New Books in National Security

Since the early twentieth-century, Kurds have challenged the borders and national identities of the states they inhabit. Nowhere is this more evident than in their promotion of the 'Map of Greater Kurdistan', an ideal of a unified Kurdish homeland in an ethnically and geographically complex region. This powerful image is embedded in the consciousness of the Kurdish people, both within the region and, perhaps even more strongly, in the diaspora. Addressing the lack of rigorous research and analysis of Kurdish politics from an international perspective, Zeynep Kaya focuses on self-determination, territorial identity and international norms to suggest how these imaginations of homelands have been socially, politically and historically constructed (much like the state territories the Kurds inhabit), as opposed to their perception of being natural, perennial or intrinsic. Adopting a non-political approach to notions of nationhood and territoriality, Mapping Kurdistan: Territory, Self-Determination and Nationalism (Cambridge UP, 2020) is a systematic examination of the international processes that have enabled a wide range of actors to imagine and create the cartographic image of greater Kurdistan that is in use today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

In The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention (Oxford University Press, 2020), Rajan Menon shows that this belief, while noble, is naïve. He considers it ancient artifact belonging to the brief period right after the end of the cold war- the ‘Unipolar Moment’With the end of the Cold War has come an upsurge in humanitarian interventions-military campaigns aimed at ending mass atrocities. These wars of rescue, waged in the name of ostensibly universal norms of human rights and legal principles, rest on the premise that a genuine "international community" has begun to emerge and has reached consensus on a procedure for eradicating mass killings. Rajan Menon argues that, in fact, humanitarian intervention remains deeply divisive as a concept and as a policy, and is flawed besides. The advocates of humanitarian intervention have produced a mountain of writings to support their claim that human rights precepts now exert an unprecedented influence on states' foreign policies and that we can therefore anticipate a comprehensive solution to mass atrocities.States continue to act principally based on what they regard at any given time as their national interests. Delivering strangers from oppression ranks low on their list of priorities. Indeed, even democratic states routinely embrace governments that trample the human rights values on which the humanitarian intervention enterprise rests. States' ethical commitment to waging war to end atrocities remains episodic and erratic-more rhetorical than real. And when these missions are undertaken, the strategies and means used invariably produce perverse, even dangerous results. This, in no small measure, stems from the hubris of leaders-and the acolytes of humanitarian intervention-who have come to believe that they possesses the wisdom and wherewithal to bestow freedom and stability upon societies about which they know little.Medha Prasanna is an M.A candidate at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

During the 1940s, many Americans began to rethink America’s place in the world, and they did so with the help of Wendell Wilkie. Wilikie, the 1940 Republican nominee for president, businessman, and unofficial presidential envoy, made international issues easy to understand for many Americans. His particular brand of internationalism, outlined in his bestselling book One World (1943), challenged Americans to think about empire and America’s global power. He did this not with weighty philosophical principles, but rather with a peculiar mix of mid-western charm and cosmopolitanism. In his book The Idealist: Wendell Wilkie’s Wartime Quest To Build One World (Harvard University Press 2020), Professor Samuel Zipp of Brown University uses a 49 day drip that Willie took around the world as an unofficial envoy to President Franklin Roosevelt to provide a new look at American culture and political thought during World War Two. Brown’s engrossing book will be of interest to not just historians, but anyone interested in understanding how ordinary American responded to the global changes in governance, politics, and culture that took place during these prewar and postwar years.Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the history of Latin American student migration to the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. You can reach him at steven.p.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

This is a Special Series on Third World Nationalism.In the wake of a rise in nationalism around the world, and its general condemnation by liberals and the left, in addition to the rise of China and Russia, we have put together this series on Third World Nationalism to nuance the present discourse on nationalism, note its centrality to anti-imperial, anti-colonial politics around the world, the reconfiguration of global power, and its inextricability from mainstream politics in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.Today my guest is Erez Manela, author of The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford UP, 2009).During the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, while key decisions were debated by the victorious Allied powers, a multitude of smaller nations and colonies held their breath, waiting to see how their fates would be decided. President Woodrow Wilson, in his Fourteen Points, had called for "a free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims," giving equal weight would be given to the opinions of the colonized peoples and the colonial powers. Among those nations now paying close attention to Wilson's words and actions were the budding nationalist leaders of four disparate non-Western societies--Egypt, India, China, and Korea. That spring, Wilson's words would help ignite political upheavals in all four of these countries.This book is the first to place the 1919 Revolution in Egypt, the Rowlatt Satyagraha in India, the May Fourth movement in China, and the March First uprising in Korea in the context of a broader "Wilsonian moment" that challenged the existing international order. Using primary source material from America, Europe, and Asia, historian Erez Manela tells the story of how emerging nationalist movements appropriated Wilsonian language and adapted it to their own local culture and politics as they launched into action on the international stage. The rapid disintegration of the Wilsonian promise left a legacy of disillusionment and facilitated the spread of revisionist ideologies and movements in these societies; future leaders of Third World liberation movements--Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Jawaharlal Nehru, among others--were profoundly shaped by their experiences at the time.The importance of the Paris Peace Conference and Wilson's influence on international affairs far from the battlefields of Europe cannot be underestimated. Now, for the first time, we can clearly see just how the events played out at Versailles sparked a wave of nationalism that is still resonating globally today.Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

In June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. This key event in 20th-century history continues to fascinate the public imagination, yet few historians have examined in depth the regional context which allowed this assassination to happen or the murder's ripples which quickly spread out across the Balkans, Austria-Hungary and Europe as a whole. In Sarajevo 1914: Sparking the First World War (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Professor Mark Cornwall, a Central European specialist at the University of Southampton, has gathered an impressive cast of contributors from a 2014 history conference to explore the causes of the Sarajevo assassination and its consequences for the Balkans in the context of the First World War.With Professor Cornwall writing a highly informative introductory essay, this volume assesses from a variety of regional perspectives how the 'South Slav Question' destabilized the empire's southern provinces, provoking violent discontent in Croatia and Bosnia, and exacerbating the empire's relations with Serbia, regarded by Austria-Hungary as a dangerous state. It then explores the ripples of the Sarajevo event, from its evolution into a European crisis to the creation of a new independent state of Yugoslavia.Bringing together fresh perspectives by historians from Austria, Croatia, Slovenia and Serbia, as well as leading British historians of Austria-Hungary, this book published by Bloomsbury Academic is essential reading for anyone, either specialists or the educated lay reader, who wants to understand the Sarajevo violence and how it shaped modern Balkan history and indeed world history,Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Today we are joined by Heather Dichter, Associate Professor of Sports History and Sports Management at DeMontfort University and fellow at the international Centre for Sports History and Culture. She is also an author in and the editor of Soccer Diplomacy: International Relations and Football since 1914 (University Press of Kentucky, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of soccer diplomacy, the diplomatic role of different actors (including large and small states, international sporting organizations, and individual athletes), and whether winning matters for sports diplomats.In Soccer Diplomacy, Dichter joins ten other scholars in a critical examination of soccer diplomacy and soccer-as-diplomacy, tracing out the ways that soccer provided a space for international exchange and how states have proactively promoted soccer to achieve diplomatic aims. Dichter shot for a wide geographic spread and each article in the book details a different angle of sports diplomacy from around the world, including some of the usual powerhouses such as Brazil, or historiographically important ones including South Africa, but more commonly from unusual places such as Iceland, Chile, and Australia.They uncover a range of successful and failed diplomatic projects, illustrating not only the way that sports contributed to the cultural brand of a country, but more importantly the way that soccer could be mobilized by states, organizations, and even individuals to achieve particular diplomatic goals. Surprisingly, many of the diplomatic ventures initially began as sporting ones; governments only joined in reluctantly once their diplomatic possibilities became evident. Others however were whole cloth inventions of states that saw sports diplomacy as one of the few ways they could achieve their geopolitical aims.Each of the essays in this volume offers insights into soccer’s diplomatic potential and scholars interested in sport diplomacy should read it.Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. It will come out with Manchester University Press in 2021. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

In The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties (Duke UP, 2020), Professor Eric Zolov retells the history of 1960s Mexico by focusing on the way that Mexican political leaders pursued a paradoxical foreign policy agenda. This agenda consisted reaffirming Mexico’s close and amicable relationship with the United States, while, at the same time, aggressively asserting a much more radical, anti-US conception of hemispheric and international relations. Zolov resolves this foreign policy paradox by setting this period of Mexican history within the larger framework of the global Cold War. In Zolov’s account, Mexico emerges not as a peripheral actor, but a leading voice in the reconfiguration of global alliances during this period. He shows that Mexican policymakers were able to skillfully draw on Mexico’s close relationship with the United States during the 1950s and 1960s while also satisfying the more radical demands of the New Left in Mexico in order to reposition the country as a leading geopolitical actor within an emerging global solidarity movement between nations of the third world. This richly textured and well-argued monograph reinterprets many aspects of Mexican, Latin American, and international history through a skillful re-reading of familiar sources, as well an impressive incorporation new sources.Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD Candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Harmony and Normalization: US-Cuban Musical Diplomacy (University Press of Mississippi, 2020) explores the channels of musical exchange between Cuba and the United States during the eight-year presidency of Barack Obama, who eased the musical embargo of the island and restored relations with Cuba. Musical exchanges during this period act as a lens through which to view not only US-Cuban musical relations but also the larger political, economic, and cultural implications of musical dialogue between these two nations. In this first book on the subject since Obama’s presidency, musicologist Timothy P. Storhoff describes how, after specific policy changes, musicians were some of the first to take advantage of new opportunities for travel, push the boundaries of new regulations, and expose both the possibilities and limitations of licensing musical exchange. This ethnography demonstrates how performances reflect aspirations for stronger transnational ties and a common desire to restore the once-thriving US-Cuban musical relationship.Dr. Timothy Storhoff is an orchestra administrator, fundraiser, and ethnomusicologist in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Although World War II had been largely remembered in the People’s Republic of China as an experience of victimization since its founding in 1949, that view has been changing since the Deng Xiaoping era in the 1980s. Rana Mitter’s newest book on modern China, China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard University Press 2020), traces this transformation in the Chinese interpretations of the war from one marked by humiliation to one that celebrates victory. This change in the discourses surrounding the war began with a changing historiography led by Chinese academia in the 1980s, when research on a variety of previously forbidden areas of historical study was encouraged. Then, through local and public attempts at reviving and celebrating war memories through museums, TV, film, and the online space, WWII has been increasingly narrated in these different arenas as China’s “good war.” What came out of these new narratives, Mitter points out, is an attempt to rehabilitate Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists war efforts, which allows the PRC “to re-create an identity it was forging in the 1930s and 1940s, as a rising power that took a cooperative and powerful role at a time of immense global crisis…” In doing so, Mitter argues that China is able to create a subtle corollary, the idea that China is also a postwar state that is both one of the creators and protectors of the postwar international order. Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Donald Trump campaigned on a great many things in 2016, but one of the issues he used to criticize Democrats was their role in supporting sequestration and cuts to the military budget. While partisan rhetoric about the country being unsafe or the military being underfunded plays well, it obscures an important reality about the relative size of U.S. military funding. The United State spends more than the next ten leading countries combined. The Democratic Party, while often criticized as soft on defense, generally supports high military spending. This seems to contradict many statements made by politicians, and it also confounds expectations about where one might expect the Democrats’ priorities to lay. How did it get to be this way, with Democrats and Republicans supporting high military spending?Michael Brenes’ For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy explains this contradictory history. Brenes argues that after the beginning of the Cold War, defense spending became an important part of the federal social safety net, winning over adherents from both parties who sought guaranteed employment. This blurred lines between Republicans and Democrats, instead creating a “Cold War Coalition” that was propped up by anticommunists and liberals. While occasionally challenged by progressives and the left or by libertarian-minded conservatives, this coalition has persisted to the present and explains why bipartisan support for the military-industrial complex remains so strong.Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security