New Books in Diplomatic History

Why have the founding members of the United Nations (the P5) evaded accountability for their crimes of genocide?Jeff Bachman, of the American University School of International Service, provides an answer in his book, The Politics of Genocide: From the Genocide Convention to the Responsibility to Protect (Rutgers UP, 2022). It starts with an analysis of the processes that led to the adoption of the United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in December 1948. It ends with a call of the “self-perpetuating” implications of Western impunity for genocidal violence, at home and abroad. Bachman narrows in on the five permanent members of the UN Security Council to highlight the structural inequality baked into the Genocide Convention. The result is a cogent and devastating evaluation of the ways in which the Western powers of the P5 -- the US in particular -- are assumed to act in good faith when it comes to preventing and punishing acts of genocide.Susan Thomson is an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. I like to interview pretenure scholars about their research. I am particularly keen on their method and methodology, as well as the process of producing academic knowledge about African places and people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Seiji Shirane’s Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan's Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895-1945 (Cornell UP, 2022) demonstrates that colonial Taiwan was an imperial center in its own right, a political, social, and economic hub for the southern expansion of Japan’s empire led by officials with agendas that did not always match those of the government in Tokyo. In addition to this contribution to the study of Japanese empire, Imperial Gateway highlights two aspects of the history that are often underappreciated in the Anglophone literature. First, Shirane expands the aperture of his narrative beyond bilateral Sino-Japanese relations to encompass a dynamic multilateral milieu that includes colonial Taiwan, the region’s Western powers, and the Taiwanese subjects of the empire called “overseas Taiwanese” (sekimin) by Japan. Second, Shirane pays particular attention to the agency not just of the Government-General installed by Japan to rule over Taiwan, but also the “overseas Taiwanese” both wooed by the Japanese to advance imperial ambitions and also pursuing their own autonomous interests.Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before the First World War, enthusiasm for a borderless world reached its height. International travel, migration, trade, and progressive projects on matters ranging from women’s rights to world peace reached a crescendo. Yet in the same breath, an undercurrent of reaction was growing, one that would surge ahead with the outbreak of war and its aftermath.In Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars (Norton, 2023), a sweeping and ambitious work of history, acclaimed scholar Tara Zahra examines how nationalism, rather than internationalism, came to ensnare world politics in the early twentieth century. The air went out of the globalist balloon with the First World War as quotas were put on immigration and tariffs on trade, not only in the United States but across Europe, where war and disease led to mass societal upheaval. The “Spanish flu” heightened anxieties about porous national boundaries. The global impact of the 1929 economic crash and the Great Depression amplified a quest for food security in Europe and economic autonomy worldwide. Demands for relief from the instability and inequality linked to globalization forged democracies and dictatorships alike, from Gandhi’s India to America’s New Deal and Hitler’s Third Reich. Immigration restrictions, racially constituted notions of citizenship, anti-Semitism, and violent outbursts of hatred of the “other” became the norm—coming to genocidal fruition in the Second World War.Millions across the political spectrum sought refuge from the imagined and real threats of the global economy in ways strikingly reminiscent of our contemporary political moment: new movements emerged focused on homegrown and local foods, domestically produced clothing and other goods, and back-to-the-land communities. Rich with astonishing detail gleaned from Zahra’s unparalleled archival research in five languages, Against the World is a poignant and thorough exhumation of the popular sources of resistance to globalization. With anti-globalism a major tenet of today’s extremist agendas, Zahra's arrestingly clearsighted and wide-angled account is essential reading to grapple with our divided present. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1971, Americans made two historic visits to China that would transform relations between the two countries. One was by US official Henry Kissinger; the other, earlier, visit was by the US table tennis team. Historians have mulled over the transcripts of Kissinger's negotiations with Chinese leaders. However, they have overlooked how, alongside these diplomatic talks, a rich program of travel and exchange had begun with ping-pong diplomacy. Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade US-China Relations (Cambridge UP, 2022) reveals how a diverse cast of Chinese and Americans – athletes and physicists, performing artists and seismologists – played a critical, but to date overlooked, role in remaking US-China relations. Based on new sources from more than a dozen archives in China and the United States, Pete Millwood argues that the significance of cultural and scientific exchanges went beyond reacquainting the Chinese and American people after two decades of minimal contact; exchanges also powerfully influenced Sino-American diplomatic relations and helped transform post-Mao China.Grant Golub is an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a PhD candidate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the politics of American grand strategy during World War II. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture (University of California Press, 2022) by Dr. Lisa Hajjar examines how hundreds of lawyers mobilized to challenge the illegal treatment of prisoners captured in the war on terror and helped force an end to the US government's most odious policies.Told as a suspenseful, high-stakes story, The War in Court clearly outlines why challenges to the torture policy had to be waged on the legal terrain and why hundreds of lawyers joined the fight. Drawing on extensive interviews with key participants, her own experiences reporting from Guantánamo, and her deep knowledge of international law and human rights, Dr. Hajjar reveals how the ongoing fight against torture has had transformative effects on the legal landscape in the United States and on a global scale.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/adchoices

Sara Pugach's African Students in East Germany, 1949-1975 (U Michigan Press, 2022)explores the largely unexamined history of Africans who lived, studied, and worked in the German Democratic Republic. African students started coming to the East in 1951 as invited guests who were offered scholarships by the East German government to prepare them for primarily technical and scientific careers once they returned home to their own countries. Drawn from previously unexplored archives in Germany, Ghana, Kenya, Zambia, and the United Kingdom, African Students in East Germany, 1949–1975 uncovers individual stories and reconstructs the pathways that African students took in their journeys to the GDR and what happened once they got there. The book places these experiences within the larger context of German history and the overlapping contexts of the Cold War and decolonization. During this time, nations across the Western and Soviet blocs were inviting Africans to attend universities and vocational schools as part of a drive to offer development aid to newly independent countries and encourage them to side with either the United States or Soviet Union in the Cold War. African leaders recognized their significance to both Soviet and American blocs and played on the desire of each to bring newly independent nations into their folds.Nicole Coleman is Associate Professor of German at Wayne State University. She tweets @drnicoleman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During the Cold War, U.S. intervention in Latin American politics, economics, and society grew in scope and complexity, with diplomatic legacies evident in today's hemispheric policies. Development became a key form of intervention as government officials and experts from the United States and Latin America believed that development could foster hemispheric solidarity and security. In parts of Latin America, its implementation was especially intricate because recipients of these programs were diverse Indigenous peoples with their own politics, economics, and cultures. Contrary to project planners' expectations, Indigenous beneficiaries were not passive recipients but actively engaged with development interventions and, in the process, redefined racialized ideas about Indigeneity. In On Our Own Terms: Development and Indigeneity in Cold War Guatemala (UNC Press, 2022), Sarah Foss illustrates how this process transpired in Cold War Guatemala, spanning democratic revolution, military coups, and genocidal civil war. Drawing on previously unused sources such as oral histories, anthropologists' field notes, military records, municipal and personal archives, and a private photograph collection, Foss analyzes the uses and consequences of development and its relationship to ideas about race from multiple perspectives, emphasizing its historical significance as a form of intervention during the Cold War.Rachel Grace Newman is a historian of modern Mexico with particular interests in migration, childhood and youth studies, and social inequality. She is Assistant Professor of History at Colgate University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Has the liberal order been taken for granted? The post war consensus and the impact of the cold war may have helped establish a way of doing politics that in fact was on less secure foundations that it seemed. That’s the view of Professor James E Cronin of Boston College who has written Fragile Victory: The Making and Unmaking of the Liberal Order (Yale University Press, 2023)  – 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/adchoices

Who are expatriates? How do they differ from other migrants? And why should we care about such distinctions? Expatriate: Following a Migration Category (Manchester University Press, 2023) by Dr. Sarah Kunz interrogates the contested category of 'the expatriate' to explore its history and politics, its making and lived experience. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, the book offers a critical reading of International Human Resource Management literature, explores the work and history of the Expatriate Archive Centre in The Hague, and studies the usage and significance of the category in Kenyan history and present-day 'expat Nairobi'. Doing so, the book traces the figure of the expatriate from the mid-twentieth-century era of decolonisation to today's heated debates about migration.The expatriate emerges as a malleable and contested category, of shifting meaning and changing membership, and as passionately embraced by some as it is rejected by others. Dr. Kunz situates the changing usage of the term in the context of social, political and economic struggle and explores the material and discursive work the expatriate performs in negotiating social inequalities and power relations. Migration, the book argues, is a key terrain on which colonial power relations have been reproduced and translated, and migration categories are at the heart of the insidious ways that intersecting material and symbolic inequalities are enacted today. Any project for social justice needs to dissect and interrogate categories like the expatriate, and this book offers analytical and methodical strategies to advance this project.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/adchoices

A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada–United States Border across Indigenous Lands (Oxford UP, 2021), is the recipient of the AHA’s Albert Corey Prize in the history of Canadian–American relations. In A Line of Blood and Dirt, Benjamin Hoy shows how the US-Canadian border was built across Indigenous lands. He explores the experiences of various indigenous groups, European settlers, African Americans, and Chinese immigrants. Benjamin Hoy is an assistant professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan, where he directs the Historical GIS Lab.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices