New Books In World Affairs

Asaad al-Saleh is assistant professor of Arabic, comparative literature, and cultural studies in the Department of Languages and Literature and the Middle East Center at the University of Utah. His research focuses on issues related to autobiography and displacement in Arabic literature and political culture in the Arab world. His Book Voices of the Arab Spring: Personal Stories from the Arab Revolutions (Columbia University Press, 2015) is narrated by dozens of activists and everyday individuals, documenting the unprecedented events that led to the collapse of dictatorial regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

According to a popular saying, “Nothing succeeds like success.” As concernswhat economists and political scientists call “development”–that is, progress towards libertyand prosperity–the saying seems to be true. As a general rule, the countries that were relatively free and relatively prosperous 100 years ago are the ones that are relatively free and relatively prosperous today.200 years ago? Yes, more or less. 300 years ago? Well, probably. 400 years ago? A good argument could be made… Why? According to one argument, the difference is caused by the rich praying on the poor. In a word, imperialism. But if you survey countries around the world, it’s not clear whether imperialism (and colonization) hurt or helped development. The Spanish thoroughly imperialized Mexico, and it’s pretty prosperous; no one really got into the interior of Africa and it’s not.  And what are we to make of developmental differences within, say, prosperous Europe? No real imperialism there; a lot of bloody war, but no imperialism as s

Our guest today tells us that the seemingly straightforward field of logistics lies at the heart of contemporary globalization, imperialism, and economic inequality. Listen to Deb Cowen, the author of The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), discuss how the field of logistics reshaped global capitalism, undermined worker power, and even transformed how we think about life and death. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Pedro Machado‘s Ocean of Trade:South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c.1750-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) is a richly detailed and engaging account of Gujarati merchants and their role in the trade of textiles, ivory and slaves across the Indian Ocean. The book not only enhances our understanding of an under researched pan-continental trade network but also, through its sensitive treatment of local markets as drivers of merchants’ patterns, pushes us to re-examine our understanding of trading networks themselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

For almost 100 years, it seemed like a good, even wholesome and optimistic idea to take young, working-class and poor British children and resettle them, quite on their own and apart from their families, in Canada, Australia, and southern Rhodesia. The impulse behind this program was philanthropic: to bring disadvantaged children living in crowded cities a better future by settling them in pristine, wide-open spaces, introducing them to nature, and letting them feel the sun on their backs. Yet the program was shot through with eugenic ideas and the racism of the age. British children were emissaries of the “kith and kin” empire, sent to “whiten” its outposts. But they could also be subject to repatriation–sometimes years after having been sent away in the first place–if their “racial fitness” was called into question. Race, nation, and identity form one of many themes Ellen Boucher examines in her fascinating, and sometimes painful, book Empire’s Children: Child Emigration, Welfare, and the Decline of the Br

Torild Skard is the author of Women of Power: Half a Century of Female Presidents and Prime Ministers Worldwide (Policy Press, 2015). Skard is a senior researcher in women’s studies at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo and is a former member of parliament and the first woman president of the Norwegian Upper House, among many other appointments. Skard takes on an enormously ambitious project in her recent book. She seeks out to examine the achievements and life stories of nearly the universe of the world’s female political leaders from the 1960s up to the current era. Organized both chronologically and geographically, Skard includes over 70 leaders in 50 countries, and uncovers a variety of paths to power, regional patterns and variation, and fascinating individual stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), Stuart Young examines Chinese hagiographic representations of three Indian Buddhist patriarchs–Asvaghosa (Maming), Nagarjuna (Longshu), and Aryadeva (Sheng tipo)–from the early fifth to late tenth centuries, and explores the role that these representations played in the development of Chinese Buddhism’s self-awareness of its own position within Buddhist history and its growing confidence that Buddhism could flourish in China despite the distance between the middle kingdom and the land of the Buddha. On the one hand, this project traces these three legendary figures as they are portrayed first as exemplars of how to revive the Dharma in a world without a Buddha, then as representatives of a lineage stretching back to Shakyamuni, and finally as scholar types who transmitted the Dharma to China via their exegetical and doctrinal works. More broadly, however, Young uses this transformation as an index of changing views of m

Andrew Cayton is a distinguished professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. In his book Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) he has given us a lucid and beautifully written history of the transatlantic relationships among the circle of radical writers that included William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Gilbert Imlay. Caught in the fervor revolutionary change, these free thinkers believing in the goodness of humanity and reason rejected the need for authority, hierarchies, and tradition in preserving social cohesion and wellbeing. Rather, mutuality and open exchange were offered as a better foundation for society. At the intersection of public lives and private desire, they sought to extend their radical vision beyond politics and into their intimate lives through new a model of egalitarian and free relationships between men and women. Deconstructing marriage their writings reflected the protested ag

Mariana Candido‘s book An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World. Benguela and its Hinterland (Cambridge University Press, 2013) is a powerful and moving exploration of the history and development of the port of Benguela. Founded by the Portuguese in the early seventeenth century, Benguela, located on the central coast of present-day Angola, was the third largest port of slave embarkation on the coast of Africa. In discussing the impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on African societies, Candido looks at the formation of new elites, the collapse of old states, and the emergence of new ones. Her book offers a new perspective on the importance of the South Atlantic as a space for the circulation of people, ideas, and crops. But what makes this book truly distinctive is how Candido digs beneath the surface of her evidence to give readers a sense of the lived experiences and feelings of all involved in the trade: the unfortunate victims and those who benefited from the violent capture and selling of huma

Thom van Dooren‘s new book is an absolute must-read. (I was going to qualify that with a “…for anyone who…” and realized that it really needs no qualification.) Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a beautifully written and evocative meditation on extinction. The book offers (and implicates us in) stories about five groups of birds – albatrosses, vultures, Little Penguins, whooping cranes, and Hawaiian crows – that build upon one another and collectively enable us to explore and re-imagine what, where, and how extinction is, and why that matters. Van Dooren emphasizes the importance of storytelling to understanding and inhabiting the world, and the book’s five “extinction stories” each bring to life the entanglements of avian, human, and other beings to ask readers to consider a series of questions that can best be explored, understood, and engaged through attentiveness to these entanglements. “What is lost,” van Dooren asks, “when a species, an evolutionar

Aristotle Tziampiris is The Emergence of Israeli-Greek Cooperation (Springer, 2015). Tziampiris is Associate Professor of International Relations and Director of the Center for International and European Affairs at the Department of International and European Studies at the University of Piraeus. The recent fiscal debt crisis in Greece has drawn world attention to the country’s position in global affairs. Rather than pursue the financial situation, Tziampiris investigates the foreign policy making of Greece, particularly its changing relationship with Israel and Turkey. Greece and Israel have had a distant relationship for much of the last 50 years, but recent politics for both countries have moved the two toward a budding friendship. Tziampiris bases his argument and key findings on high-level original interviews which lend the book a degree of legitimacy and significance. Based on these conversations with Greek and Israeli diplomats, he points to the Gaza Freeodm Flotilla as the point where leaders from th

Genocide studies is one of the few academic fields with which I’m acquainted which is truly interdisciplinary in approach and composition. Today’s guest Abdelwahab El-Affendi, and the book he has edited, Genocidal Nightmares: Narratives of Insecurity and the Logic of Mass Atrocities (Bloomsbury Academic 2014), is an excellent example of how this works out in practice. The question this book addresses is not that unusual: How it is that societies and individuals come to a place where they feel it necessary to commit mass atrocities. But El-Affendi has assembled a set of authors remarkably varied in their background and approach. Indeed, his is one of the very few books in the field to draw on African and Middle Eastern scholars. Andthe case studies he examined go well beyond the usual canon of genocide studies. His conclusions clearly emerge out of this interdisciplinary cooperation. The book focuses on what he calls narratives of insecurity. These are stories people tell themselves about their relationships

Identity, performance and globalisation are at the heart of the cultural practices interrogated by Amanda Rogers in Performing Asian Transnationalisms: Theatre, Identity and the Geography of Performance (Routledge, 2015).The book explores the global networks of theatre that have emerged between Asia, America and Europe, using a variety of policy, practice and political examples. The book argues that globalisation, and the attendant transnational flows of people and culture, has both the potential to create theatre careers and new, important, works, whist at the same time constraining individuals, communities and cultural forms. The book draws on a rich combination of ethnographic and interview data, along with theoretically informed cultural analysis, using examples ranging from The British Council and the Singapore Art Festival, through Asian American and British East Asian identities, to controversial performances of theOrphan of Zhao. The book will be of primary interest to cultural,geography and performan

Riots, audiences on stage, fabulous costumes, gripping stories. That’s what theater was like in the Atlantic world in the age of slavery and colonialism. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon wonderful book New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849 (Duke University Press, 2014) vividly invokes a transatlantic network of performances and their publics, and argues for the making of a performative commons that worked out tensions among societies bent on simultaneously profiting from, and negating the existence of, enslaved Africans and indigenous people. They did this in part through a tradition of dramatizing those very tensions on stage. The book is full of stories of how the riotous multitude witnessed and interacted with those performances, as plays, actors, music, and costumes made their way around the colonial Atlantic world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affai

In the annals of cold war history Italy is rarely seen as a crucial locale.  In his stimulating new book, The United States, Italy, and the Origins of Cold War: Waging Political Warfare (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Kaeten Mistry reveals how events in Italy proved surprisingly crucial in defining a conflict that dominated much of the twentieth century.  For the United States, it marked the first intervention in the postwar era to influence events abroad through political warfare, the use of all measures ‘short of war’ in foreign affairs.  Drawing particular attention to the Italian election of 18 April 1948, he explains how the campaign for the first national election of the newfound Italian republic marked a critical defeat for communism in the early cold war.  The United States utilized a range of overt and covert methods against Marxist political and social power.  Political warfare seemingly outlined a way to tackle communist strength more widely. Analyzing American political warfare efforts agains

The period from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries witnessed a mass migration which carried millions of Jews from central and eastern Europe, north Africa, and the Ottoman Empire to new lands. Hasia Diner’s new book, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (Yale University Press, 2015) examines this migration through the prism of the oft overlooked peddler. For the Jewish men arriving in the United States, Great Britain, South Africa, and Latin America, peddling was among the most prevalent of professions. It allowed those without large amounts of capital to quickly start their own businesses. Jewish men took to the roads, selling household items door to door in small towns, rural areas, mining camps and on Indian reservations. In the process, these men learned about the languages and cultures of their new homelands. At the same time, peddlers were agents of change and modernization, introducing their customers to new products, tastes an

Thomas Weiss and Dan Plesch are the co-editors of We Are Strong: Wartime Origins and the Future United Nations (Routledge, 2015). Weiss is Presidential Professor of Political Science and Director Emeritus of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at The City University of New York’s Graduate Center; Plesch is Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS, University of London. They write in the introduction “Today a key question that ought to be in bold-faced type on the agenda of global governance is: ‘Do we need another cataclysm to re-kindle the imagination and energy and cooperation that was in the air in the 1940s, or are we smart enough to adapt in anticipation?'” Much of the book is built on a hope that the answer to this question is the later, and that world leaders look to the historical lessons delivered in each chapter. Weiss and Plesch break the book into sections: Planning and Propaganda, Human Security, and Economic Development. One is left believing that

Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn‘s An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban/Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, 1970-2010 (Oxford University Press, reprint edition 2014) offers what is in many ways is an untold, insider’s account of the birth of the Taliban and Al Qaeda during the anti-Soviet jihad, and their subsequent cooperation (or indeed lack thereof) in the pre- and post-9/11 world. By living first in Kabul, and then Kandahar, Afghanistan, the authors gained more privileged access to individuals involved with Afghan history in the 1980s-2000s than perhaps anyone outside of Western intelligence agencies. By speaking with Taliban officials — indeed Van Linschoten and Kuehn’s previous project was editing the memoirs of Taliban senior official Abdul Salam Zaeef – and former “Afghan Arabs”, the authors enriched their research immensely. The result shows in the final product: a nuanced, deeply layered, and meticulously investigative look at a fascinating subject. An Enemy We Createdshould be seen as

Thomas Weiss and Dan Plesch are the co-editors of We Are Strong: Wartime Origins and the Future United Nations (Routledge, 2015). Weiss is Presidential Professor of Political Science and Director Emeritus of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at The City University of New York's Graduate Center; Plesch is Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS, University of London. They write in the introduction "Today a key question that ought to be in bold-faced type on the agenda of global governance is: 'Do we need another cataclysm to re-kindle the imagination and energy and cooperation that was in the air in the 1940s, or are we smart enough to adapt in anticipation?'" Much of the book is built on a hope that the answer to this question is the later, and that world leaders look to the historical lessons delivered in each chapter. Weiss and Plesch break the book into sections: Planning and Propaganda, Human Security, and Economic Development. One is left believing that t

The Young Turk revolution of 1908 restored the Ottoman constitution, suspended earlier by Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and initiated a new period of parliamentary politics in the Empire. Likewise, the revolution was a watershed moment for the Empire’s ethnic communities, raising expectations for their full inclusion into the Ottoman political system as modern citizens and bringing to the fore competitions for power within and between groups. In Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2014), Bedross Der Matossian examines how Ottoman ethnic communities understood and reacted to the revolution. Focusing on the Arab, Armenian and Jewish communities, and using sources in multiple languages, including Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Ladino and Ottoman Turkish, Der Matossian highlights the contradictions and ambiguities in interpretations of  Ottomanism and its reification as political structure. How, for example, could these groups express loyalty to the