New Books in World Affairs

Is contemporary international order truly a secular arrangement? Theorists of international relations typically adhere to a narrative that portrays the modern states system as the product of a gradual process of secularization that transcended the religiosity of medieval Christendom. William Bain's Political Theology of International Order (Oxford University Press, 2020) challenges this narrative by arguing that modern theories of international order reflect ideas that originate in medieval theology. They are, in other words, worldly applications of a theological pattern.This ground-breaking book makes two key contributions to scholarship on international order. First, it provides a thorough intellectual history of medieval and early modern traditions of thought and the way in which they shape modern thinking about international order. It explores the ideas of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, Martin Luther, and other theologians to rise above the sharp differentiation of medieval and modern that underpins most international thought. Uncovering this theological inheritance invites a fundamental reassessment of canonical figures, such as Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, and their contribution to theorizing international order. Second, this book shows how theological ideas continue to shape modern theories of international order by structuring the questions theorists ask as well as the answer they provide. It argues that the dominant vocabulary of international order, system and society, anarchy, balance of power, and constitutionalism, is mediated by the intellectual commitments of nominalist theology. It concludes by exploring the implications of thinking in terms of this theological inheritance, albeit in a world where God is only one of several possibilities that can called upon to secure the regularity of order.William Bain is Associate Professor of International Relations at National University of Singapore. He is the author of Between Anarchy and Society: Trusteeship and the Obligations of Power (OUP, 2003) and editor of, and contributor to, Medieval Foundations of International Relations (Routledge, 2016) and The Empire of Security and the Safety of the People (Routledge, 2006). He has written widely on the theory of international society and the history of international thought. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Research in political science shows that collections and textbooks often mention race, gender, ethnicity, and religion – but they don’t consistently use those lenses to understand politics. InUnderstanding Comparative Politics: An Inclusive Approach (CQ Press, 2024), Dr. Lisa A. Baglione creates a new kind of textbook that puts issues of race, gender, ethnicity, and religion into context and encourages critical thinking about world regions and individual countries through the lens of current events such as social justice movements and the COVID-19 pandemic. She helps readers make personal connections and actively learn and explore through maps, data, theory, and reflection questions.Dr. Lisa A. Baglione is a professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University who has conducted research in five areas over the course of her career. While they are varied, she has benefited from integrating insights from each: negotiations between adversaries, authoritarian transformation, peacebuilding, gender in politics, and pedagogy. Many listeners will be familiar with Dr. Baglione’s Writing a Research Paper in Political Science: A Practical Guide to Inquiry, Structure, and Methods published by CQ Press. The book is in its 4th edition with a 5th edition in the works. She co-authored “’Pale, Male, and Stale?’ An Analysis of Introductory Readers in Political Science” with Becki Scola and Laura Bucci.During our conversation Lisa mentions: Research on gender published by U of I (meaning Indiana) by Ekaterina M. Levintova and Alison Kathryn Staudinger Gender in the Political Science Classroom. Valerie Hudson, Donna Lee Bowen, and Perpetua Lynn Nielson, First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance & National Security Worldwide (New York: Columbia U Press, 2021) and Cynthia Enloe, Seriously: Investigating Crashes and Crises as if Women Mattered (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). Daniela Lavergne served as the editorial assistant for this podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Gabriele Mazzini, a lawyer and officer of the European Commission and expert in AI regulation. Mazzini discusses the means through which European countries have found agreement on the definition of AI and how to regulate it. Moreover, Mazzini stresses that the fears of an apocalyptic AI revolution taking over humankind are not well-grounded. He also comments on the United States case and how it differs from Europe when it comes to regulating AI, acknowledging that there's been big progress in legislation in this area. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2024) illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided. Yet as decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries' power. Were missionaries serving the interests of American diplomacy? Or were they creating unnecessary problems?As Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz demonstrates, they were doing both. Across the century, missionaries forced the government to articulate new conceptions of the rights of US citizens abroad and of the role of the US as an engine of humanitarianism and religious freedom. By the time the US entered the first world war, missionary diplomacy had for nearly a century created the conditions for some Americans to embrace a vision of their country as an internationally engaged world power. Missionary Diplomacy exposes the longstanding influence of evangelical missions on the shape of American foreign relations.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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

A vivid, thoughtful examination of how technological innovation—especially AI—is shaping the tensions between democracy and autocracy during the new Cold War. So much of what we hear about China and Russia today likens the relationship between these two autocracies and the West to a “rivalry” or a “great-power competition.” Some might consider it alarmist to say we are in the midst of a second Cold War, but that may be the only responsible way to describe today’s state of affairs. What’s more, we have come a long way from Mao Zedong’s infamous observation that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Now we live in an age more aptly described by Vladimir Putin’s cryptic prophecy that “artificial intelligence is the future not only of Russia, but of all mankind, and whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become ruler of the world.” George S. Takach’s incisive and meticulously researched new volume, Cold War 2.0: Artificial Intelligence in the New Battle between China, Russia, and America (Pegasus Book, 2024), is the book we need to thoroughly understand these frightening and perilous times. In the geopolitical sphere, there are no more pressing issues than the appalling mechanizations of a surveillance state in China, Russia’s brazen attempt to assert its autocratic model in Ukraine, and China’s increasingly likely plans to do the same in Taiwan. But the key here, Takach argues, is that our new Cold War is not only ideological but technological: the side that prevails in Cold War 2.0 will be the one that bests the other in mastering the greatest innovations of our time. Artificial intelligence sits in our pockets every day—but what about AI that coordinates military operations and missile defense systems? Or the highly sophisticated semiconductor chips and quantum computers that power those missiles and a host of other weapons? And, where recently we have seen remarkable feats of bio-engineering to produce vaccines at record speed, shouldn’t we be concerned how catastrophic it would be if bio-engineering were co-opted for nefarious purposes? Takach thoroughly examines how each of these innovations will shape the tension between democracy and autocracy, and how each will play a central role in this second Cold War. Finally, he crafts a precise blueprint for how Western democracies should handle these innovations to respond to the looming threat of autocracy—and ultimately prevail over it.AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

A new economic history which uncovers the forgotten left-wing, anti-imperial, pacifist origins of economic cosmopolitanism and free trade from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The post-1945 international free-trade regime was established to foster a more integrated, prosperous, and peaceful world. As US Secretary of State Cordell Hull (1933-1944), "Father of the United Nations" and one of the regime's principal architects, explained in his memoirs, "unhampered trade dovetailed with peace; high tariffs, trade barriers, and unfair economic competition, with war." Remarkably, this same economic order is now under assault from the country most involved in its creation: the United States. A global economic nationalist resurgence - heralded by Donald Trump's "America First" protectionism and resultant trade wars with the USA's closest allies and trading partners - now looks to transform over seventy years of regional and global market integration into an illiberal economic order resembling that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Economic cosmopolitan critics of today's retreat from free trade have offered dire warnings that doing so would be catastrophic for global consumers and an existential threat to regional and world peace. But under what circumstances did this ideological marriage of free trade, prosperity, and peace arise? Who were its main adherents? How did this same free-trade ideology succeed in becoming the new economic orthodoxy following the Second World War? And how might the successes and failures of this earlier struggle to reform the economic order inform today's globalization crisis? In Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World (Princeton UP, 2024), economic historian Marc-William Palen finds answers amid a century of transnational peace and anti-imperial activism that stretched from Britain's unilateral adoption of free trade in 1846 to the founding of the US-led liberal trading system that arose immediately after the Second World War. Over five thematic chapters, considering the period from different perspectives, and utilising archival research conducted in Europe, North America, and Australia, Palen shows that this politico-ideological struggle to create a more prosperous and peaceful world through free trade pitted economic cosmopolitans against economic nationalists. Cosmopolitans sought to counter the industrialising world's embrace of economic nationalism because they believed - much like today's critics of Trump's tariffs and Brexit - that economic nationalism laid the groundwork for trade wars, high prices for consumers, and geopolitical conflict; while free trade created market interdependence, prosperity, social justice, and a more peaceful world. Pax Economica argues that this cosmopolitan fight for free trade laid foundations for a century of anti-imperial and peace activism across the globe - and paved the way for today's global trade regime now under siege. 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 1990s, the promise of justice for atrocity crimes was associated with the revival of international criminal tribunals (ICTs). More recently, however, there has been a renewed emphasis on domestic accountability for international crimes across the globe. In identifying a 'complementarity turn', a paradigm shift toward domestic accountability in the field of international criminal justice, this book investigates how the shadow of international criminal tribunals influences the treatment of serious crimes at the national level.Drawing on research and interviews in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sierra Leone, International Criminal Tribunals and Domestic Accountability: In the Court's Shadow (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Patryk I. Labuda develops a tripartite framework to analyse how states and tribunals work with, despite, or against one another in the fight against impunity. While international prosecutors and judges use the principle of complementarity to foster cooperation and decrease tension with government actors, Dr. Labuda argues that too much deference by ICTs toward states reduces the likelihood of accountability and may enable national elites to consolidate authoritarian power.By interrogating how international accountability stakeholders relate to their domestic counterparts, International Criminal Tribunals and Domestic Accountability advocates improvements to ICTs' institutional design and more dynamic interactions with states to strengthen the enforcement of international criminal law.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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

Kalika Mehta's book Strategic Litigation and Corporate Complicity in Crimes Under International Law: A TWAIL Analysis (Routledge, 2023) provides a comprehensive account of how non-state actors rely on international criminal law as a tool in the service of progressive political causes.The argument that international criminal law and its institutions serve as an instrument in the hands of a few powerful states, and that its practice is characterized by double standards and selectivity, has received considerable attention. This book, however, focuses on a practice that is informed by this argument. Its focus is on an alternative practice within international criminal law, where non-state actors navigate what critical scholars call a structurally biased legal system, in order to achieve long-term political objectives. Innovatively, the book combines the concerns expressed by Third World Approaches to International Law with strategic litigation that focuses on the accountability of corporations for their complicity in crimes under international law. Analysing this litigation, the book demonstrates that, while it is crucial to highlight the blind spots of the international criminal legal framework, it is also important to take into account the practice of non-state actors engaged in leveraging its emancipatory potential.Alex Batesmith is a Lecturer in Legal Profession at the School of Law, University of Leeds, UK. His research focuses on lawyers, their professional self-identity and their motivations, and how these shape the institutions and the discipline in which they work. Twitter: @batesmith Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

We have a preponderance of books on leadership in business; yet, despite broad dissatisfaction with our political leaders, almost none on how to be a good statesman. John A. Burtka IV, President and CEO of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, discusses lessons on political leadership from thinkers and leaders throughout history, from Xenophon and Aristotle to Machiavelli, Washington and everyone in between. Along the way, he delves into the differences between the theory and practice of statesmanship, the distinctions between Western and Eastern political advice, whether Christianity makes one a better leader, and why the "Mirrors for Princes" tradition can be helpful for students and leaders in modern democracies.John A. Burtka IV is the President and CEO of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a non-profit founded in 1953 by William F. Buckley and Frank Chodorov focused on introducing undergraduates to the American tradition of liberty. He earned his BA at Hillsdale College and graduate degree in theology from La Faculté Jean Calvin in Aix-en-Provence, France. His writing has been widely featured in publications including The American Conservative, the Washington Post, First Things, The Dispatch, and the Intercollegiate Review. He recently published an edited collection, Gateway to Statesmanship: Selections from Xenophon to Churchill, which contains excerpts of great thinkers from the ancient, medieval, renaissance, and modern eras designed to teach students about the history of statesmanship.Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Hemispheric foreign policy has waxed and waned since the Mexican War, and the Cold War presented both extraordinary promises and dangerous threats to U.S.-Latin American cooperation. In Hemispheric Alliances: Liberal Democrats and Cold War Latin America (UNC Press, 2022), Andrew J. Kirkendall examines the strengths and weaknesses of new models for U.S.-Latin American relations created by liberal Democrats who came to the fore during the Kennedy Administration and retained significant influence until the Reagan era. Rather than exerting ironfisted power in Latin America, liberal Democrats urged Washington to be a moral rather than a militaristic leader in hemispheric affairs. Decolonization, President Eisenhower's missteps in Latin America, and the Cuban Revolution all played key roles in the Kennedy administration's Alliance for Progress, which liberal Democrats hailed as a new cornerstone for U.S.-Latin American foreign policy. During the Vietnam War era, liberal Democrats began to incorporate human rights more centrally into their agendas, using Latin America as the primary arena for these policies. During the long period of military dictatorship in much of Latin America and the Caribbean, liberal Democrats would see their policies dissolved by the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush administrations who favored militant containment of both communism and absolutism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs