New Books In World Affairs

Judith Kelley is the author of Monitoring Democracy: When International Election Observation Works, and Why It Often Fails (Princeton University  Press, 2012). Kelley is associate professor of public policy and political science at Duke University. Monitoring Democracy, which won the Co-Winner of the 2013 Chadwick F. Alger Prize from the International Studies Association, has numerous theoretical insights and empirical findings to deepen our knowledge of democratic elections. Kelley weaves together new data to answer novel, yet simple questions: Does election monitoring work? And when does it fail? Kelley suggests that governments invite monitors in for a variety of reasons, not all consistent with a goal of holding free and fair elections. And, likewise, monitors – some intergovernmental organizations others non-governmental organizations – have a varied set of constraints on their monitoring and reporting. A critical report on an election can stimulate positive change in some circumstances, but lead to vio

Most of the authors I’ve interviewed for this show have addressed episodes in the past, campaigns of mass violence that occurred long ago, often well-before the author was born. Today’s show is different. In his book Genocide by Attrition: The Nuba Mountains of Sudan (Transaction Publishers, 2012), Samuel Totten addresses the violence against the people of the Nuba Mountains of the Sudan.  This violence was part of a broader civil war and unrest in the Sudan in the 1980s and 90s.  Totten makes a convincing case that, in the Nuba, it reached a level reasonably labeled genocidal.  To demonstrate this, Totten provides a succinct but thorough history of the conflict. But the heart of the book is a series of interviews with victims of the tragedy.  Totten collected the interviews himself and uses them to demonstrate the nature and consequences of the conflict. Our interview won’t stop with the book, however, for conflict has recently broken out again in the region.  Scholars differ about how to label the new vi

In his new book, Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India (MIT Press, 2014), Amit Prasad, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Missouri, examines what he calls the “entangled histories of MRI” by studying the development of the technology in the United States, Britain and India. In this way, Prasad deconstructs West/non-West technological and cultural divisions, as well as elucidating Euro/West-centrism in the histories of technology. To do so, Prasad examines five key aspects of MRI research: invention, industrial development, market, history, and culture. In so doing, Prasad provides a critique of the situating of the origin of modern science in the West. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Donovan Chau is the author of Exploiting Africa: The Influence of Maoist China in Algeria, Ghana, and Tanzania (Naval Institute Press, 2014). Chau is an associate professor of political science at California State University. Chau examines China’s role in Algeria, Ghana, and Tanzania from the 1950s to the 1970s. China used its limited diplomatic, intelligence, and economic means to shape events and to exploit its relationships to gain lasting influence on the continent. Chau argues that it is critical to understand the nature and character of China’s historical actions in Africa in order to properly grasp the nation’s current and future policies. Rather than merely looking forward, he argues that we must look backward to comprehend the true nature of China in Africa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

What do you say to someone who suggests that genocide is not just destructive, but constructive? This is the basic theme of Benjamin Lieberman‘s excellent new book Remaking Identities:  God, Nation and Race in World History (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013). The book surveys two thousand years of history to explain how people have used violence to reconstruct identities.  This obviously involves death and destruction.  But it also involves recasting the identities of survivors.  It involves evangelism and religious conversion.  It entails education and persuasion.  It sometimes requires forced separation from one’s community and integration into a new community and a new way of viewing the world.  In doing so, Lieberman reminds us, many perpetrators intended to create a new world, not just destroy an old one.  It’s an important insight, one Lieberman explores through a variety of case studies ranging from the Islamic expansion of the 700s to the violence of the 20th century. Lieberman was not content, however,

Climate change is in the news a lot today. There seems to be little doubt that it’s getting warmer and that, should present trends continue, the warming trend will have “historical” consequences. Things are going to change. Ever thus. As John L. Brooke shows in his remarkable Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (Cambridge University Press, 2014), what we might colloquially call “the weather” has been nudging, pushing, and dramatically altering the course of World history for eons. Sometimes it’s dry; sometimes it’s wet. Sometimes it’s hot; sometimes it’s cold. Sometimes the air is good; sometimes it’s bad. There are patterns, as John points out, but there’s also a good degree of unpredictability–it is, after all, the weather. What’s happening right now, though, is not in the slightest unpredictable: if we keep dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it’s going to get hot; if it gets hot, things are going to change–again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/

Brett Scott is the author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money (Pluto Press, 2013). Scott is a journalist, urban deep ecologist, and Fellow at the Finance Innovation Lab. While much of Scott’s book focuses on explaining various aspects of the financial services section, the heart of the book is a call to action. Scott infuses this call with a variety of first-hand experiences as a campaigner for radical approaches to disrupt the sector. For this reason, the book acts as a guide to activism, applicable for those interested in global finance, but also other domains that are ripe for criticism. His blog that he mentions at the end of the podcast can be found 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

The twentieth-century West witnessed a revolution in childbirth. Before that time, most women gave birth at home and were attended by family members and midwives. The process was usually terribly painful for the mother. Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, doctors started to “medicalize” childbirth. Physicians began to think of ways to ease the pain of childbirth. Two main options were explored. One–drugs–is quite familiar to us, for it is the primary tool used by doctors to make women comfortable during the birth process today. The other–“psychoprophylaxis”–has now passed into memory. The most famous form of psychoprophylaxis, and the subject of Paula A. Michaels’ excellent book Lamaze: An International History (Oxford University Press, 2014), is known as the “Lamaze method.” Its history is fascinating and surprising: born in the Soviet Union (or was it the United Kingdom?), it migrated to France, and then to much of Europe. It then jumped the Atlantic and became a quasi-political force in the Uni

The paleontologist Michael Benton describes a mass extinction event as a time when “vast swaths of the tree of life are cut short, as if by crazed, axe wielding madmen.” Elizabeth Kolbert‘s new book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Holt, 2014), explores the five major mass extinction events that have occurred on the Earth over the last half billion years. Kolbert contrasts these Big Five, as they are known, to the sixth mass extinction event, which we are in the midst of today. This time, instead of a massive asteroid or a sudden glaciation event, humans are the culprit. Travelling with different scientists to remote ecosystems around the world, Kolbert sees evidence of the many ways humans are altering the planet – through climate change, ocean acidification, and the spread of invasive species. By the end of the century, scientists predict we will lose 20 to 50% of all living species. Kolbert also places this current extinction event in the context of human history: although the rate at w

Stephen C. Neff‘s Justice Among Nations: A History of International Law (Harvard UP, 2014) is a book of breathtaking scope, telling the story of the development of international law from Ancient times to the present. It moves across many different cultures and parts of the world, with the express ambition of being a comprehensive intellectual history of international law. It moves among names that any student of international law will recognize, but also surveys unfamiliar sources and recovers their importance. Neff’s prose is both accessible and elegant. This book will surely become an enormously important resource for scholars and students interested in the field. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Miriam Kingsberg‘s fascinating new book offers both a political and social history of modern Japan and a global history of narcotics in the modern world. Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History (University of California Press, 2013) locates the emergence of a series of three “moral crusades” against narcotics that each accompanied a perceived crisis in collective values and political legitimacy in nineteenth and twentieth century Japan. In the first moral crisis after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5, opium became a symbol of difference between Japan and an “Other” epitomized by Qing China, as Japan sought to “leave Asia” and “enter” the West. Here, Kingsberg traces a series of attempts to regulate drug use in Taiwan in the wake of Japan’s transformation into a formal empire. Between the end of WWI and Japan’s defeat in WWII, Japan saw its second moral crisis as it navigated the most protracted and intense moral crusade against narcotics in its history. The central chapters of Kingsberg’s b

Professor Sean D. Murphy is the Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor of Law at George Washington University and co-author of the book Litigating War: Mass Civil Injury and the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission (Oxford University Press, 2013) with Won Kidane, Associate Professor of Law at the Seattle University Law School, and Thomas R. Snider, an international arbitrator at Greenberg Taurig. Their book goes to the heart and intricacies of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission. Its analysis and comprehensiveness is certainly insightful and is a must-read for anyone wanting to learn about the commission and its context.  Professor Murphy discusses with us some of the contents of the book, providing details on the war that occasioned the commission, the commission’s establishment, its jurisdiction and other very pertinent issues relating to the commission’s work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportin

In 1927 Russian-American legal theorist Alexander Sack introduced the doctrine of “odious debt.” Sack argued that a state’s debt is “odious” and should not be transferable to successor governments after a revolution, if it was incurred without the consent of the people; and not for their benefit. This doctrine has largely been rejected, with a firm presumption of “sovereign continuity” emerging instead: post-revolutionary governments must repay sovereign debt even if it was incurred to cover the personal expenses of plutocrats. If they fail to do so, their credit reputation is harmed. As Odette Lienau explains in a striking line, “we can now imagine prosecuting the leaders of a fallen regime for crimes against a state’s population while simultaneously asking that population to acknowledge and repay the fallen regime’s debts.” In Rethinking Sovereign Debt: Politics, Reputation, and Legitimacy in Modern Finance (Harvard University Press, 2014), Lienau unfolds the historical conditions from which this seeming

Americans are moving to the ocean. Every year, more and more Americans move to–or are born in– the coasts and fewer and fewer remain in–or are born in–the interior. The United States began as a coastal nation; it’s become one again. According to John R. Gillis‘s provocative new book The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (University of Chicago Press, 2012), the same may be said of the entire world. Humans, he says, started–or rather quickly became after they evolved in eastern Africa 200,000 ago–a coastal species. We stayed very close to the oceans and seas until the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Thereafter, we moved into various interiors. Now, he says, we are moving back to the shore in force. We are transforming it and, alas, destroying much of it. Gillis calls on us to think of the shore not as a place to settle, but a habitat that is essential to our future prosperity and, one might say, survival. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by beco

Emma Teng‘s new book explores the discourses about Eurasian identity, and the lived experiences of Eurasian people, in China, Hong Kong, and the US between the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 and the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943. Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842-1943 (University of California Press, 2013) situates this history within a broader frame of competing scientific, cultural, and political notions of racial hybridity as a detrimental or positive force, as a transformative power leading to racial degeneration or eugenic improvement. Placing special emphasis on the importance of self-narratives of some of the main figures of Teng’s account, Eurasian is built around the stories of families who lived through and contributed to early debates over Chinese-Western intermarriage in the US and China, tracing the histories of many of these families through the experiences of their children and the transformations they help shape, and understandi

Aswin Punthamabekar‘s From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry (New York University Press, 2013) offers a deeply researched and richly theorized look at the evolution of the world’s largest film industry over the past few decades. Combining ethnographic research with close textual analyses of Bollywood films, Punthamabekar shows how the media industry’s growth has been complexly intertwined with India’s emerging place in the global economy. The book offers a nuanced look at globalization, bringing to light the tensions and productivities that emerge when a highly powerful, historically localized industry enters the world of multinational capitalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy: Once Upon a Time in a Globalized World (Ashgate, 2013), a new book by Constance DeVereaux (Colorado State University) and Martin Griffin (University of Tennessee) sets out to challenge assumptions about policy making and culture in the contemporary world. The book has, at its centre, an understanding of narrative as both a practice that is central to what it means to be human and an analytical tool for understanding policy and culture. The book uses a wide range of case studies to illustrate the importance of this dual understanding of narrative to account for debates and differences between understandings of global culture as potentially threatening, in the form of globalization, or liberating, in the form of transnationalism. The case studies range from film and media studies, historical examples of Berlin and the USA’s National Endowment for the Arts, as well as questions over cultural heritage, through to readings of fictional case studies using the

The 22nd Winter Olympics are underway. It’s safe to say that the lead-up has not gone smoothly. Of course, there have been the obligatory cost overruns, crony contracts, displacement of locals, and environmental despoliation–all the problems we’ve seen with past Olympics. But this year’s games have come with new wrinkles. It’s possible, though, that the various ills plaguing the Sochi games, from security concerns to shambolic accommodations, might stir deeper changes in the Olympic movement. For all the spectacle, for all the competitive drama and remarkable performances, more and more people are questioning whether the Olympics are worth the expense and trouble that they bring. A series of reports this week on National Public Radio cast light on the financial losses and expensive white elephants saddling cities that have hosted recent games. Meanwhile, a writer for an Australian sports site declared flatly: “It is time to get rid of this anachronistic political farce.” Political scientist Jules Boykoff isn

The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard University Press 2010) takes the reader on a sweeping journey through the history of international law from the ancient world to the present in search for an answer to the question: where did human rights come from? The book’s author, Columbia University intellectual historian Samuel Moyn examines, in turn, Enlightenment humanism, socialist internationalism, horror at twentieth-century genocide, anti-colonialism, and the civil rights movement. But he concludes that these were not sufficient individually or collectively to account for the emergence this key term of our contemporary political vocabulary. Human rights has, as Moyn tells us in this interview, a more recent and surprising vintage. I have never read a book that devoted so much space to where something wasn’t and to why it wasn’t there. Yet in Moyn’s explanation of the non-existence of human rights until its breakthrough moment in the 1970s, we learn a great deal not only about the importance of the

We spend a lot of time arguing about the meaning and implications of words in the field of genocide studies. Buckets of ink have been spilled defining and debating words like genocide, intent, ‘in part,’ and crimes against humanity. Philip Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan are certainly invested in the process of careful definitions and descriptions.  Theaters of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killing, and Atrocity through History (Berghahn Books, 2012)and the special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research that form the basis of our discussion are both a plea for and a move toward a thorough, theoretically sound understanding of the concept of a massacre.  In doing so, they offer a thoughtful commentary on the notion of genocide and its relationship to massacres and atrocities. But these volumes are more than a theoretical engagement with a concept.  They are a rich exploration of the nature of mass killing, as the subtitle puts it, throughout history.  The essays here range from individual case studies to attempts to di