New Books in World Affairs

Today we are joined by Danyel Reiche, Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at the American University of Beirut, and the author of Success and Failure of Countries at the Olympic Games (Routedge, 2016) In Success and Failure, Reiche provides a playbook for National Committees that want to win more medals. Reiche’s fascinating work moves beyond the macro level analysis of international sport...

In his new book, Matthew Longo takes the reader on an unusual journey, at least within political theory, since his work combines a normative political theory approach with an ethnographic approach to understand both the conceptual and actual issue of borders as spaces that separate and distinguish states and nations, and individuals and citizens. The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and...

The Super Bowl is a singular spectacle in American culture. More than just a championship football game, the Super Bowl has become an unparalleled display of nationalism, consumerism, and culture. But despite its impact in the United States, the Super Bowl has never caught on around the world the way many Americans might assume. Peter Hopsicker and Mark Dyreson look at the magnitude of the Super B...

Since its initial postulation by Karl Jaspers, the concept of an “axial age” in the development of human thought and religion has exerted enormous influence in the fields of history and sociology. In The Three Axial Ages: Moral, Material, Mental (Rutgers University Press, 2017), John Torpey develops the concept further by identifying two additional axial points in human history following upon the...

Revival from Below: The Deoband Movement and Global Islam (University of California Press, 2018) by Brannon D. Ingram is a timely study of the Deoband movement from its inception in India to its transnational contemporary context in South Africa. Through careful analysis of historical textual discourses, Ingram carefully guides his readers through important polemics that manifested amongst the Deo...

In his new book The Stalinist Era(Cambridge University Press, 2018), David L. Hoffmann focuses on the myriad ways in which Stalinist practices had their origins in World War I (1914-1918) and Russian Civil War era (1918-1920). These periods saw mass mobilizations of the population take place not just in Russia and the early Bolshevik state, but in many other nations, too. In order to place Stalini...

Noah Coburn's Under Contract: The Invisible Workers of America's Global War (Stanford University Press, 2018) is about the hidden workers of American’s foreign wars: third country nationals who while not serving in their country’s militaries, still work to support the American war effort. These men and women serve as laborers, cooks, logisticians, engineers and security guards. They bear the burde...

Andrew Lambert, Professor of Naval History at King’s College, London, author of eighteen books, and winner of the prestigious Anderson Medal—turns his attention in a book that historian Felipe Fernandez Armesto describes as full of ‘ambition’, ‘verve’ and at times ‘brilliance’ - to Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Dutch Republic, and Britain. In Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires...

Chinmay Tumbe's book Moving India: A History of Migration (Penguin/Viking, 2018) is a brilliant and path-breaking history of Migration in India. Tumbe analyses the interlinked histories of migrations of different communities in and out of India and the world. His focus is novel and he argues for regarding the Great Indian Migration Wave as a unique phenomenon especially in terms of its voluntary c...

I spoke with Professor Rodrigo Zeidan of New York University, Shanghai. He has just published Economics of Global Business (MIT Press, 2018), a great book with innovative real-world macroeconomic analyses of timely policy issues, with case studies and examples from more than fifty countries. The book is particularly suitable for use as an introduction to macroeconomics for business students. If yo...

Jonathan Fulton's China's Relations with the Gulf Monarchies (Routledge, 2018) sheds light on China’s increasing economic role at a moment that the traditionally dominant role in international oil markets of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf oil producers is changing as a result of the United States having become more or less self-sufficient, China replacing the US as the Gulf’s foremost export market,...

In his new book On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and The Threat of Nuclear War (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Van Jackson succinctly explains the major issues facing U.S.-North Korea relations since the Korean Armistice Agreement. Jackson argues that the 2017 nuclear crisis was a product of a gradual hardening of U.S. policy towards North Korea, as well as the particular characteristics of the curre...

China’s global rise has been analysed from many perspectives in recent years. But pressing questions over how understandings of gender – and particularly masculinity – have been changing amidst increasing mutual contact between China and the wider world have been asked less often. Derek Hird and Geng Song are among the foremost contributors to a steadily growing body of work in this area, however,...

By the third century BC, the once-modest settlement of Rome had conquered most of Italy and was poised to build an empire throughout the Mediterranean basin. What transformed a humble city into the preeminent power of the region? In The Rise of Rome: From the Iron Age to the Punic Wars(Harvard University Press, 2018), the Durham University historian and archaeologist Kathryn Lomas reconstructs dip...

In Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World(Scribner Books, 2018), Dr. Michele Gelfand leverages cultural psychology research to examine social norms and their implications on individuals, organizations, and nations.  Dr. Gelfand examines how the threat environment shapes a nation’s culture, as well as how organizations, such as the military, are shaped by cultural f...

Costa Rica is the only full-fledged and totally independent country to be entirely demilitarized. Its military was abolished in 1948, with the keys to the armory handed to the Department of Education. Socially, Costa Rica is a success story. Although 94th in the world for GDP, it is in the top 10 on various measurements of health and well-being. Citizens enjoy high standards of living that include...

Onur Ulas Ince constructs an important analysis of liberalism, capitalism, and empire in his new book, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2018). This text brings together a number of lenses through which to consider the writings and ideas of British liberal thinkers, especially John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield. This book—which is part...

The world that Alexander remade in his lifetime was transformed once more by his death in 323 BCE. In Age of Conquests: The Greek World from Alexander to Hadrian(Harvard University Press, 2018), Angelos Chaniotis, Professor of Ancient History and Classics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, examines how his successors reorganized Persian lands to create a new empire stretching from t...

At a time when trade between China and the outside world is rarely out of the news, it remains important to remember that in centuries past global commerce moved in directions very different from those which dominate the present. This was especially evident during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Western countries and Japan employed a mix of coercive and collaborative mechanisms to fois...

Jonathan Fulton and Li-Chen Sim’s edited volume, External Powers and the Gulf Monarchies(Routledge, 2018) is a timely contribution to understanding the increasingly diversified relations between the Gulf’s six oil-rich monarchies and external powers. Traditionally reliant on the United States for their security, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain have become far more...

Having been born into a world in which people knew about anthropogenic global warming, I grew up in the “global environment.” Although the category “global environment” seems normal, if not natural, Perrin Selcer shows just how recent its origins actually are. In his innovative new book, The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment: How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth(Columbia University...

Donald Trump in the United States, Brexit vote in the U.K., various anti-EU parties in Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, and Hungary, as well as nativist or authoritarian leaders in Turkey, Russia, India, and China—Why has nationalism suddenly returned with a vengeance to the political front stage?  Are we headed back to the type of conflicts between nations that led to two...

Harkening back to the tribunal on Vietnam once convened by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, the World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) emerged in 2003 from the global antiwar movement that had mobilized against the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq by a US-led coalition.  This decentralized, transnational network of antiwar activists attempted to document and give grounds for the prosecution...

Kate Fullagar's and Michael A. McDonnell's edited volume Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) reimagines the Age of Revolution from the perspective of indigenous peoples. Rather than treating indigenous peoples as distant and passive players in the political struggles of the time, this book argues that they helped create and exploit the...

On the background of widespread portrayals of China as a monolithic geographical and political entity moving through time, insights into the endlessly contingent, local and contested events which have occurred in this part of East Asia over time are always valuable. This arguably applies all the more the further back in history we look, and so Jinping Wang's In the Wake of the Mongols: The Making...