New Books in World Affairs

As the US becomes a second-place nation, can it shed the superpower nostalgia that still haunts the UK? The debate over the US's fading hegemony has raged and sputtered for 50 years, glutting the market with prophecies about American decline. Media experts ask how fast we will fall and how much we will lose, but generally ignore the fundamental question: What does decline mean? What is the significance, in experiential and everyday terms, in feelings and fantasies, of living in a country past its prime? Drawing on the example of post-WWII Britain and looking ahead at 2020s America, Jed Esty suggests that becoming a second-place nation is neither disastrous, as alarmists claim, nor avoidable, as optimists insist. Contemporary declinism often masks white nostalgia and perpetuates a conservative longing for Cold War certainty. But the narcissistic lure of "lost greatness" appeals across the political spectrum. As Esty argues, it resonates so widely in mainstream media because Americans have lost access to a language of national purpose beyond global supremacy. It is time to shelve the shopworn fables of endless US dominance, to face the multipolar world of the future, and to tell new American stories. The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at Its Limits (Stanford Briefs, 2022) is a guide to finding them.Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. 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

In the spring of 1954, after eight years of bitter fighting, the war in Vietnam between the French and the communist-led Vietminh came to a head. With French forces reeling, the United States planned to intervene militarily to shore-up the anti-communist position. Turning to its allies for support, first and foremost Great Britain, the US administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower sought to create what Secretary of State John Foster Dulles called a "united action" coalition. In the event, Winston Churchill's Conservative government refused to back the plan. Fearing that US-led intervention could trigger a wider war in which the United Kingdom would be the first target for Soviet nuclear attack, the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, was determined to act as Indochina peacemaker - even at the cost of damage to the Anglo-American "special relationship".In Anthony Eden, Anglo-American Relations and the 1954 Indochina Crisis (Bloomsbury, 2019), Kevin Ruane and Matthew Jones revisit a Cold War episode in which British diplomacy played a vital role in settling a crucial question of international war and peace. Eden's diplomatic triumph at the 1954 Geneva Conference on Indochina is often overshadowed by the 1956 Suez Crisis which led to his political downfall. This book, however, recalls an earlier Eden: a skilled and experienced international diplomatist at the height of his powers who may well have prevented a localised Cold War crisis escalating into a general Third World War.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

Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) by Jayita Sarkar challenges this received wisdom by narrating a global story of India's nuclear program during its first forty years. The book foregrounds the program's civilian and military features by probing its close relationship with the space program. Through nuclear and space technologies, India's leaders served the technopolitical aims of economic modernity and the geopolitical goals of deterring adversaries.The politically savvy, transnationally connected scientists and engineers who steered the program obtained technologies, materials, and information through a variety of state and nonstate actors from Europe and North America, including both superpowers. They thus maneuvered around Cold War politics and the choke points of the nonproliferation regime. Hyperdiversification increased choices for the leaders of the nuclear program but reduced democratic accountability at home. The nuclear program became a consensus-enforcing device in the name of the nation.Ploughshares and Swords is a provocative new history with global implications. It shows how geopolitical and technopolitical visions influence decisions about the nation after decolonization.Thanks to generous funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellopen.org) and other repositories. You can access the ebook here.Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University Of Glasgow and the Founding Director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. Follow her on Twitter @DrJSarkar or check out her website (www.JayitaSarkar.com).Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Today I talked to Florian Wagner about his new book Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982 (Cambridge UP, 2022).From its founding in 1893, to its decline in the 1970s, the International Colonial Institute (ICI) was one of the most powerful nongovernmental actors on the colonial scene. Styling itself a reformist institution, the ICI applied the tools of transnational scientific exchange to “rationalize” the practice of colonial rule. As part of this reformist project, members of the ICI mobilized progressive ideas in ways that built broad political consensus across Europe while also furthering inequality, exploitation, and segregation in the Global South, even beyond the end of formal empire. Tracing the long history of the ICI reveals fundamental continuities, argues Florian Wagner, that colonialist narratives of change obscure.Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor in International History at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In her new book, Promoting Justice Across Borders: The Ethics of Reform Intervention (Oxford UP, 2021) political scientist Lucia M. Rafanelli develops an ethical theory of global reform intervention, arguing that new theories are necessary as increasing global interconnection continues and expands around the world. Rafanelli classifies global reform intervention as any attempt to promote justice in a society other than one’s own. This loose definition means that there are several variations of these actions: the degree of control held by the interveners; how interveners interact with recipients; existing political institutions; the context surrounding the action, and the risks intervention poses to the recipients of that intervention. Promoting Justice Across Borders argues that there are components within these dimensions that pollute the moral permissibility of reform intervention. Once the malleability of these actions becomes evident, it also becomes clear that there are ethical ways to go about (and not go about) such an action. When studying examples of reform interventions, it is clear that there are some interveners who disrespect and essentially ignore the recipients and treat them with intolerance. But not all interveners treat recipients this way, many treat the recipients of intervention with respect for the legitimate political institutions, working to establish collective self-determination, thus providing a blueprint for moral action. It is through these particular examples that Rafanelli creates an ethical framework through which reform intervention is analyzed with the goal of global justice.Promoting Justice Across Borders combines philosophical analysis of justice and morality with a case-by-case investigation of real-life events, in an attempt to identify which kinds of reform intervention are not subject to ethical objection. The analysis redefines the ordinary boundaries of global politics with the values of toleration, legitimacy, and collective self-determination. Rafanelli explains how vital it is for interveners to avoid subjecting recipients to neocolonial power dynamics or making their institutions more responsive to the intervener’s interests at the expense of the recipient’s interests in order to maintain this framework of global collectivism. A qualification of reform intervention is not to undermine the self-determination of the recipients; in fact, it may bolster it and re-affirm the recipient’s independence in the name of justice. Promoting such justice, unfortunately, takes place in a non-ideal world, and Rafanelli discusses how these theories can be put into practice in this context. To prevent negative consequences from the most well-principled interventions, diverse global oversight of such actions is an important component of the process, as well as ensuring that interveners favor interventions where they exert less rather than more control over recipients. Priority must be given to interventions that challenge current and historical power hierarchies. Humanity’s collective purpose of pursuing justice can be reshaped and better applied according to the analysis in Promoting Justice Across Borders, but the approach and process needs to be reconfigured to avoid reinscribing past problematic applications of these reform interventions.Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast.Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. 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 searing and insightful critique, Adrienne Buller examines the fatal biases that have shaped the response of our governing institutions to climate and environmental breakdown, and asks: are the 'solutions' being proposed really solutions? Tracing the intricate connections between financial power, economic injustice and ecological crisis, she exposes the myopic economism and market-centric thinking presently undermining a future where all life can flourish. The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism (Manchester UP, 2022) examines what is wrong with mainstream climate and environmental governance, from carbon pricing and offset markets to 'green growth', the commodification of nature and the growing influence of the finance industry on environmental policy. In doing so, it exposes the self-defeating logic of a response to these challenges based on creating new opportunities for profit, and a refusal to grapple with the inequalities and injustices that have created them. Both honest and optimistic, The Value of a Whale asks us - in the face of crisis - what we really value. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Between 1848 and 1899, miners extracted more gold from the earth than in the previous 3,000 years of human history combined. Each gold rush in this period, from the Sierra Nevada to the highlands of Australia to the Transvaal, was a global event, drawing argonauts and others seeking new lives from all corners of the world, including from China. In her Bancroft-Prize winning book, The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (Norton, 2021), Columbia University Professor of Asian American Studies and History Mae Ngai seeks to dispel a long held myth that Chinese gold-seekers arrived as unfree labor to sites of gold rushes. Instead, Mae describes in great detail not just the global nature of gold rushes, but the complicated lives and politics of Chinese participation in imperial-era gold mining. Using a comparative study of three gold rushes in California, Australia, and South Africa, Ngai explains why "The Chinese Question" became a driving social and political question among White settlers in each of these zones of industrial gold mining, and how Chinese people navigated increasingly unfriendly and racist environments and legal structures. The Chinese Question is not just a thing of the past either, and Ngai makes a compelling case for its lasting impact on American and global politics into the twenty first century.Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Vanessa Walker's Principles in Power: Latin America and the Politics of U. S. Human Rights Diplomacy (Cornell University Press, 2020) explores the relationship between policy makers and nongovernment advocates in Latin America and the United States government in order to explain the rise of anti-interventionist human rights policies uniquely critical of U.S. power during the Cold War. Walker shows that the new human rights policies of the 1970s were based on a complex dynamic of domestic and foreign considerations that was rife with tensions between the seats of power in the United States and Latin America, and the growing activist movement that sought to reform them. By addressing the development of U.S. diplomacy and politics alongside that of activist networks, especially in Chile and Argentina, Walker shows that Latin America was central to the policy assumptions that shaped the Carter administration's foreign policy agenda. The coup that ousted the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, sparked new human rights advocacy as a direct result of U.S. policies that supported authoritarian regimes in the name of Cold War security interests. From 1973 onward, the attention of Washington and capitals around the globe turned to Latin America as the testing ground for the viability of a new paradigm for U.S. power. This approach, oriented around human rights, required collaboration among activists and state officials in places as diverse as Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Washington, DC. Principles in Power tells the complicated story of the potentials and limits of partnership between government and nongovernment actors. Analyzing how different groups deployed human rights language to reform domestic and international power, Walker explores the multiple and often conflicting purposes of U.S. human rights policy.Jo Butterfield is the Advisor for the Human Rights Certificate offered by the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights and is an Adjunct Asst. Professor with the UI Department of History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

This podcast is a recorded panel discussion on “War and Peace: America's Humane War and the Crisis in Ukraine.” The panel was part of the Annual Conference of the Connecticut/Baden-Württemberg Human Rights Research Consortium (HRRC) held on May 12, 2022 at the University of Connecticut in Hartford. The discussion considers the recent book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, written by Samuel Moyn, and its relevance to the current war in Ukraine. The event featured the author (Moyn), as well as Silja Voeneky, of the University of Freiburg, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and Frauke Lachenmann, of the Connecticut/Baden-Württemberg Human Rights Research Consortium. James Cavallaro, of the University Network for Human Rights, Yale Law School and Wesleyan University, was the moderator. The public address questions to the panelists in the second half of the event.Samuel Moyn is Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and a Professor of History at Yale University.Prof. Dr. Silja Vöneky (Voeneky) is Co-Director of the Institute for Public Law, Professor of Public International Law, Comparative Law and Ethics of Law and an associated member of the Institute for Philosophy of Law. Since October 2019, she has served as the Vice Dean of the Freiburg Law Faculty.Frauke Lachenmann is an international lawyer and holds a PhD in English literature. She has worked for the UNHCR in Berlin, the Max Planck Institute for International Law and the Max Planck Foundation for the Rule of Law in Heidelberg and has been a Visiting Researcher at Yale.James (Jim) Cavallaro is the Executive Director of the University Network for Human Rights. He teaches at Wesleyan University, Yale Law School and UCLA Law School. Prior to co-founding the University Network, he served as a professor of law at Stanford Law School (2011-2019) and a clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School (2002-2011).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs