New Books In World Affairs

In The Darkening Nation: Race, Neoliberalism, and Crisis in Argentina (University of Wales Press, 2018), Ignacio Aguiló studies the sociocultural impact caused by the failure of the IMF economic measures in Argentina of 2001-2002. Through the lens of cultural production (films, novels, short stories, artwork and music), the author explores two of the country’s so-called exceptionalisms: whiteness and economic success. These myths, heavily endorsed by the military dictatorship during the 1970s and early 1980s, created a sense of homogeneity and uniqueness that came into question at the time of the crisis. All of the cultural products studied by the author show different aspects of what was actually a crisis in the exceptionality myths that linked race with progress. Pamela Fuentes is Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Pace University, NYC campus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwor

In Rising Powers and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1947 (Lexington Books, 2018), Guy Burton, who teaches politics and international relations at the Mohammed bin Rashid School of Government, studies how five rising powers—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, a group that is sometimes called the BRICS countries—have approached the conflict since it first became internationalized in 1947. 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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

I was joined in Oxford by Ben Clift, Professor of Political Economy, Deputy Head of Department and Director of Research at the Department of Politics and International Studies of the University of Warwick. Ben has just published a very important, timely and interesting book on the IMF: The IMF and the Politics of Austerity in the Wake of the Global Financial Crisis by Ben Clift (Oxford University Press, 2018). The book provides the first comprehensive analysis of major shifts in IMF fiscal policy thinking as a consequence of the great financial crisis and the Eurozone debt crisis. It widely presents the IMF’s role in the politics of austerity. The book also offers an innovative theory specifying four mechanisms of IMF ideational change – reconciliation, operationalization, corroboration, and authoritative recognition. It combines in-depth content analysis of the Fund’s vast intellectual production with extensive interviews with IMF economists and management. The book is structured in seven chapters plus conc

In her new book, The Expatriate Myth: New Zealand Writers and the Colonial World (Otago University Press, 2018), Helen Bones, a Research Associate in Digital Humanities at Western Sydney University, presents a new look at late nineteenth and early twentieth century New Zealand literary culture. Contrary to the stereotype that New Zealand writers were “exiled” overseas, Bones follows the lives of a set of writers who, even as they may have been mobile around the colonial world, should, in fact, be recognized for their contributions as New Zealand writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

There have been many histories and treatments of the Cold War, few however have the breath, range and definitiveness of Harvard Professor Odd Arne Westad’s new take on the subject: The Cold War: A World History (Basic Books, 2017). In a book which takes the reader from the economic crisis of the 1890’s to the present-day, Professor Westad delineates a history of the Cold War unlike any in the past. In The Cold War, Westad gives the reader a new perspective on a century when great power rivalry and ideological battles transformed every part of the globe. From Europe and North America to the Third World, The Cold War achieves a broadness in its coverage which has yet to be equaled. Based upon a mountain of primary and secondary source research, Professor Westad’s book has set a new standard of scholarship in the field of Cold War studies. All from a past winner of the Bancroft award. Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and M

For decades the implementation of a single European currency was seen by its advocates as a vital step in the post-World War II movement toward greater European integration. As Ashoka Mody details in Eurotragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts (Oxford University Press, 2018), however, the euro that emerged was built on a dangerously flawed set of assumptions, ones which have made the euro a key factor in the continent’s ongoing economic problems. First proposed by French leaders in the 1960s, the idea of a single European currency was viewed by them as a way of shoring up their presence in the global economy. Though German politicians and bankers were initially resistant to implementing such a currency, this changed during the chancellorship of Helmut Kohl. As he grappled with the resistance to German reunification at the end of the Cold War, Kohl embraced the single currency as a symbol of Germany’s commitment to European cooperation and over the course of the 1990s he shepherded its creation over the objections of ec

Is there a difference between the Communist Party as an idea and the Communist Party in practice? A. James McAdams thinks so and takes the global approach to history to write a political and intellectual history of the Communist party. In Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party (Princeton University Press, 2017), he urges us to think of the party in practice and not simply think of communism as an idea detached from the workings of a political party. He starts with the writing of The Communist Manifesto and tracks the major communist parties that changed the course of the 20th century. We talk global history, Marx, the idea of world revolution, and the longevity of ideas. James McAdams is the William M. Scholl Professor of International Affairs and Director of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies.  He has written widely on European, especially central European, affairs.  His books include East Germany and Detente, Germany Divided, Judging the Past in Unified Germany, and The

