New Books in World Affairs

Afghanistan and the United States have a complicated relationship. And poppies have often been at the center of the problem between the two countries. In James Tharin Bradford's new book, Poppies, Power, and Politics: Afghanistan and the Global History of Drugs and Diplomacy (Cornell University Press, 2019), he reevaluates the Afghan state, opium, and international drug regulation. Bradford offers a new perspective on this US/Afghan relationship and underlines ways of thinking about drugs in the United States. As the U.S. deals with an opioid crisis, this timely book underlines how we think about licit and illicit substances and forces.Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The United States has been the world's dominant power for more than a century. Now many analysts and commentators believe that other countries such as China are rising and the United States is in decline. Is the era of American hegemony over? Is America finished as a superpower?In his superb and learned book, Unrivaled: Why America Will remain the World's Sole Superpower(Cornell University Press, 2018), Michael Beckley, Professor in the Department of Political Science at Tufts University cogently argues that the United States has unique advantages over other nations that, if used wisely, will allow it to remain the world's sole superpower throughout this century. We are not living in a transitional, post-hegemonic, pluralist era. Instead, we are in the midst of what he calls the unipolar era―a period as singular and important as any epoch in modern history. This era, Beckley contends, will endure because the US has a much larger economic and military lead over its closest rival, China, than most people think and the best prospects of any nation to amass wealth and power in the decades ahead.Deeply researched and brilliantly argued, Professor Beckley’s book covers hundreds of years of great power politics and develops new methods for measuring power and predicting the rise and fall of nations. According to Chatham House’s International Affairs, Unrivaled, “is by far the most comprehensive analysis to date on the power dynamics of the international system and clearly debunks the established narrative on US decline”. By documenting long-term trends in the global balance of power and explaining their implications for world politics, the book provides guidance for policymakers, businesspeople, and scholars alike.Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Psychedelics are not terribly new. And the drug mescaline is certainly not new. Mike Jay's new book, Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic (Yale University Press, 2019), tells two trippy stories: one that is about Indigenous use and another about Western society's adoption of the drug in culture and medicine. He discusses perceptions of mescaline in science, culture, and the psychedelic renaissance. The book - and the discussion - is eye-opening.Mike Jay is a freelance writer and public intellectual. He is the author of over a dozen books and regularly contributes to the the London Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal and the Literary Review. He works as a curator and exhibit designer for the Wellcome Trust in London.Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Stefan Al, PhD, is a native of the Netherlands, a low-lying county that would not exist without flood protection, is an architect, urban designer, and infrastructure expert at global design at Kohn Pedersen Fox in New York. He has served as a TED resident, advisor to the United Nations High Level Political Forum on sustainable development and Professor of urban design at the University of Pennsylvania.Adapting Cities to Sea Level Rise: Green and Gray Strategies(Island Press, 2018) is a tool kit for adapting and managing sea level rise and storm events for metropolitan cities and smaller communities. It’s a “how to” guide to create better comprehensive strategies and ideas for implementation. The beautiful and simple diagrams illustrate the difference responses possible for cities and the pros and cons of each. The book makes the argument that collaboration is the key to finding successful solutions for all stakeholders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Stefan Al, PhD, is a native of the Netherlands, a low-lying county that would not exist without flood protection, is an architect, urban designer, and infrastructure expert at global design at Kohn Pedersen Fox in New York. He has served as a TED resident, advisor to the United Nations High Level Political Forum on sustainable development and Professor of urban design at the University of Pennsylvania.Adapting Cities to Sea Level Rise: Green and Gray Strategies(Island Press, 2018) is a tool kit for adapting and managing sea level rise and storm events for metropolitan cities and smaller communities. It’s a “how to” guide to create better comprehensive strategies and ideas for implementation. The beautiful and simple diagrams illustrate the difference responses possible for cities and the pros and cons of each. The book makes the argument that collaboration is the key to finding successful solutions for all stakeholders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) practice periodic surveillance of member states to ensure they are adopting effective economic policies. Despite the importance of these practices, they remain understudied by scholars until now. Martin Edwards has written The IMF, the WTO & the Politics of Economic Surveillance (Routledge, 2018). Edwards is an Associate Professor in the School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University and is also department chair.The world is paying increasing attention to issues of transparency and accountability, questioning whether the IMF and WTO are in part responsible for the global economic crisis, as well as assessing their responsiveness to the crisis. Examining the influence and effectiveness of surveillance, Edwards offers recommendations of how surveillance can be designed differently to make it more effective in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the People's Republic of China (Palgrave, 2018) by Daniel Vukovich analyzes the 'intellectual political culture' of post-Tiananmen China in comparison to and in conflict with liberalism inside and outside the P.R.C. It questions how mainland politics and discourses challenge ‘our’ own, chiefly liberal and anti-‘statist’ political frameworks and how can one understand its general refusal of liberalism? Daniel argues that the Party-state poses a challenge to our understandings of politics, globalization, and even progress. To be illiberal is not necessarily to be reactionary and vulgar but to be anti-liberal and to seek alternatives to a degraded liberalism. The book analyses the history of liberalism within China, the forces of the New Left, and some of the sites of struggle such as Wukan and Hong Kong. Today I spoke with Daniel about his new book. 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 denying that the public remains fascinated with monarchy. In the United Kingdom, the royal family commands the headlines, but paradoxically they are distant and knowable all at once. The Queen is an iconic yet reserved figure, what with the kerchiefs, the corgis, and the deftly delivered speeches at state occasions. The younger royals seem to be interested in keeping it real, engaging different publics while maintaining ‘the Firm’s’ commitment to service to the nation. Like Greek Gods or reality show contestants, when it comes to the Royals, we all have our favourites.We have come a long way from the eighteenth century, when monarchs were branded as tyrants. At least that is the impression we get if we read the great anti-monarchical voices of the enlightenment. For Thomas Paine, ‘Monarchy and succession have laid the world in blood and ashes’. But lately historians have been taking a second look at the place of monarchy in the history of a global British empire. Hanna Weiss Muller is Assistant Professor of History at Brandeis University. In Subjects and Sovereign: Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017) she shows that the relationship between ‘subjects’ and ‘sovereign’ was defined by complex and shared bonds. The book takes us around the British empire, from Quebec, to Gibraltar to Calcutta, and reveals the many ways in which the status of subject bound the empire together.Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), who has written on the politics of religion in early modern Britain, and whose work has recently expanded to the intersection of colonial, indigenous, and imperial politics in early America. He co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

If today’s geopolitical fragmentation and the complexities of a ‘multipolar’ world order have led some to reminisce about the apparent stability of the Cold War era’s two ‘camps’, it should be remembered that things were of course never so straightforward. As Jeremy Friedman shows in Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World, the 1960s-1980s Sino-Soviet Split(UNC Press, 2018) generated a much more fractious and divided global situation than today’s nostalgia would imply.Taking ideology seriously as a component of socialist foreign policy, Friedman’s new and compelling analysis shows how deep Moscow and Beijing’s disagreements ran, and argues that the division was based at heart on two quite different revolutionary agendas. Drawing on archives all over the world in multiple languages, Shadow Cold War traces the origins of these agendas in revolutionary experience in each of Russia and China, and reveals how these continued to manifest themselves as Soviet and Chinese interests competed in the developing world in the latter half of the twentieth century. With China in particular now a major player in many of the locations discussed here, this book should be indispensable reading for anyone seeking clarity about how we got to where we are today.Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The practice of Partition understood as the physical division of territory along ethno-religious lines into separate nation-states is often regarded as a successful political "solution" to ethnic conflict. In their edited volume Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism (Stanford University Press, 2019), Laura Robson and Arie Dubnov uncover the collective history of the concept of partition and locate its genealogy in the politics of twentieth-century empire and decolonization. Moving beyond the nationalist frameworks that served in the first instance to promote partition as a natural phenomenon, the volume discusses creation of new political entities in the world of the British empire, from the Irish Free State, to the Dominions (later Republics) of India and Pakistan, and Palestine.Yorgos Giannakopoulos is a currently a Junior Research Fellow in Durham University, UK. He is a historian of Modern Britain and Europe. His published research recovers the regional impact of British Intellectuals in Eastern Europe in the age of nationalism and internationalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs