New Books in World Affairs

Accounts of late-nineteenth-century US expansionism commonly refer to an open-door empire and an imperialism spurred by belief in free trade. In his new book The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846-1896 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Marc-William Palen challenges this commonplace. Instead, he notes, American adherents to Richard Cobden’s free-trade philosophy faced off against and ultimately lost to a powerful version of protectionist economic nationalism inspired by German-American economic theorist Friedrich List. The success of Listian protectionism spurred closed-door, aggressive US expansionism and also challenged free-trade orthodoxies in Britain, where political-economic policy also shifted toward protectionism by the end of the nineteenth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Television had been transformed by the rise of the format. In The Format Age: Television’s Entertainment Revolution Jean Chalaby, Professor of International Communication at City University London, charts the beginnings of the format for TV shows, through the globalization of the trade in TV formats, to conclude with reflections on the future of local and global TV markets. The book uses an eclectic set of theoretical frames, including Global Value Chains, World Systems Theory and work of the Annales School, to chart the political economy of the TV format. Using a wide range of examples, detailed case studies of local markets and local production systems (including the UK), the book shows how the format is now crucial to the modern television industry encompassing everything from the game show to the long form drama. The book will be of interest to all media and communications scholars, as well as anyone keen to know why we have the sorts of television programmes we have on our screens. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

If you want to know how to bring future mass atrocities to an end, the best place to start is to examine how past mass atrocities have ended. This simple piece of logic is at the heart of Bridget Conley-Zilkic’s new edited collection titled How Mass Atrocities End: Studies from Guatemala, Burundi, Indonesia, the Sudans, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iraq (Cambridge University Press, 2016). As Conley points out in her introduction, leaders choose to engage in mass atrocities because the rewards for doing so seem greater than the cost. They end either because they have achieved their goal or because the balance of rewards and costs has changed. So, for people interested in preventing or stopping mass atrocities, the challenge lies in changing that balance. This book, then, examines a variety of different case studies to understand how the changing calculus of rewards and cots has occurred historically. The case studies are superb, the range of cases broad and the analysis perceptive. It is a sobering book to read, one that avoids easy answers or platitudes. But behind it lies a determination to make a difference. This is one of an occasional series of podcasts that address the question of preventing or responding to mass atrocities. Earlier this summer I interviewed Scott Straus about his book Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention. In the next couple months I’ll also speak with Jim Waller and Carrie Booth Walling. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Since the birth of the modern Olympics movement in the late nineteenth century, its leaders have attempted to maintain a strict separation of athletics and politics. Former International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage once stated, “We actively combat the introduction of politics into the Olympic movement.” But this attempt to keep politics out of the Olympics has been a bit disingenuous. After all, athletes will march into the stadium for this years Rio Games behind their national flags, and medalists will take the stand while listening to their national anthems. And many times, IOC claims to be apolitical have been outright hypocritical. Brundage was especially guilty in this department. In 1936, he praised Nazi Germany for offering a model of how to “stamp out communism and arrest the decline of patriotism.” Even as late as the 1950s, he wrote of the benefits of an “intelligent” dictatorship. “To say the Olympics transcend politics is to conjure fantasy.” So writes Jules Boykoff at the start of his book Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics (Verso, 2016). A former international athlete and now political scientist, Jules gives a well-researched account of the cost overruns, national boycotts, and athlete protests that have been present in the games from their very beginning. He finishes with an in-depth look at the crony corruption at the heart of the present-day Olympics, based on his findings as a Fulbright scholar in Rio. A lively read, full of scenes that are familiar and plenty that are new, Jules book is an up-close and personal look at the halls of Olympic power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict Over Israel (Princeton University Press, 2016), Dov Waxman, professor of political science, international affairs, and Israel studies at Northeastern University, explores how Israel has become a source of tension within the American Jewish community. Drawing on dozens of interviews with American Jewish leaders, Waxman shows traces the ways that Israel used to unite American Jews, but increasingly seems to divide them.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Cuban artists have been very productive this past decade, producing stunning and surprising works against a backdrop of political and economic transformation as well as continuing scarcity on the island. Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture and the Future of the Island (Verso, 2015), Rachel Price’s thoughtful approach to this cultural scene, pays special attention to conceptual and performance art that moves from the very local to the global. Her focus on artistic vocabularies centered on trees, marabou, and water as well as the symbolic and real significance of time and surveillance brings together a provocative array of artists that have a lot to tell us about the everyday both in Cuba and on our shared planet. This marvelous book acquaints readers with unforgettable artists and their work.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

