New Books in National Security

At the start of 2020 few of us would have recognized the face of the current director general of the World Health Organization. Three months later, and in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic he and other senior WHO officials appear on television and online almost daily, exhorting governments around the world to take urgent measures to stop the spread of the virus, advising them on how to do so, and coordinating efforts. To these exhortations governments in Southeast Asia, like their counterparts elsewhere, have a duty to respond. This duty they owe not only to their citizens and neighbours, but also to the international community of states, via a special regulatory regime that has emerged in part out of experiences fighting recent contagions in East and Southeast Asia.In Containing Contagion: The Politics of Disease Outbreaks in Southeast Asia (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), Sara E. Davies explains how and why a duty to contain contagion at the source or within borders became central to the contemporary politics of disease control. She tracks regulatory changes for the control of contagion worldwide in tandem with the emergence in the 1990s of a new regional regime to respond to disease outbreaks among the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. In ASEAN, she observes, agreement to combat contagious diseases rested on a shared understanding of contagion as a security threat that member states would have to combat in unison rather than apart. Notwithstanding the divergences in capacities and willingness to combat contagion among Southeast Asian states, securitization of disease outbreaks in the 2000s made member states better prepared, overall, to combat it. But it also carried risks of costs to civil liberties and democratic practices that, if anything, are even more pronounced today than they were a decade ago.Sara Davies joins us for a coronavirus pandemic special on New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about health security and political sovereignty; the revised International Health Regulations; experiments with SARS and the avian influenza; surveillance of and reporting on contagious disease in Southeast Asia; democracy, transparency and trust in the wake of outbreaks; how endemic diseases risk being neglected and relatively unfunded in the wake of epidemics; and, the responses of China and Singapore to coronavirus, so far.Nick Cheesman is a Fellow in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University.  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 Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump (Verso, 2019), Max Blumenthal excavates the real, connected story behind the rise of Donald Trump, international jihad, Western ultra-nationalism and the many extremist forces that threaten peace across the globe: American imperialism.Washington’s secret funding of the mujahedin provoked the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. With guns and money, the United States has ever since sustained the extremists, including Osama Bin Laden, who have become its enemies. The Pentagon has trained and armed jihadist elements in Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya; it has launched military interventions to change regimes in the Middle East. In doing so, it created fertile ground for the Islamic State and brought foreign conflicts home to American soil.These failed wars abroad have made the United States more vulnerable to both terrorism as well as native ultra-nationalism. The Trump presidency is the inevitable consequence of neoconservative imperialism in the post–Cold War age. Trump’s dealings in the Middle East are likely only to exacerbate the situation.Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author whose articles and video documentaries have appeared in the New York Times, Daily Beast, Guardian, Huffington Post, Salon, Al Jazeera English and many other publications. He is Senior Editor of AlterNet’s Grayzone Project and the author of Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, which won the 2014 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Notable Book Award, the New York Times bestseller Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party, and The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza. His documentaries and on-the-ground reports have been seen by millions.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

How best to teach history and, for that matter any social science subject, to college students? The traditional answer has been to lecture them. Given that the typical length of an attentive lecture-listener is about 15 minutes, this might not be the best way to get the job done.Beginning in the late 1990s, a group of professors offered another technique now called "Reacting to the Past." You can read all about it here. Essentially, the "Reacting" technique asks students to play the roles of historical actors and to re-enact particular events and situations. The instructors using the method have had great success.Today I talked to Kelly McFall, a "Reacting" practitioner, about the techniques and his experience using it. McFall created a "Reacting" module called The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations, and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994 (W. W. Norton, 2018). In the interview, McFall talks about how the particular modules are created, how they are used in the classroom, and how any college teacher can become involved in creating new modules.Here are some resources for those interested in using "Reacting" series and getting involved in creating new modules.--The "Reacting to the Past" website is here.--The publisher's (W. W. Norton) website on the "Reacting to the Past" series is here.--The "Reacting to the Past" Facebook group is here.Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Reporters and scholars often focus on violence and victimization: “if it bleeds, it leads.” But unarmed civilians around the world often protect themselves against armed combatants using social processes to reduce the violence perpetrated against them. Oliver Kaplan’s case studies of Columbia – with extensions to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and the Philippines – demonstrates how, why, and when civilians effectively resist the influence of armed actors and limit violence.In our conversation about his new book Resisting War: How Communities Protect Themselves (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Kaplan describes his interdisciplinary methodology that creatively combines fieldwork, statistics, and scholarship from sociology, psychology, history, and political science. Kaplan insists that civilians are not helpless victims but deployers of covert and overt nonviolence strategies that preserve and cultivate autonomy. He explains how local social organization and cohesion allows civilians to create strategies that help them protect themselves (and human rights more broadly). Kaplan’s book traces the strategies that help civilians enhance their autonomy – particularly the ways in which they affect armed actors’ behavior, capabilities, and ways of thinking. The book contributes to the study of human rights, conflict processes, peace studies, and order in weak states.Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

In her new book, West Germany and Israel: Foreign Relations, Domestic Politics and the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Carole Fink examines the relationship between West Germany and Israel. By the late 1960s, West Germany and Israel were moving in almost opposite diplomatic directions in a political environment dominated by the Cold War. The Federal Republic launched ambitious policies to reconcile with its Iron Curtain neighbors, expand its influence in the Arab world, and promote West European interests vis-à-vis the United States. By contrast, Israel, unable to obtain peace with the Arabs after its 1967 military victory and threatened by Palestinian terrorism, became increasingly dependent upon the United States, estranged from the USSR and Western Europe, and isolated from the Third World. Nonetheless, the two countries remained connected by shared security concerns, personal bonds, and recurrent evocations of the German-Jewish past. Drawing upon newly-available sources covering the first decade of the countries' formal diplomatic ties, Carole Fink reveals the underlying issues that shaped these two countries' fraught relationship and sets their foreign and domestic policies in a global context.Carole Fink is Humanities Distinguished Professor Emeritus at The Ohio State UniversityCraig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

The attacks on the luxurious Taj Hotel in Mumbai in 2008 put Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, a jihadist terrorist group, in the international / Western spotlight for the first time, though they had been deadly active in India and Afghanistan for decades.In her book In Their Own Words: Understanding Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (Oxford University Press, 2018), Christine Fair reveals a little-known aspect of how LeT functions in Pakistan and beyond, by translating and commenting upon a range of publications produced and disseminated by Dar-ul-Andlus, the publishing wing of LeT.Only a fraction of LeT's cadres ever see battle: most of them are despatched on nation-wide "prozelytising" (dawa) missions to convert Pakistanis to their particular interpretation of Islam, in support of which LeT has developed a sophisticated propagandist literature. This canon of Islamist texts is the most popular and potent weapon in LeT's arsenal, and its scrutiny affords insights into how and who the group recruits; LeT's justification for jihad; its vision of itself in global and regional politics; the enemies LeT identifies and the allies it cultivates; and how and where it conducts its operations. Particular attention is paid to the role that LeT assigns to women by examining those writings which heap extravagant praise upon the mothers of aspirant jihadis, who bless their operations and martyrdom. It is only by understanding LeT's domestic functions as set out in these texts that one can begin to appreciate why Pakistan so fiercely supports it, despite mounting international pressure to disband the group.India and the United States are placed in extremely difficult positions with regard to Pakistan because of this.Christine Fair is a Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor in the Peace and Security Studies Program within Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.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

Sanjib Baruah’s latest book In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast (Stanford University Press, 2020) completes a trilogy on India’s northeastern borderland region of which the first two are India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (1999) and Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India (2005).Writing about a region that is 'an artifact of a deliberate policy', the directional name--the Northeast--is a postcolonial coinage that refers to the eight states of India that border Myanmar, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Tibetan areas of China. Baruah's book is a wide-ranging analysis of a mode of governance that has become associated with the region where armed resistance, electoral institutions, states of exception and the force of development co-exist. Baruah's book is a dive into the 'unfinished business of partition' in this borderland region, contested sovereignty, citizenship and mobility and the postcolonial trajectory of the colonial state in its direct and indirect avatar. Scholars studying civil conflict and armed resistance as well as those studying the political economy of borderlands and nationalism will find in Baruah's book deep and comparative insights into universal concerns of federalism, development and democracy. This is a crucial text to introduce students and scholars to the dilemmas and contradictions of a democracy as well as a region to whose concern institutional academia has arrived rather belatedly.Dr. Sanjib Baruah is a Professor of Political Studies at Bard College.Bhoomika Joshi is a doctoral student in the department of anthropology at Yale University.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Global history records an astonishing variety of forms of social organization. Yet almost universally, males subordinate females. How does the relationship between men and women shape the wider political order? Valerie M. Hudson, Donna Lee Bowen, and Perpetua Lynne Nielsen's new book The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide (Columbia University Press, 2020) is a groundbreaking demonstration that the persistent and systematic subordination of women underlies all other institutions, with wide-ranging implications for global security and development.Incorporating research findings spanning a variety of social science disciplines and comprehensive empirical data detailing the status of women around the globe, the book shows that female subordination functions almost as a curse upon nations. A society’s choice to subjugate women has significant negative consequences: worse governance, worse conflict, worse stability, worse economic performance, worse food security, worse health, worse demographic problems, worse environmental protection, and worse social progress. Yet despite the pervasive power of social and political structures that subordinate women, history—and the data—reveal possibilities for progress.The First Political Order shows that when steps are taken to reduce the hold of inequitable laws, customs, and practices, outcomes for all improve. It offers a new paradigm for understanding insecurity, instability, autocracy, and violence, explaining what the international community can do now to promote more equitable relations between men and women and, thereby, security and peace. With comprehensive empirical evidence of the wide-ranging harm of subjugating women, it is an important book for security scholars, social scientists, policy makers, historians, and advocates for women worldwide.Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction.The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

The 9/11 attacks fundamentally transformed how the US approached terrorism, and led to the unprecedented expansion of counterterrorism strategies, policies, and practices. While the analysis of these developments is rich and vast, there remains a significant void. The diverse actors contributing to counterterrorism increasingly consider, engage and impact women as agents, partners, and targets of their work. Yet, flawed assumptions and stereotypes remain prevalent, and it remains undocumented and unclear how and why counterterrorism efforts have evolved as they did, including in relation to women.Drawing on extensive primary source documents, A Woman's Place: US Counterterrorism Since 9/11 (Oxford University Press, 2020) traces the evolution of women in US counterterrorism efforts through the administrations of Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump, examining key agencies like the US Department of Defense, the Department of State, and USAID. Joana Cook investigates how and why women have developed the roles they have, and interrogates US counterterrorism practices in key countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Analysing conceptions of and responses to terrorists, she also considers how the roles of women in Al- Qaeda and Daesh have evolved and impacted on US counterterrorism considerations.Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security