New Books in World Affairs

The global success of football icons like Samuel Eto'o, Didier Drogba and Mohamed Salah has fuelled the migratory projects of countless young men across the African continent who dream of following - literally and figuratively - in their footsteps. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research, African Football Migration: Aspirations, Experiences and Trajectories (Manchester University Press,...

Ban Wang's book China in the World: Culture, Politics, and World Vision (Duke University Press, 2022), traces the evolution of modern China from the late nineteenth century to the present. With a focus on tensions and connections between national formation and international outlooks, Wang shows how ancient visions persist even as China has adopted and revised the Western nation-state form. The con...

Jo Guldi tells the story of a global struggle to bring food, water, and shelter to all. Land is shown to be a central motor of politics in the twentieth century: the basis of movements for giving reparations to formerly colonized people, protests to limit the rent paid by urban tenants, intellectual battles among development analysts, and the capture of land by squatters taking matters into their...

For nearly 3,000 years, the question of what it means to be Greek has been one of perennial interest—and, incredibly enough, not only to the Greeks. How a collection of small cities and kingdoms around the northeastern Mediterranean Sea laid down precepts for science, the arts, politics, law, and philosophy is one of the great historical stories. Their influence would eventually reach far beyond t...

Across the twentieth century, Earth's human population increased undeniably quickly, rising from 1.6 billion people in 1900 to 6.1 billion in 2000. As population grew, it also began to take the blame for some of the world's most serious problems, from global poverty to environmental degradation, and became an object of intervention for governments and nongovernmental organizations. But the links b...

Susan H. Allen's Interactive Peacemaking: A People-Centered Approach (Routledge, 2022) examines the theory and practice of interactive peacemaking, centering the role of people in making peace. This book presents the theory and practice of peacemaking as found in contemporary processes globally. By putting people at the center of the analysis, it outlines the possibilities of peacemaking by and fo...

The attacks of 9/11 changed the course of the global counter-terrorism order which has entrenched a system of global governance. This institutional creep is arguably eroding national borders, spheres of domestic governance, human rights, and seeps into the daily lives of ordinary citizens in largely unforeseen aspects. Perhaps just as alarming, there is limited accountability on the part of either...

“Human rights in public policy are constructed by diplomats and politicians in an international legislative process, not discovered amongst the clouds of metaphysics.” In "Advanced Introduction to the Politics of International Human Rights (Edward Elgar, 2021), David P. Forsythe, general editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Human Rights (5 vol.) and pioneer of the field of human rights and interna...

Dr. Sam Lebovic’s A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization (University of Chicago Press, 2022) is an examination of how the postwar United States twisted its ideal of “the free flow of information” into a one-sided export of values and a tool with global consequences. When the dust settled after World War II, the United States stood as the world’s unquest...

There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation. – epigraph in The Long Land War by Jo Guldi (2021) Every political order contains within it tensions, contradictions, and vulnerabilities that at a ce...

Americans in China: Encounters with the People’s Republic (Oxford, 2022) tells the stories of men and women who have lived and worked in China from before the Communist era to the present. Their experiences provide unique insights and deeply human perspectives on issues that have shaped US engagement with the PRC: politics, diplomacy, education, science, business, art, law, journalism, and human r...

We often neglect the Indian Ocean when we talk about our macro-level models of geopolitics, global economics or grand strategy—often in favor of the Atlantic or the Pacific. Yet the Indian Ocean—along whose coasts live a third of humanity—may be a better vehicle to understand how our world is changing. Globalization first began in the Indian Ocean with traders sailing between the Gulf, South Asia...

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...