newly declassified documents to expose some of the darkest secrets of apartheid’s economic crimes and their murderous consequences. Those who profited from sustaining white power in South Africa included heads of state, arms dealers, aristocrats, bankers, spies, journalists and secret lobbyists. Whistleblowers were assassinated and ordinary people suffered. This war machine, as van Vuuren describes it, remains a largely hidden aspect of South Africa’s past – until now. Van Vuuren explains how shades of apartheid continue to threaten democracy; inequality, poverty, insecurity, state surveillance, excessive police force, selective prosecutions, and threats to media freedom from a good part of the post-apartheid political experience. The book attempts to piece together the secret global network that pro

Robert McNamara is best remembered today for his momentous term as Secretary of Defense in the 1960s. Often overlooked because of this is his even longer tenure as president of the World Bank, one that reflected both the strengths and flaws of McNamara’s leadership. In Robert McNamara’s Other War: The World Bank and International Development (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), Patrick Sharma situates McNamara’s tenure within the context of the changes taking place both in international development and in the broader global economy. Sharma describes how in the two decades prior to McNamara’s selection to run it the World Bank was a relatively small institution focused mainly on financing infrastructure projects in the developing world. McNamara brought to the agency a determination to do more, dramatically expanding the number of staff employed and redirecting the focus of the organization towards fighting global poverty. While Sharma details the Bank’s success in expanding its access to financial resour

Are market cities better than people cities? Does the satisfaction that residents take in their city vary from market city to people city? In Market Cities, People Cities: The Shape of Our Urban Future (NYU Press, 2018), Dr. Michael Oluf Emerson and Dr. Kevin T. Smiley identify the kinds of cities people want to live in and the façades strategically placed by city administrators to draw a specific crowd. Emerson and Smiley characterize cities as being somewhere along a spectrum with market city as one extreme and people city as the other extreme. Market cities are inclined to focus on wealth, employment, individualism, and economic opportunity. People cities are more egalitarian, with government investment in infrastructure and an active civil society. In this interview, Dr. Smiley discusses the implications urban design and policy have on environment and on the experience of people who inhabit these two types of cities. He shares that the approach in which a city takes to mitigate and respond to environmenta

Throughout modern history, British and American rivalry has gone hand in hand with common interests. Now renown diplomatic historian Professor Kathleen Burk in her newest book, The Lion and the Eagle: The Interaction of the British and American Empires, 1783-1972 (Bloomsbury, 2019), examines and looks at the different kinds and forms of power and influence that these the two empires have projected, and the ways and means they have used to do it. What these two empires have shared is a mixture of pragmatism, ruthless commercial drive, a self-righteous foreign policy and plenty of naked aggression. These have been aimed against each other more than once; yet their underlying alliance against common enemies has been historically unique and a defining force throughout the twentieth century. This is a global history of an unusual type: the rise and fall of empires projected against their joint interaction with Japan, China in the 19th century and vis-á-vis Europe and the Near East in the 20th century. Ranging from

Over the past decade, and especially in the last several years, anti-Semitic crimes have increased significantly. According to FBI Statistics, hate crimes against Jews in the US spiked 37% between 2016 and 2017. We are witnessing similar trends in Canada, where anti-Semitic crimes increased by 60% since last year, according to Statistics Canada. Why is it that anti-Semitism continues to thrive? Why won’t this irrational hatred die? What factors contribute to the rise of anti-Semitism? Deborah E. Lipstadt addresses these, and many other questions, in her book, Antisemitism: Here and Now(Schocken, 2019). The number 1 best-seller in Human Rights Law on Amazon, Lipstadt’s book is a provocative page-turner about this ancient and persistent form of hatred and prejudice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's easy to get sidetracked while writing a book. But imagine being interrupted by the President of the United States. That happened to Tom Wheeler, who was in the midst of writing a history of communication networks when President Obama appointed him to be chairman of the Federal Communications Commission in 2013. Wheeler went from writing history to participating in it, making consequential decisions about net neutrality, cybersecurity, privacy, and the 5G mobile network. Wheeler is a former President of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association and former CEO of the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association. He was inducted into the Wireless Hall of Fame in 2003 and the Cable Television Hall of Fame in 2009. After leaving the FCC at the end of President Obama's second term, Wheeler finished his book, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future (Brookings Institution Press, 2019). He is currently a visiting fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. Wheeler’s

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge. You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/ Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices w

In the twenty-first century, India and the United States are two closely connected states. Some of this is economic, and with it comes a concern that jobs in the United States are being outsourced to India. The two countries also face concerns over terrorism, engage in cultural dialogue with each other, and lay claim to being two of the largest and most powerful democracies in the world. However, while many people might be aware of that status for the contemporary world, they are less aware of the long history between the two countries. Dr. Nico Slate’sLord Cornwallis is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India (Harvard University Press, 2019) draws attention to this long and storied history. Drawing from early mercantile ties, the spiritual and philosophical inspirations that thinkers have drawn from in both countries, cultural connections, criticism of race and caste, and the political engagement that exists between both countries, Slate paints a picture of the two countries as learni