New Books in World Affairs

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Nathalie Tocci, director of the Institute of International Affairs in Rome, about the implications of Donald Trump’s second administration for Europe. The discussion explores how Trump’s approach to foreign policy—characterized by protectionism, nationalism, and disdain for multilateralism—affects European politics, particularly in relation to NATO, trade, and the far-right’s growing influence. Prof. Tocci highlights how Trump’s return emboldens nationalist movements across the continent, especially in countries like Italy, where leaders such as Giorgia Meloni now feel freer to express their ideological stances. The conversation also examines the evolving European response to Trump, from initial panic to a mix of wishful thinking and cautious strategizing, particularly regarding the future of NATO and the war in Ukraine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Shifting Sovereignties: A Global History of a Concept in Practice (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025) explores practical manifestations of sovereignty from antiquity to the Anthropocene. Taking a global-history perspective and centring Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, it destabilises overly neat theoretical notions of the concept. Shifting Sovereignties shows that, in practice, sovereignty is far from absolute, perpetual, indivisible, or supreme; rather it is fuzzy, compromised, fragmented, and layered. From these observations, the authors derive a historical conceptualisation which makes change and contingency core aspects of the understanding of sovereignty. Rather than understanding sovereignty as a characteristic of individual states, Mihatsch and Mulligan propose the notion of “sovereignty regimes”: frameworks of legitimation enforced through mutual recognition. These regimes are created and managed by more or less institutionalised structures which embody what the authors call “system sovereignty.” Sovereignty regimes and system sovereignty are, like sovereignty itself, continuously changing and contingent. This process of change forms the core of the book. Shifting Sovereignties thus contributes a practical, historical perspective on a concept which is foundational in political science, international relations, and international law.If purchased from De Gruyter, you can get the book with a 30% discount for €41.96 / £38.15 / $46.19 by ordering with discount code DGBSS30Moritz Mihatsch is Assistant Professor in World History at the University of Cambridge. Michael R. Mulligan is an Assistant Professor in Law at the Euro University of Bahrain. The book has a X/Twitter page, @ShiftingSovs.Benjamin Goh (@BenGohsToSchool) is an independent scholar and humanities educator in Singapore. He holds a MPhil in World History from the University of Cambridge, and a B.A. (Hons.) in History from Yale-NUS College. He is a historian of education, and has published on the history of sex education in Singapore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The definitive history of Canadian foreign policy since the 1930s, Canada First, Not Canada Alone: A History of Canadian Foreign Policy (Oxford UP, 2024) examines how successive prime ministers have promoted Canada's national interests in a world that has grown increasingly complex and interconnected. Eleven case studies focus on environmental reform, Indigenous peoples, trade, hostage diplomacy, and wartime strategy illustrate the breadth of issues that shape Canada's global realm. In this lively interview, Asa McKercher offers explains the structure of the book, its main take-way and how Canada has positioned itself in the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Today’s European Union grew out of functional communities set up in the wake of world war in the 1950s. It would shock the new White House intake to learn that the wartime American political class lobbied hard for a postwar United States of Europe. The role of US officials in building Europe’s first community – one for the coal and steel industries – and their close ties to "founding father" Jean Monnet have long been known. But, in Building Europe in New York: From the Munich Conference to the European Coal and Steel Community (Routledge, 2025), Enrico Ciappi takes things back a step - to the intellectual groundwork done by a network of American, French, and British politicians, diplomats, economists, and strategic thinkers."The Schuman Plan arrived at the end of a long intellectual journey," he writes, with the two critical players in that journey being Monnet himself and the renowned New York-based think tank: the Council on Foreign Relations.Enrico Ciappi is a postdoctoral research fellow in history at the LUISS Guido Carli University of Rome. This is his first book.*His book recommendations were The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950 by Or Rosenboim (Princeton University Press, 2017) and The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia by Peter Hopkirk (John Murray, 1990 — reprint in 2006).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts on Substack at 242.news. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The global financial crisis of the late 2000s was marked by the failure of regulators to rein in risk-taking by banks. And yet regulatory issues varied from country to country, with some national financial regulatory systems proving more effective than others. In Visions of Financial Order: National Institutions and the Development of Banking Regulation (Princeton University Press, 2024), Dr. Kim Pernell traces the emergence of important national differences in financial regulation in the decades leading up to the crisis. To do so, she examines the cases of the United States, Canada, and Spain—three countries that subscribed to the same transnational regulatory framework (the Basel Capital Accord) but developed different regulatory policies in areas that would directly affect bank performance during the financial crisis.In a broad historical analysis that extends from the rise of the first modern chartered banks in the 1780s through the major financial crises of the twentieth century and the Basel Capital Accord of 1988, Dr. Pernell shows how the different (and sometimes competing) principles of order embedded in each country’s regulatory and political institutions gave rise to distinctive visions of order and prosperity, which shaped subsequent financial regulatory design. Dr. Pernell argues that the different worldviews of national banking regulators reflected cultural beliefs about the ideal way to organize economic life to promote order, stability, and prosperity. Visions of Financial Order offers an innovative perspective on the persistent differences between regulatory institutions and the ways they shaped the unfolding of the 2008 global financial crisis.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Environments associated with migration are often seen as provisional, lacking both history and architecture. As Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi demonstrates in Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke UP, 2023), a refugee camp’s aesthetic and material landscapes—even if born out of emergency—reveal histories, futures, politics, and rhetorics. She identifies forces of colonial and humanitarian settlement, tracing spatial and racial politics in the Dadaab refugee camps established in 1991 on the Kenya-Somalia border—at once a dense setting that manifests decades of architectural, planning, and design initiatives and a much older constructed environment that reflects its own ways of knowing. She moves beyond ahistorical representations of camps and their inhabitants by constructing a material and visual archive of Dadaab, finding long migratory traditions in the architecture, spatial practices, landscapes, and iconography of refugees and humanitarians. Countering conceptualizations of refugee camps as sites of border transgression, criminality, and placelessness, Siddiqi instead theorizes them as complex settlements, ecologies, and material archives created through histories of partition, sedentarization, domesticity, and migration.This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool, whose research focuses on human mobilities. She is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Today I’m speaking with Shimon Shetreet, Greenblatt Chair of Public and International Law at the Hebrew University and a former politician. We are discussing his recently published work, co-edited with Hiram Chodosh, titled Judicial Independence: Cornerstone of Democracy. Democracies around the world, from Israel and Mexico to Poland and Hungary, are grappling with challenges to judicial independence. Attacks on judicial independence often masquerade as attempts to strengthen democracy, despite the necessity of judicial independence to uphold constitutionality, hold no one above the law, and protect the most vulnerable people. This volume offers a truly comprehensive view of the global challenges facing judicial independence.Shimon Shetreet is an Israeli former politician who held several ministerial portfolios between 1992 and 1996. He is currently the Greenblatt Chair of Public and International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

International Development Law: Rule of Law, Human Rights & Global Finance (Springer, 2020) describes how international development works, its shortcomings, its theoretical and practical foundations, along with prescriptions for the future. It provides the reader with new perspectives on the origins of global poverty, identifies legal impediments to sustainable economic growth, and provides a better understanding of the challenges faced by the international community in resolving global poverty issues. The text is structured into two basic parts: the first part deals with the theoretical and philosophic foundations of the subject, and the second part sets forth issues relating to the international financial architecture, namely, international borrowing practices, privatization, and emerging economies. In particular, the book provides new, innovative analysis on corruption as an impediment to sustainable development. The three interlocking facets of corruption are examined: transnational organized crime, Islamic-based international terrorism, and corruption within emerging economies and the international banking system. Thus fresh new analysis adds depth and clarity to a field that heretofore has been scattered and superficial. Finally, the “right to development” within the international human rights discourse is critically reviewed, particularly in light of new jurisprudence emerging from the African context.This book offers a fresh, new and balanced legal perspective on the development process. The text has been rigorously researched and has many practical facets based on the author’s professional experience within the international development field. It is an invaluable research and teaching tool since it takes a multidisciplinary approach to putting complex issues, legal trends and political questions into a clear, new perspective that is highly analytical as well as accessible to the reader. The author's elegant legal prose is both powerful and persuasive.Rumu Sarkar is Adjunct Law Professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Between the 1870s and 1930s, American social reformers, working closely with the US government, transformed sexual vice into an international political and humanitarian concern. As these activists worked to eradicate prostitution and trafficking, they promoted sexual self-control for both men and women as a cornerstone of civilization and a basis of American exceptionalism. Empire of Purity: The History of Americans' Global War on Prostitution (Princeton University Press, 2024) by Dr. Eva Payne traces the history of these efforts, showing how the policing and penalization of sexuality was used to justify American interventions around the world.Dr. Eva Payne describes how American reformers successfully pushed for international anti-trafficking agreements that mirrored US laws, calling for states to criminalize prostitution and restrict migration, and harming the very women they claimed to protect. She argues that Americans’ ambitions to reshape global sexual morality and law advanced an ideology of racial hierarchy that viewed women of color, immigrants, and sexual minorities as dangerous vectors of disease. Dr. Payne tells the stories of the sex workers themselves, revealing how these women’s experiences defy the dichotomies that have shaped American cultural and legal conceptions of prostitution and trafficking, such as choice and coercion, free and unfree labor, and white sexual innocence and the assumed depravity of nonwhites.Drawing on archives in Europe, the United States, and Latin America, Empire of Purity ties the war on sexual vice to American imperial ambitions and a politicization of sexuality that continues to govern both domestic and international policy today.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Member selection is one of the defining elements of social organization, imposing categories on who we are and what we do. Discriminatory Clubs: The Geopolitics of International Organizations (Princeton UP, 2023) shows how international organizations are like social clubs, ones in which institutional rules and informal practices enable states to favor friends while excluding rivals.Where race or socioeconomic status may be a basis for discrimination by social clubs, geopolitical alignment determines who gets into the room to make the rules of global governance. Christina Davis brings together a wealth of data on membership provisions for more than three hundred organizations to reveal the prevalence of club-style selection on the world stage. States join organizations to deepen their association with a particular group of states—most often their allies—and for the gains from policy coordination. Even organizations that claim to be universal, to target narrow issues, or to cover geographic regions use club-style admission criteria. Davis demonstrates that when it comes to the most important decision of cooperation—who belongs to the club and who doesn’t—geopolitical alignment can matter more than the merits or policies of potential members.With illuminating case studies ranging from nineteenth-century Japan to contemporary Palestine and Taiwan, Discriminatory Clubs sheds light on how, for global and regional organizations such as the WTO and the EU, alliance ties and shared foreign-policy positions form the basis of cooperation.Christina L. Davis is the Edwin O. Reischauer Professor of Japanese Politics in the Department of Government at Harvard University. She is the author of Why Adjudicate? and Food Fights over Free Trade (both Princeton).Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs