New Books in World Affairs

Violent conflict and its aftermath are pressing problems, particularly for international development initiatives. However, the results of development in conflict contexts have generally been disappointing and their preventative potential thus questionable. Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Mareike Schomerus argues that this is because practitioners adhere to a mental model that emphasises linearity, certainty, and causality, assuming that violence is best addressed through work plans that deliver state-building, stabilisation and services. Based on ten years of multi-method research from, in, and on conflict-affected countries, this book challenges this approach.Drawing on a significant collaborative body of scholarship, Dr. Schomerus puts forward original and generalizable conclusions about how lives amid violence persist, offering an invitation to abandon restricting mental models and to embrace creative ways of thinking and working. These include paying attention to the long-term effects of conflict on individual behaviour and decision-making, the social realities of economic life, the role service delivery plays in negotiations between citizens and states, and to creating meaningful relationships. Transformation also requires reflection and therefore the book concludes with constructive suggestions on how to practice these insights to better support those whose lives are shaped by violence.This book is available open access here. 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

The United States has been an empire since the time of its founding, and this empire is inextricably intertwined with American religion. Religion and US Empire: Critical New Histories (NYU Press, 2022) examines the relationship between these dynamic forces throughout the country’s history and into the present. The volume will serve as the most comprehensive and definitive text on the relationship between US empire and American religion.Whereas other works describe religion as a force that aided or motivated American imperialism, this comprehensive new history reveals how imperialism shaped American religion—and how religion historically structured, enabled, challenged, and resisted US imperialism. Chapters move chronologically from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, ranging geographically from the Caribbean, Michigan, and Liberia, to Oklahoma, Hawai’i, and the Philippines. Rather than situating these histories safely in the past, the final chapters ask readers to consider present day entanglements between capitalism, imperialism, and American religion. Religion and US Empire is an urgent work of history, offering the context behind a relationship that is, for better or worse, very much alive today.Tisa Wenger is Associate Professor of American Religious History at Yale Divinity School. She is the author of We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (2009) and Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (2017).Sylvester A. Johnson is Professor in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech, and Assistant Vice Provost the Center for Humanities. He is the author of African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom and co-editor of FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security Before and After 9/11.This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his websitethereluctantamericanist.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Sean Lynn-Jones, editor of International Security, interviews author John Schuessler, whose article "The Deception Dividend: FDR's Undeclared War" appears in the Spring 2010 issue of the journal. Their conversation tackles the question of whether FDR willfully deceived the American public in order to persuade them to support WWII – and touches on perceptions of warring democracies as well as comparisons to the 2003 Iraq War. The conversation was recorded on May 21, 2010 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO (Cornell UP, 2022), Susan Colbourn tells the story of the height of nuclear crisis and the remarkable waning of the fear that gripped the globe. In the Cold War conflict that pitted nuclear superpowers against one another, Europe was the principal battleground. Washington and Moscow had troops on the ground and missiles in the fields of their respective allies, the NATO nations and the states of the Warsaw Pact. Euromissiles―intermediate-range nuclear weapons to be used exclusively in the regional theater of war―highlighted how the peoples of Europe were dangerously placed between hammer and anvil. That made European leaders uncomfortable and pushed fearful masses into the streets demanding peace in their time. At the center of the story is NATO. Colbourn highlights the weakness of the alliance seen by many as the most effective bulwark against Soviet aggression. Divided among themselves and uncertain about the depth of US support, the member states were riven by the missile issue. This strategic crisis was, as much as any summit meeting between US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, the hinge on which the Cold War turned. Euromissiles is a history of diplomacy and alliances, social movements and strategy, nuclear weapons and nagging fears, and politics. To tell that history, Colbourn takes a long view of the strategic crisis―from the emerging dilemmas of allied defense in the early 1950s through the aftermath of the INF Treaty thirty-five years later. The result is a dramatic and sweeping tale that changes the way we think about the Cold War and its culmination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Miriam Bak McKenna is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University (Denmark). Her first monograph, Reckoning with Empire: Self-Determination in International Law (Brill, 2023), adopts a new approach to self-determination’s international legal history, tracing the ways in which various actors have sought to reinvent self-determination in different juridical, political, and economic iterations to create the conditions for global transformation. The value of the book’s approach lies not only in a more nuanced understanding of self-determination’s legal history, but also in excavating the multiple ways in which actors, particularly those from the Global South, have challenged the existing normative and legal structures which rendered them unequal under the European system of international law. Rethinking this process touches on issues that are relevant not only to debates about the enduring legacy of imperialism in our present, but also to contemporary discussions of the position self-determination has come to occupy in international law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

This week on International Horizons, Ellen Chesler interviews Rebecca Adami and Fatima Sator, editor and co-author of Women and the UN: A New History of Women's International Human Rights (Routledge, 2022) that debunks the myth that the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were Western male-dominated inventions. Moreover, the authors discuss how women did not act as a unified bloc in the first chapters of global governance, and that it has been women from the Global South such as Marie Sivomey from Togo, Jaiyeola Aduke Moore from Nigeria, Jeanne Martin Cissé from Guinea, Aziza Hussein from Egypt, Artati Marzuki from Indonesia, and Carmela Aguilar from Peru, Bertha Lutz from Brazil and Minerva Bernardino from Dominican Republic who were the main drivers of feminism in the early stages of the UN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

During the first months of the pandemic, governments worldwide agreed that ‘following the science’ with hard lockdowns and vaccine mandates was the best way to preserve life. But evidence is mounting that ‘the science’ was all politics and time reveals the horrific human and economic cost of these policies.The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (Hurst, 2023) provides an internationalist-left perspective on the world’s Covid-19 response, which has had devastating consequences for democratic rights and the poor worldwide. As the fortunes of the richest soared, nationwide shutdowns devastated small businesses, the working classes, and the Global South’s informal economies.Toby Green and Thomas Fazi argue that these policies grossly exacerbated existing trends of inequality, mediatisation and surveillance, with grave implications for the future. Rich in human detail, The Covid Consensus tackles head-on the refusal of the global political class and mainstream media to report the true extent of the erosion of democratic processes and the socioeconomic assault on the poor.Toby Green and Thomas Fazi speak to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the emergence of a global consensus, the abject failure of the left to hold power to account, and the sometimes fine line between critique and conspiracy theorising.Richard Seymour’s critique of the book on Politics, Theory, Other.Toby Green is Professor of African History at King’s College London, and author of A Fistful of Shells and The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa.Thomas Fazi is the author and co-author of several books on economic and political issues, including Reclaiming the State. His article with Toby Green for UnHerd, The Left’s Covid Failure, was translated into ten languages. He is a regular contributor to Compact.Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Beginning in the 1920s, audiences around the globe were seduced not only by Hollywood films but also by lavish movie theaters that were owned and operated by the major American film companies. These theaters aimed to provide a quintessentially “American” experience. Outfitted with American technology and accoutrements, they allowed local audiences to watch American films in an American-owned cinema in a distinctly American way.In a history that stretches from Buenos Aires and Tokyo to Johannesburg and Cairo, Ross Melnick considers these movie houses as cultural embassies. He examines how the exhibition of Hollywood films became a constant flow of political and consumerist messaging, selling American ideas, products, and power, especially during fractious eras. Melnick demonstrates that while Hollywood’s marketing of luxury and consumption often struck a chord with local audiences, it was also frequently tone-deaf to new social, cultural, racial, and political movements. He argues that the story of Hollywood’s global cinemas is not a simple narrative of cultural and industrial indoctrination and colonization. Instead, it is one of negotiation, booms and busts, successes and failures, adoptions and rejections, and a precursor to later conflicts over the spread of American consumer culture. A truly global account, Hollywood's Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World (Columbia UP, 2022) shows how the entanglement of worldwide movie theaters with American empire offers a new way of understanding film history and the history of U.S. soft power.Ross Melnick is professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of American Showman: Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry, 1908–1935 (Columbia, 2012) and co-editor of Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm: Cinema, Television, and the Archive (2018).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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The term "Silk Road" evokes images of trade and exotic luxurious goods and Orientalist images. Today, however, it also is associated with the projection of Chinese power abroad. And as that pairing suggests, the term "Silk Road" in fact has many meanings as Professor Tim Winter has been explaining in his book The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures (Oxford University Press, 2022). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett-Jones.Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

"The world's future will depend on Africa having a good future."This week on International Horizons, Jack Goldstone, Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Chair Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and a Global Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center, discusses the role of age and demographics of social movements in the twenty-first century. Goldstone speculates about the possibilities of regime change in China associated with the role of the youth and their discontent with governments that are losing performance legitimacy, and the possibilities for a slight rise in authoritarianism in India as the growth of the working-age population slows. Goldstone also suggests why Africa will be the great resource of youth for the entire world for the next 20 years, despite the fact that the talent of young Africans is being held back by government corruption and ineffectiveness.International Horizons is a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly expertise to bear on our understanding of international issues. John Torpey, the host of the podcast and director of the Ralph Bunche Institute, holds conversations with prominent scholars and figures in state-of-the-art international issues in our weekly episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs