New Books In World Affairs

William C. Smith (ed.), senior associate with RESULTS Educational Fund, joins New Books in Education to discuss The Global Testing Culture: Shaping Education Policy, Perceptions, and Practice (Symposium Books, 2016). This edited volume provides an analysis of the global testing culture that has permeated societies throughout the world. With a diverse range of academic contributors, perspectives of this global phenomenon are thoroughly explored and problematized at various levels of societies, from an expansive macro view from the top, down to the micro view of individual actors. You can find more information on the author and on the Right to Education Index (RTEI) at www.results.org. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can connect to the host at @PoliticsAndEd. 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 nonprofit sector is growing, not just in the United States, but globally. In The Nonprofit World: Civil Society and the Rise of the Nonprofit Sector (Kumarian Press, 2015), John Casey demonstrates the extent to which nonprofits, what are sometimes called civil society organizations, charities, or community groups, participate in all sectors of the economy in countries across the world. This broad focus allows Casey to show the commonalities and differences in which issues nonprofits pursue and how this increasingly internationalized sector affects national policy and politics. 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 new edited volume by Francesca Bray, Peter Coclanis, Edda Fields-Black and Dagmar Schafer is a wonderfully interdisciplinary global history of rice, rooted in specific local cases, that spans 15 chapters written by specialists in the histories of Africa, the Americas, and several regions of Asia. Rice: Global Networks and New Histories (Cambridge University Press, 2015) creates a conversation among regional and disciplinary modes of studying and narrating rice histories that have often been conducted in isolation. Specifically, the project brings together two large-scale debates that emerge from very different rice historiographies: the “Black Rice” and “agricultural involution” debates frame the inquiry here, and as you listen to my conversation with Francesca and Dagmar (the two co-editors with whom I spoke for the podcast) you’ll hear them offer an overview of the nature and stakes of both of those areas of inquiry. In the course of the conversation we also had a chance to talk about the collaborative

It is commonly thought that violence, injustice, and discrimination against religious minorities, especially in the Middle East, are a product of religious fundamentalism and myopia. Concomitantly, it is often argued, that more of secularism and less of religion represents the solution to this problem. In her stunning new book Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton University Press, 2015), Saba Mahmood, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, brings such a celebratory view of secularism into fatal doubt. Through a careful and brilliant analysis, Mahmood convincingly shows that far from a solution to the problem of interreligious strife, political secularism and modern secular governance are in fact intimately entwined to the exacerbation of religious tensions in the Middle East. Focusing on Egypt and the experience of Egyptian Copts and Bahais, Mahmood explores multiple conceptual and discursive registers to highlight the paradoxical qualities of pol

Anna L. Tsing‘s new book is on my new (as of this post) list of Must-Read-Books-That-All-Humans-Who-Can-Read-Should-Read-And-That-Nonhumans-Should-Find-A-Way-To-Somehow-Engage-Even-If-Reading-Is-Not-Their-Thing. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015) joyfully bursts forth in a “riot of short chapters” that collectively open out into a mushroom-focused exploration of what Tsing refers to as a “third nature,” or “what manages to live despite capitalism.” Tsing’s book is based on fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2011 in the US, Japan, Canada, China, and Finland, plus interviews with scientists, foresters, and matsutake traders in those places and in Denmark, Sweden, and Turkey. The book is an exemplar of the kind of work that can come out of thoughtful and extended scholarly collaboration, here resulting from Tsing’s work with the Matsutake Worlds Research Group. The book treats matsutake mushrooms as objects and companions that

Today, sustainability is all the rage. But when and why did the idea of sustainable development emerge, and how has its meaning changed over time? Stephen Macekura’s new book, Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2015) explores this question by connecting three of the most important aspects of the twentieth century: decolonization, the rise of environmentalism, and the pursuit of economic development and modernization in the Third World. Macekura, who is an Assistant Professor of International Studies at Indiana University, demonstrates how environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) attempted to promote environmental protection in the post-colonial world, then, after failing to do so, challenged the economic development approaches of the United States, World Bank, and United Nations. The book reveals how environmental activists initially conceived of “sustainable development” as a way to link environmental protection w

In Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015), author Jason W. Moore seeks to undermine popular understandings of the relationship among society, environment, and capitalism. Rather, than seeing society and environment as acting on an external, nonhuman nature, Moore wants us to recognize capitalism-in-nature. For Moore, seeing society and environment as separate has hampered clear thinking on the problems we face, such as climate change or the end of cheap nature, as well as political solutions to these issues. His book is an analysis of the interrelationship of capitalism and nature over the past few centuries as well as a critique of important environmental concepts such as the Anthropocene. Moore is assistant professor of sociology at SUNY-Binghamton and coordinator of the World Ecology Research Network. This book is a product of over a decade of research and writings on world ecology and evidence of his wide-ranging scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices.

