New Books in World Affairs

One of the outcomes of globalization is the growth of diasporic communities worldwide. This population has continued to face a lot of complexities due to differences in ethnicities. However, these communities have the potential to contribute immensely to a nation’s development through their knowledge and skills. What is needed is to shed the ethnocentric lens for an inclusive one.In the third episode of our new themed series Migration, Dr. Sarah Peck, a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the Centre for International Development in Northumbria University, examines the role of diaspora in the development of a state, in the context of her work “Re-orienting the Diaspora–Development Nexus”, published by Brill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Why has "car society" proven so durable, even in the face of mounting environmental and economic crises? In Globalizing Automobilism: Exuberance and the Emergence of Layered Mobility, 1900–1980 (Berghahn Books, 2020), Gijs Mom traces the global spread of the automobile in the postwar era and investigates why adopting more sustainable forms of mobility has proven so difficult. Drawing on archival research as well as wide-ranging forays into popular culture, Mom reveals here the roots of the exuberance, excess, and danger that define modern automotive culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Human fertility rates are declining fast and in twenty years or so the global population will go down fast – not just in affluent countries but in the world as a whole. While many may welcome that outcome, Professor John Aitken who has just written The Infertility Trap: Why Life Choices Impact Your Fertility and Why We Must Act Now (Cambridge UP, 2022), argues that a rapid fall in the numbers of people on earth could cause havoc.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

For all of the doubts raised about the effectiveness of international aid in advancing peace and development, there are few examples of developing countries that are even relatively untouched by it. Sarah Phillips's When There Was No Aid: War and Peace in Somaliland (Cornell UP, 2020) offers us one such example.Using evidence from Somaliland's experience of peace-building, When There Was No Aid challenges two of the most engrained presumptions about violence and poverty in the global South. First, that intervention by actors in the global North is self-evidently useful in ending them, and second that the quality of a country's governance institutions (whether formal or informal) necessarily determines the level of peace and civil order that the country experiences.Phillips explores how popular discourses about war, peace, and international intervention structure the conditions of possibility to such a degree that even the inability of institutions to provide reliable security can stabilize a prolonged period of peace. She argues that Somaliland's post-conflict peace is grounded less in the constraining power of its institutions than in a powerful discourse about the country's structural, temporal, and physical proximity to war. Through its sensitivity to the ease with which peace gives way to war, Phillips argues, this discourse has indirectly harnessed an apparent propensity to war as a source of order.When There Was No Aid was awarded the Australian Political Science Association’s biennial Crisp Prize for the best political science monograph (2018-2020). It was also a ‘Best Book of 2020’ at Foreign Affairs, a ‘Book of the Year (2020)’ at Australian Book Review, was shortlisted for the Conflict Research Society 'Book of the Year' Prize (2021), and was a finalist for the African Studies Association’s Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize (2021).Sarah Phillips is a Professor of Global Conflict and Development at The University of Sydney, an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, and Non-Resident Fellow at the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies. Her research draws from years of in-depth fieldwork, and focuses on international intervention in the global south, non-state governance, and knowledge production about conflict-affected states, with a geographic focus on the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa.Lamis Abdelaaty is an assistant 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

Dr. Sofia Stolk’s The Opening Statement of the Prosecution in International Criminal Trials: A Solemn Tale of Horror (Routledge, 2021) addresses the discursive importance of the prosecution’s opening statement before an international criminal tribunal. Opening statements are considered to be largely irrelevant to the official legal proceedings but are simultaneously deployed to frame important historical events. They are widely cited in international media as well as academic texts; yet have been ignored by legal scholars as objects of study in their own right. Dr. Stolk aims to remedy this neglect, by analysing the narrative that is articulated in the opening statements of different prosecutors at different tribunals in different times.This book aims to magnify the story of the opening statement where it becomes ambiguous, circular, repetition, self-referential, incomplete, and inescapable. It aims to uncover the specificities of a discourse that is built on and rebuilds paradoxes, to illuminate some of the absurdities that mark the foundations of the opening statements’ celebration of reason. More generally, it aims to show how the contradticion in the opening statement reflects foundational tensions that are productive and constituative of the field of international criminal law more broadly. Above all, [this book] shows how the opening statement aims to provide certainty where there is none.The book takes an interdisciplinary approach and looks at the meaning of the opening narrative beyond its function in the legal process in a strict sense, discussing the ways in which the trial is situated in time and space and how it portrays the main characters. Dr. Stolk shows how perpetrators and victims, places and histories, are juridified in a narrative that, whilst purporting to legitimise the trial, the tribunal and international criminal law itself, is beset with tensions and contradictions.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

Pandemic Re-Awakenings: The Forgotten and Unforgotten 'Spanish' Flu Of 1918-1919 (Oxford UP, 2021), edited by Guy Beiner, offers a multi-level and multi-faceted exploration of a century of remembering, forgetting, and rediscovering the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, arguably the greatest catastrophe in human history. Twenty-three researchers present original perspectives by critically investigating the hitherto unexplored vicissitudes of memory in the interrelated spheres of personal, communal, medical, and cultural histories in different national and transnational settings across the globe. The volume reveals how, even though the Great Flu was overshadowed by the commemorative culture of the Great War, recollections of the pandemic persisted over time to re-emerge towards the centenary of the 'Spanish' Flu and burst into public consciousness following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapters chart historiographical neglect (while acknowledging the often-unnoticed dialogues between scientific and historical discourses), probe silences, and trace vestiges of social and cultural memories that long remained outside of what was considered collective memory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

When and why does international order change? The largest peaceful transfer of wealth across borders in all of human history began with the oil crisis of 1973. OPEC countries turned the tables on the most powerful businesses on the planet, quadrupling the price of oil and shifting the global distribution of profits. It represented a huge shift in international order. Yet, the textbook explanation for how world politics works-that the most powerful country sets up and sustains the rules of international order after winning a major war-doesn't fit these events, or plenty of others.Instead of thinking of the international order as a single thing, Jeff Colgan explains how it operates in parts, and often changes in peacetime. Partial Hegemony: Oil Politics and International Order (Oxford University Press, 2021) offers lessons for leaders and analysts seeking to design new international governing arrangements to manage an array of pressing concerns ranging from US-China rivalry to climate change, and from nuclear proliferation to peacekeeping. A major contribution to international relations theory, this book promises to reshape our understanding of the forces driving change in world politics.Jeff D. Colgan is Richard Holbrooke Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University and the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs. He is also author of Petro-Aggression: When Oil Causes War.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). 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 Digital Frontier: Infrastructures of Control on the Global Web (Indiana University Press, 2021), Sangeet Kumar interrogates the world wide web and the digital ecosystem has spawned to reveal how its conventions, protocols, standards, and algorithmic regulations represent a novel form of global power. Kumar shows the operation of this power through the web's "infrastructures of control" visible at sites where the universalizing imperatives of the web run up against local values, norms, and cultures. These include how the idea of the "global common good" is used as a ruse by digital oligopolies to expand their private enclosures, how seemingly collaborative spaces can simultaneously be exclusionary as they regulate legitimate knowledge, how selfhood is being redefined online along with Eurocentric ideals, and how the web's political challenge is felt differentially by sovereign nation-states.In analysing this new modality of cultural power in the global digital ecosystem, The Digital Frontier is an important read for scholars, activists, academics and students inspired by the utopian dream of a truly representative global digital network.Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and the public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Tariffs and trade barriers are rising, and major diplomatic institutions that have long promoted liberal trade are coming under attack as impending trade wars threaten global trade and global value chains. At the root of this crisis, argues Geoffrey Pigman, is accelerating technological change. Negotiating Our Economic Future: Trade, Technology, and Diplomacy (McGill-Queen's UP, 2020) traces the impact of today's major technological transformations on global trade and the diplomacy that makes trade possible. Not only is global trade changing, in terms of what is traded and how, but diplomacy in the digital age is changing as well. Arguing that we must think differently about trade and diplomacy, Pigman proposes pragmatic policy approaches for the diplomatic management of a challenging and potentially dangerous future.Leo Nasskau writes and thinks about leadership and change, exploring how leaders can build societies fit for the 21st century. We face change in our economic, social, and political worlds; it is the role of leaders, in business, society, and politics, to ensure that this change manifests as opportunities rather than challenges. He blogs at empoweredbelonging.substack.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Collaborative Damage: An Experimental Ethnography of Chinese Globalization (Cornell UP, 2022) is an experimental ethnography of Chinese globalization that compares data from two frontlines of China's global intervention—sub-Saharan Africa and Inner/Central Asia. Based on their fieldwork on Chinese infrastructure and resource-extraction projects in Mozambique and Mongolia, Mikkel Bunkenborg, Morten Nielsen, and Morten Axel Pedersen provide new empirical insights into neocolonialism and Sinophobia in the Global South.The core argument in Collaborative Damage is that the different participants studied in the globalization processes—local workers and cadres; Chinese managers and entrepreneurs; and the authors themselves, three Danish anthropologists—are intimately linked in paradoxical partnerships of mutual incomprehension. The authors call this "collaborative damage," which crucially refers not only to the misunderstandings and conflicts they observed in the field, but also to their own failure to agree about how to interpret the data. Via in-depth case studies and tragicomical tales of friendship, antagonism, irresolvable differences, and carefully maintained indifferences across disparate Sino-local worlds in Africa and Asia, Collaborative Damage tells a wide-ranging story of Chinese globalization in the twenty-first century.Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs