New Books in World Affairs

What does Xi Jinping want, and what is he afraid of? What is the future of China's relationship with Russia? What should the United States be doing to counter China? Matt Pottinger, Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and former Deputy National Security Advisor, joins Madison's Notes to answer these questions and others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Southeast Asia and South America are regions made up of largely illiberal states lacking stabilizing great powers or collective identities. But despite persistent territorial disputes, regime instability, and interstate rivalries, both regions have avoided large-scale war for decades. What accounts for the lack of war in these regions, and importantly, how are conflicts managed?In Practicing Peace: Conflict Management in Southeast Asia and South America (Oxford University Press, 2022), Dr. Aarie Glas offers a comparative regional perspective on conflict management and diplomacy in Southeast Asia and South America. Dr. Glas finds that regional interstate relations are shaped by particular habitual dispositions—discrete sets of processual and substantive qualities of relations understood and enacted by diplomatic communities of practice. Different habitual dispositions in each case shape conflict management and regionalism in important ways, and lead to a tolerance of limited regional violence. Dr. Glas expands on new developments in social International Relations theory to develop a practice-oriented and interpretive account of regional relations and explores the existence of habitual dispositions across crucial cases of regional conflict management, including the Southeast Asian response to the Preah Vihear dispute in 2011 and the South American response to the Cenepa conflict in 1995.Drawing on novel research methods and detailed interviews with regional practitioners, Practicing Peace challenges existing scholarly claims of peace in Southeast Asia and South America. Instead, Dr. Glas argues that officials successfully manage pervasive conflict short of war in both regions. He provides an in-depth look into how diplomacy unfolds and peace is practiced within diplomatic communities, from government actors to organizational officials, as they attempt to respond to and resolve territorial disputes.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

Using a multidisciplinary approach and case studies based on fieldwork in nine countries scattered across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Oceania, China in the Global South: Impact and Perceptions (Springer, 2023) scrutinizes the frequently ignored agency of the Global South sub-national actors in their interactions with rising China. Diverse case studies engage with two interrelated questions. What are the real economic, political, and social impacts of China’s growing presence in the Global South? And, more critically, how do the state and societies of the Global South frame and interpret their interactions with China amid its rise? Consequently, the volume analyzes how sub-national actors respond to China’s emergence as an increasingly consequential power in the Global South and whether they are attracted by cooperation models proposed by Beijing or deterred by its newfound assertiveness.Each chapter of this volume identifies and fills a gap in the literature on China’s rise by offering a nuanced perspective on its relations with the Global South that captures such variables as social context, intersubjective meanings, and identities. They also illuminate often neglected aspects of China’s role in the international politics of development and identify emerging trends in South-South cooperation. Critically, the central argument of the volume is that the agency of sub-state and non-state actors in developing countries meaningfully influences the evolution of their interactions with China. Far from being passive recipients of Beijing-constructed images and cooperation models, these actors are fully aware of their identity and interests and respond accordingly to China’s increasingly visible presence in the Global South.All chapters are based on extensive fieldwork and intimate knowledge of spaces whose dynamics often seem complicated or obscure to outside observers. Building their analysis on firsthand empirical findings, each contributor provides an improved and nuanced understanding of China’s interactions with diverse, frequently divergent, and complex state-society systems of the Global South. A multidisciplinary approach enriches the volume and allows us to bring together insights from International Relations, Political Geography, Government, Development Studies, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Media Studies, and International Communication Studies.Theodor Tudoroiu is a senior lecturer at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine campus, Trinidad and Tobago. Anna Kuteleva is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work intertwines international relations, development studies, energy security, and feminist-informed approaches to politics.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

"The Ukrainian nation will emerge from this war more united and certain of its identity than at any other point in its modern history," writes Serhii Plokhy at the end of The Russo-Ukrainian War (Norton, 2023).But that's not all, says the man acclaimed by the Financial Times as “the world's foremost historian of Ukraine” - author of Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, and Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis."Ukraine’s successful resistance to Russian aggression is destined to promote Russia's own nation-building project. Russia and its elites now have little choice but to reimagine their country's identity by parting ways not only with the imperialism of the Tsarist past but also with the anachronistic model of a Russian nation consisting of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians. By paying an enormous price in wealth and blood of its citizens, Ukraine is terminating the era of Russian dominance in a good part of eastern Europe and challenging Moscow's claim to primacy in the rest of the post-Soviet space".Serhii Plokhy is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard and director of the university's Ukrainian Research Institute.*The author's own book recommendations are The Zelensky Effect by Olga Onuch and Henry Hale (Hurst, 2022) and Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990 by Katja Hoyer (Allen Lane, 2023)Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the Twenty-Four Two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Climate change is devastating the planet, and globalisation is hiding it. Laurie Parsons's book Carbon Colonialism: How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown (Manchester UP, 2023) opens our eyes. Around the world, leading economies are announcing significant progress on climate change. World leaders are queuing up to proclaim their commitment to tackling the climate crisis, pointing to data that shows the progress they have made. Yet the atmosphere is still warming at a record rate, with devastating effects on poverty and precarity in the world's most vulnerable communities. Are we being deceived? Outsourcing climate breakdown explores the murky practices of exporting a country's environmental impact. A world in which corporations and countries are allowed to maintain a clean, green image while landfills in the world's poorest countries continue to expand and droughts and floods intensify under the auspices of globalisation, deregulation and economic growth. Taking a wide-ranging, culturally engaged approach to the topic, the book shows how this is notonly a technical problem, but a problem of cultural and political systems and structures - from nationalism to economic logic - deeply embedded in our society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era (Oxford UP, 2022) explores the role of digital advocacy organizations, a major new addition to the international arena. Organizations such as MoveOn, GetUp, and Campact derive power and influence from their ability to rapidly mobilize members on-line and off-line and are shaping public opinion on many issues including climate change, trade, and refugees. Research in international relations (IR) has highlighted the influence of non-governmental organizations, which wield power through their expertise and long-term, moral commitment to an issue. However, no IR scholars have explored the spread and power of digital advocacy organizations. Nina Hall provides a detailed investigation of how these organizations have harnessed digitally networked power and can quickly respond to the most salient issues of the day, and mobilize large memberships, to put pressure on politicians. She finds that these organizations operate in a globalized world but tackle transnational problems by focusing on national targets. This new generation of activists have formed a strong transnational network, but still see the state as the locus of power.Nina Hall is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Europe. Her research explores the role of transnational advocacy and international organizations in international relations. Her first book explored how international organizations have adapted to climate change: Displacement, Development and Climate Change: International Organizations Moving Beyond their Mandates? (Routledge, 2016). Nina holds a DPhil (PhD) in International Relations from the University of Oxford and a master's degree from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She previously worked as a Lecturer at the Hertie School of Governance.Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In State Responses to Crimes of Genocide: What Went Wrong and How to Change it (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) Dr Ewelina U. Ochab and Lord Alton of Liverpool bring together ongoing situations of genocide around the globe. Foregrounding the testimonies of victims, the authors' multiple visits to the aftermath of atrocities, and the countless actions taken by Lord Alton in British Parliament over his 40 year political career, this book is a chilling but essential read which compels a response. Atrocities are contextualised in the history of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It poses the question as to what, if anything, has improved since the Genocide Convention was enacted in 1948. In our interview, Dr Ochab and Lord Alton make the case that the international response to recent and ongoing genocides perpetrated against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, against belief minorities in Syria and Iraq, and in Nigeria and Dafur, have been inadequate. Instead, the global community must act to predict, prevent, protect and punish genocide. And while recent responses to these atrocities would seem to give little hope for the future, the book does aim to motivate action to prevent the crime of genocide in the future. Dr Ewelina U. Ochab is a human rights advocate, author and co-founder of the Coalition for Genocide Response.Lord David Alton of Liverpool was a Member of the House of Commons in British Parliament for 18 years, and is now an Independent Crossbench Life Peer. Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Denial is a classic symptom of codependency ... Lacking a sense of self, codependent partners tend to be hypersensitive to criticism or negative feedback, preferring instead to deflect it onto others. The resulting denial fuels an escalating cycle of blame and conflict that drives codependent partners apart. Unfortunately, this progressively dysfunctional pathology applies all too well to the conflict between the United States and China. The United States sees its trade deficit as China’s fault, as if its own lack of saving had nothing to do with it. China sees its surplus saving and its related current account and trade surpluses as benevolent support for deficit-prone America, as if its own underfunded social safety net and the resulting suppression of personal consumption were not its own doing. Both economies are steeped in denial over the effects of their self-inflicted saving imbalances. Each then turns that denial into blame directed at the other.– Stephen Roach, Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives (Yale UP, 2022)In the short span of four years, America and China have entered a trade war, a tech war, and a new Cold War. This conflict between the world’s two most powerful nations wouldn’t have happened were it not for an unnecessary clash of false narratives. America falsely blames its trade and technology threats on China yet overlooks its shaky saving foundation. China falsely blames its growth challenges on America’s alleged containment of market-based socialism, ignoring its failed economic rebalancing.In a hard-hitting analysis of both nations’ economies, politics, and policies, Stephen Roach argues that much of the rhetoric on both sides is dangerously misguided, amplified by information distortion, and more a reflection of each nation’s fears and vulnerabilities than a credible assessment of the risks they face. Outlining the disastrous toll of conflict escalation between China and America, Roach offers a new road map to restoring a mutually advantageous relationship.A rare combination of thought leadership on Wall Street and academia places Stephen Roach in the unique position as a leading practitioner of analytical macroeconomics, and he is one of the country’s most influential economists. A forecaster by training in his early days as a Fed economist, Stephen Roach has long been mindful of the perils of historical extrapolation. As seen through that lens, his vision of the “Next China” grew out of this deep respect for the past as a template for the exciting but daunting possibilities of China’s uncertain future. Roach’s focus on the US-China relationship is an outgrowth of the interplay between two major strands of his professional experience — a leading US economist and an influential analyst of a rising China. Roach’s analyses and opinions on China, the United States, and the global economy have long helped to shape policy debates from Beijing to Washington.Professor Stephen Roach is a Senior Fellow of the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School. He joined the Yale faculty in 2010 after 30 years at Morgan Stanley, mainly as the firm’s chief economist heading up a highly regarded global team followed by several years as the Hong Kong-based Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. He was also a Senior Lecturer at Yale’s School of Management and has drawn on his rich experience and developed popular new courses on Asia — notably "The Next China" and "The Lessons of Japan." His prolific writings also include two other books Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China (2014), and The Next Asia: Opportunities and Challenges for a New Globalization (2009). The professor’s work has appeared in both domestic and international media, as well as academic journals and in congressional testimony over his long and ongoing career. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In 1949, women from across the world traveled to Beijing for the Asian Women’s Conference to discuss how to combat the dual threats of colonial rule and a new post-war global imperialism. These activists developed a groundbreaking political strategy, which assigned different roles to women living in colonial nations and those still colonized, arguing that both had a part to place in creating a more just global peace. In Bury the Corpse of Colonialism: The Revolutionary Feminist Conference of 1949 (University of California Press, 2023), Elisabeth Armstrong looks more closely at the lives of the women who attended the conference. Their backgrounds in anticolonial struggles helped shape the work of the umbrella organization—the Women’s International Democratic Federation—that supported the convening. The book profiles a range of women from Indonesia, Vietnam, the United States, France, India, Iraq, and China among others, who had been involved in armed revolution, antifascist resistance, and leftist party politics worldwide. In the preparations and travel that led to the conference they butted heads, but also built lasting friendships with each other through their activism. Their collective efforts helped create a framework for internationalist solidarity for women’s emancipation in a world structured through militarism, capitalism, patriarchy, and the seeming impossibility of justice.Rebecca Turkington is a PhD Candidate in History at Cambridge University studying transnational women’s networks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Mark Galeotti's book Putin's Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine (Bloomsbury, 2022) is a timely overview of the conflicts in which Russia has been involved since Vladimir Putin became prime minister and then president of Russia, from the First Chechen War to the two military incursions into Georgia, the annexation of Crimea and the eventual invasion of Ukraine itself. But it also looks more broadly at Putin's recreation of Russian military power and its expansion to include a range of new capabilities, from mercenaries to operatives in a relentless information war against Western powers. This is an engrossing strategic overview of a rejuvenated Russian military and the successes and failures on the battlefield. Thanks to Dr Galeotti's wide-ranging contacts throughout Russia, it is also peppered with anecdotes of military life, personal snapshots of conflicts, and an extraordinary collection of first-hand accounts from serving and retired Russian officers.Russia continues to dominate the news cycle throughout the Western world. There is no better time to understand how and why Putin has involved his armed forces in a variety of conflicts for over two decades. There is no author better placed to demystify the capabilities of the Russian military and give a glimpse into what the future may hold.Putin's Wars is an engaging and important history of a reawakened Russian bear and how it currently operates both at home and abroad to ensure Russia is front and centre on the world stage.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