New Books in World Affairs

“Human rights in public policy are constructed by diplomats and politicians in an international legislative process, not discovered amongst the clouds of metaphysics.” In "Advanced Introduction to the Politics of International Human Rights (Edward Elgar, 2021), David P. Forsythe, general editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Human Rights (5 vol.) and pioneer of the field of human rights and international relations studies distills insights gained over his long career about the progress and challenges of the human rights enterprise in a world that remains structured by a life-and-death competition between territorial states.A self-defined “liberal realist” Forsythe believes that “individuals can make a difference in constructing a world sympathetic to human rights – up to a point”. In this slim volume, he stresses the difficulties of interjecting human rights into foreign policy and international politics, while recognising the considerable progress that has been made over time. Focusing on international organizations, states, corporations, and private advocacy groups, Forsythe addresses key themes including war, migration, climate change, and slavery.Nicholas Bequelin is a human rights practitioner with a PhD in history and a scholarly bent. He has worked about 20 years for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, most recently as Regional director for Asia. He’s currently a Visiting Scholar and Lecturer at Yale Law School. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Dr. Sam Lebovic’s A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization (University of Chicago Press, 2022) is an examination of how the postwar United States twisted its ideal of “the free flow of information” into a one-sided export of values and a tool with global consequences.When the dust settled after World War II, the United States stood as the world’s unquestionably pre-eminent military and economic power. In the decades that followed, the country exerted its dominant force in less visible but equally powerful ways, too, spreading its trade protocols, its media, and—perhaps most importantly—its alleged values. In A Righteous Smokescreen, Dr. Lebovic homes in on one of the most prominent, yet ethereal, of those professed values: the free flow of information. This trope was seen as capturing what was most liberal about America’s self-declared leadership of the free world. But as Dr. Lebovic makes clear, even though diplomats and public figures trumpeted the importance of widespread cultural exchange, these transmissions flowed in only one direction: outward from the United States.Whereas most scholars focus on grand problems of geopolitics and international finance to explore what sort of international order the US constructed after World War II, this book focuses instead on visa and passport regulations, the funding for educational exchange and school construction, the purchase of land for embassies, civil aviation agreements, the rights of international correspondents, and other equally pragmatic and practical problems of international relations…Detailing how cultural globalization was meant to work in practice therefore reveals a great deal about how the postwar order was actually supposed to operate.Though other countries did try to promote their own cultural visions, Dr. Lebovic shows that the US moved to marginalize or block those visions outright, highlighting the shallowness of American commitments to multilateral institutions, the depth of its unstated devotion to cultural and economic supremacy, and its surprising hostility to importing foreign cultures. His book uncovers the unexpectedly profound global consequences buried in such ostensibly mundane matters as visa and passport policy, international educational funding, and land purchases for embassies. Even more crucially, A Righteous Smokescreen does nothing less than reveal that globalization was not the inevitable consequence of cultural convergence or the natural outcome of putatively free flows of information—it was always political to its core.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

Americans in China: Encounters with the People’s Republic (Oxford, 2022) tells the stories of men and women who have lived and worked in China from before the Communist era to the present. Their experiences provide unique insights and deeply human perspectives on issues that have shaped US engagement with the PRC: politics, diplomacy, education, science, business, art, law, journalism, and human rights. Looming over their narratives is the quandary of whether divergent Chinese and Western worldviews could find common ground.Terry Lautz, former vice president of the Henry Luce Foundation, has chaired the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Lingnan Foundation, and the Yale-China Association. Dr. Lautz holds degrees from Harvard College and Stanford University and is the author of John Birch: A Life (Oxford, 2016).Dong Wang is distinguished professor of history and director of the Wellington Koo Institute for Modern China in World History at Shanghai University (since 2016), a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

We often neglect the Indian Ocean when we talk about our macro-level models of geopolitics, global economics or grand strategy—often in favor of the Atlantic or the Pacific. Yet the Indian Ocean—along whose coasts live a third of humanity—may be a better vehicle to understand how our world is changing.Globalization first began in the Indian Ocean with traders sailing between the Gulf, South Asia and Southeast Asia, spreading goods, cultures and ideas. And now, with no hegemon and an array of different states, governments, and economies, the world may look more like the Indian Ocean in the future.Beyond Liberal Order: States, Societies and Markets in the Global Indian Ocean (Hurst: 2021 / Oxford University Press: 2022), edited by Harry Verhoeven and Anatol Lieven, studies the countries in the Indian Ocean—nations as as different as Singapore, Pakistan, and Somalia—to look at how our understanding of the post-Cold War world order doesn’t quite align with this part of the world.Harry Verhoeven is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy, School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He is the Convenor of the Oxford University China-Africa Network and a Senior Adviser at the European Institute of Peace. He is the author of Water, Civilisation and Power in Sudan (Cambridge University Press: 2015) and Why Comrades Go To War (Oxford University Press: 2016) and the editor of Environmental Politics in the Middle East (Oxford University Press: 2018)Anatol Lieven is a senior fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington DC, and was formerly a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and King's College London. In the 1980s and 1990s he worked as a British journalist in South Asia and the former Soviet Union, and is the author of several books on these regions including Pakistan: A Hard Country (PublicAffairs: 2012). His most recent book, Climate Change and the Nation State, appeared in paperback in 2021.In this interview, the three of us talk about the Indian Ocean—and how it challenges the way we think about international relations and the international system.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Beyond Liberal Order. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.– epigraph in The Long Land War by Jo Guldi (2021)Every political order contains within it tensions, contradictions, and vulnerabilities that at a certain point become too difficult to maintain.– The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle (2022)In the Economica Centenary Coarse Lecture delivered virtually to the London School of Economics in 2021 Thomas Piketty lightheartedly remarked on his English as part of a larger point about how linguistic limitations can reduce our access to important information and data worldwide. And like the epigraph above opening a book about the global struggle for occupancy rights, Piketty was noting just how dependent scholars are on the kind of primary sources to which they can use and access. Coming from one of our era’s preeminent scholars of political economy it was more than just a self-deprecating lead-in for his 2020 Capital and Ideology, a book that enlarged the focus of his famous 2014 Capital in the 21st Century by expanding the geopolitical reach of its analysis of the structure of inequality with its emphasis on political and ideological forces as key causative factors rather than purely economic and technological ones. As he mentions in this interview, his latest book concisely refines his arguments.Coming in at a short 277 pages the professor’s A Brief History of Equality, translated by Steven Randall (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022) will come as a bit of relief for readers acquainted with his much lengthier earlier works. Piketty offers up this comparative history of inequalities among social classes in human societies – or, as he points out: a brief history of equality acknowledging the long-term trend toward greater social, economic and political equality. The book opens with ‘the movement toward equality’ and ‘the slow deconcentration of power and property’ before reminding readers of our ‘heritage of slavery and colonialism’ and then broaching ‘the question of reparations’. You will hear Professor Piketty share his thoughts on why this question is key for reconciling societal divisions and what reparations could represent in terms of social justice.As he points out, both in this interview and in the book, ‘everything remains to be invented’ which is offered in the same optimistic spirit with which he argues that the struggle for increasing levels of equality requires ‘collective learning’. The crisp progression of ideas in the ten chapters of his narrative leads to its concluding implications that the need for increasing equality at the global level is not only a moral imperative but also an economic one. Not everyone will agree with the professor’s vision or his interpretations but few will question his authority or transparency in such deliberations. The professor’s research and data can be studied through his homepage, and the World Inequality Database.Thomas Piketty is a professor at the Paris School of Economics, Director of Studies at The School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, and Co-Director of the World Inequality Lab and Database.Keith Krueger lectures in the SILC Business School at Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In today's program, we speak to Nandita Sharma, activist scholar and Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. We talk about Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press, 2020).In Home Rule, Sharma brilliantly traces the "historical formation and political separation of Natives and Migrants from the nineteenth century to the present to theorize the portrayal of Migrants as 'colonial invaders.'" She theorizes the Postcolonial New World Order of nation-states wherein the category of the Native (initially referred to as such to demarcate colonized status) has been revitalized and claims to autochthony have become the basis of "true national belonging." In consequence, migrants have been facing exclusion, expulsion, and even extermination. The hardening of nationalisms in the Postcolonial New World Order has contained demands for decolonization, leaving their potential unfulfilled. Sharma forcefully and convincingly shows that the only way forward is by building a common wherein the ruling categories of Native and Migrant are dissolved.Jochen Schmon is a PhD Student in Politics at the New School for Social Research. You can reach him on Twitter @JohenShmon.Deren Ertas is a PhD Candidate in the joint program in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. You can reach her own Twitter @drnrts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In No Standard Oil: Managing Abundant Petroleum in a Warming World (Oxford University Press, 2021), Deborah Gordon shows that no two oils or gases are environmentally alike. Each has a distinct, quantifiable climate impact. While all oils and gases pollute, some are much worse for the climate than others. In clear, accessible language, Gordon explains the results of the Oil Climate Index Plus Gas (OCI+), an innovative, open-source model that estimates global oil and gas emissions. Gordon identifies the oils and gases from every region of the globe–– along with the specific production, processing, and refining activities–– that are the most harmful to the planet, and proposes innovative solutions to reduce their climate footprints.Global climate stabilization cannot afford to wait for oil and gas to run out. No Standard Oil shows how we can take immediate, practical steps to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the crucial oil and gas sector while making sustainable progress in transitioning to a carbon-free energy future.Deborah Gordon is a senior principal in the Climate Intelligence Program at RMI where she leads the Oil and Gas Solutions Initiative. Gordon also serves as a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University and the principal investigator for the Oil Climate Project.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

"The rule of law is a means by which [western EU members] want to knead us into something that resembles them," warned Viktor Orbán during his successful campaign for a fourth consecutive term as Hungary's prime minister.Yet, until Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the EU has held back on the demands it makes of members regarding core democratic norms and values. For a decade, the EU's institutions and most of its members have worried about the possibility of the emergence of a full democracy within its borders but have been held back by diplomatic interests and the constraints imposed by unanimity in the use of Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union.The war, Orbán's re-election, a split in the Polish-Hungarian axis, and the lengthening queue of eastern membership applicants have changed the backdrop. The political will to ensure a liberal-democratic union has been reinforced but Article 7 is still inadequate to the task.Tom Theuns, assistant professor of political theory and European politics at Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science, has a nuclear option in his new paper: The Need for an EU Expulsion Mechanism: Democratic Backsliding and the Failure of Article 7 (Res Publica, Springer - 2022)*.*https://link.springer.com/arti...Mentioned: Memory and the future of Europe: Rupture and integration in the wake of total war by Peter Verovšek (Manchester University Press, 2020) and Adding a Bite to a Bark? A Story of Article 7, the EU Enlargement, and Jörg Haider by Wojciech Sadurski (Sydney Law School Research Paper No. 10/01)*The authors' book recommendations are: Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics by Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti (OUP Oxford, 2021) and The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (Little Brown, 2013).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors (a division of Energy Aspects). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Robert Jacob’s book Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha (Yale UP, 2022) re‑envisions the history of the Cold War as a slow nuclear war, fought on remote battlegrounds against populations powerless to prevent the contamination of their lands and bodies. Jacobs’s book put these “nuclear bodies” and the legacy of our eighty years history of nuclear weapon and power use at the center of his inquiry. The contaminated bodies of the hibakusha and the contaminated grounds on which they live (or in many cases lived. As many lost their homes), Jacobs argues, are largely invisible because of the colonial and post -colonial power relations that made these communities a target to begin with. Nuclear weapon tests and power stations usually were set at remote places, and the harm was done to people with no political power. Furthermore, it is not just contemporary communities that were harmed, but also future generations. “Plutonium will remain dangerous for over two hundred thousand years, and uranium particles for more than one million years”. Eighty years of tests and nuclear power have saddled our future descendants with radiative waste, most of which is still not safely stored, “a global legacy currently sitting in spent fuel pools and dry storage casks, waiting.” The invisibility of the problem and people affected by it, Jacobs argues, is manufactured in science and politics. Furthermore, the way we study the problem historically further obscured its scope. Different sites have been studied through different national historical “silos,” Jacobs, however, takes a global approach, and look at sites from Nevada to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kazakhstan to Xinjian, and the various Pacific sites that were sites of nuclear tests and accidents since 1945 to make the invisible global hibakusha visible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The Rise and Fall of Democracy Promotion in US Foreign Policy (Routledge, 2022) employs a transformational change framework to understand US democracy promotion from 1977 until the present day. American exceptionalism is a framework that has driven the US since the founding days of the republic, charging the US to promote the universal values of liberty and the pursuit of happiness around the world. Providing a frame of continuity for successive administrations, it reinforces the mythology of American exceptionalism in the eyes of the American people and the world. In different eras, different presidential worldviews, along with different international and domestic factors, have shaped how each administration has acted in the international arena and yet all have employed this language regardless of the policies pursued.This timely volume maps out and interrogates through four key indicators the rise and fall of democracy promotion at the conceptualization, rhetorical, and implementation levels. It argues that there were two transformational changes during this period. The first was the expansion of democracy promotion in US foreign policy confirmed with the election of Jimmy Carter to the White House in 1977. The second was the rejection of liberal ideology and institutions confirmed with Donald Trump’s election in 2016. It is nuanced in that it shows how these changes in the acceptance and then rejection of democracy promotion as a foreign policy tool played out. In examining these two administrations, and those in-between, this work also observes that the rise and fall of democracy promotion as an effective foreign policy tool mirrored the relative dominance of the US in the international arena.Matthew Hill is a Senior Lecturer in US History and International Relations at Liverpool John Moores University. He runs the International Relations and Politics discipline in the School of Humanities and Social Science.Joe Renouard is Resident Professor of American Studies and Fei Yi-Ming Journalism Foundation Chair of American Government and Comparative Politics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Nanjing, China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs