New Books in World Affairs

Nineteen months since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the books are coming thick and fast. Fortunately, each tells a different and compelling story. Like other recent books, Gwendolyn Sasse’s Russia's War Against Ukraine (Polity, 2023) analyses three decades of diverging Russian and Ukrainian politics and society, burgeoning Russian neo-imperialism, and Western temerity. Unique to this...

"War was always central to Putin's project," writes Alex J. Bellamy in Warmonger: Vladimir Putin's Imperial Wars (Agenda, 2023). Not just the second Chechen war that made him but the NATO-probing wars in Georgia and eastern Ukraine that emboldened him, and the Western-style war from air in Syria designed to mark Russia’s return to Great Power status. But, the project has not gone well. According t...

Based on the author’s eight years of fieldwork with the United Nations-led Conference of Parties (COP), In Quest of a Shared Planet: Negotiating Climate from the Global South (Fordham UP, 2023) offers an illuminating first-person ethnographic perspective on climate change negotiations. Focusing on the Paris Agreement, anthropologist Naveeda Khan introduces readers to the only existing global appro...

In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, many believed that we had arrived at the 'End of History' - that the global dominance of liberal democracy had been secured forever. Now however, with Russia rattling its sabre on the borders of Europe and China rising to challenge the post-1945 world order, the liberal West faces major threats. These threats are not only external. Espec...

In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, many believed that we had arrived at the 'End of History' - that the global dominance of liberal democracy had been secured forever. Now however, with Russia rattling its sabre on the borders of Europe and China rising to challenge the post-1945 world order, the liberal West faces major threats. These threats are not only external. Espec...

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has already changed the world. Why did it happen? Who is winning? How will it end? Christopher Miller is the author of The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine (Bloomsbury, 2023). Hear him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign corr...

Our lives are in countless ways defined by our citizenship. The country we belong to affects our rights, our travel possibilities, and ultimately our chances in life. Obtaining a new citizenship is rarely easy. But for those with the means—billionaires like Peter Thiel and Jho Low, but also countless unknown multimillionaires—it’s just a question of price. As discussed in The Golden Passport: Glob...

Defectors fleeing the Soviet Union seized the world's attention during the Cold War. Their stories were told in sensational news coverage and dramatized in spy novels and films. In contrast to other refugees, they were pursued by the states they left even as they were sought by the United States and other Western governments eager to claim them. Taking part in a risky game that played out across t...

From Asia to Africa to the Middle East, #MeToo has inspired local movements and hashtag trends like #AnaKaman and transnational collective hashtags like #MosqueMeToo. Yet, most Western scholarly and popular treatment of the movement assumes it is a primarily Western phenomenon.  To attend to the revolutionary international impact of #MeToo, Iqra Shagufta Cheema brings together contributions from s...

How do we talk about China? It’s a question every analyst, academic, policymaker, and reporter probably needs to ask themselves. Is China, as some of the hawks claim, an existential threat to the world order? Is it on the verge of aggressively taking the number one spot—or is it on the verge of collapse? Is it a dangerous military threat or is it—as some Chinese commentators claim—an entirely bene...

When uprisings against colonial rule broke out across the world after 1945, Britain responded with overwhelming and brutal force. Although this period has conventionally been dubbed "postwar," it was punctuated by a succession of hard-fought, long-running conflicts that were geographically diffuse, morally ambiguous, and impervious to neat endings or declarations of victory. Ruthless counterinsurg...

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviewed Jayati Ghosh, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, about different debates surrounding inequality. Ghosh criticizes the flaws in some inequality indicators that are focusing only on measuring how the poor are doing and not on how the rich are getting richer, or other indicators that exa...

Chris Murray's book Unknown Conflicts of the Second World War: Forgotten Fronts (Routledge, 2019) is a collection of chapters dealing with various overlooked aspects of the Second World War. The aim is to give greater depth and context to the war by introducing new stories about regions of the world and elements of the war rarely considered. These chapters represent new discussions on previously u...

In just four decades, bottled water has transformed from a luxury niche item into a ubiquitous consumer product, representing a $300 billion market dominated by global corporations. It sits at the convergence of a mounting ecological crisis of single-use plastic waste and climate change, a social crisis of affordable access to safe drinking water, and a struggle over the fate of public water syste...

Today we are joined by Dr. Karen Carr, Associate Professor Emerita in the Department of History at Portland State University and the author of Shifting Currents: A World History of Swimming (Reaktion Books, 2022). Shifting Currents is the winner of the 2023 North American Society for Sports History Monograph Book Award. In our conversation, we discussed the historical, cultural, and geographic div...

In A Book of Waves (Duke UP, 2023), Stefan Helmreich examines ocean waves as forms of media that carry ecological, geopolitical, and climatological news about our planet. Drawing on ethnographic work with oceanographers and coastal engineers in the Netherlands, the United States, Australia, Japan, and Bangladesh, Helmreich details how scientists at sea and in the lab apprehend waves’ materiality t...

Why are we seeing a rise in coups in Africa and growing debate about the possible benefits of military rule? What are the roots of “feel good” militarism and how much of a threat does this pose to civilian governments? Whose interests are served by giving the military a role in development, and how well do the armed forces actually perform in reality? Join Nic Cheeseman and Rita Abrahamsen in this...

The “Middle East” has long been an indispensable and ubiquitous term in discussing world affairs, yet its history remains curiously underexplored. Few question the origin of the term or the boundaries of the region, commonly understood to have emerged in the twentieth century after World War I.  In Inventing the Middle East: Britain and the Persian Gulf in the Age of Global Imperialism (McGill-Que...

Western analysts and media often assess the prospect that Moscow might use nuclear weapons as the war in Ukraine grinds on, possibly to a flailing Russia’s disadvantage. George Beebe, though, injects a less-familiar element into this grim dynamic: What are the chances that Washington might resort to nukes, should the direction in the war turn sharply against U.S.-backed Ukraine? Or enter the confl...

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book sho...

Ines Prodöhl’s Globalizing the Soybean: Fat, Feed, and Sometimes Food, c. 1900-1950 (Routledge, 2023) is a history of how, why, and where the soybean became a critical ingredient in industry and agriculture in the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on Japanese-dominated Manchuria, Germany, and the United States, Prodöhl shows that the soybean was a serendipitous solution to numerous and...

The British empire, in sentimental myth, was more free, more just and more fair than its rivals. But this claim that the British empire was 'free' and that, for all its flaws, it promised liberty to all its subjects was never true. The British empire was built on slavery. Padraic X. Scanlan's book Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain (Robinson, 2021) puts enslaved people at the centre th...

The statement ‘we live in a secular age’ is open to the obvious challenge that in some parts of the word, religion is a growing force in society. And even in places such as the US, religious activists seem to have growing influence – as the recent US Supreme Court decision about abortion suggests. So, is this actually a secular age? Ryan Cragun is a co-author (with Isabella Kasselstrand and Phil Z...

We kick off our Fall 2023 season of International Horizons with Upendra Choudhury from Aligarh Muslim University discussing the role of India in the contemporary international system. Prof. Choudhury argues that India’s vision of a multipolar world order consists of acting as a balancing mediator between the traditional West and a rising China. In that sense, Choudhury claims that India cannot aff...

Our world has innumerable boundaries, ranging from the obvious - like an ocean - to subtle differences in language or climate. Most of us cross invisible lines all the time, but don't stop to consider them. In Invisible Lines: Boundaries and Belts That Define the World (Profile, 2023), geographer Dr. Maxim Samson presents 30 such unseen boundaries, intriguing and unexpected examples of the myriad...