In Nations Divided: American Jews and the Struggle over Apartheid (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Marjorie Feld, associate professor of history at Babson College, explores the tension between the particularist and universalist commitments many American Jews have felt in the battle against apartheid. For Feld, the post-war debates among American Jews about how to deal with injustice in South Africa later expanded when the term apartheid was used in other contexts. Drawing on archival research and interviews, Feld brings a global perspective to the story of the American Jewish past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

To write a comprehensive history of Southeast Asia is a task reserved for precious few scholars: historians of unrivaled skill and formidable knowledge. Anthony Reid is among them. His new book, A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads (Wiley Blackwell, 2015), is almost impossibly vast in scale and ambitious in scope, ranging across familiar territory while drawing out major new themes in the history of one of the world’s most diverse yet nevertheless coherent regions. Writing against the “seductive pressure” to view past political and cultural arrangements as analogues of our own, Reid draws on the resources of a life spent studying and writing Southeast Asian history to take the reader on a journey from the nagara polities and stateless majorities of a thousand years ago to the rise of high modernism in the places that today we know as Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam. His strong engagement with major debates will appeal to specialists, yet the book is also highly accessible to students new to study

The assassination of the Armenian-Turkish activist Hrant Dink in 2007 raised uncomfortable questions about a historical tragedy that the leaders of the Turkish Republic would like people to forget: the Armenian genocide. In his new book Open Wounds: Armenians, Turks, and a Century of Genocide (Oxford UP, 2015), the journalist/historian Vicken Cheterian offers a scholarly, yet high readable account of this injustice and the century-long silence surrounding it. With engaging prose, he explains how and why this genocide took place, including a description of the violence that Kurds carried out against Armenians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He also helps readers better grasp the continuities in how Sultan Abudhamid II, the Young Turks, and Mustafa Kamal's Turkish Republic employed violence to deal with their "Armenian problem" and other "internal enemies" such as Greeks, Assyrians, and the Yezidis. Not one to mince words, Cheterian offers a fascinating description of the Turkish efforts t

Owning property. Being property. Becoming propertyless. These are three themes of white possession that structure Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s brilliant new inquiry into the dynamics of race and Indigeneity in “postcolonizing” societies like Australia.The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) collects and expands over a decade of work that speaks to key dynamics both at the heart, and sometimes obscured, within critical Indigenous studies. A Goenpul scholar from Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island), Quandamooka First Nation (Moreton Bay) in Queensland, Australia, Aileen Moreton-Robinson is the author of numerous previous books and articles in the fields of law and sovereignty, whiteness, race and feminism, and is a Council Member of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Today’s podcast marks the beginning of what I hope might become a regular feature on the podcast. The session was recorded live on the campus of Bryant University at the end of weekend conference with the title Genocide in World History, sponsored by the New England region of the World History Association. I’m hoping that occasional reports from conferences will help shed light on new research and new directions in the field. They will of necessity be a bit rawer than ordinary interviews. But I think the benefits far outweigh occasional blemishes. The conference at Bryant stressed the need to see genocide through the lens of the discipline of world history. Individual panels tended to focus on specific cases. But several papers took an explicitly comparative perspective. And the capstone session looked carefully at what it might mean to study genocide from the perspective of a world historian. The podcast features four participants from the conference: Jonathan Bush, Jon Cox, Tommy O’Connell and Michael

“What exactly is liberalism?” The independent scholar Edwin van de Haar tackles this important question in his new book Degrees of Freedom: Liberal Political Philosophy and Ideology (Transaction Publishers, 2015). Setting the record straight, van de Haar explains how the history of liberalism should be viewed as an ongoing struggle for individual freedom. The importance that liberals place on freedom helps explain why they tend to create dynamic political/economic orders that change the status quo in ways not predetermined by centralized plans or ideological blueprints. To help readers better understand the diversity and boundaries of liberalism, van de Haar divides liberal thought into three main variants–Classical, Social, and Libertarianism. Unlike previous works on liberalism, he devotes considerable attention to how each of these variants tends to conceive of international affairs and defines the optimal global order. He also explains how liberal thought differs from conservatism and the mistakes authors

“Pop pop pop pop musik” -M Jonathyne Briggs‘ new book, Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities, and Pop Music, 1958-1980(Oxford University Press, 2015) makes music the historical focus of the Fifth Republic’s first two decades. What made certain sounds “French,” and how did different cultural communities come together, expressing themselves in a variety of musical forms? From Francoise Hardy to Serge Gainsbourg, to the sounds of free jazz, Brittany folk, and punk, the book considers French musical production and consumption in global cultural context. Exploring the relationship between audio and national identities and communities, Briggs tracks both the influences from outside France on a range of scenes in and beyond Paris, and the reach of “French” sounds beyond the nation’s borders. Sounds French is a book that examines the contributions of artists and listeners, reading “the noise” of (and surrounding) the music treated in its pages. The book also includes links to some of the songs that Br

Eric Tagliacozzo, Peter C. Perdue, and Helen F. Siu‘s “Asia Inside Out” project is a model for interdisciplinary and collaborative scholarship in all kinds of ways. Planned as a trilogy, the first two volumes were released this year. Asia Inside Out: Changing Times (Harvard University Press, 2015) collects essays by historians, art historians, and anthropologists that each take a particular year as an inflection point when “certain major cultural processes changed direction.” These include key turning points in religious, economic, and political formations across land and sea since the sixteenth century, and they bring us into a wide range of localities from Macau to the Dutch East Indies to Yemen, Japan, Bangalore, and beyond. Asia Inside Out: Connected Places (Harvard University Press, 2015) gathers essays that collectively emphasize connectedness and motion by moving beyond regional and national boundaries to look at a series of “spatial moments” that were shaped by colonialism, nationalism, and post-moder

Jenny Shaw‘s recent book Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (University of Georgia Press, 2013) analyzes how social, religious, and ethnic categories operated in Barbados and the Leeward Islands. She documents the arrival of Irish migrants into the Caribbean who came in some cases involuntarily, and in other cases with dreams to make their own fortunes in the islands’ booming sugar trade. Their Catholicism and social standing long kept them from joining the ruling class. But, Shaw traces how the simultaneous arrival of enslaved Africans complicated those social standings, while also helping to simplify them at a later date. In the process, her study injects new life into the question of racial ideology in the British Americas, as well as the role and influence of religion in the Anglo-Caribbean. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/wo

Neha Vora‘s Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2013) is a wonderfully rich and engaging account of middle class Indians who live and work, supposedly temporarily, in Dubai. Through an analysis of these perpetual outsiders, that are crucial to the Emirati economy, Vora sheds new light on our understanding of citizenship, belonging and Dubai itself. In the finest tradition of anthropology, the book is simultaneously minutely detailed in its descriptions and global in its analytical reach, opening up new ways of thinking about migrants in the contemporary world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Though the conventional history of the U.S.-led “War on Drugs” locates the origins of this conflict in a reaction to the domestic culture of excess of the 1960s, a new book argues that international drug control efforts are actually decades older, and much more imbricated with the history of U.S. access to international markets, than we have previously thought. Suzanna Reiss’s We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire (University of California Press, 2014) uncovers this history by tracing the transnational geography and political economy of coca commodities–stretching from Peru and Bolivia into the United States, and back again. The book examines how economic controls put in place during WWII transformed the power of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry in Latin America and beyond, and gave rise to new definitions of legality and illegality–definitions that were largely premised on who grew, manufactured, distributed, and consumed drugs, and not on the qualities of the drugs themselves. Drug control, she shows, is

Today’s guest discusses the history of sexuality in the workplace through the lens of male flight attendants. We speak with Phil Tiemeyer about the shifts and changes in the airline industry across the 20th century. Phil steers us through this history and reveals the importance and difficulty of braiding together race, gender, and sexuality in a study of the labor and capitalism. Phil Tiemeyer is Associate Professor of History at Philadelphia University. He is author of Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants (University of California Press, 2013). You can read more about his 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

“There was China before there was an America, and it is because of China that America came to be.” According to Gordon H. Chang‘s new book, the idea of “China” became “an ingredient within the developing identity of America itself.” Written for a broad audience, Chang’s Fateful Ties: A History of America’s Preoccupation with China (Harvard University Press, 2015) traces the intertwined relationships of the US and China from their might as world powers in the eighteenth century to today. Moving roughly chronologically, Fateful Ties explores this long history from the point of Americans’ eighteenth century entry into the China trade, paying attention to the contemporary “Chinomania” of Ben Franklin and other prominent Americans as well as the significance of China for America’s westward expansion. The story continues with the travel of American missionaries to China and Chinese students, intellectuals, and laborers to America. Chang looks at the establishment and implications of the Open Door policy, American