New Books in World Affairs

For centuries, the vastness of the Chinese market tempted foreign companies in search of customers. But in the 1970s, when the United States and China ended two decades of Cold War isolation, China’s trade relations veered in a very different direction. In Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade (Harvard University Press, 2024) Dr. Elizabeth Ingleson shows how the interests of US business and the Chinese state aligned to reframe the China market: the old dream of plentiful customers gave way to a new vision of low-cost workers by the hundreds of millions. In the process, the world’s largest communist state became an indispensable component of global capitalism.Drawing on Chinese- and English-language sources, including previously unexplored corporate papers, Ingleson traces this transformation to the actions of Chinese policymakers, US diplomats, maverick entrepreneurs, Chinese American traders, and executives from major US corporations including Boeing, Westinghouse, J. C. Penney, and Chase Manhattan Bank. Long before Walmart and Apple came to China, businesspeople such as Veronica Yhap, Han Fanyu, Suzanne Reynolds, and David Rockefeller instigated a trade revolution with lasting consequences. And while China’s economic reorganisation was essential to these connections, Ingleson also highlights an underappreciated but crucial element of the convergence: the US corporate push for deindustrialization and its embrace by politicians.Reexamining two of the most significant transformations of the 1970s—US-China rapprochement and deindustrialization in the United States—Made in China takes bilateral trade back to its faltering, uncertain beginnings, identifying the tectonic shifts in diplomacy, labor, business, and politics in both countries that laid the foundations of today’s globalized economy.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

Development is political but what does that mean for how we solve some of the biggest challenges facing the world today? A pathbreaking new book, The Politics of Development (Sage, 2024), sets out to answer this question and many more. Why is it so hard to reduce corruption, deliver good quality healthcare, and create more equal societies? And what can be done to remove these blockages, so that politics goes from being the problem to the solution? Join three of the editors – Claire Mcloughlin, David Hudson and People, Power, Politics host Nic Cheeseman – as they talk about the novel approach of their volume (co-edited with Sameen Ali and Kailing Xie) and the many lessons it reveals about why getting it right can be so hard. Listen now to find out why The Politics of Development is “destined to become essential reading” (Duncan Greene)!Claire Mcloughlin is Associate Professor at the International Development Department, University of Birmingham, and the lead editor of The Politics of Development.David Hudson is Professor of Politics and Development, also at the International Development Department, University of Birmingham, and an editor of The Politics of Development.Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR, and was also an editor of The Politics of Development.The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on X (Twitter) at @CEDAR_Bham! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Throughout the nuclear age, states have taken many different paths toward or away from nuclear weapons. These paths have been difficult to predict and cannot be explained simply by a stable or changing security environment. We can make sense of these paths by examining leaders' nuclear decisions. The political decisions state leaders make to accelerate or reverse progress toward nuclear weapons define each state's course. Whether or not a state ultimately acquires nuclear weapons depends to a large extent on those nuclear decisions.Nuclear Decisions: Changing the Course of Nuclear Weapons Programs (Oxford University Press, 2023) offers a novel theory of nuclear decision-making that identifies two mechanisms that shape leaders' understandings of the costs and benefits of their nuclear pursuits.The internal mechanism is the intervention of domestic experts in key scientific and military organizations. If the conditions are right, those experts may be able to influence a leader's nuclear decision-making. The external mechanism emerges from the structure and politics of the international system. This book identifies three different proliferation eras, in which changes to international political and structural conditions have constrained or freed states pursuing nuclear weapons development.Scholars and practitioners alike will gain new insights from the fascinating case studies of nine states across the three eras. Through this global approach to studying nuclear proliferation, this book pushes back against the conventional wisdom that determined states pursue a straight path to the bomb. Instead, nuclear decisions define a state's nuclear pursuits.Our guest today is Lisa Langdon Koch, Associate Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College.Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College and author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The United States integrated counterterrorism mandates into its aid flows in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the early years of the global war on terror. Some two decades later, this securitized model of aid has become normalized across donor intervention in Palestine. Elastic Empire: Refashioning War Through Aid in Palestine (Stanford UP, 2023) traces how foreign aid, on which much of the Palestinian population is dependent, has multiplied the sites and means through which Palestinian life is regulated, surveilled, and policed—this book tells the story of how aid has also become war.Drawing on extensive research conducted in Palestine, Elastic Empire offers a novel accounting of the US security state. The US war chronicled here is not one of tanks, grenades, and guns, but a quieter one waged through the interlacing of aid and law. It emerges in the infrastructures of daily life—in a greenhouse and library, in the collection of personal information and mapping of land plots, in the halls of municipal councils and in local elections—and indelibly transfigures lives. Situated in a landscape where the lines between humanitarianism and the global war on terror are increasingly blurred, Elastic Empire reveals the shape-shifting nature of contemporary imperial formations, their realignments and reformulations, their haunted sites, and their obscured but intimate forms.Lisa Bhungalia is Assistant Professor of Geography at Kent State University. Her new position (as of fall 2024) will be Assistant Professor of Geography and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Russia in World History: A Transnational Approach (Bloomsbury, 2022) uses a comparative framework to understand Russian history in a global context. The book challenges the idea of Russia as an outlier of European civilization by examining select themes in modern Russian history alongside cases drawn from the British Empire.Choi Chatterjee analyzes the concepts of nation and empire, selfhood and subjectivity, socialism and capitalism, and revolution and the world order in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. In doing so she rethinks many historical narratives that bluntly posit a liberal West against a repressive, authoritarian Russia. Instead Chatterjee argues for a wider perspective which reveals that imperial practices relating to the appropriation of human and natural resources were shared across European empires, both East and West.Incorporating the stories of famous thinkers, such as Leo Tolstoy, Emma Goldman, Wangari Maathai, Arundhati Roy, among others. This unique interpretation of modern Russia is knitted together from the varied lives and experiences of those individuals who challenged the status quo and promoted a different way of thinking. This is a ground-breaking book with big and provocative ideas about the history of the modern world, and will be vital reading for students of both modern Russian and world history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The Future of War Crimes Justice (Melville House, 2024), journalist and war correspondent Chris Stephen takes a colourful look at the erratic history of war crimes justice, and the pioneers who created it. He examines its shortcomings, and options for making it more effective, including the case for prosecuting the corporations and banks who fund warlords. Casting the net wider, he examines alternatives to war crimes trials, and looks into the minds of war criminals themselves through an evaluation of evidence from psychiatric studies. With international law advocates fighting for justice on one side, and reluctant governments unwilling to relinquish control on the other, he sets out to answer whether the world of the future will be governed by the rule of law or might is right.The podcast begins by exploring what is meant by ‘justice’ in the context of war crimes – whether it is (or should be) a process and collection of rights-respecting investigations and trials, or an outcome (the prosecution, conviction and sentencing of people who have committed the worst crimes) – and then discusses the challenges at the heart of the system of international war crimes justice as it has developed from the post-World War II trials of Nuremberg and Toyko. Chris Stephen discusses the impossibility of bringing leaders of major powers to justice, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, under the current system of war crimes justice, acknowledging the role that realpolitik and national state interest plays in preventing greater engagement with the International Criminal Court in The Hague.Alex Batesmith is a Lecturer in Legal Profession in the School of Law at the University of Leeds, and a former barrister and UN war crimes prosecutor, with teaching and research interests in international criminal law, cause lawyering and the legal profession, and law and emotion. Twitter: @batesmith. LinkedIn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Forest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Dr. Liliana Doganova’s book Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (Princeton University Press, 2024) sheds new light on this anxious query. It argues that our relationship to the future has been trapped in the gears of a device called discounting. While its incidence remains little known, discounting has long been entrenched in market and policy practices, shaping the ways firms and governments look to the future and make decisions accordingly. Thus, a sociological account of discounting formulas has become urgent.Discounting means valuing things through the flows of costs and benefits that they are likely to generate in the future, with these future flows being literally dis-counted as they are translated in the present. How have we come to think of the future, and of valuation, in such terms? Building on original empirical research in the historical sociology of discounting, Dr. Doganova takes us to some of the sites and moments in which discounting took shape and gained momentum: valuation of European forests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; economic theories devised in the early 1900s; debates over business strategies in the postwar era; investor-state disputes over the nationalisation of natural resources; and drug development in the biopharmaceutical industry today. Weaving these threads together, the book pleads for an understanding of discounting as a political technology, and of the future as a contested domain.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

Governing After War: Rebel Victories and Post-war Statebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Shelley X. Liu explores how wartime processes affects post-war state-building efforts when rebels win a civil war and come into power. Post-war governance is a continuation of war--although violence has ceased, the victor must consolidate its control over the state through a process of internal conquest. This means carefully making choices about resource allocation towards development and security. Where does the victor choose to spend, and why? And what are the implications for ultimately consolidating power and preventing conflict recurrence?The book examines wartime rebel-civilian ties under rebel governance and explains how these ties--along with rebel governing institutions--shape the rebel victors' post-war various resource allocation strategies to establish control at the sub-national level. In turn, successfully balancing resources dedicated toward development and security helps the victor to consolidate power. The book relies on mixed-methods evidence from Zimbabwe and Liberia, combining interviews, focus groups, and archival data with fine-grained census, administrative, survey, and conflict datasets to provide an in-depth examination of subnational variation in wartime rebel behavior and post-war governing strategies. A comparison of Zimbabwe and Liberia alongside four additional civil wars in Burundi, Rwanda, Côte d'Ivoire, and Angola further demonstrates the importance of wartime civilian tie-formation for post-war control. The argument's central insights point to war and peace as part of a long state-building process, and suggest that the international community should pay attention to sub-national political constraints that new governments face. Her findings offer implications for recent rebel victories and, more broadly, for understanding the termination, trajectories, and political legacies of such conflicts around the world.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

Charles Blaha, a former State Department expert on the vetting of U.S. weapons transfers to other countries, helps us understand this important moment in the Israel-Hamas conflict. After an extended period of tension between U.S President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden has decided to freeze some transfers of weapons to Israel, at least temporarily. In his conversation with RBI director John Torpey, Blaha explains United States law and policy governing weapons transfers, which imposes stringent controls to avoid the misuse of U.S. weaponry. Blaha also discusses the role of the protests on campuses and their doubtful effects on changing American or Israeli policy. Finally, the conversation delves into the overall posture of the United States vis-à-vis arms transfers to Israel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

China’s rise to global prominence is a pretty good contender for the most important world development in the past 30 years. But now the question is how Beijing managed to be successful on the international stage–let alone how large that success is—with fierce debates between hawks and doves in the West and elsewhere.Jeremy Garlick tries to offer an explanation of China’s success and how Beijing is trying to remake the international system in Advantage China: Agent of Change in an Era of Global Disruption (Bloomsbury, 2023)Jeremy is an associate professor in the Department of International and Diplomatic Studies at the Prague University of Economics and Business and the director of the Jan Masaryk Centre for International Studies. His first book is The Impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative: From Asia to Europe (Routledge: 2019), and his second is Reconfiguring the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (Routledge: 2022)You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Advantage China. 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