For anyone with an interest in Korean studies, the study of diaspora and globalization, and indeed in broader questions around transnational identities and encounters in East Asia and beyond, Homing will prove an invaluable text. In it Ji-Yeon Jo, Associate Professor of Korean language and culture at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, weaves together an array of fascinating and often moving personal accounts from members of the longstanding Korean communities in China, the former-Soviet Union and the United States who have moved ‘back’ (a complicated term as she explains in this podcast) to South Korea, mostly since the 1990s. Basing her work largely on personal interviews, Professor Jo also offers rich background on how the Chinese, Soviet and US Korean diaspora communities became established in the first place, and how and why it was that many of them elected to return to the Korean peninsula in recent decades. But this book is much more than just a historical summary or collection of interview

Yoav Di-Capua‘s new book, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre and Decolonization (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is narrative intellectual history at its best: a tale of friendship and betrayal, of missed connections and surprising syntheses, of unfinished revolutions, Oedipal revolts, and angst-ridden meditations on the meaning of freedom. Di-Capua’s story begins in May of 1944 with a six-hour dissertation defense heard around the Arab world, in which ‘Abd al-Rahman Badawi demonstrated the compatibility of Heideggerian phenomenology and Sufism. The subsequent chapters of No Exit offer a tour of existentialist hotbeds across the Middle East, ending with a detailed account of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Claude Lanzmann’s visit to the region on the eve of the 1967 war. At each juncture, Di-Capua offers a lucid analysis of how the Arab intelligentsia struggled with a set of intertwined questions about decolonization: What does it take to “secure the physical liberation of the population and de

In 1957 Ghana achieved its independence from Great Britain under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah. In Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana (Ohio University Press, 2017), Jeffrey Ahlman uses a wide range of archival and print sources to examine the first decade of Ghanaian self-rule and challenges the teleological assumptions that have dominated historical understandings of African decolonization. The author starts by explaining the roots of Nkrumah’s anti-colonial agenda, which became the guiding principle for the Convention People’s Party (CPP) political program. The book also describes the means by which said program was implemented, how it evolved in response to national and international conditions, and how it was experienced by some of the people who lived through it. Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University. She specializes in modern intellectual history of Africa, historiography, World History and Philosophy of History.  S

John Munro’s new book, The Anticolonial Front: The African-American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is a transnational study that traces the persistence and continuities of Black radicalism from the end of the Second World War through the period of McCarthyism in the United States. Departing from an insistence on colonialism as the primary historical driver of the twentieth century, the book moves from the Popular Front politics of the interwar years to the beginning of the 1960s. Considering of “long civil rights movement” in relationship to the history of forms of colonialism and imperialism that were global in scope, the chapters of the book travel from key sites and events in the U.S. across the Atlantic to the U.K. and Europe, and further afield to spaces and conversations between activists in Asia and Africa. Reframing the history of Cold-War U.S. politics in relationship to broader histories of decolonization, The Anti-Colonial Front challenges analyses th

Toufoul Abou-Hodeib‘s A Taste for Home: The Modern Middle Class in Ottoman Beirut (Stanford University Press, 2017) is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the urban history of Beirut precisely because it exceeds the disciplinary boundaries of urban history: A Taste for Home tells the story of late Ottoman Beirut through the middle class and their sense of self. Abou-Hodeib uses domesticity as a category of analysis to look at how the middle class functioned and what it aspired to be in the midst of the late Ottoman period. However, the book also succeeds wildly because it treats a local context within the global setting, taking seriously the intersecting themes of global capitalism and consumer culture, themes of domesticity and taste. Over the course of the book, leisure and urban development are also shown to be key elements in the development of the middle class, defining the city for generations to come. A Taste for Home will be critical for conversations for many years to come on class, the economy,

Most people know that slavery was foundational to the economic development of the United States in the antebellum period. Fewer people are aware that slavery was also important for American foreign policy in the period. In his book This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at The Helm of American Foreign Policy (Harvard University Press, 2016), Matthew Karp examines how American slaveholders and their allies steered American diplomacy so as to preserve and expand slavery as an institution. Adam McNeil is an incoming PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware. He completed his M.A. in History at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts and B.S. in History at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) in Tallahassee, Florida. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The Western concept of democracy has a lineage dating back to the classical world. Paul Cartledge’s book Democracy: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2016) details its origins in ancient Greece and its evolution of it as a theory over the course of the 2,500 years since then. As he explains, what people think of as “classical Greek” democracy was primarily the Athenian concept of it, which was one of several versions that emerged during the Hellenic era. Though typically viewed as at its peak during the days of the Athenian empire, Cartledge sees the “golden age” of democracy as taking place in the 4th century BCE rather than in the preceding one, a shift which attests to the endurance of democracy as a governing system. It was during Roman times when the practice of democracy declined, to the point where it was often seen as a failed or impractical system during the Middle Ages. It was not until the 17th century when democracy staged a comeback in the West, with its advocates in the 18th and 19th centuries ch

Benjamin Bryce, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Northern British Columbia, has written a history of belonging within a culturally plural Argentina. To Belong in Buenos Aires: Germans, Argentines, and the Rise of a Pluralist Society (Stanford University Press, 2018) describes a period from the 1880s to the 1930s, when a massive wave of immigration transformed Argentine society and the country’s cultural landscape. By 1914, almost half the residents of Buenos Aires were foreign nationals. About 100,000 of the country’s newcomers in those decades were Germans, who arrived from Austria-Hungary, the Russian and German Empires, and Switzerland. Alongside the leaders of many other immigrant enclaves in Buenos Aires, Germans, too, created ethnic spaces by building institutions, from orphanages to hospitals to schools. They became loyal Argentine citizens even as they maintained a connection to German culture. The book’s guiding argument is that while immigrants often talked about the past – where

Space Science and the Arab World, Astronauts, Observatories and Nationalism in the Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 2018) a recently published history of Arab exploration of space, offers a fascinating insight into fundamental issues shaping the contemporary Middle East, including efforts to turn Arab societies into twenty first-century knowledge-based economies and  the role of the religion and its relationship to science. Assistant Professor Jörg Matthias Determann takes the reader on a highly readable and well-documented tour of the struggle of Arab scientists to contribute to the development on space studies and how scientific research contributes to reform and change in the Arab world. It is a process that often meant that scientists were forced to pursue their studies and explorations outside of the region and in doing so contributed to concepts of cosmopolitanism in the region. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Learn more about your ad choices

The Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was one of the greatest human disasters of all time. It infected a third of the people on Earth–from the poorest immigrants of New York City to the king of Spain, Franz Kafka, Mahatma Gandhi and Woodrow Wilson. But despite a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people, it exists in our memory as an afterthought to World War I. In this gripping narrative history, Laura Spinney traces the overlooked pandemic to reveal how the virus travelled across the globe, exposing mankind’s vulnerability and putting our ingenuity to the test. As socially significant as both world wars, the Spanish flu dramatically disrupted–and often permanently altered–global politics, race relations and family structures, while spurring innovation in medicine, religion and the arts. It was partly responsible, Spinney argues, for pushing India to independence, South Africa to apartheid and Switzerland to the brink of civil war. It also created the true “lost generation.” Drawing on the latest research in h

As any scholar of the Vietnam War can tell you, the field doesn’t lack for study: it’s one of the most-studied fields for both military and diplomatic historians. And yet, for all of the scholarly attention it has received, there are understudied facets of this complicated, multilateral conflict, particularly in its early years, before American ground troops entered the country in large numbers. Jessica Elkind’s Aid Under Fire: Nation Building and the Vietnam War (University of Kentucky Press, 2016) does precisely this by examining U.S. development programs that tried to foster a viable South Vietnamese state in the 1950s and early 1960s. The outcomes of those disparate programs ultimately deepened a U.S. commitment to the Republic of South Vietnam and helped set the United States on the road to war. Dr. Elkind’s research was conducted using U.S. government sources, private collections from Michigan State University, and South Vietnamese government sources held in Ho Chi Minh City. Michigan State University

In Austrian Reconstruction and the Collapse of Global Finance, 1921–1931 (Harvard University Press, 2018), Nathan Marcus, analyzes the events that took place around the financial crisis in Austria after World War I. When Austria was the first interwar country in Europe to suffer a hyperinflation the League of Nations stepped in to offer financial support and advice. But a total collapse of the financial system in 1931 couldn’t be avoided. Nathan Marcus offers a new perspective on the already well researched subject and an individual approach not only with regards to content but also on a methodological level by interlacing multiple perspectives and sources (such as journals and caricatures, literature, anecdotes etc.) with each other to create a wider understanding for the events. Nathan Marcus is an Assistant Professor of Modern European History at the Higher School of Economics, National Research University, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support ou

Ji-Young Lee’s book investigates the changing nature of tribute relations during the Ming and High Qing between a dominant China and its less powerful neighbors, Korea and Japan. China’s Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination (Columbia University Press, 2017) reexamines the theory and literature of the tribute system, discovering a significant gap—few studies take into account the domestic political situations of Korea and Japan and their changing needs for Chinese leaders to legitimate them. Official dynastic annals, state letters, edicts, and other diplomatic documents illuminate the internal debates over legitimation that drove Korean and Japanese participation in tribute practices. Ultimately, Lee’s study of Korea and Japan provides a more nuanced theory of hegemony in the study of tributary relationships and international relations in East Asia more broadly. Ji-Young Lee’s book leaves the reader with a better understanding of China’s hegemony in the early modern period and with a sense tha