New Books in Diplomatic History

In April 1988, after years of failed negotiations over the status of the Northwest Passage, Brian Mulroney gave Ronald Reagan a globe, pointed to the Arctic, and said "Ron that's ours. We own it lock, stock, and icebergs." A simple statement, it summed up Ottawa's official policy: Canada owns the icy waters that wind their way through the Arctic Archipelago. Behind the scenes, however, successive governments have spent over a century trying to figure out how to enforce this claim and on which legal basis to assert Canadian sovereignty over Arctic waters. In Lock, Stock, and Icebergs: A History of Canada's Arctic Maritime Sovereignty (UBC Press, 2016), Adam Lajeunesse, a Professor of Public Policy and Fellow of the Brian Mulroney Institute of Government at St. Francis Xavier University, guides readers through the evolution of Canada's Arctic sovereignty, showing how the Northwest Passage and the surrounding waters became Canadian. Listen to this engaging podcast to understand what inspired Lajeunesse to write the book, what are the main points of his argument, and how its insights are still relevant today.Lavinia Stan is a professor of political science at St. Francis Xavier University in Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The American Imperative: Reclaiming Global Leadership through Soft Power (Bombardier, 2023), Washington insider Daniel Runde makes the case for building a new global consensus through vigorous internationalism and the judicious use of soft power.Daniel F. Runde is Senior Vice President and the William A. Schreyer Chair in Global Analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This surprising global history of an indispensable document reveals how the passport has shaped art, thought, and human experience while helping to define the modern world.In License to Travel: A Cultural History of the Passport (U California Press, 2022), Patrick Bixby takes the reader on a captivating journey from pharaonic Egypt and Han-dynasty China to the passport controls and crowded refugee camps of today. Along the way, you will: Peruse the passports of artists and intellectuals, writers and musicians, ancient messengers and modern migrants. See how these seemingly humble documents implicate us in larger narratives about identity, mobility, citizenship, and state authority. Encounter intimate stories of vulnerability and desire along with vivid examples drawn from world cinema, literature, art, philosophy, and politics. Witness the authority that travel documents exercise over our movements and our emotions as we circulate around the globe. With unexpected discoveries at every turn, License to Travel exposes the passport as both an instrument of personal freedom and a tool of government surveillance powerful enough to define our very humanity.Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on mass media, popular culture and avant-garde art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Aaron Berman's book America's Arab Nationalists: From the Ottoman Revolution to the Rise of Hitler (Routledge, 2022) focuses in on the relationship between Arab nationalists and Americans in the struggle for independence in an era when idealistic Americans could see the Arab nationalist struggle as an expression of their own values. In the first three decades of the twentieth century (from the 1908 Ottoman revolution to the rise of Hitler), important and influential Americans, including members of the small Arab-American community, intellectually, politically and financially participated in the construction of Arab nationalism. This book tells the story of a diverse group of people whose contributions are largely unknown to the American public.The role Americans played in the development of Arab nationalism has been largely unexplored by historians, making this an important and original contribution to scholarship. This volume is of great interest to students and academics in the field, though the narrative style is accessible to anyone interested in Arab nationalism, the conflict between Zionists and Palestinians, and the United States’ relationship with the Arab world.Roberto Mazza is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1974, India surprised the world with “Smiling Buddha”: a secret underground nuclear test at Pokhran, Rajasthan. India called it a “peaceful nuclear explosion”—but few outside of India saw it that way.The 1974 nuclear tests became a symbol of India’s ability to help itself, especially given how the country was left out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an agreement the country argued was colonial. But, as Jayita Sarkar’s Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) points out, India’s nuclear program was in fact the product of Cold War tensions and international networks–including some foreign sources of nuclear knowledge and material. (An open-access version of Jay’s book can be found 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. She can be followed on Twitter at @DrJSarkar, and her Linktree can be found here.In this interview, Jay and I talk about India’s nuclear program, from its very beginnings through to when India was brought back into the world’s—or, at least, the U.S.’s–nuclear good graces in 2008.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ploughshares and Swords. Follow 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/adchoices

Since the beginnings of independence, a number of African nations have been plagued by repeated coup d'états. Within the African Union (AU), there has been a concerted effort to break this cycle through the official adoption of an 'anti-coup norm', by which the AU is mandated to suspend a member state and restore constitutional order following a coup. Supporters of this stance see it as strengthening democracy in Africa, while critics argue that it has served to prop up existing regimes. But there has been little analysis of what the AU's attempts to 'restore constitutional order' have meant for individual African states.In Undoing Coups: The African Union and Post-coup Intervention in Madagascar (Zed Books, 2020), Dr. Antonia Witt looks at the legacy of the AU's intervention in Madagascar following the 2009 'Malagasy crisis', one of the increasingly relevant yet under-researched cases of non-Western intervention in Africa. Dr. Witt looks at the ways in which international intervention reconfigured the political order in Madagascar, how it facilitated the power struggle within the Madagascan elite and prevented more profound political change. It also considers what the example set by the Madagascan intervention means for the wider international order in Africa and the powers attributed to African international actors such as the AU.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

In the middle of the 20th century, there was a passionate affair, between the Soviet empire and newly independent West African states. It was a short, intense, and acrimonious love story built on shared dreams for a noncapitalist future. Alessandro Iandolo’s new book, Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955-1968 (Cornell UP, 2022), explores the history of this unlikely romance. The book traces the rise and fall of the Soviet Union’s engagement with these three West African nations, which Iandolo argues were at the center of the Soviet search for development in the Third World.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/adchoices

Unofficial Peace Diplomacy: Private Peace Entrepreneurs in Conflict Resolution Processes (Manchester University Press, 2022) by Dr. Lior Lehrs analyses the international phenomenon of private peace entrepreneurs. These are private citizens with no official authority who initiate channels of communication with official representatives from the other side of a conflict in order to promote a conflict resolution process.Dr. Lehrs combines theoretical discussion with historical analysis, examining four cases from different conflicts: Norman Cousins and Suzanne Massie in the Cold War, Brendan Duddy in the Northern Ireland conflict and Uri Avnery in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The book defines the phenomenon, examines the resources and activities of private peace entrepreneurs and their impact on official diplomacy, and examines the conditions under which they can play an effective role in peace-making processes.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

Contemporary issues like the refugee crisis, climate refugees, and global restrictions on movement caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have brought into stark relief the extent to which our movements, lives, and worldviews are governed by national borders and boundary-making. But these borders and their associated militarization and security infrastructures are a recent phenomenon, the legacy of 20th-century wars and colonialism. Modern borders are also often the result of complex, disputed negotiation processes between governments and other authorities, which rarely take into consideration the local populations living in border zones.What happens when these modern border-making processes interact with nomadic peoples? How is pastoralism affected and circumscribed by nation-state borders and boundary regimes? This episode discusses histories of border formation in the modern Middle East in relation to nomadic pastoralists - the Bedouin - specifically in Iraq and Israel. I talked to a range of scholars working on these topics, and you'll hear from them throughout the episode. We also talk about the effects of these borders on the Bedouin today, as well as evidence for Bedouin alternatives to borders and maps. Music in this episode: Desert City by Kevin MacLeod. License. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The British occupation of Iraq after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire led to the creation of Iraq's national boundaries, a process with profound and long-lasting implications for the inhabitants of Iraq's border regions. In his dissertation, "The Origins and Development of Iraq's National Boundaries, 1918-1932: Policing and Political Geography in the Iraq-Nejd and Iraq-Syria Borderlands" (University of Chicago, 2018), Dr. Carl Shook examined how Iraq's modern national borders were formed in relation to the Bedouin and to the policing of Bedouin tribes. In this episode he joins me to discuss the history of Iraq's southern border with Saudi Arabia, the role of Bedouin tribespeople within the border formation process, and the effects of transnational borders on nomadic peoples. Follow Dr. Shook on Twitter.Music in this episode: Desert City by Kevin MacLeod. License. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices