New Books in World Affairs

In today's program, we speak to Nandita Sharma, activist scholar and Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. We talk about Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press, 2020). In Home Rule, Sharma brilliantly traces the "historical formation and political separation of Natives and Migrants from the nineteenth century to the...

In No Standard Oil: Managing Abundant Petroleum in a Warming World (Oxford University Press, 2021), Deborah Gordon shows that no two oils or gases are environmentally alike. Each has a distinct, quantifiable climate impact. While all oils and gases pollute, some are much worse for the climate than others. In clear, accessible language, Gordon explains the results of the Oil Climate Index Plus Gas...

"The rule of law is a means by which [western EU members] want to knead us into something that resembles them," warned Viktor Orbán during his successful campaign for a fourth consecutive term as Hungary's prime minister. Yet, until Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the EU has held back on the demands it makes of members regarding core democratic norms and values. For a decade, the EU's institutions a...

Robert Jacob’s book Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha (Yale UP, 2022) re‑envisions the history of the Cold War as a slow nuclear war, fought on remote battlegrounds against populations powerless to prevent the contamination of their lands and bodies. Jacobs’s book put these “nuclear bodies” and the legacy of our eighty years history of nuclear weapon and power use at the center of his inquiry....

The Rise and Fall of Democracy Promotion in US Foreign Policy (Routledge, 2022) employs a transformational change framework to understand US democracy promotion from 1977 until the present day. American exceptionalism is a framework that has driven the US since the founding days of the republic, charging the US to promote the universal values of liberty and the pursuit of happiness around the worl...

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to renowned University of Cambridge political theorist John Dunn about what the COVID-19 pandemic reveals about our alarming low levels of collective political judgement. Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives...

Rejecting claims that migration is a crisis for Europe, Europe's Migration Crisis: Border Deaths and Human Dignity (Cambridge University Press, 2020) instead suggests that the 'migration crisis' reflects a more fundamental breakdown of a modern European tradition of humanism. Squire provides a detailed and broad-ranging analysis of the EU's response to the 'crisis', highlighting the centrality of...

The Russian war in Ukraine has placed India in a difficult situation: how to retain the historically good relationship with Russia, without jeopardizing the increasingly important strategic partnership with the USA? In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen is joined by Ravinder Kaur, Henrik Chetan Aspengren and Sunniva Engh to analyze the diplomatic tightrope that India has had to walk over the war in...

(Dis)connected Empires: Imperial Portugal, Sri Lankan Diplomacy, and the Making of a Habsburg Conquest in Asia (Oxford University Press, 2019) takes the reader on a global journey to explore the triangle formed during the sixteenth century between the Portuguese empire, the empire of Kotte in Sri Lanka, and the Catholic Monarchy of the Spanish Habsburgs. It explores nine decades of connections, cr...

Well into its third decade, the military conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been dubbed a "forever war"--a perpetual cycle of war, civil unrest, and local feuds over power and identity. Millions have died in one of the worst humanitarian calamities of our time. The War That Doesn't Say Its Name: The Unending Conflict in the Congo (Princeton UP, 2022) investigates the most recent...

In The Hindu Nation: A Reconciliation with Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2021), M. K. Raghavendra examines what being a Hindu means and asks whether its practices are reconcilable with global modernity and compatible with justice and egalitarianism. While examining the obstacles a modern Hindu nation faces, including the fixed ways of a large public, this extensively researched book also suggests measure...

Although there is often opposition to individual wars, most people continue to believe that the arms industry is necessary in some form: to safeguard our security, provide jobs and stimulate the economy. Not only conservatives, but many progressives and liberals, support it for these reasons. Indefensible puts forward a devastating challenge to this conventional wisdom, which has normalized the ex...

This groundbreaking book examines the role of rulers with nomadic roots in transforming the great societies of Eurasia, especially from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. Distinguished historian Pamela Kyle Crossley, drawing on the long history of nomadic confrontation with Eurasia’s densely populated civilizations, argues that the distinctive changes we associate with modernity were founded o...

In How to Build a Global City: Recognizing the Symbolic Power of a Global Urban Imagination (Cornell University Press, 2022), Michele Acuto considers the rise of a new generation of so-called global cities - Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai - and the power that this concept had in their ascent, in order to analyse the general relationship between global city theory and its urban public policy practice...

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Andy Hoffman, the dynamic and innovative business professor at the University of Michigan, about what the pandemic has brought to light to effectively address our many pressing global problems. Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary f...

The epochal shift toward neoliberalism–– a web of related policies that, broadly speaking, reduced the footprint of government in society and reassigned economic power to private market forces-that began in the United States and Great Britain in the late 1970s fundamentally changed the world. Today, the word neoliberal is often used to condemn a broad swath of policies, from prizing free-market pr...

Policymakers worry that "ungoverned spaces" pose dangers to security and development. Why do such spaces exist beyond the authority of the state? Earlier scholarship—which addressed this question with a list of domestic failures—overlooked the crucial role that international politics play. In this shrewd book, Melissa M. Lee argues that foreign subversion undermines state authority and promotes un...

Today music fills our lives. How we have created, performed and listened to this music throughout history has defined what our species is and how we understand who we are. Yet music is an overlooked part of our origin story.  The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth (Bloomsbury, 2021) takes us on an exhilarating journey across the ages - from Bach to BTS and back - to explore the vibrant rela...

Ayse Zarakol, Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge, is the author of Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Before the West offers a grand narrative of (Eur)Asia as a space connected by normatively and institutionally overlapping successive world orders originating from the Mongol Empire. It uses that vast histo...

The history of U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East is marked by numerous stark failures and a few ephemeral successes. Jimmy Carter's short-lived Middle East diplomatic strategy constitutes an exception in vision and approach. In this extensive and long-overdue analysis of Carter's Middle East policy, Jorgen Jensehaugen sheds light on this important and unprecedented chapter in U.S. regional diploma...

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shaken the ground of global politics, and one of the key questions has been China’s position in the situation. In this episode, Dr. Matti Puranen analyses China’s international relations and strategic position in the context of the Ukraine crisis and China’s relationship with Russia. The newfound Western unity in response to the situation may also complicate China’...

Everyone knows that democracy is in trouble, but do we know what democracy actually is? Jan-Werner Müller, author of the widely translated and acclaimed What Is Populism?, takes us back to basics in Democracy Rules (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). In this short, elegant volume, he explains how democracy is founded not just on liberty and equality, but also on uncertainty. The latter will sound u...

In the first decades after World War II, many newly independent Asian and African countries and established Latin American states pursued a socialist development model. In Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World (Harvard UP, 2022), Jeremy Friedman traces the socialist experiment over forty years through the experience of five countries: Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Ir...

Jonathan Katz’s Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire (St. Martin’s Press, 2022) tells the story of the birth and maturation of modern American imperialism, and its culmination in an alleged domestic coup attempt in 1934 led by a shadowy capitalist cabal and modeled on foreign interventions. The protagonist, Smedley Butler, is one of...

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Samuel Moyn, Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence and Professor of History at Yale University, about neoliberalism, human rights and what our collective response to the COVID-19 pandemic reveals about our true values. Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforci...