New Books in World Affairs

The Colonial World: A History of European Empires, 1780s to the Present (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Robert Aldrich and Dr. Andreas Stucki provides the most authoritative, in-depth overview on European imperialism available. It synthesizes recent developments in the study of European empires and provides new perspectives on European colonialism and the challenges to it. With a post-1800 focus and extensive background coverage tracing the subject to the early 1700s, the book charts the rise and eclipse of European empires. Dr. Aldrich and Dr. Stucki integrate innovative approaches and findings from the 'new imperial history' and look at both the colonial era and the legacies it left behind for countries around the world after they gained independence.Dividing the text into three complementary sections, Aldrich and Stucki explore different eras of colonisation and decolonisation from early modern European colonialism to the present day. They also examine overarching themes in colonial history, like 'land and sea', 'the body' and 'representations of colonialism'. Finally, they include a global range of snapshot colonial case studies, such as Peru (1780), India (1876), The South Pacific (1903), the Dutch East Indies (1938) and the Portuguese empire in Africa (1971)This is the essential text for anyone seeking to understand the nature and complexities of modern European imperialism and its aftermath.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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

Command in war is about forging effective strategies and implementing them, making sure that orders are appropriate, well-communicated, and then obeyed. But it is also an intensely political process. This is largely because how wars are fought depends to a large extent on how their aims are set. It is also because commanders in one realm must possess the ability to work with other command structures, including those of other branches of the armed forces and allies. In Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine (Oxford UP, 2022), Lawrence Freedman explores the importance of political as well as operational considerations in command with a series of eleven vivid case studies, all taken from the period after 1945. Over this period, the risks of nuclear escalation led to a shift away from great power confrontations and towards civil wars, and advances in communication technologies made it easier for higher-level commanders to direct their subordinates.Freedman covers defeats as well as victories. Pakistani generals tried to avoid surrender as they were losing the eastern part of their country to India in 1971. Iraq's Saddam Hussein turned his defeats into triumphant narratives of victory. Osama bin Laden escaped the Americans in Afghanistan in 2001. The UK struggled as a junior partner to the US in Iraq after 2003. We come across insubordinate generals, such as Israel's Arik Sharon, and those in the French army in Algeria, so frustrated with their political leadership that they twice tried to change it. At the other end of the scale, Che Guevara in Congo in 1966 and Igor Girkin in Ukraine in 2014 both tried to spark local wars to suit their grandiose objectives.Freedman ends the book with a meditation on the future of command in a world that is becoming increasingly reliant on technologies like artificial intelligence. A wide-ranging and insightful history of the changing nature of command in the postwar era, this will stand as a definitive account of a foundational concept in both military affairs and politics.Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Armed conflict and natural disasters have plagued the twenty-first century. Not since the end of World War II has the number of armed conflicts been higher. At the same time, natural disasters have increased in frequency and intensity over the past two decades, their impacts worsened by climate change, urbanization, and persistent social and economic inequalities. Providing the first comprehensive analysis of the interplay between natural disasters and armed conflict, Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints: How Disasters Shape the Dynamics of Armed Conflicts (MIT Press, 2023) explores the extent to which disasters facilitate the escalation or abatement of armed conflicts—as well as the ways and contexts in which combatants exploit these catastrophes.Tobias Ide utilizes both qualitative insights and quantitative data to explain the link between disasters and the (de-)escalation of armed conflict and presents over thirty case studies of earthquakes, droughts, floods, and storms in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. He also examines the impact of COVID-19 on armed conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and the Philippines.Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints is an invaluable addition to current debates on climate change, environmental stress, and security. Professionals and students will greatly appreciate the wealth of timely data it provides for their own investigations.Dr. Tobias Ide is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. His work broadly focuses on the intersections of environmental change and environmental politics with peace, conflict, and security.Sidney Michelini is a PhD student at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research with the FutureLab - Security, Ethnic Conflicts and Migration. His work focuses on how climate, climate shocks, and climate change impact conflicts of different types. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Epidemiologists and national security agencies warned for years about the potential for a deadly pandemic, but in the end global surveillance and warning systems were not enough to avert the COVID-19 disaster. In The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure: Why Warning Was Not Enough (Georgetown UP, 2023), Erik J. Dahl demonstrates that understanding how intelligence warnings work--and how they fail--shows why the years of predictions were not enough.In the first in-depth analysis of the topic, Dahl examines the roles that both traditional intelligence services and medical intelligence and surveillance systems play in providing advance warning against public health threats--and how these systems must be improved for the future. For intelligence to effectively mitigate threats, specific, tactical-level warnings must be collected and shared in real time with receptive decision makers who will take appropriate action. Dahl shows how a combination of late and insufficient warnings about COVID-19, the Trump administration's political aversion to scientific advice, and decentralized public health systems all exacerbated the pandemic in the United States. Dahl's analysis draws parallels to other warning failures that preceded major catastrophes from Pearl Harbor to 9/11, placing current events in context.The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure is a wake-up call for the United States and the international community to improve their national security, medical, and public health intelligence systems and capabilities.Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion (Oxford UP, 2023) traces how American ideas about race in the Pacific were made and remade on the imperial stage before World War II. Following the Russo-Japanese War, the United States cultivated an amicable relationship with Japan based on the belief that it was a "progressive" empire akin to its own. Even as the two nations competed for influence in Asia and clashed over immigration issues in the American West, the mutual respect for empire sustained their transpacific cooperation until Pearl Harbor, when both sides disavowed their history of collaboration and cast each other as incompatible enemies.In recovering this lost history, Chris Suh reveals the surprising extent to which debates about Korea shaped the politics of interracial cooperation. American recognition of Japan as a suitable partner depended in part on a positive assessment of its colonial rule of Korea. It was not until news of Japan's violent suppression of Koreans soured this perception that the exclusion of Japanese immigrants became possible in the United States. Central to these shifts in opinion was the cooperation of various Asian elites aspiring to inclusion in a "progressive" American empire. By examining how Korean, Japanese, and other nonwhite groups appealed to the United States, this book demonstrates that the imperial order sustained itself through a particular form of interracial collaboration that did not disturb the existing racial hierarchy.Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Ecumenics program at Princeton Theological Seminary, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions. His research focuses on the indigenous expressions of Christianities found in Southeast Asia, particularly Christianity that is practiced in the Muslim-dominant archipelagic nation of Indonesia. More broadly, he is interested in history and the anthropology of Christianity, complexities of religious conversion and social identity, inter-religious dialogue, ecumenism, and World Christianity.Chanhee Heo is a Ph.D. candidate in American Religions and a Ph.D. minor in the Department of History at Stanford University. Her research interests include late 19th and early 20th -century transpacific religious history with a focus on race and immigration. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post and the anthology, Migration and Diaspora, from SBL Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Charles P. Kindleberger, renowned economist, discusses the evolution of the dollar system, its history, and the views of economists towards it. He reflects on the monetary side of the economy and the foundations of monetary theory. The interview explores Kindleberger's work, interests, and contemporary issues like the gold-backed dollar and the Bretton Woods agreement. It also delves into the emergence of the dollar system, the translation of Kindleberger's ideas by economists, and the challenges faced by the global dollar system.

The Pacific Rim of Asia – Pacific Asia – is now the world's largest and most cohesive economic region, and China has returned to its center. In this conversation, Julie Yu-Wen Chen, Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Helsinki discusses with Brantly Womack from the University of Virginia about his new book Recentering Pacific Asia: Regional China and World Order (Cambridge University Press, 2023).China's global outlook is shaped by its regional experience, first as a pre-modern Asian center, then displaced by Western-oriented modernization, and now returning as a central producer and market in a globalized region. Developments since 2008 have been so rapid that future directions are uncertain, but China's presence, population, and production guarantee it a key role. As a global competitor, China has awakened American anxieties and the US-China rivalry has become a major concern for the rest of the world. However, rather than facing a power transition between hegemons, the US and China are primary nodes in a multi-layered, interconnected global matrix that neither can control. Brantly Womack argues that Pacific Asia is now the key venue for working out a new world order.Recentering Pacific Asia: Regional China and World Order is written by Brantly Womack. The book contains commentaries from Wang Gungwu (National University of Singapore), Wu Yu-shan (Academia Sinica), Qin Yaqing (China Foreign Affairs University), and Evelyn Goh (Australian National University).Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland). From 2023-2025, Julie Yu-Wen Chen is in the EU twinning project The EU in the Volatile Indo-Pacific Region (EUVIP) where she leads the preparatory research and provides supervision and counselling to junior researchers. Brantly Womack is on the international advisory board of EUVIP. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss' book The "Third" United Nations: How a Knowledge Ecology Helps the UN Think (Oxford UP, 2021) is about the Third UN: the ecology of supportive non-state actors—intellectuals, scholars, consultants, think tanks, NGOs, the for-profit private sector, and the media—that interacts with the intergovernmental machinery of the First UN (member states) and the Second UN (staff members of international secretariats) to formulate and refine ideas and decision-making at key junctures in policy processes. Some advocate for particular ideas, others help analyze or operationalize their testing and implementation; many thus help the UN “think.”Dr. Tatiana Carayannis is director of the Social Science Research Council’s Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum (CPPF), Understanding Violent Conflict (UVC) program, and China-Africa Knowledge Project.Prof. Thomas G. Weiss is Presidential Professor of Political Science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Director Emeritus of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies.Sally Sharif is Simons Foundation Canada Post-Doctoral Fellow at the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University. She was previously a Political Affairs Analyst at the UN Headquarters. Her most recent co-authored paper is “Proto-insurgencies, State Repression, and Civil War Onset.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Arthur Snell's book How Britain Broke the World: War, Greed and Blunders from Kosovo to Afghanistan (1997-2021) (Canbury Press, 2022) critically assesses UK foreign policy over the past 25 years, from Kosovo in 1998 to Afghanistan in 2021, while also scrutinising British policy towards the powerhouses of the USA, Russia, India, and China. Far from being unimportant, Snell reveals, Britain has often played a pivotal role in world affairs. For instance, London supplied the false intelligence that justified the Allied invasion of Iraq and plugged Russia's corrupt elite into Western economies. Then come the bungled humanitarian interventions in foreign states. Without the UK's marginal but key role, the author argues, it's likely that wars would not have blighted the Balkans, Iraq, and Libya, hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved, and the world would be a safer place in the 2020s. Taking in Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Snell charts the key political, economic and geographic factors that drive the behaviour of the most powerful and populous countries. Like a diplomatic version of Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall, How Britain Broke the World reveals the ignominious reality of UK foreign policy and the true state of world affairs. It is a must-read for anyone interested in Britain's role in international affairs.Philip Blood is a British historian residing in Germany. His specialist research covers military culture, war, security, genocide and the Holocaust. 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 modern age, some parts of the world are experiencing a long peace. Nuclear weapons, capitalism and the widespread adoption of democratic institutions have been credited with fostering this relatively peaceful period. Yet, these accounts overlook one of the most dramatic transformations of the 20th century: the massive redistribution of political power as millions of women around the world won the right to vote.The Suffragist Peace: How Women Shape the Politics of War (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Robert Trager and Dr. Joslyn Barnhart presents a deep and historical examination of how the political influence of women at the ballot box has shaped the course of war and peace.Through gripping history and careful reasoning, this book examines how the political influence of women at the ballot box has shaped war and peace. What would a world ruled by women look like? For more than a hundred years, conventional wisdom held that women's votes had little effect. That view is changing - it turns out that women voters had a profound effect on the world we know and in ways we hardly understand. A world ruled by women's voices is a world that is less willing to fall in love with war as a noble end in itself, less prone to lapse into violence for the sake of maintaining an image. In other words, it is the world we live in now, more so than we have ever realised.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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