New Books in World Affairs

Fights about the fate of the state of Israel, and the Zionist movement that gave birth to it, have long been a staple of both Jewish and American political culture. In We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel (Basic Books, 2022), Eric Alterman traces this debate from its nineteenth-century origins. Following Israel’s 1948–1949 War of Independence (called the “nakba” or “catastrophe...

This book announces the new, interdisciplinary field of critical disaster studies. Unlike most existing approaches to disaster, critical disaster studies begins with the idea that disasters are not objective facts, but rather are interpretive fictions--and they shape the way people see the world. By questioning the concept of disaster itself, critical disaster studies reveals the stakes of definin...

What is the future of time and space in democracy? It's now widely accepted that Chinese politicians are advantaged by the lack of the short time horizons that come with electoral cycles. And all the discussion of immigration raises issues of borders in politics. Professor Jan Zielonka of Oxford University has been thinking about these matters and you can hear him in conversation with Owen Bennett...

In this episode of International Horizons, journalist and UN director of Human Rights Watch Louis Charbonneau describes the US's government misinformation campaign to justify its invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its aftermath. Charbonneau also discusses the role of media in the lack of questioning of the information they were spreading and contrasts it with the right practices journalists should condu...

While central banks have gained remarkable influence over the past fifty years, promising more stability, global finance has gone from crisis to crisis. How do we explain this development? Drawing on original sources ignored in previous research, The Rise of Central Banks: State Power in Financial Capitalism (Harvard University Press, 2023) offers a groundbreaking account of the origins and conseq...

Edward Mead Earle was a historian, scholar, professor, and international relations expert; he was also a founding father of the field we know as Security Studies. Listen as David Ekbladh and International Security Editor Sean Lynn-Jones discuss Earle's contributions to the field, his views on what Security Studies should be, his seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study, and what he might think...

Melanie 0'Brien's book From Discrimination to Death: Genocide Process Through a Human Rights Lens (Routledge, 2022) studies the process of genocide through the human rights violations that occur during genocide. Using individual testimonies and in-depth field research from the Armenian Genocide, Holocaust and Cambodian Genocide, this book demonstrates that a pattern of specific escalating human ri...

Much has been made of the rise of China's economy, and some fear that China will surpass the United States as the world's largest economy in the coming years. Michael Beckley goes against the grain in his article "China's Century? Why America's Edge Will Endure" (International Security, Winter 2011/12), arguing that the size of a nation's economy doesn't necessarily dictate its global power, and t...

Every two seconds a person is displaced, caught in one of the more than 40 active conflicts around the world that show no sign of ending. Since 1994, there has been ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has uprooted millions of people and resulted in the deaths of millions more. In the West, we have entered a political era where our border policies are underpinned by unending wars...

China's role as an economic powerhouse in Latin America is reshaping a region on the cusp of development and change. Since the turn of the century, bilateral trade between China and Latin America has increased massively, going from $12.17 billion in 2000 to $307.94 billion in 2019. From the pampas of Argentina and the vast Brazilian Amazon to Panama's canal and Jamaica's coastal waters, China is f...

In Women, Empires, and Body Politics at the United Nations, 1946–1975 (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), Giusi Russo focuses on the first decades of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) to examine gender politics in the postwar period. The Commission was comprised of a diverse group of women whose ideas about equality often clashed. Shaped by Cold War politics and the proc...

Space technology was developed to enhance the killing power of the state. The Moon landings and the launch of the Space Shuttle were mere sideshows, drawing public attention away from the real goal: military and economic control of space as a source of power on Earth. Today, as Bleddyn E. Bowen vividly recounts in Original Sin: Power, Technology and War in Outer Space (Oxford UP, 2022), thousands...

The United States has been an empire since the time of its founding, and this empire is inextricably intertwined with American religion. Religion and US Empire: Critical New Histories (NYU Press, 2022) examines the relationship between these dynamic forces throughout the country’s history and into the present. The volume will serve as the most comprehensive and definitive text on the relationship...

Violent conflict and its aftermath are pressing problems, particularly for international development initiatives. However, the results of development in conflict contexts have generally been disappointing and their preventative potential thus questionable. Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Mareike Schomerus argues that this is because p...

In Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO (Cornell UP, 2022), Susan Colbourn tells the story of the height of nuclear crisis and the remarkable waning of the fear that gripped the globe. In the Cold War conflict that pitted nuclear superpowers against one another, Europe was the principal battleground. Washington and Moscow had troops on the ground and missiles in the fields...

Miriam Bak McKenna is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University (Denmark). Her first monograph, Reckoning with Empire: Self-Determination in International Law (Brill, 2023), adopts a new approach to self-determination’s international legal history, tracing the ways in which various actors have sought to reinvent self-determination in different...

Sean Lynn-Jones, editor of International Security, interviews author John Schuessler, whose article "The Deception Dividend: FDR's Undeclared War" appears in the Spring 2010 issue of the journal. Their conversation tackles the question of whether FDR willfully deceived the American public in order to persuade them to support WWII – and touches on perceptions of warring democracies as well as compa...

This week on International Horizons, Ellen Chesler interviews Rebecca Adami and Fatima Sator, editor and co-author of Women and the UN: A New History of Women's International Human Rights (Routledge, 2022) that debunks the myth that the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were Western male-dominated inventions. Moreover, the authors discuss how women did not act as a unified b...

During the first months of the pandemic, governments worldwide agreed that ‘following the science’ with hard lockdowns and vaccine mandates was the best way to preserve life. But evidence is mounting that ‘the science’ was all politics and time reveals the horrific human and economic cost of these policies. The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left ...

Beginning in the 1920s, audiences around the globe were seduced not only by Hollywood films but also by lavish movie theaters that were owned and operated by the major American film companies. These theaters aimed to provide a quintessentially “American” experience. Outfitted with American technology and accoutrements, they allowed local audiences to watch American films in an American-owned cinem...

The term "Silk Road" evokes images of trade and exotic luxurious goods and Orientalist images. Today, however, it also is associated with the projection of Chinese power abroad. And as that pairing suggests, the term "Silk Road" in fact has many meanings as Professor Tim Winter has been explaining in his book The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures (Oxford University Press, 2022). Listen t...

"The world's future will depend on Africa having a good future." This week on International Horizons, Jack Goldstone, Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Chair Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and a Global Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center, discusses the role of age and demographics of social movements in the twenty-first century. Goldstone speculates about the...

America's decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 is arguably the most important foreign policy choice of the entire post-Cold War era. Nearly two decades after the event, it remains central to understanding current international politics and US foreign relations. In Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq (Oxford UP, 2023), the eminent historian of US foreign policy Melv...

How has a Christian movement, founded at the turn of the twentieth century by the son of freed slaves, become the fastest-growing religion on Earth? This is the religion of the Holy Spirit, with believers directly experiencing God and His blessings: success for the mind, body, spirit, and wallet. Pentecostalism is a social movement. It serves impoverished people in Africa and Latin America and ins...

Does China show that capitalism works better without democracy? What can be done to secure the future of open societies in which there is wealth, tolerance and stability. Martin Wolf - associate editor of the Financial Times and its chief economist - has been thinking about these big questions for his book The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (Penguin, 2023). Listen to him in conversation with Owen...