New Books in World Affairs

In scholarly and popular discourse, popular sovereignty and self-determination are typically conceived of as the antitheses of imperialism, while histories of the emergence of democracy in Western Europe and its settler offshoots ignore the imperial setting of struggles for suffrage expansion and institutional change altogether. Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism (Cambridge UP, 2023) casts doubt on both of these tendencies. My guest, Ines Valdez, argues that popular sovereignty in the global North contains an affective attachment to wealth that is secured through collective agreements to dominate others, a phenomenon she calls “self-and-other determination.” The book details how social reproduction in the US and Western Europe is enabled by the exploitation of racialized others who sacrifice their families and communities to perform arduous and poorly-paid menial jobs, only to be derided and oppressed by the populations who depend on their labor. It also shows how the political alienation from nature it wealthy countries is mediated by technology and enabled by a joint devaluation of nature and manual labor performed by racialized others. The book concludes with a theorization of anti-imperial popular sovereignty grounded in transnational movements and political relations that encompass nature.Ines Valdez is Associate Professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. She is also the author of Transnational Cosmopolitianism: Kant, Dubois, and Justice as a Political Craft (Cambridge, 2019). Democracy and Empire is available open access here.  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 aftermath of the First World War the Western great powers sought to redefine international norms according to their liberal vision. They introduced Western-led multilateral organizations to regulate cross-border flows which became pivotal in the making of an interconnected global order. In contrast to this well-studied transformation, in Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism, 1919-1939 (Oxford University Press, 2024), Samuel Hirst considers in detail for the first time the responses of the defeated interwar Soviet Union and early Republican Turkey who challenged this new order with a reactive and distinctly state-led international politics.As Mustafa Kemal Atatürk took up arms in 1920 to overturn the terms of the Paris settlement, Vladimir Lenin provided military and economic aid as part of a partnership that both sides described as anti-imperialist. Over the course of the next two decades, the Soviet and Turkish states coordinated joint measures to accelerate development in spheres ranging from aviation to linguistics. Most importantly, Soviet engineers and architects helped colleagues in Ankara launch a five-year plan and build massive state-owned factories to produce textiles and replace Western imports. Whilst the Kemalists' cooperation with the Bolsheviks has often been described as pragmatic, this book demonstrates that Moscow and Ankara actually came together in an ideological convergence rooted in anxiety about underdevelopment relative to the West, gradually arriving at statist internationalism as an alternative to Western liberal internationalism.Drawing on extensive archival research and offering an often-ignored and non-Western perspective on the history of international relations and diplomacy, Against the Liberal Order presents a novel interpretation of the international order of the interwar period that crosses the borders of historical disciplines and contributes to questions of current concern in world politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

How the CIA used American unions to undermine workers at home and subvert democracy abroad.Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of U.S. Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade (Verso, 2024) tells the shocking story of the AFL-CIO's global anticommunist crusade--and its devastating consequences for workers around the world.Unions have the power not only to secure pay raises and employee benefits but to bring economies to a screeching halt and overthrow governments. Recognizing this, in the late twentieth century, the US government sought to control labor movements abroad as part of the Cold War contest for worldwide supremacy. In this work, Washington found an enthusiastic partner in the AFL-CIO's anticommunist officials, who, in a shocking betrayal, for decades expended their energies to block revolutionary ideologies and militant class consciousness from taking hold in the workers' movements of Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.Jeff Schuhrke is a labor historian, journalist, union activist, and assistant professor at the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies, SUNY Empire State University in New York City. He is a frequent contributor to In These Times and Jacobin, and his scholarship has been published in Diplomatic History and Labor: Studies in Working-Class History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In their pursuit of social justice, revolutionaries have taken on the assembled might of monarchies, empires, and dictatorships. They have often, though not always, sparked cataclysmic violence, and have at times won miraculous victories, though at other times suffered devastating defeat.Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2023) illuminates the revolutionaries, their strategies, their successes and failures, and the ways in which revolutions continue to dominate world events and the popular imagination. Starting with the city-states of ancient Greece and Rome, Jack Goldstone traces the development of revolutions through the Renaissance and Reformation, the Enlightenment and liberal constitutional revolutions such as in America, and their opposite--the communist revolutions of the 20th century. He shows how revolutions overturned dictators in Nicaragua and Iran and brought the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and examines the new wave of non-violent "color" revolutions--the Philippines' Yellow Revolution, Ukraine's Orange Revolution--and the Arab Uprisings of 2011-12 that rocked the Middle East.In this new edition, Goldstone also sheds light on the major theories of revolution, exploring the causes of revolutionary waves, the role of revolutionary leaders, the strategies and processes of revolutionary change, and the intersection between revolutions and shifting patterns of global power. Further, he explores the role social media and nonviolence play in modern revolutions. Finally, he examines the reasons for diverse revolutionary outcomes, from democracy to civil war and authoritarian rule, and the likely future of revolution in years to come.Jack A. Goldstone is the Hazel Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Center for the Study of Social Change, Institutions and Policy at George Mason University. He has previously held positions at the University of California, Northwestern University, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.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

State capitalism. Socialism with Chinese characteristics. A socialist market economy. There have been numerous descriptions of the Chinese economy. However, none seems to capture the predatory, at times surreal, nature of the economy of the world’s most populous nation – nor the often bruising and mind-bending experience of doing business with the Middle Kingdom.Ian Williams, a long-standing reporter on China, has a new argument in Vampire State: The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Economy (Birlinn, 2024). Rules and agreements mean little. Markets are distorted, statistics fabricated, foreign industrial secrets and technology systematically stolen. Companies and entrepreneurs, at home and abroad, are bullied – often with the collusion of the victims themselves. The Party is in every boardroom and lab, with businesses thriving or dying at its will. All this is part of realising President Xi Jinping’s ambition of China becoming the world’s pre-eminent economic, technological and military power.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

In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I tried to send several letters to her Chinese counterpart, the Wan Li Emperor. The letters tried to ask the Ming emperor to conduct trade relations with faraway England; none of the expeditions carrying the letters ever arrived.It’s an inauspicious beginning to the four centuries of foreign relations between China and what eventually became Britain, covered by Kerry Brown in his latest book The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power (Yale University Press: 2024) Kerry’s book covers incidents like the MacCartney embassy, the East India Company, the Anglo-Chinese wars, the Communist takeover in 1949, and the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London. He is the author of over twenty books on modern Chinese politics, history, and society.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Reversal. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

After close to three decades of the hegemony of free market ideas, the state has made a big comeback as an economic actor since the 2008 financial crisis. China’s state-owned companies and international financial institutions have made headlines for their growing influence in the world economy. State-backed investment vehicles based in the Gulf states have made high-profile investments in global real estate markets and professional sports, while their state-owned firms have become world leaders in the logistics and natural resource sectors. Governments around the world – including in the heartlands of advanced capitalism – have promoted the interests of ‘national champion’ companies in strategic economic sectors, bailed out financial institutions by taking toxic assets off of their balance sheets, and implemented industrial policies with the aim of moving into the most profitable segments of global value chains.What accounts for this renewed prominence of states in global capitalism? Does the increased activism of states mark the end of neoliberal hegemony? And how do contemporary state-led economic initiatives compare to the heyday of Keynesian and developmentalist policy agendas in the decades immediately following World War II?The book that we are discussing today, The Spectre of State Capitalism (Oxford UP, 2024) by Ilias Alami and Adam Dixon, marks the culmination of a highly productive research project that the authors have led on the compulsions and constraints that shape the ‘new’ state capitalism. The book aims to challenge narratives that pathologize state capitalism as an authoritarian deviation from the ‘normal’ course of free market capitalism while also showing how new forms of state activism depart from earlier models of state-led development.Ilias Alami is a University assistant professor in the political economy of development at Cambrdige University. His previous book is Money Power and Financial Capital in Emerging Markets (2019). Adam Dixon holds the Adam Smith Chair in Sustainable Capitalism at Heriot Watt University’s Ediburgh Business School. He is the author of several books, most recently Sovereign Wealth Funds: Between States and Markets (2022).This book is available open access here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The Wagner Group: Inside Russia’s Mercenary Army (Reaktion, 2024) exposes the history and the future of the Wagner Group, Russia’s notorious and secretive mercenary army, revealing details of their operations never documented before.Using extensive leaks, first-hand accounts, and the byzantine paper trail left in its wake, Jack Margolin traces the Wagner Group from its roots as a battlefield rumour to a private military enterprise tens of thousands-strong that eventually comes to threaten Putin himself. He follows individual commanders and foot soldiers within the group as they fight in Ukraine, Syria, and Africa, sometimes alongside fellow military contractors from the United Kingdom and the US. He shows Wagner mercenaries committing atrocities, plundering oil, diamonds, and gold, and changing the course of conflicts from Europe to Africa in the name of the Kremlin’s strategic aims.In documenting the Wagner Group’s story up to the dramatic demise of its chief director, Evgeniy Prigozhin, Margolin demonstrates that Wagner was not an aberration, but a manifestation of the new geopolitical order of global capital, global crime and of the entrepreneurs that thrive in it.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

As soon as the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, prominent independent Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar circulated a Facebook petition signed first by hundreds of his cultural and journalistic contacts and then by thousands of others. That act led to a new law in Russia criminalizing criticism of the war, and Zygar fled Russia. In his time as a journalist, Zygar has interviewed President Zelensky and had access to many of the major players--from politicians to oligarchs. As an expert on Putin's moods and behavior, he has spent years studying the Kremlin's plan regarding Ukraine, and here, in clear, chronological order he explains how we got here.In 1996 to 2004, Ukraine became an independent post-Soviet country where everyone was connected to the former empire at all levels, financially, culturally, psychologically. However, the elite anticipated that the empire would be back and punish them. From 2004 to 2018, there were many states inside one state, each with its own rulers/oligarchs and its own interests--some of them directly connected with Russia. In 2018, a new generation of Ukrainians arrive, and having grown in an independent country, they do not consider themselves to be part of Russia--and that was the moment when the war began, as Putin could not tolerate losing Ukraine forever.Authoritative, timely, and vitally important, War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine (Scribner, 2023) is an unique overview of the war that continues to threaten the future of the entire world as we know it.Mikhail Zygar, a journalist, filmmaker, and public historian, was founding editor-in-chief in 2010 of Russia’s only independent news TV channel, Dozhd (TVRain), which provided an alternative to Kremlin-controlled state television and gave a platform to opposition voices. He was also the founder and editor-in-chief of Project 1917, a website revisiting the Russian Revolution through myriad eye-witness perspectives. The New York Times has described Zygar as “one of Russia’s smartest and best-sourced young journalists.” Winner of the International Press Freedom Award in 2014, Zygar is the author of All the Kremlin’s Men (2016), the #1 bestseller in Russia that has been translated into over twenty languages, and The Empire Must Die (2017), a Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year.Zygar openly protested against the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and then left Russia. He reported on the atrocities committed by Russian armed forces against Ukrainian civilians in the town of Bucha in 2022 and was charged with “distributing false information about Russia’s military.” In 2023 he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to 8.5 years in prison. He has written for based Der Spiegel in Germany and The New York Times in the USA and writes a substack newsletter, “The Last Pioneer.”  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Why did a nation-state order emerge when nationalist activism was usually an elitist pursuit in the age of empire? Ordinary inhabitants and even most indigenous elites tended to possess religious, ethnic, or status-based identities rather than national identities. Why then did the desires of a typically small number result in wave after wave of new states? The answer has customarily centred on the actions of "nationalists" against weakening empires during a time of proliferating beliefs that "peoples" should control their own destiny.Rethinking the End of Empire: Nationalism, State Formation, and Great Power Politics (Stanford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Lynn M. Tesser upends conventional wisdom by demonstrating that nationalism often existed more in the perceptions of external observers than of local activists and insurgents. Dr. Tesser adds nuance to scholarship that assumes most, if not all, pre-independence unrest was nationalist and separatist, and sheds light on why the various demands for change eventually coalesced around independence in some cases but not others.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