New Books in World Affairs

In Mapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity (U Nebraska Press, 2019), Simon Ferdinand analyzes diverse map-based works of painting, collage, film, walking performance, and digital drawing, made in Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, Ukraine, the United States, and the former Soviet Union, arguing that together they challenge the dominant modern view of the world as a measurable and malleable geometrical space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Constitutional Investigations is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Linda Colley, the Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University. Linda Colley is a leading expert on British, imperial and global history since 1700. After inspiring insights about Linda Colley’s teachers and professors who had a strong impact on her future career as a historian, this wide-ranging conversation provides a detailed examination of the global history and present state of constitutions and their impact.Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is often invoked, but usually as a means of cultural critique and analysis. However, my guest Lorenzo Fusaro argues in his recent book Crises and Hegemonic Transitions: From Gramsci's Quaderni to the Contemporary World Economy (Haymarket Books, 2020) that Gramsci’s work is permeated by Marx’s economic critique and his theories of value. Split into two parts, the book is both a critical rereading of Gramsci, followed by a rereading of the last century of economic and political developments. The first half of the book involves a careful rereading of key concepts in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, rethinking concepts such as hegemony as being more closely related to the base, instead of simply being superstructural description. Hegemony is not above and beyond economic dynamics and antagonisms, but emerges from them and changes alongside them. This allows for a broadening of the theory conceptually, and also allows him to apply it to international relations, instead of being confined to a particular state. The second half of the book then traces the economic history of the 20th century, starting with the rise of the United States in the international scene in the 1920’s, and following through to its eventual unraveling on the world stage in the present day. And even though the book was first published in 2018, at the end Fusaro offered some speculations on how this reworked theory of hegemony might help us think about the recent COVID crisis and its aftermath. Synthesizing theory, history and economics, this is a book that offers a powerful punch, and will reward readers from a number of different angles, and offers some dynamic theoretical resources for understanding our current crisis, and what might be just around the corner. The book was first published by Brill as part of the Historical Materialism book series, and is now available in paperback from Haymarket.Lorenzo Fusaro received his PhD in international political economy at King's College, London. He is an associate professor of political economy at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico, and is also one of the editors of Revisiting Gramsci’s Laboratory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The image most of us have of whalers includes harpoons and intentional trauma. Yet eating commercially caught seafood leads to whales' entanglement and slow death in rope and nets, and the global shipping routes that bring us readily available goods often lead to death by collision. We--all of us--are whalers, marine scientist and veterinarian Michael J. Moore contends. But we do not have to be.Drawing on over forty years of fieldwork with humpback, pilot, fin, and in particular, North Atlantic right whales--a species whose population has declined more than twenty percent since 2017--Moore takes us with him as he performs whale necropsies on animals stranded on beaches, in his independent research alongside whalers using explosive harpoons, and as he tracks injured whales to deliver sedatives. The whales' plight is a complex, confounding, and disturbing one. We learn of existing but poorly enforced conservation laws and of perennial (and often failed) efforts to balance the push for fisheries profit versus the protection of endangered species caught by accident.But despite these challenges, Moore's We Are All Whalers: The Plight of Whales and Our Responsibility (U Chicago Press, 2021) is an optimistic one. He shows us how technologies for rope-less fishing and the acoustic tracking of whale migrations make a dramatic difference. And he looks ahead with hope as our growing understanding of these extraordinary creatures fuels an ever-stronger drive for change. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Global Public Health (MIT Press, 2020), physician-anthropologist Eugene T. Richardson explores how public health practices—from epidemiological modeling to outbreak containment—help perpetuate global inequities.This book questions the Global North's "monopoly on truth" in global public health science, making a provocative claim: that public health science manages and maintains global health inequity. Richardson, a physician and anthropologist, examines the conventional public health approach to epidemiology through the lens of a participant-observer, identifying a dogmatic commitment to the quantitative paradigm. This paradigm, he argues, plays a role in causing and perpetrating public health crises. The mechanisms of public health science--and epidemiology in particular--that set public health agendas and claim a monopoly on truth stem from a colonial, racist, and patriarchal system that had its inception in 1492.Deploying a range of rhetorical tools, including ironism, “redescriptions” of public health crises, Platonic dialogue, flash fiction, allegory, and koan, Richardson describes how epidemiology uses models of disease causation that serve protected affluence (the possessing classes) by setting epistemic limits to the understanding of why some groups live sicker lives than others—limits that sustain predatory accumulation rather than challenge it. Drawing on his clinical work in a variety of epidemics, including Ebola in West Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, leishmania in the Sudan, HIV/TB in southern Africa, diphtheria in Bangladesh, and SARS-CoV-2 in the United States, he concludes that the biggest epidemic we currently face is an epidemic of illusions—one that is propagated by the coloniality of knowledge production.Eugene T. Richardson, MD, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Visiting Faculty at the University of Global Health Equity in Butaro, Rwanda, and Chair of the Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice.Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. Her current work concerns the politics of travel in Cold War US; she has previously published on US intervention in the 2013-16 Ebola epidemic. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Why has the United States, the world’s premier military and economic power, struggled recently to achieve its foreign policy desiderata? How might America’s leaders reconsider the application of power for a world of asymmetric and unconventional threats? In his new book, Power and Complacency: American Survival in an Age of International Competition (Potomac Books, 2021), American Enterprise Institute Visiting Fellow Philip Lohaus explores the roots of America’s “efficacy deficit” and offers recommendations for how the United States can ensure a favorable place on an increasingly crowded global stage.Lohaus argues that the American way of competition, rooted in a black-and-white approach to conflict and an overreliance on technology, impedes effectiveness in the amorphous landscape of the 21st-century conflict. By tracing the geographic and historical development of the United States, China, Russia, and Iran, Lohaus shows that America’s principal competitors have developed more dynamic approaches to competition and conflict outside of warfare. Unless the United States adapts, Lohaus writes, it will find itself on the path to decline.Before joining the American Enterprise Institute, Lohus previously served as an Intelligence Analyst in the US Department of Defense, where he deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. He is currently a Reserve Officer in the US Navy.John Sakellariadis is a 2021-2022 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a Master’s degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Through various international case studies presented by both practitioners and scholars, Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene: From (Un)Just Presents to Just Futures (Routledge, 2021) explores how an environmental justice approach is necessary for reflections on inequality in the Anthropocene and for forging societal transitions toward a more just and sustainable future. Environmental justice is a central component of sustainability politics during the Anthropocene - the current geological age in which human activity is the dominant influence on climate and the environment. Every aspect of sustainability politics requires a close analysis of equity implications, including problematizing the notion that humans as a collective are equally responsible for ushering in this new epoch. Environmental justice provides us with the tools to critically investigate the drivers and characteristics of this era and the debates over the inequitable outcomes of the Anthropocene for historically marginalized peoples. The contributors to Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene focus on a critical approach to power and issues of environmental injustice across time, space, and context--drawing from twelve national contexts: Austria, Bangladesh, Chile, China, India, Nicaragua, Hungary, Mexico, Brazil, Sweden, Tanzania, and the United States. Beyond highlighting injustices, the volume highlights forward-facing efforts at building just transitions, with a goal of identifying practical steps to connect theory and movement and envision an environmentally and ecologically just future. This interdisciplinary work will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners focused on conservation, environmental politics and governance, environmental and earth sciences, environmental sociology, environment and planning, environmental justice and global sustainability and governance. It will also be of interest to social and environmental justice advocates and activists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In 1961, it was famously declared that the “fight for education is too important to be left solely to the educators.” Enter the OECD. In The OECD’s Historical Rise in Education: The Formation of a Global Governing Complex (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Christian Ydesen offers a well-edited volume that illuminates how the OECD normalized its influence over global education policy from its Cold War origins until today. Ydesen argues for an interpretation of the OECD as a “global governing complex” that roots its power in comparative data and the production of educational norms. How did the OECD, initially an outgrowth of Marshall Plan funds, become a dominant player in global education policy? Listen in to find out.Elisa Prosperetti is a Visiting Assistant Professor in African history at Mount Holyoke College. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at: www.elisaprosperetti.net. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific (Apollo, 2020), the distinguished anthropologist Nicholas Thomas tells the story of the peopling of the Pacific. In clear, accessible language Thomas shows us that most Pacific Islanders are in fact 'inter-islanders', or people defined by their movement across the ocean and between islands, rather than 'trapped' in islands in a far sea. Thomas also described the European discovery of the Pacific, and emphasizes the role Pacific Islanders played in teaching European explorers about the Pacific. 'European' knowledge of the Pacific, Thomas claims, was very much 'intercultural' and relied on indigenous Pacific knowledge of the region.In this episode of the podcast, Nick sits down with Alex Golub to discuss his book and the history of the Pacific. They talk about the influence of Epeli Hau‘ofa's writings on Nick's concept of 'inter-islanders' and discuss the complexities of intercultural contact in the nineteenth century Pacific which are exemplified by 'Tupaia's Chart' -- the map made for Captain Cook by Tupaia, the Tahitian navigator who led Cook to Aotearoa/New Zealand. Overall, Voyagers is an excellent introduction to Pacific history which can be read by anyone with an interest in the Pacific.Associate professor of anthropology, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In a narrative-redefining approach, Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War (Cornell UP, 2020) dramatically alters how we look at the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Tracking key events in US-Soviet relations across the years between 1980 and 1985, Simon Miles shows that covert engagement gave way to overt conversation as both superpowers determined that open diplomacy was the best means of furthering their own, primarily competitive, goals. Miles narrates the history of these dramatic years, as President Ronald Reagan consistently applied a disciplined carrot-and-stick approach, reaching out to Moscow while at the same time excoriating the Soviet system and building up US military capabilities.The received wisdom in diplomatic circles is that the beginning of the end of the Cold War came from changing policy preferences and that President Reagan in particular opted for a more conciliatory and less bellicose diplomatic approach. In reality, as Miles vividly demonstrates, Reagan and ranking officials in the National Security Council had determined that the United States enjoyed a strategic margin of error that permitted it to engage Moscow overtly.As US grand strategy developed, so did that of the Soviet Union. Engaging the Evil Empire covers five critical years of Cold War history when Soviet leaders tried to reduce tensions between the two nations in order to gain economic breathing room and, to ensure domestic political stability, prioritize expenditures on butter over those on guns. Written with style and verve, Miles's bold narrative shifts the focus of Cold War historians away from exclusive attention on Washington by focusing on the years of back-channel communiqués and internal strategy debates in Moscow as well as Budapest, Prague, and East Berlin.Grant Golub is a PhD candidate in U.S. and international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His research examines the politics of American grand strategy during World War II. Follow him on Twitter @ghgolub. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs