New Books in World Affairs

Grain traders wandering across the steppe; the Russian conquest of Ukraine (in the 18th century, that is); boulevard barons and wheat futures; railroads; the first fast food breakfast; and war socialism. It’s all crammed into this discussion of wheat, and what it wrought, with Scott Nelson. Scott Reynolds Nelson is the Georgia Athletics Association Professor of the Humanities at the University of...

Most stories of medical progress come with ready-made heroes. John Snow traced the origins of London's 1854 cholera outbreak to a water pump, leading to the birth of epidemiology. Florence Nightingale's contributions to the care of soldiers in the Crimean War revolutionized medical hygiene, transforming hospitals from crucibles of infection to sanctuaries of recuperation. Yet histories of individu...

One of the outcomes of globalization is the growth of diasporic communities worldwide. This population has continued to face a lot of complexities due to differences in ethnicities. However, these communities have the potential to contribute immensely to a nation’s development through their knowledge and skills. What is needed is to shed the ethnocentric lens for an inclusive one. In the third epi...

Why has "car society" proven so durable, even in the face of mounting environmental and economic crises? In Globalizing Automobilism: Exuberance and the Emergence of Layered Mobility, 1900–1980 (Berghahn Books, 2020), Gijs Mom traces the global spread of the automobile in the postwar era and investigates why adopting more sustainable forms of mobility has proven so difficult. Drawing on archival r...

Human fertility rates are declining fast and in twenty years or so the global population will go down fast – not just in affluent countries but in the world as a whole. While many may welcome that outcome, Professor John Aitken who has just written The Infertility Trap: Why Life Choices Impact Your Fertility and Why We Must Act Now (Cambridge UP, 2022), argues that a rapid fall in the numbers of p...

For all of the doubts raised about the effectiveness of international aid in advancing peace and development, there are few examples of developing countries that are even relatively untouched by it. Sarah Phillips's When There Was No Aid: War and Peace in Somaliland (Cornell UP, 2020) offers us one such example. Using evidence from Somaliland's experience of peace-building, When There Was No Aid c...

Dr. Sofia Stolk’s The Opening Statement of the Prosecution in International Criminal Trials: A Solemn Tale of Horror (Routledge, 2021) addresses the discursive importance of the prosecution’s opening statement before an international criminal tribunal. Opening statements are considered to be largely irrelevant to the official legal proceedings but are simultaneously deployed to frame important his...

Pandemic Re-Awakenings: The Forgotten and Unforgotten 'Spanish' Flu Of 1918-1919 (Oxford UP, 2021), edited by Guy Beiner, offers a multi-level and multi-faceted exploration of a century of remembering, forgetting, and rediscovering the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, arguably the greatest catastrophe in human history. Twenty-three researchers present original perspectives by critically investigat...

In The Digital Frontier: Infrastructures of Control on the Global Web (Indiana University Press, 2021), Sangeet Kumar interrogates the world wide web and the digital ecosystem has spawned to reveal how its conventions, protocols, standards, and algorithmic regulations represent a novel form of global power. Kumar shows the operation of this power through the web's "infrastructures of control" visi...

When and why does international order change? The largest peaceful transfer of wealth across borders in all of human history began with the oil crisis of 1973. OPEC countries turned the tables on the most powerful businesses on the planet, quadrupling the price of oil and shifting the global distribution of profits. It represented a huge shift in international order. Yet, the textbook explanation...

Collaborative Damage: An Experimental Ethnography of Chinese Globalization (Cornell UP, 2022) is an experimental ethnography of Chinese globalization that compares data from two frontlines of China's global intervention—sub-Saharan Africa and Inner/Central Asia. Based on their fieldwork on Chinese infrastructure and resource-extraction projects in Mozambique and Mongolia, Mikkel Bunkenborg, Morten...

Tariffs and trade barriers are rising, and major diplomatic institutions that have long promoted liberal trade are coming under attack as impending trade wars threaten global trade and global value chains. At the root of this crisis, argues Geoffrey Pigman, is accelerating technological change. Negotiating Our Economic Future: Trade, Technology, and Diplomacy (McGill-Queen's UP, 2020) traces the i...

2019 marked the five-hundred year anniversary of the launch of Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage around the world–a milestone marked by commemorative sailings, museum exhibitions, and a joint submission from Spain and Portugal to UNESCO. Two years later, the Philippines marked their own commemoration of Magellan’s voyage: the 500th anniversary of his death at the hands of local leader Lapu-Lapu. A maste...

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...