New Books in 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

Music from East Asia has recently been making its way round the world on waves created and mediated by new technologies and global interconnections. This may seem like something very novel, but as Andrew Jones shows in Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s (U Minnesota Press, 2020), popular music from this region – and here specifically varieties of Chinese music – has been riding revolutionary technological and socioeconomic currents for a long time.Events during the 1960s, that quintessentially musical decade, prove this, and Jones’ book asks the key questions about genre and periodisation which help us understand whether there was a ‘global 60s’, while also examining the geopolitical currents connecting and dividing Taiwan, China and Hong Kong at this time. The book is thus not only a rich source of insights into stars such as Grace Chan, Teresa Teng and Taiwanese folk troubadour Chen Da, but also offers a whole framework for understanding the shifts in globalisation and communication which continue to shape our soundscape today.Ed Pulford is a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

It might seem somewhat paradoxical that in the Wars of 1898 and their aftermath—the era in which the United States expanded its imperial reach deep into the Caribbean and Pacific—international law became a feature of US foreign policy. In the midst of all of the militarism (think of Teddy Roosevelt’s roughriders storming Cuba), colonial conquest, and the use of torture to quash Philippine resistance to US colonial rule, the US government sought to make its empire legalistic and to help build a broader international legal order. Benjamin Coates, in his book Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford UP, 2019), ably dissects this project, and, in the process, helps illuminate aspects of the United States’ overseas empire that other scholars have overlooked.Coates, an associate professor at Wake Forest University, explores the many ways in which international law bolstered imperial rule and interimperial relations. International-law arguments, for example, helped justify the seizure of the Panama Canal Zone. In Coates’ telling, then, it was not a coincidence that the US foreign-policy apparatus lawyered up—filling the State Department’s ranks with a multitude of international lawyers—at the same moment that it began to administer colonial populations abroad. I hope you enjoy our discussion!Dexter Fergie is a doctoral student in US and global history at Northwestern University. His research examines the history of ideas, infrastructure, and international organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Nicholas Harrison's Our Civilizing Mission: The Lessons of Colonial Education (Liverpool UP, 2019) is a fascinating examination of colonial education not just as a facet of colonialism, but as an "example" of education in a broader sense, albeit an "extreme" one. At once a historical study, a series of close readings of texts, ideas, and authors, and a set of intellectual, professional, and political biographies, the book explores and interrogates approaches to the teaching of languages, literatures, and histories within and beyond colonial contexts. Centering as educators writers and thinkers essential to our critical understanding of colonialism and postcolonialism literature, the book has implications for how we think about the project of education as a whole, particularly in the Humanities, and especially right now. In chapters that pursue the educational, intellectual, and teaching stories of figures like Edward Said, Mouloud Ferraoun, Assia Djebar, and Albert Memmi, Our Civilizing Mission takes up issues of power and resistance in the definition and interpretation of "canon," pedagogic philosophies and approaches within and beyond classrooms, and the complex relationships between teaching, scholarship, and politics.Reading this book and speaking with Nick, I was surprised by how much these chapters held for me, not just as a historian and scholar of France and empire, but as a teacher of these things who regularly asks myself questions about my own choices, goals, and approaches to working with students. It is a book I would recommend enthusiastically to anyone interested in the figures mentioned above, in the role that education has played in colonialisms past and present, and in the project of education on a much wider scale. What we do as teachers, why and how we do it, is interrogated here in ways that might surprise, and will certainly enlighten.I hope listeners will enjoy our conversation!Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In The Economics of Sustainable Food: Smart Policies for Health and the Planet (Island Press, 2021), Dr. Nicoletta Batini, and co-authors, unpack the true cost of food production. While the Green Revolution served a purpose, Dr. Batini makes the case that the industrial food complex continues to cause tremendous global economic losses in terms of malnutrition, diseases, and environmental degradation. To ensure we do not exceed the 1.5oC target, the book offers the Great Food Transformation (GFT) as a solution. The GFT entails, (1) halving animal-based food production and increasing plant-based production, (2) shifting to organic, regenerative farming, and (3) rewilding, reforesting, and afforesting land. In this interview, Dr. Batini discusses the economics and policy mechanisms to make the GFT possible. Some of the mechanisms discussed include taxes, labor market reform, alongside regulation in cases where market incentives are unlikely to work or to work fast enough. We discuss the important differences in the GFT between “advanced economies” and “less-advanced economies,” with case studies that highlight successes in both. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Early 20th century Southeast Asia was arguably home to the once of the most vibrant and diverse caldrons of revolutionary ferment in world history. Revolts against Western imperialism and traditional socio-economic structures developed into a range of utopian experiments. In Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (Cornell UP, 2021), John T. Sidel argues that in order to understand these revolutions we must denationalize, internationalize, and transnationalism our analysis. Multiple forms of cosmopolitanism produced the Filipino revolt against Spanish rule, the Indonesian struggle from independence from the Dutch, and the Vietnamese fight against the French empire and for a Marxist utopia. Sidel highlights Southeast Asia’s often surprising global connections.Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University and was fortunate enough to have been mentored by both James C. Scott and Benedict Anderson. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (Stanford University Press, 1999), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2006), and The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (East-West Center, 2007). He has also co-authored Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories and Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines. Dr. Sidel was previously at the School of Oriental and African Studies but since 2004 has held the Sir Patrick Gillam Chair in International and Comparative Politics in the Departments of Government and International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Follow Mike on Twitter: @MichaelGVann. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

World Christianity publications proliferate but the issue of methodology has received little attention. World Christianity: Methodological Considerations (Brill, 2020) addresses this lacuna and explores the methodological ramifications of the World Christianity turn. In twelve chapters scholars from various academic backgrounds (anthropology, religious studies, history, missiology, intercultural studies, theology, and patristics) as well as of multiple cultural and national belongings investigate methodological issues (e.g. methods, use of sources, choosing a unit of analysis, terminology, conceptual categories,) relevant to World Christianity debates. In a closing chapter the editors Frederiks and Nagy converge the findings and sketch the outlines of what they coin as a ‘World Christianity approach’, a multidisciplinary and multiple perspective approach to study Christianity/ies’ plurality and diversity in past and present. Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. Student from South Korea in the Department of History & Ecumenics, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Based on sweeping research in six languages, Sebastian N. Page's Black Resettlement and the American Civil War (Cambridge UP, 2021) offers the first comprehensive, comparative account of nineteenth-century America's greatest road not taken: the mass resettlement of African Americans outside the United States. Building on resurgent scholarly interest in the so-called 'colonization' movement, the book goes beyond tired debates about colonization's place in the contest over slavery, and beyond the familiar black destinations of Liberia, Canada, and Haiti. Striding effortlessly from Pittsburgh to Panama, Toronto to Trinidad, and Lagos to Louisiana, it synthesizes a wealth of individual, state-level, and national considerations to reorient the field and set a new standard for Atlantic history. Along the way, it shows that what haunted politicians from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln was not whether it was right to abolish slavery, but whether it was safe to do so unless the races were separated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

"The point of studying the world – including the past and other’s writings – is not just to understand it but to use that understanding to change it."– Harry Cleaver (33 Lessons from Capital – On Reading Marx Politically)Listening to Robert Ovetz explain the origins of his interest in the study of labor and his academic influences I was reminded of the title of the late A.O. Hirschman’s book A Propensity for Self-Subversion – you’ll know what I mean even though Robert uses the phrase ‘suicide pact for my academic career’!Seriously though, for those unfamiliar with Professor Ovetz’s engaging first book, When Workers Shot Back – Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921, the Hirschman reference is just a hint at the breadth of the professor’s experiences beyond academia that bring much to bear to his insightful and active approach to writing and labor studies. He has worked in politics and as a public policy advocate including as an aide for members of the Texas legislature, executive director of an NGO, and as a campaign director and policy advocate for other non-governmental organizations on debt, development, human rights, and ocean conservation issues. Robert has appeared on NPR, CNN, and the BBC and is currently on the editorial board of the Journal of Labor and Society.Most recently he edited and contributed to Workers’ Inquiry and Global Class Struggle: Strategies, Tactics, Objectives published by Pluto Press in 2020. We talk about both books and endeavor to connect the theory with the methodology as exemplified in this edited volume of research from both academic and activist contributing authors representing labor studies from nine different countries over multiple industry sectors. In the course of the conversation Robert confirms the relevance and value of a ‘worker’s inquiry’ while broadening our understanding of class composition and struggle both historically and through recent developments with Amazon in our own global gilded age.Robert Ovetz is a lecturer in Political Science and the graduate program in Public Administration at San Jose State University.Keith Krueger lectures at the SILC Business School – Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Today we are joined by Alan McDougall, Professor of History at the University of Guelph, and the author of Contested Fields: A Global History of Modern Football (University of Toronto Press, 2020). In our conversation we discussed football’s role in global migrations from the 19th to the 21st century, global football’s changing economic conditions from grassroots pastime to neo-liberal ‘big business,’ and the many roles that spectators and stadiums have played in shaping the game.In Contested Fields, McDougall offers an innovative history of football since 1863. Rather than proceed chronologically, examining football emanating from England outward only colonial lines, his work is organized thematically with chapters on: migrations, money, competitions, gender, race, space, spectators, and confrontations. Through his themed chapters, McDougall draws together parallel phenomenon that typically appear only in national histories. For example, his chapter on spaces looks at the development of stadiums and their uses in diverse national and international contexts. In the chapter on confrontations, he traces the similarities and differences between the ways states – including authoritarian, democratic, post-colonial and developing -- used football for political ends.Throughout McDougall’s thematic approach allows him to transcend the usual conventions of football writing. For instance, although incisive commentary on gender emerges in many sections of the book, he uses his chapter on the gender politics of football inside and outside of Europe to rewrite the origins of the game. Eschewing the language of ‘women’s football’ he reframes the games origins as a history of resistance and oppression. Similarly, his chapter on spectatorship pushes past the more common discussion of hooliganism to draw on the transnational links between fan movements around the globe.An pioneering and pithy account, pitched to people interested in global and transnational histories, readers interested in sport and sports studies will undoubtedly find its approaches and conclusions insightful.Keith Rathbone is a senior 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/world-affairs