New Books in World Affairs

Economic sanctions dominate the landscape of world politics today. First developed in the early twentieth century as a way of exploiting the flows of globalization to defend liberal internationalism, their appeal is that they function as an alternative to war. This view, however, ignores the dark paradox at their core: designed to prevent war, economic sanctions are modeled on devastating techniqu...

In Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), Dr. David Alston shows how Scots were involved in every stage of the slave trade: from captaining slaving ships to auctioning captured Africans in the colonies and hunting down those who escaped from bondage. This book focuses on the Scottish Highlanders who engaged in or benefitted from...

From his earliest days Winston Churchill was an extreme risk taker and he carried this into adulthood. Today he is widely hailed as Britain's greatest wartime leader and politician. Deep down though, he was foremost a warlord. Just like his ally Stalin, and his arch enemies Hitler and Mussolini, Churchill could not help himself and insisted on personally directing the strategic conduct of World Wa...

The Political Economy of Collective Action, Inequality, and Development (Stanford UP, 2020) examines how a society that is trapped in stagnation might initiate and sustain economic and political development. In this context, progress requires the reform of existing arrangements, along with the complementary evolution of informal institutions. It involves enhancing state capacity, balancing broad a...

Today we are joined by Heather Dichter, Associate Professor of Sports History and Sports Management at the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University. She is also the author of Bidding for the 68 Olympic Games: International Sport’s Cold War Battle with NATO (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of the East Germa...

Based on religious ethnography, in-depth interviews and archival data, Afe Adogame, Indigeneity in African Religions: Oza Worldviews, Cosmologies and Religious Cultures (Bloomsbury, 2021) explores the historical origins, worldviews, cosmologies, ritual symbolism and praxis of the indigenous Oza people in South West Nigeria. The author's locationality and positionality plugs the book within decolon...

Alliance politics is a regular headline grabber. When a possible military crisis involving Russia, North Korea, or China rears its head, leaders and citizens alike raise concerns over the willingness of US allies to stand together. As rival powers have tightened their security cooperation, the United States has stepped up demands that its allies increase their defense spending and contribute more...

In Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene (Duke UP, 2020), Mimi Sheller delves into the ecological crises and reconstruction challenges affecting the entire Caribbean region during a time of climate catastrophe. Drawing on fieldwork on postearthquake reconstruction in Haiti, flooding on the Haitian-Dominican border, and recent hurricanes, Sheller shows how ecological vulnerability...

In Number One Realist: Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare (Oxford UP, 2021), Dr. Nathaniel L. Moir studies the thought of this overlooked figure, one of the most important experts on counterinsurgency warfare in Indochina. Dr. Moir’s intellectual history analyses Fall’s formative experiences: his service in the French underground and army during the Second World War; his father’s ex...

Iraq has in the last year taken a lead in sponsoring talks between Middle Eastern arch-rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran in an effort to prevent tension in the region spinning out of control. The Iraqi role is remarkable given that Saudi Arabia for more than a decade after the 2003-led US invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein wanted nothing to do with the country’s post-Saddam leadership....

Leaders dominate coverage of political history and election campaigns and there is hardly a historian or election analyst who doesn't attribute importance to leadership. But the argument of this book from Lord Andrew Adonis is different. In It's the Leader, Stupid: Changemakers in Modern Politics (2021), he argues that leaders are basically all that matter to the course of politics. In this incisi...

As the old cliché goes, “there must have been something in the water.” A new book by historian Micah Alpaugh, Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions (Cambridge UP, 2021), courses a thread through the various disorders that riddled the Atlantic World in the late-eighteenth century. Alpaugh searches for and brings to light commonalities that spread throug...

Food insecurity poses one of the most pressing development and human security challenges in the world. Feeding the Hungry: Advocacy and Blame in the Global Fight Against Hunger (Oxford UP, 2020) examines the social and normative environments in which international anti-hunger organizations are working and argues that despite international law ascribing responsibility to national governments to ens...

In light of the discrepancy between Britain’s and France’s postcolonial security roles in Africa, which seemed already determined half a decade after independence, this book studies the making of the postcolonial security relationship during the transfer of power and the early years of independence (1958-1966). It focuses on West Africa, and more specifically the newly independent states of Nigeri...

Elora Shehabuddin’s new book Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism (University of California Press, 2021), traces the genealogy of the representation of Muslim women, and especially Bengali women, from colonial contexts to the contemporary moment. Weaving a rich analysis using diverse historical archives, the study highlights how notions of feminism d...

The common-sense way of thinking about what representatives should do in democracies tends to revolve around the concept of responsiveness: representatives should respond to the interests and demands of their constituents. However, this account of representation does not tell us much about how citizens form preferences. If political representatives and other actors have the ability to shape the in...

In The Reagan Moment: America and the World in the 1980s (Cornell UP, 2021), the ideas, events, strategies, trends, and movements that shaped the 1980s are revealed to have had lasting effects on international relations: The United States went from a creditor to a debtor nation; democracy crested in East Asia and returned to Latin America; the People's Republic of China moved to privatize, decentr...

Julian Strube's book Global Tantra (Oxford UP, 2022) explores the global exchanges that shaped a subject often associated with sexuality, social liberation, and bodily wellbeing but that also offers insights into political and religious developments in colonial India, involving race, education, and national identity. The study elides boundaries in disciplinary, historical, and regional contexts, t...

In recent years, India has repeatedly expressed its ambitions of becoming a global power – or ‘jagat guru.’ Yet, many believe that India’s economic troubles at home are far more pressing and that foreign policy aspirations can wait. But is a proactive foreign policy really a ‘luxury’ for India, to be postponed until the economy develops; or is it, in fact, a prerequisite for economic growth in a g...

In Making the World Safe for Dictatorship (Oxford University Press, 2021) Dr. Alexander Dukalskis looks at the tactics that authoritarian states use for image management and the ways in which their strategies vary from one state to another, using both "promotional" tactics of persuasion and "obstructive" tactics of repression. Using a diverse array of data, including interviews, cross-national dat...

In How ISIS Fights: Military Tactics in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Egypt (Edinburgh UP, 2021), Omar Ashour has written a detailed and data-rich analysis of ISIS's way of war. He analyzes the tactical and operational levels of war to depict what makes ISIS successful and unique. He reveals that ISIS was tactically and organizationally innovative, redefining not just what a terrorist organization is, bu...

Libya stands out as an example of a complex, internecine Middle Eastern and North African conflict in which regional and global powers as well as jihadists exploit tribal and sectarian rivalries. The rivalries fuel a seemingly endless wave of chaos and violence in a part of the world that is pockmarked by ungoverned spaces. In Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder, Libya expert Jason Pack demonst...

Before 1871, Germany was not yet nation but simply an idea. Its founder, Otto von Bismarck, had a formidable task at hand. How would he bring thirty-nine individual states under the yoke of a single Kaiser? How would he convince proud Prussians, Bavarians, and Rhinelanders to become Germans? Once united, could the young European nation wield enough power to rival the empires of Britain and France-...

Saving the International Justice Regime: Beyond Backlash against International Courts (Cambridge University Press, 2021) is at the forefront of a new conceptualization of backlash politics. Dr. Courtney Hillebrecht brings together theories, concepts and methods from the fields of international law, international relations, human rights and political science and case studies from around the globe t...

Throughout history, warfare has transformed social, political, cultural, and religious aspects of our lives. We tell tales of wars--past, present, and future--to create and reinforce a common purpose. In A Short History of War (Yale UP, 2021), Jeremy Black examines war as a global phenomenon, looking at the First and Second World Wars as well as those ranging from Han China and Assyria, Imperial R...