This podcast is the first of a new occasional series of interviews addressing the question of responding to mass atrocities and genocide. Later in the summer I’ll interview Bridget Conley-Zilkic, James Waller and Carrie Booth Walling. First up, however, is today’s interview with Scott Straus. Whenever I teach classes on genocide or on the Holocaust, students most want to know the answer to a simple question: How can we make sure this doesn’t happen again? Straus’ new book, Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2016), surveys the recent research to try and answer this question. In part, it’s a resource for practitioners, summarizing the consensus on best practices. But it’s much more than that. It’s a succinct but subtle conversation with the research–pointing out complexities, interrogating common assumptions and pointing to places where more research is needed. The result is a book that professionals, academics and interested citizens should read. It’s a book that has interesting resonances with the other books of this series as well. I hope you’ll listen to the entire series and read the books. I know that doing so has made me think hard about how I teach the subject in my classes.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

From the 1880s onward, Beirut-based calendars and almanacs were in high demand as they packaged at least four different calendars into one, including: “the reformed Gregorian calendar; the unreformed, Julian calendar used by various churches of the East; the Islamic lunar Hijri calendar; and the Ottoman ‘Rumi’ or sometimes financial/’Maliyye’ calendar.” Described as a center of calendar pluralism, Beirut’s plurality of time was less an exception than it was a quandary to later advocates who aimed to organize time along geographical lines. In The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950 (Harvard University Press, 2015), Vanessa Ogle excavates 19th century movements to reform and standardize time: summer time, calendar time, time zones, religious time, and national time among others. Ogle questions the inevitability of 21st century time, demonstrating that it was the object of active creation for nearly two centuries prior. The rise of nationalism, the consolidation of colonial practice, along with autonomous religious reform movements simultaneously gave rise to, and were in turn, molded by advocacy focused on time. New communications technologies, such as the telegraph, and time-keeping devices, such as city clock towers, similarly served as the infrastructure around which time-keeping debates became organized. Written as a historical account, time becomes a central character in this book: casting a common lens over otherwise disconnected places and people, raising controversy, and shifting between the center and the periphery of a broader story of 19th century transformation. Anna Levy is an independent researcher and policy analyst with interests in critical political economy, historical memory, histories and philosophies of normalization, accountability politics, science and technology, and structural inequality. She is based in Brooklyn, NY and Amman, Jordan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Since World War II, the United States has repeatedly posited itself as a defender of democracy, using its military might to promote freedom abroad even as it ascended to the status of the world’s only superpower. The answer to almost every international problem, it seems, has been American military intervention which is always pitched as a disinterested attempt to deal with a crisis. For decades, the world has believed that US foreign policy means well and that Americas motives in spreading democracy are honorable, even noble. According to William Blum’s America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy – the Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else (Zed Books, 2013), nothing could be further from the truth. Discussing his latest book with New Books Network, Blum explains what makes the US the most destructive nation in history and how the exceptionalist goal of spreading democracy is only a cover for a less benign agenda. William Blum is one of the United States leading non-mainstream chroniclers of American foreign policy and author of the popular online newsletter, The Anti-Empire Report, a historian and U.S. foreign policy critic. Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, and other books. Jasun Horsley is the author of Seen & Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist and several other books on extra-consensual perceptions. He has a weekly podcast called The Liminalist: The Podcast Between and a blog. For more info, go to http://auticulture.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

While the world’s attention is focused on the nuclearization of North Korea and Iran and the nuclear brinkmanship between India and Pakistan, China is believed to have doubled the size of its nuclear arsenal, making it the forgotten nuclear power, as described in Foreign Affairs. Susan Turner Haynes (Professor of Political Science, Lipscomb University) analyzes China’s buildup and its diversification of increasingly mobile, precise, and sophisticated nuclear weapons in her new book Chinese Nuclear Proliferation: How Global Politics is Transforming China’s Weapons Buildup and Modernization (Potomac Books, 2016) . Haynes provides context and clarity on this complex global issue through an analysis of extensive primary source research and lends insight into questions about why China is the only nuclear weapon state recognized under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that continues to pursue qualitative and quantitative advancements to its nuclear force. As the gap between China’s nuclear force and the forces of the nuclear superpowers narrows against the expressed interest of many nuclear and non-nuclear states, Chinese Nuclear Proliferation offers policy prescriptions to curtail China’s nuclear growth and to assuage fears that the “American world order” presents a direct threat to China’s national security. Presenting technical concepts with minimal jargon in a straightforward style, this book will be of use to casual China watchers and military experts alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs