New Books in European Politics

Why do some countries do better than others in advancing women as political leaders and in promoting women’s rights? And what difference does this make to women’s everyday lives? In this episode CEDAR’s Nic Cheeseman talks to Aili Mari Tripp, a world leading researcher of women’s movements, who explains why there are more women in parliament than ever before, and the role that gender quotas have played in this trend. We also discuss why some authoritarian governments gone to greater lengths to promote women’s representation than their democratic counterparts, and whether this is simply a PR exercise or reflects a deeper commitment to equality.Aili Mari Tripp is the Vilas Research Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the world’s leading researchers on women’s movements and political representation. She has written seven books and co-edited seven more, many of which have won awards, and all of which have demonstrated the complexities of women’s struggle for equality, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Her most recent work focusses on women’s representation under authoritarian rule.Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR.The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On 1 January 2006, soldiers from across Bosnia and Herzegovina gathered to mark the official formation of a unified army; and yet, little over a decade before, these men had been each other's adversaries during the vicious conflict which left the Balkan state divided and impoverished. Building a Multi-Ethnic Military in Post-Yugoslav Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bloomsbury, 2022) by Dr. Elliot Short offers the first analysis of the armed forces during times of peace-building in Bosnia and Herzegovina.This sophisticated study assesses Yugoslav efforts to build a multi-ethnic military during the socialist period, charts the developments of the armies that fought in the war, and offers a detailed account of the post-war international initiatives that led to the creation of the Armed Forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. At this point, the military became the largest multi-ethnic institution in the country and was regarded as a model for the rest of Bosnian society to follow. As such, as Elliot Short adroitly contends, this multi-ethnic army became the most significant act in stabilising the country since the end of the Bosnian War.Drawing upon a wealth of primary sources – including interviews with leading diplomats and archival documents made available in English for the first time – this book explores the social and political role of the Bosnian military and in doing so provides fresh insight into the Yugoslav Wars, statehood and national identity, and peace-building in modern European history.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses 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

Since Simon Shuster's November 2023 Time cover story ("Nobody believes in our victory like I do - Nobody"), anyone with an interest in the war in Ukraine has been waiting for his fly-on-the-wall study of command. Finally, The Showman: The Inside Story of the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky (William Morrow, 2024) is out.Born in Moscow but raised in California, Simon Shuster has reported from Russia and Ukraine for 17 years. Before joining Time, he worked in the region for the Moscow Times, Reuters, and AP. He first met Ukraine’s leader and his entourage when Zelensky was running for president in 2019 and built enough trust to be granted sustained wartime access three years later. Based on off-and-on-the-record conversations with the Ukrainian principals – including the president, his wife, their childhood friends, his chief of staff, his defence minister, his national security advisor, and the chief of staff of the armed forces – The Showman provides a unique insight into the conduct of the war from the top.*The authors' book recommendations are Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham (Bantam Press, 2019) and Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick (Viking, 1993).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adriana Helbig's book ReSounding Poverty: Romani Music and Development Aid (Oxford University Press, 2023) offers a micro ethnography of economic networks that impact the daily lives of Romani musicians on the borders of the former Soviet Union and the European Union. It argues that the development aid allotted to provide economic assistance to Romani communities, when analyzed from the perspective of the performance arts, continues to marginalize the poorest among them. Through their structure and programming, NGOs choose which segments of the population are the most vulnerable and in the greatest need of assistance. Drawing on ethnographic research in development contexts, ReSounding Poverty asks who speaks for whom within the Romani rights movement today. Framing the critique of development aid in musical terms, it engages with Romani marginalization and economic deprivation through a closer listening to vocal inflections, physical vocalizations of health and disease, and emotional affect. ReSounding Poverty brings us into the back rooms of saman, mud and straw brick, houses not visited by media reporters and politicians, amplifying the cultural expressions of the Romani poor, silenced in the business of development.Maggie Freeman is a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How helpful is the democracy-authoritarianism binary when it comes to our understanding of contemporary conflict? What is the state of the Russia-Ukraine war? And how has it affected the great power rivalry between the United States and China? Listen to Stefan Wolff and Petra Alderman talk about the global struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, the state of the Russia-Ukraine war, and whether democracy is likely to lose out from the heightening tensions between the three great powers: the United States, Russia, and China.Stefan Wolff is a Professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham. He is well-known for his research on the management of contemporary security challenges, especially in the prevention and settlement of ethnic conflicts and civil wars. He is also an expert on post-conflict state-building in deeply divided and war-torn societies and has written extensively on the geopolitics and geo-economics in Eurasia, including great power competition between Russia, China, and the West. He is a regular contributor to The Conversation and a co-founder of the Navigating the Vortex.Petra Alderman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics at the University of Birmingham and Research Fellow at CEDAR.Please note that this episode was recorded in December 2023. All mentions of ‘this year’ refer to 2023 and mentions of ‘last year’ refer to 2022.The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In A United Ireland: Why Unification in Inevitable and How It Will Come About (Biteback Publishing, 2017), Kevin Meagher argues that a reasoned, pragmatic discussion about the most basic questions regarding Britain's relationship with its nearest neighbour is now long overdue, and questions that have remained unasked, and perhaps unthought, must now be answered. Indeed, in the light of Brexit and a highly probable second independence referendum in Scotland, the reunification of Ireland is not a question of if, but when and how.Listen to Meagher explain to Owen Bennett Jones why he thinks a united Ireland is inevitable and how he thinks it will happen.Kevin Meagher was a Special Adviser to former Labour Northern Ireland Secretary Shaun Woodward. He is the associate editor of the Labour Uncut blog and frequently writes about Irish politics for the New Statesman.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

In The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism (Duke UP, 2023), Jennifer V. Evans examines postwar and contemporary German history to broadly argue for a practice of queer history that moves beyond bounded concepts and narratives of identity. Drawing on Black feminism, queer of color critique, and trans studies, Evans points out that although many rights for LGBTQI people have been gained in Germany, those rights have not been enjoyed equally. There remain fundamental struggles around whose bodies, behaviors, and communities belong. Evans uses kinship as an analytic category to identify the fraught and productive ways that Germans have confronted race, gender nonconformity, and sexuality in social movements, art, and everyday life. Evans shows how kinship illuminates the work of solidarity and intersectional organizing across difference and offers an openness to forms of contemporary and historical queerness that may escape the archive’s confines. Through forms of kinship, queer and trans people test out new possibilities for citizenship, love, and public and family life in postwar Germany in ways that question claims about liberal democracy, the social contract, and the place of identity in rights-based discourses.Jennifer V. Evans is Professor of History at Carleton University and author of Life among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin.Armanc Yildiz is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University. He received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Harvard University, with a secondary degree in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since February 2022, a string of books have been published about the war in Ukraine but, for the most part, these have been histories and political studies. Only now are the “first drafts of history” from war reporters starting to emerge.Christopher Miller and Andrew Harding published last summer and they will be followed, in late January, by Simon Shuster’s inside account of Volodymyr Zelensky’s war. But, beating Shuster by a fortnight, is Yaroslav Trofimov’s Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence (Penguin Press, 2024) - an account of the first year of the full-scale invasion combining history, frontline reporting, and flashes of emotion from the Wall Street Journal's Kyiv-born chief foreign-affairs correspondent"Being in a country at war,” he writes, “one is rarely distressed by the causalities of the invading army ... But, in the forests outside Lyman, these freshly dead Russian men with their civilian backpacks containing their meagre possessions, with their sleeping bags and pouches of fever and pain medication, were no longer anonymous and generic invaders. I looked at their faces and felt anger".Yaroslav Trofimov joined the Wall Street Journal in 1999 – reporting from Rome, Singapore, Pakistan, Dubai, and Afghanistan where he covered the Taliban’s takeover in 2021. Since January 2022 – a month before the invasion – he has been working out of Ukraine. This is his third book.*The authors' book recommendations are Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine by Timothy Snyder (Yale University Press, 2005) and Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte (first published in Italian in 1944, the latest edition from Adelphi, 2014; translated into English and published in 2007 by NYRB Classics).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (Cornell University Press, 2019) Jelena Subotić asks why Holocaust memory continues to be so deeply troubled―ignored, appropriated, and obfuscated―throughout Eastern Europe, even though it was in those lands that most of the extermination campaign occurred. As part of accession to the European Union, Subotić shows, East European states were required to adopt, participate in, and contribute to the established Western narrative of the Holocaust. This requirement created anxiety and resentment in post-communist states: Holocaust memory replaced communist terror as the dominant narrative in Eastern Europe, focusing instead on predominantly Jewish suffering in World War II. Influencing the European Union's own memory politics and legislation in the process, post-communist states have attempted to reconcile these two memories by pursuing new strategies of Holocaust remembrance. The memory, symbols, and imagery of the Holocaust have been appropriated to represent crimes of communism.Yellow Star, Red Star presents in-depth accounts of Holocaust remembrance practices in Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania, and extends the discussion to other East European states. The book demonstrates how countries of the region used Holocaust remembrance as a political strategy to resolve their contemporary "ontological insecurities"―insecurities about their identities, about their international status, and about their relationships with other international actors. As Subotić concludes, Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe has never been about the Holocaust or about the desire to remember the past, whether during communism or in its aftermath. Rather, it has been about managing national identities in a precarious and uncertain world.Jelena Subotić is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Georgia State University (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007).Steven Seegel is professor of history at University of Northern Colorado. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

February 2024 will mark the tenth anniversary of Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian territory in Crimea and the Donbas and two years since its full-scale invasion.While military assistance from Ukraine’s allies has been gradual and cautious, retaliatory sanctions have been impressive. "The sanctions imposed against Russia beginning in late winter 2022 were sweeping, historic and rolled out with stunning rapidity,” writes Christine Abely in The Russia Sanctions: The Economic Response to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine (Cambridge University Press, 2023).Yet, until now at least, most Russians have been insulated from their effects. As the war reaches an attritional stalemate and Putin waits for NATO's resolve to fracture, the sanctions and their lagged effects are taking on critical importance.Christine Abely is an assistant professor at New England Law in Boston. Previously, she taught at Boston University School of Law after a career at Massachusetts law firms specialising in business litigation, and international trade and sanctions law. While she has published papers on sanctions, food and sports law, The Russia Sanctions is her first book.*The authors' book recommendations are Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against US Interests by Agathe Demarais (Columbia University Press, 2022) and The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson (Princeton University Press, second edition 2016).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices