New Books in World Affairs

Thom van Dooren‘s new book is an absolute must-read. (I was going to qualify that with a “…for anyone who…” and realized that it really needs no qualification.) Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a beautifully written and evocative meditation on extinction. The book offers (and implicates us in) stories about five groups of birds – albatrosses, vultures, Little Penguins, whooping cranes, and Hawaiian crows – that build upon one another and collectively enable us to explore and re-imagine what, where, and how extinction is, and why that matters. Van Dooren emphasizes the importance of storytelling to understanding and inhabiting the world, and the book’s five “extinction stories” each bring to life the entanglements of avian, human, and other beings to ask readers to consider a series of questions that can best be explored, understood, and engaged through attentiveness to these entanglements. “What is lost,” van Dooren asks, “when a species, an evolutionary lineage, a way of life, passes from the world?” How does this loss mean, and what does it mean, within the particular multispecies community formed and shaped by that way of life? And how might storytelling, conceived as an act of witnessing, help draw us into new relationships and accountabilities within our multispecies communities? Flight Ways is deeply concerned with the ethical questions that emerge – and that must be sustained – in the course of thinking through these crucial questions, and it is committed to moving us away from a position of human exceptionalism as we work with and inside of that ethical troubling. Deeply interdisciplinary, van Dooren’s book brings together approaches in animal studies and the environmental humanities, but it speaks to and from many more fields. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Aristotle Tziampiris is The Emergence of Israeli-Greek Cooperation (Springer, 2015). Tziampiris is Associate Professor of International Relations and Director of the Center for International and European Affairs at the Department of International and European Studies at the University of Piraeus. The recent fiscal debt crisis in Greece has drawn world attention to the country’s position in global affairs. Rather than pursue the financial situation, Tziampiris investigates the foreign policy making of Greece, particularly its changing relationship with Israel and Turkey. Greece and Israel have had a distant relationship for much of the last 50 years, but recent politics for both countries have moved the two toward a budding friendship. Tziampiris bases his argument and key findings on high-level original interviews which lend the book a degree of legitimacy and significance. Based on these conversations with Greek and Israeli diplomats, he points to the Gaza Freeodm Flotilla as the point where leaders from the two countries began to rebuild their bi-lateral relationship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Genocide studies is one of the few academic fields with which I’m acquainted which is truly interdisciplinary in approach and composition. Today’s guest Abdelwahab El-Affendi, and the book he has edited, Genocidal Nightmares: Narratives of Insecurity and the Logic of Mass Atrocities (Bloomsbury Academic 2014), is an excellent example of how this works out in practice. The question this book addresses is not that unusual: How it is that societies and individuals come to a place where they feel it necessary to commit mass atrocities. But El-Affendi has assembled a set of authors remarkably varied in their background and approach. Indeed, his is one of the very few books in the field to draw on African and Middle Eastern scholars. Andthe case studies he examined go well beyond the usual canon of genocide studies. His conclusions clearly emerge out of this interdisciplinary cooperation. The book focuses on what he calls narratives of insecurity. These are stories people tell themselves about their relationships with others, stories that both reflect and further the securitization of relationships between people. These narratives, he argues, play a key role in moving people to commit acts they would earlier have believed unnecessary and even criminal. The book offers a variety of well-written and considered essays. And, if you’re like me, it will acquaint you with an area of international relations theory I knew nothing about. After we concluded the interview, Abdelwahab realized he had not mentioned in our discussion one of the key contributors to the book, the UN’s Special Adviser to the Secretary General on the Prevention of Genocide..  Deng authored the books forward and richly deserve the thanks Abdelwahab wanted to give him. I hope this will serve as an adequate substitute for a verbal appreciation from Abdelwahab. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Identity, performance and globalisation are at the heart of the cultural practices interrogated by Amanda Rogers in Performing Asian Transnationalisms: Theatre, Identity and the Geography of Performance (Routledge, 2015).The book explores the global networks of theatre that have emerged between Asia, America and Europe, using a variety of policy, practice and political examples. The book argues that globalisation, and the attendant transnational flows of people and culture, has both the potential to create theatre careers and new, important, works, whist at the same time constraining individuals, communities and cultural forms. The book draws on a rich combination of ethnographic and interview data, along with theoretically informed cultural analysis, using examples ranging from The British Council and the Singapore Art Festival, through Asian American and British East Asian identities, to controversial performances of theOrphan of Zhao. The book will be of primary interest to cultural,geography and performance scholars, but has valuable insights for social science and the humanities more generally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Riots, audiences on stage, fabulous costumes, gripping stories. That’s what theater was like in the Atlantic world in the age of slavery and colonialism. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon wonderful book New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849 (Duke University Press, 2014) vividly invokes a transatlantic network of performances and their publics, and argues for the making of a performative commons that worked out tensions among societies bent on simultaneously profiting from, and negating the existence of, enslaved Africans and indigenous people. They did this in part through a tradition of dramatizing those very tensions on stage. The book is full of stories of how the riotous multitude witnessed and interacted with those performances, as plays, actors, music, and costumes made their way around the colonial Atlantic world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In the annals of cold war history Italy is rarely seen as a crucial locale.  In his stimulating new book, The United States, Italy, and the Origins of Cold War: Waging Political Warfare (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Kaeten Mistry reveals how events in Italy proved surprisingly crucial in defining a conflict that dominated much of the twentieth century.  For the United States, it marked the first intervention in the postwar era to influence events abroad through political warfare, the use of all measures ‘short of war’ in foreign affairs.  Drawing particular attention to the Italian election of 18 April 1948, he explains how the campaign for the first national election of the newfound Italian republic marked a critical defeat for communism in the early cold war.  The United States utilized a range of overt and covert methods against Marxist political and social power.  Political warfare seemingly outlined a way to tackle communist strength more widely. Analyzing American political warfare efforts against the Italian left allows Mistry to advance a number of important arguments.  He shows how U.S. efforts were largely improvised and many key decisions ad hoc.  While officials in Washington like George F. Kennan worked to institutionalize political warfare, Italian actors and a host of non-governmental organizations played a crucial role in the defeat of the Italian left, even if they did not always share the same agenda as American officials.  Mistry emphasizes Italian agency, explaining how Christian Democrat Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi pursued his own agenda to protect national sovereignty.  The Vatican had its own objectives, as did trade unions, citizen groups, and multinational corporations.  Other actors held a less rigid view of the Cold War than their American counterparts.  In short, political warfare was more than an American story yet U.S. officials and commentators lined up to praise the election campaign as a distinctly American success.  Mistry argues that this ‘perception of success’ contributed to an expanded use of political warfare, as U.S efforts turned to subverting communist power in Eastern Europe and, later, the Global South. The work is a refreshing reminder of how foreign policy is rarely under the control of elite figures in Washington.  Rather, it is subject to negotiation with various foreign and non-governmental actors.  When viewed in this light, Mistry’s work is a useful reminder that governments will almost always invite trouble when they assume the ‘success’ of their efforts to shape events abroad, overlooking the role and motives of other peoples and groups, to make the case for intervention elsewhere.  Enjoy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The period from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries witnessed a mass migration which carried millions of Jews from central and eastern Europe, north Africa, and the Ottoman Empire to new lands. Hasia Diner’s new book, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (Yale University Press, 2015) examines this migration through the prism of the oft overlooked peddler. For the Jewish men arriving in the United States, Great Britain, South Africa, and Latin America, peddling was among the most prevalent of professions. It allowed those without large amounts of capital to quickly start their own businesses. Jewish men took to the roads, selling household items door to door in small towns, rural areas, mining camps and on Indian reservations. In the process, these men learned about the languages and cultures of their new homelands. At the same time, peddlers were agents of change and modernization, introducing their customers to new products, tastes and kinds of consumption, while linking rural areas to the cosmopolitan cultures of the big cities. Diner’s book analyzes the symbiotic relationship that developed between Jewish peddlers and the women whose homes they entered. Their intimate interactions facilitated Jewish integration, while often upsetting racial and gender norms. Peddling changed the lives of the peddlers and their customers during a transformative moment of modern Jewish history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Thomas Weiss and Dan Plesch are the co-editors of We Are Strong: Wartime Origins and the Future United Nations (Routledge, 2015). Weiss is Presidential Professor of Political Science and Director Emeritus of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at The City University of New York’s Graduate Center; Plesch is Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS, University of London. They write in the introduction “Today a key question that ought to be in bold-faced type on the agenda of global governance is: ‘Do we need another cataclysm to re-kindle the imagination and energy and cooperation that was in the air in the 1940s, or are we smart enough to adapt in anticipation?'” Much of the book is built on a hope that the answer to this question is the later, and that world leaders look to the historical lessons delivered in each chapter. Weiss and Plesch break the book into sections: Planning and Propaganda, Human Security, and Economic Development. One is left believing that the original design of the various appendages of the United Nations was the work of truly forward-looking planners, and that while the current institution may not resemble the original vision, much could be gained by looking back to what they designed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn‘s An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban/Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, 1970-2010 (Oxford University Press, reprint edition 2014) offers what is in many ways is an untold, insider’s account of the birth of the Taliban and Al Qaeda during the anti-Soviet jihad, and their subsequent cooperation (or indeed lack thereof) in the pre- and post-9/11 world. By living first in Kabul, and then Kandahar, Afghanistan, the authors gained more privileged access to individuals involved with Afghan history in the 1980s-2000s than perhaps anyone outside of Western intelligence agencies. By speaking with Taliban officials — indeed Van Linschoten and Kuehn’s previous project was editing the memoirs of Taliban senior official Abdul Salam Zaeef – and former “Afghan Arabs”, the authors enriched their research immensely. The result shows in the final product: a nuanced, deeply layered, and meticulously investigative look at a fascinating subject. An Enemy We Createdshould be seen as paradigmatic for future research on militant organizations, and offers up an immense challenge to those experts who would seek to write on such topics from the comfort of Western armchairs.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Thomas Weiss and Dan Plesch are the co-editors of We Are Strong: Wartime Origins and the Future United Nations (Routledge, 2015). Weiss is Presidential Professor of Political Science and Director Emeritus of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at The City University of New York's Graduate Center; Plesch is Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS, University of London.They write in the introduction "Today a key question that ought to be in bold-faced type on the agenda of global governance is: 'Do we need another cataclysm to re-kindle the imagination and energy and cooperation that was in the air in the 1940s, or are we smart enough to adapt in anticipation?'" Much of the book is built on a hope that the answer to this question is the later, and that world leaders look to the historical lessons delivered in each chapter. Weiss and Plesch break the book into sections: Planning and Propaganda, Human Security, and Economic Development. One is left believing that the original design of the various appendages of the United Nations was the work of truly forward-looking planners, and that while the current institution may not resemble the original vision, much could be gained by looking back to what they designed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs