New Books in World Affairs

The Young Turk revolution of 1908 restored the Ottoman constitution, suspended earlier by Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and initiated a new period of parliamentary politics in the Empire. Likewise, the revolution was a watershed moment for the Empire’s ethnic communities, raising expectations for their full inclusion into the Ottoman political system as modern citizens and bringing to the fore competitions for power within and between groups. In Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2014), Bedross Der Matossian examines how Ottoman ethnic communities understood and reacted to the revolution. Focusing on the Arab, Armenian and Jewish communities, and using sources in multiple languages, including Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Ladino and Ottoman Turkish, Der Matossian highlights the contradictions and ambiguities in interpretations of  Ottomanism and its reification as political structure. How, for example, could these groups express loyalty to the ideas of the revolution while protecting their own communal interests? For the Young Turks, the goal of the revolution was first and foremost to centralize power and to preserve the territorial integrity of the Empire. They saw constitutionalism and parliamentarianism as vehicles to this end. For the non-dominant ethnic groups in the Empire, however, the Revolution meant freedom and equality, often understood as political decentralization and the preservation of their ethnic privileges. Through in depth analysis of revolutionary festivals, debates in the ethnic press, electoral campaigns, parliamentary discourse and then reactions to the 1909 counter-revolution, Der Matossian shows us that the dreams of the revolution were shattered under the weight of the incompatibility these understandings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Many Americans know about the military side of the Civil War, and the private, official diplomacy of the Civil War is also well documented. The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (Basic Books, 2015), though, focuses on public diplomacy — on the battle for public opinion in Europe (primarily) waged by Union and Confederate officials, private citizens, and their European supporters. White northerners were slower to realize what American blacks and European republicans recognized instinctively — that what was at stake in the American Civil War was not the political and territorial integrity of the United States, but the causes of progress and self-government. In The Cause of All Nations, Don H. Doyle has done the impossible — found a hitherto unappreciated feature of the American Civil War that forces us to reevaluate how we understand it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Studying the forces behind and the implications for education’s ascension as a predominant global phenomenon is becoming a more important, yet convoluted, endeavor. Envisioned as a way to succinctly encapsulate this narrative, Robin Shields, Senior Lecturer in the Higher Education Management at the University of Bath, has written Globalization and International Education (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) in the Contemporary Issues in Education Studies series. Beginning with the first conceptions of development by the colonial powers, through the modernization theories prevalent through the Cold War, and to the expansion of the mass knowledge economy of today, Shields’ book chronicles the historical and contemporary challenges or issues in this field through case studies and easy-to-follow theoretical summaries. The book provides for a useful handbook for this expansive and complicated field, perfect for students, educators, or anyone else interested in international and comparative education or development. Dr. Shields joins New Books in Education for the interview and you can follow him on Twitter at @robinshields. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Two Canadian socialist thinkers have published a new book on the successes and failures, the crises, contradictions and conflicts in present-day capitalism. In The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso, 2013), Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin trace the evolution of the international capitalist system over the last century. (Panitch is a professor of political science at Toronto’s York University while Gindin holds the Packer Chair in Social Justice at York.) They argue that today’s global capitalism would not have been possible without American leadership especially after the two World Wars and that the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve were more crucial in extending and maintaining American power than the Pentagon or the CIA. The U.S. capitalist empire is an “informal” one, they write, in which Americans set the terms for international trade and investment in partnership with other sovereign, but less powerful states. Panitch and Gindin also disagree with those who contend that China is set to replace the U.S. as the world’s economic superpower. They write that China does not have the institutional capacity to manage the crisis-prone, global capitalist system — a burden that, for the foreseeable future, will continue to be carried by the American empire. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire won the 2013 Deutscher Prize awarded for books which exemplify “the best and most innovative new writing in or about the Marxist tradition.” The New Books Network spoke with co-author Leo Panitch during his recent visit to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Emilie Cloatre‘s award-winning book, Pills for the Poorest:An Exploration of TRIPS and Access to Medication in Sub-Saharan Africa (Palgrave, 2013), locates the effects–and ineffectualness–of a landmark international agreement for healthcare: the World Trade Organization’s “Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights.” Cloatre takes seriously the idea of TRIPS as a technology in Bruno Latour’s meaning of the word–as a material object that anticipates effects in specific settings. Cloatre follows the text from its consolidation in European meeting halls to its use in the former French and British colonies of Ghana and Djibouti. Pills for the Poorest is a significant ethnography of law and healthcare in Africa that shows precisely how this paper tool begat new buildings, relationships, experts, and, indeed, pills, but only in particular places, among certain people, and for particular kinds of pharmaceuticals. Cloatre is a broadly trained scholar and talented researcher who shows the power of Actor Network Theory as an analytic device, and yet does so with a spirit of critique in the best sense: that is, as an act of sympathetic, yet persistent, questioning. As a text itself, the book has potential to reshape the thinking of readers from a wide range of fields, from law, science studies, healthcare policy, and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The current conflict in Ukraine has reopened old wounds and brought the complexity of Russia’s relationship with the United States and Europe to the forefront. One of the most important factors in relations between the Kremlin and the West has been the issue of Ballistic Missile Defense, particularly as a result of American plans to develop a Missile Defense Shield with installations in Eastern Europe. Bilyana Lilly, an expert on Eurasian affairs and security, has written the most comprehensive study available on Russia’s Ballistic Missile Defense policies. In the course of her book Russian Foreign Policy toward Missile Defense: Actors, Motivations, and Influence (Lexington Books, 2014), drawing on a huge array of media sources as well as interviews, she demonstrates how these policies serve as a barometer for measuring US-Russia and US-NATO relations, as well as how they illustrate the complex interplay of factions and forces among Russia’s elite. As relations between Russia and the West continue to worsen, a thorough examination of how BMD policies have affected both Russia’s relations with the outside world and served as a tool for domestic political considerations could not be timelier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Contemporary advances in technology have in many ways made the world smaller.  It is now possible for vast numbers of geographically disparate people to interact, communicate, coordinate, and plan.  These advances potentially bring considerable benefits to democracy, such as greater participation, more inclusion, easier dissemination of information, and so on.  Yet they also raise unique challenges, as the same technology that facilitates interaction also enables surveillance, as well as new forms of exclusion. In Interactive Democracy: The Social Roots of Global Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Carol Gould aims to develop a conception of democracy that acknowledges the new democratic possibilities while being attuned to the need to protect human rights, cultural differences, and individual freedom.  The result is a fascinating discussion of modern democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

There has been a dramatic leap in education across the world over the past 150 years–from the importance and longevity to Western-style universities to truth and knowledge production created through schooling, permeating to almost every culture throughout the globe. Dr. David Baker, professor at Penn State University, calls this phenomenon the “education revolution” in his most recent book, entitled The Schooled Society: The Educational Transformation of Global Culture (Stanford University Press 2014). What is the “Schooled Society” and how was it created? Drawing on neo-institutional theories and real world examples, Dr. Baker provides an interesting and compelling take on society and its interactions with education. He joins New Books in Education for the interview. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Jan Lemnitzer‘s new book Power, Law and the End of Privateering (Palgrave, 2014) offers an exciting new take on the relationship between law and power, exposing the delicate balance between great powers and small states that is necessary to create and enforce norms across the globe. The 1856 Declaration of Paris marks the precise moment when international law became universal, and is the template for creating new norms until today. Moreover, the treaty was an aggressive and successful British move to end privateering forever – then the United States’ main weapon in case of war with Britain. Based on previously untapped archival sources, Jan Lemnitzer shows why Britain granted generous neutral rights in the Crimean War, how the Europeans forced the United States to respect international law during the American Civil War, and why Bismarck threatened violent redemption during the Franco-German War of 1870/71. The powerful conclusion exposes the 19th century roots of our present international system, and why it is as fragile as before the First World War. A sample chapter of the book can be found on the publishers website here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Elizabeth Schmidt‘sForeign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror (Cambridge University Press, 2013)depicts the foreign political and military interventions in Africa during the periods of decolonization (1956-75) and the Cold War (1945-91), as well as the periods of state collapse (1991-2001) and the “global war on terror” (2001-10). In the first two periods, the most significant intervention was intercontinental. The United States, the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and the former colonial powers entangled themselves in numerous African conflicts. During the period of state collapse, the most consequential interventions were intracontinental. African governments, sometimes assisted by powers outside the continent, supported warlords, dictators, and dissident movements in neighboring countries and fought for control of their neighbors’ resources. The global war on terror, like the Cold War, increased the foreign military presence on the African continent and generated external support for repressive governments. In each of these cases, external interests altered the dynamics of internal struggles, escalating local conflicts into larger conflagrations, with devastating effects on African populations. Schmidt’s book is an excellent synthesis of the past 70 years of African history and politics. Her book is provocative, thoughtful and passionate. It is a superb book for students, general readers as well as scholars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs