New Books in World Affairs

In the twenty-five years after 1989, the world enjoyed the deepest peace in history. In The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth (Oxford Univiersity Press, 2019), the eminent foreign policy scholar Michael Mandelbaum examines that remarkable quarter century, describing how and why the peace was established and then fell apart. To be sure, wars took place in this era, but less frequently and on a far sm...

In his new book, Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German Japanese Relations, 1919-1936 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University Ricky W. Law examines the cultural context of Tokyo and Berlin’s political rapprochement in 1936. This study of interwar German-Japanese relations is the first to employ sources in both languages. Transn...

Larry Diamond joins us this week to talk about the threat China’s model of authoritarian capitalism poses to liberal democracy in the United States and around the world. Economics drives politics, and it’s easy to admire China’s growth while looking past things like increasing surveillance and lack of respect for norms and the rule of law. We’ve wanted to do an episode on China for a long time, an...

Dag Hammarskjold was such a dynamic secretary-general that for years, the motto about him was simply “Leave it to Dag.” Only the second person to hold that post when he was elected, Hammarskjold did a great deal to shape perceptions of the UN. Consequently, evaluations of his legacy have tended to run the gamut, from extremely positive to bitingly critical. Hammarskjold’s defenders see him as a pa...

Who has the right to have rights? Motivated by Hannah Arendt’s famous reflections on the question of statelessness the book tells a non-linear global story of the emergence and transformations of human rights in the age of nation-states. In his new book A World Divided: The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States (Princeton UP, 2019), Eric D. Weitz argues somewhat provocativel...

Behind every landmark drug is a story. It could be a researcher’s genius insight, a catalyzing moment in geopolitical history, a new breakthrough technology, or an unexpected but welcome side effect discovered during clinical trials. In his new book, Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine (Harry N. Abrams, 2019), Thomas Hager traces the “mini-biographies” of...

Wonderfully concise and very readable, A Brief History of Spain (Robinson, 2019), is perfect for travelers as well as the discerning reader. Professor of History at Exeter University Jeremy Black’s book is a ‘must read’. This is an extraordinary tale of Spain, from early tribalism and Roman rule to the Moorish conquest in the 8th century, Spain's eighteenth-century revival under the Bourbons, the...

Neoliberalism is one of those fuzzy words that can mean something different to everyone. Wendy Brown is one of the world’s leading scholars on neoliberalism and argue that a generation of neoliberal worldview among political, business, and intellectual leaders led to the populism we’re seeing throughout the world today. But is it mutually exclusive to democracy? Not necessarily. Wendy joins us thi...

Why Don′t Women Rule the World?: Understanding Women′s Civic and Political Choices (Sage, 2019) is a comprehensive and useful addition to the established literature on women and politics. This book, authored by four political scientists with a diversity of training and expertise, delves into a broad and extensive overview of the issues that have long surrounded women in civic life and in pursuing...

In No Path Home: Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement (Cornell University Press, 2018), Elizabeth Cullen Dunn describes in a very on point and straight forward way how displacement has become a chronic condition for more than 60 million people. Dunn shows how war creates a deeply damaged world in which the structures that allow people to occupy social roles, constitute economic value,...

How did a Danish historian wind up with a human skull from colonial India in his University of London office? Kim A. Wagner’s The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857(Oxford University Press, 2018) tells two stories. The first concerns the way in which he came into possession of the skull of a Muslim soldier executed by the British in the aftermath of the rebellion of 1857, al...

Timothy LeCain is an award-winning environmental historian whose past work has focused on the connections between open-pit copper mines, technology, and the natural world. LeCain's newest book The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past (Cambridge University Press, 2017) presents a path-breaking approach to the study of the environment and history. In it LeCain argues that humans are insepar...

The enterprise of journalism is in crisis. Today’s journalists face accusations of “fake news” on the one hand, and harassment, arrest, and even the murder of reporters on the other. At the same time, we who rely on journalists for information, are constantly bombarded by breaking news. Confronted by video and print updates in real time, it is increasingly challenging to keep up with, let alone un...

Joy McCann discusses the great circumpolar ocean that surrounds Antarctica. McCann is the author of Wild Sea: A History of the Southern Ocean (University of New South Wales Press, 2018). She is a historian at the Centre for Environmental History at Australian National University. Flowing completely around the Earth and unimpeded by any landmass, the wild and elusive Southern Ocean reaches from the...

From Moscow, the world looks different. It is through understanding how Russia sees the world—and its place in it—that the West can best meet the new Russian challenge to the existing world order. Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West (Chatham House, 2019), by Chatham House Senior Russian expert, Keir Giles provides the sophisticated and curious reader a primer to help explain Puti...

A popular myth in the American nationalist imaginary is that the country has been on a continued path of progress. Another is that the country’s history has been the self-realization of the principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence. Jay Sexton says these are wrong. In fact, in his new book A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History (Basic Books, 2018), he shows how crises and c...

In the 1980s, fires burned an average of two million acres per year. Today the average is eight million acres and growing. Scientists believe that we could see years with twenty million acres burned, an area larger than country of Ireland. Today I talked to Michael Kodas about the phenomenon of megafires, forest fires that burn over 100,000 acres, and why the number of these fires is increasing ev...

Afghanistan and the United States have a complicated relationship. And poppies have often been at the center of the problem between the two countries. In James Tharin Bradford's new book, Poppies, Power, and Politics: Afghanistan and the Global History of Drugs and Diplomacy (Cornell University Press, 2019), he reevaluates the Afghan state, opium, and international drug regulation. Bradford offers...

Psychedelics are not terribly new. And the drug mescaline is certainly not new. Mike Jay's new book, Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic (Yale University Press, 2019), tells two trippy stories: one that is about Indigenous use and another about Western society's adoption of the drug in culture and medicine. He discusses perceptions of mescaline in science, culture, and the psyched...

The United States has been the world's dominant power for more than a century. Now many analysts and commentators believe that other countries such as China are rising and the United States is in decline. Is the era of American hegemony over? Is America finished as a superpower? In his superb and learned book, Unrivaled: Why America Will remain the World's Sole Superpower(Cornell University Press,...

Stefan Al, PhD, is a native of the Netherlands, a low-lying county that would not exist without flood protection, is an architect, urban designer, and infrastructure expert at global design at Kohn Pedersen Fox in New York. He has served as a TED resident, advisor to the United Nations High Level Political Forum on sustainable development and Professor of urban design at the University of Pennsylv...

Stefan Al, PhD, is a native of the Netherlands, a low-lying county that would not exist without flood protection, is an architect, urban designer, and infrastructure expert at global design at Kohn Pedersen Fox in New York. He has served as a TED resident, advisor to the United Nations High Level Political Forum on sustainable development and Professor of urban design at the University of Pennsylv...

Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the People's Republic of China (Palgrave, 2018) by Daniel Vukovich analyzes the 'intellectual political culture' of post-Tiananmen China in comparison to and in conflict with liberalism inside and outside the P.R.C. It questions how mainland politics and discourses challenge ‘our’ own, chiefly liberal and anti-‘statist’ political frameworks and how can...

Both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) practice periodic surveillance of member states to ensure they are adopting effective economic policies. Despite the importance of these practices, they remain understudied by scholars until now. Martin Edwards has written The IMF, the WTO & the Politics of Economic Surveillance (Routledge, 2018). Edwards is an Assoc...

There is no denying that the public remains fascinated with monarchy. In the United Kingdom, the royal family commands the headlines, but paradoxically they are distant and knowable all at once. The Queen is an iconic yet reserved figure, what with the kerchiefs, the corgis, and the deftly delivered speeches at state occasions. The younger royals seem to be interested in keeping it real, engaging...