New Books in World Affairs

How do military organizations learn? Robert W. Tomlinson's book The Influence of Foreign Wars on U.S. Domestic Military Policy (Lexington, 2022) covers an important instance of military learning in which the United States military systematically examined the lessons of Israel's decisive victory in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and applied those lessons towards major doctrinal and equipment changes. The book relies heavily on Paul Senge’s model of learning organizations outlined in his seminal work, The Fifth Dimension. Using Senge’s model, the book examines the Departments of the Army, Air Force, and Navy’s reactions to the Yom Kippur War and how they organizationally incorporated—or ignored—the lessons of the conflict within their force. Using source documents, including personal memoirs, doctrinal publications, and individual reflections, the book offers a vital examination of how militaries can use foreign conflicts to make substantive and necessary organizational changes. The Yom Kippur War, particularly the Israeli experience in that conflict, provided the American military a battle laboratory in which to develop new warfighting concepts and assess new weapons acquisitions. In its conclusion, the book offers a cautionary tale that suggests learning and change do not come automatically to military organizations. If they are to be successful in the future, military organizations must embrace learning structures.Dr. Robert W. Tomlinson is an associate dean at the Naval War College.The views expressed in this podcast by both participants are their own, and do not reflect the official position of any organization with which they are affiliated.Sam Canter is a policy and strategy analyst, PhD candidate, and Army Reserve intelligence officer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

While the nineteenth century has been described as the golden age of the European bourgeoisie, the emergence of the middle class and bourgeois culture was by no means exclusive to Europe. The Global Bourgeoisie: The Rise of the Middle Classes in the Age of Empire (Princeton UP, 2019) explores the rise of the middle classes around the world during the age of empire. Bringing together eminent scholars, this landmark essay collection compares middle-class formation in various regions, highlighting differences and similarities, and assesses the extent to which bourgeois growth was tied to the increasing exchange of ideas and goods. The contributors indicate that the middle class was from its very beginning, even in Europe, the result of international connections and entanglements. Essays are grouped into six thematic sections: the political history of middle-class formation, the impact of imperial rule on the colonial middle class, the role of capitalism, the influence of religion, the obstacles to the middle class beyond the Western and colonial world, and, lastly, reflections on the creation of bourgeois cultures and global social history. Placing the establishment of middle-class society into historical context, this book shows how the triumph or destabilization of bourgeois values can shape the liberal world order.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. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Too often, we are told that Russia plays a weak hand well. But, perhaps the nation's cards are better than we know. Russia ranks significantly behind the US and China by traditional measures of power: GDP, population size and health, and military might. Yet 25 years removed from its mid-1990s nadir following the collapse of the USSR, Russia has become a supremely disruptive force in world politics. Kathryn E. Stoner assesses the resurrection of Russia and argues that we should look beyond traditional means of power to assess its strength in global affairs. Taking into account how Russian domestic politics under Vladimir Putin influence its foreign policy, Stoner explains how Russia has battled its way back to international prominence.From Russia's seizure of the Crimea from Ukraine to its military support for the Assad regime in Syria, the country has reasserted itself as a major global power. Stoner examines these developments and more in tackling the big questions about Russia's turnaround and global future. Stoner marshals data on Russia's political, economic, and social development and uncovers key insights from its domestic politics. Russian people are wealthier than the Chinese, debt is low, and fiscal policy is good despite sanctions and the volatile global economy. Vladimir Putin's autocratic regime faces virtually no organized domestic opposition. Yet, mindful of maintaining control at home, Russia under Putin also uses its varied power capacities to extend its influence abroad. While we often underestimate Russia's global influence, the consequences are evident in the disruption of politics in theUS, Syria, and Venezuela, to name a few. Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order (Oxford UP, 2020) is an eye-opening reassessment of the country, identifying the actual sources of its power in international politics and why it has been able to redefine the post-Cold War global order.Kathryn E. Stoner is the Deputy Director at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, all at Stanford University. She is the author orco-editor of five books, including Transitions to Democracy: A Comparative Perspective, written and edited with Ambassador Michael A. McFaul, and Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia.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

Maeve Ryan’s new book Humanitarian Governance and the British Antislavery World System (Yale UP, 2022) highlights Britain’s early-nineteenth-century, Royal Navy seizures of slave ships and the processes involved in the “liberation” of these enslaved Africans. Nearly two hundred thousand Africans were resettled throughout the British Empire from Sierra Leone to St Helena, the British West Indies, and by treaties to Cuba and Brazil. From 1808 to the end of the Atlantic slave trade, abolitionists attempted to bring relief to these “liberated” Africans. Yet, the needs of Empire often clashed with the moral ideals of abolitionism creating then a “benevolent despotism.” Ryan’s work highlights these imperial experiments across time and the Atlantic and the manifestations of this resettlement. Ryan expertly claims that what Britain did during this period is the beginning ruminations “Humanitarian Governance”; that the evolution of what we today consider humanitarian relief has at its roots this “anti slavery mother.” Back then, the process of liberating Africans from the condition of slavery looked remarkably like slavery itself. But, this humanitarianism was – as Ryan puts it – “a new phenomenon.” Abolitionism evolved as did the processes of humanitarian relief.Joseph Krulder is a historian of Britain's long eighteenth-century: cultural, social, military, and economic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Spoken by a quarter of the world's population, English is today's lingua franca--its common tongue. The language of business, popular media, and international politics, English has become commodified for its economic value and increasingly detached from any particular nation. This meteoric "rise of English" has many obvious benefits to communication. Tourists can travel abroad with greater ease. Political leaders can directly engage their counterparts. Researchers can collaborate with foreign colleagues. Business interests can flourish in the global economy.But the rise of English has very real downsides at times generating intense legal conflicts. In Europe, imperatives of political integration, job mobility, and university rankings compete with pride in national language and heritage as countries like France attempt to curb its spread. In countries like India, South Africa, Morocco, and Rwanda, it has stratified society along lines of English proficiency and devalued commonly spoken languages. In Anglophone countries like the United States and England, English isolates us from the cultural and economic benefits of speaking other languages.In The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language (Oxford University Press, 2021), Dr. Rosemary Salomone offers a commanding view of the unprecedented spread of English and the far-reaching effects it has on global and local politics, economics, media, education, and business. From the inner workings of the European Union to China's use of language as "soft power" in Africa, Salomone draws on a wealth of research to tell the complex story of English--and, ultimately, to argue for English not as a force for domination but as a core component of multilingualism and the transcendence of linguistic and cultural borders.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

Roanne Kantor tells us about World Literature, in the ideas and practices of readers, writers, and scholars. Spatial metaphors like libraries, closets, and airport bookshops, help her imagine the “world” in world literature.In the episode Roanne references work by many scholars in the field, including David Damrosch’s What is World Literature (Princeton UP, 2003); Debjani Ganguly’s This Thing Called the World (Duke UP, 2016), and Gloria Fisk’s Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature (Columbia UP, 2018). In the longer version of our conversation, we talked about how little magazines from the 1970s New York literary scene, like Ed Sanders’ Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, circulated in South Asia, inspiring avant-garde magazines like Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s damn you/a magazine of the arts.Roanne is an assistant professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. She has a brand new book, South Asian Writers, Latin American Literature, and the Rise of Global English, (Cambridge UP, 2022). If you want to learn more about the world of world lit, check it out.This week’s image of an airport bookshop at the Incheon International Airport in South Korea, was photographed by Adli Wahid and made publicly available on Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons License.Music used in promotional material: ‘Six More Weeks’ by Evening Fires Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Wars have always been fought in different ways, depending not only on the manpower available – elite professional armies to mass mobilization of whole populations - but also on technological developments, all the way from medieval siege engines to modern fighter jets. Recent developments suggest that there is much more rapid change to come as information campaigns, crime and subversion become weaponised in new ways. Mark Galeotti has been thinking about all these things for a long time. Today I talked to him about his book The Weaponization of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War (Yale UP, 2022).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

Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom: Lessons from 100,000 Years of Human History (Cambridge UP, 2022) is an entertaining and engaging guide to global economic history told for the first time from an African perspective. In thirty-five short chapters, Johan Fourie tells the story of 100,000 years of human history spanning humankind's migration out of Africa to the Covid-19 pandemic. His unique account reveals just how much we can learn by asking unexpected questions such as 'How could a movie embarrass Stalin?', 'Why do the Japanese play rugby?' and 'What do an Indonesian volcano, Frankenstein and Shaka Zulu have in common?'. The book sheds new light on urgent debates about the roots and reasons for prosperity, the march of opportunity versus the crushing boot of exploitation, and why it is the builders of society - rather than the burglars -who ultimately win out.Javier Mejia is an economist teaching at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In his book Why Humans Fight: The Social Dynamics of Close-Range Violence (2022, Cambridge University Press), Siniša Malešević emphasises the centrality of the social and historical contexts that make fighting possible. He argues that fighting is not an individual attribute, but a social phenomenon shaped by one's relationships with other people. Drawing on recent scholarship across a variety of academic disciplines as well as his own interviews with the former combatants, Malešević shows that one's willingness to fight is a contextual phenomenon shaped by specific ideological and organisational logic. This book explores the role biology, psychology, economics, ideology, and coercion play in one's experience of fighting, emphasising the cultural and historical variability of combativeness. By drawing from numerous historical and contemporary examples from all over the world, Malešević demonstrates how social pugnacity is a relational and contextual phenomenon that possesses autonomous features.Siniša Malešević is the chair of the sociology department at University College, Dublin. His main research interests include the study of war and violence, ethnicity, nation-states, and nationalism, empires, ideology, sociological theory and comparative historical sociology.Christian Axboe Nielsen is associate professor of history and human security at Aarhus University in Denmark. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

From the Institute’s Vault, we have an excerpt from a two day symposium--“Hannah Arendt Right Now”--which explored the philosopher’s impact on the 21st Century. The 2006 event was held on the hundredth anniversary of Arendt’s birth.In this episode, Dr. Rony Brauman describes how Arendt influenced his thinking about the politics of humanitarian aid. Brauman was president of Doctors without Borders from 1982 to 1994. In 1999, he co-directed The Specialist - Portrait of a Modern Criminal, a documentary about the trial of Adolf Eichman. Samantha Power responds to Brauman’s presentation. Power was the US ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017, and author of A Problem From Hell, America and the Age of Genocide, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs