New Books in World Affairs

Miriam Kingsberg‘s fascinating new book offers both a political and social history of modern Japan and a global history of narcotics in the modern world. Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History (University of California Press, 2013) locates the emergence of a series of three “moral crusades” against narcotics that each accompanied a perceived crisis in collective values and political legitimacy in nineteenth and twentieth century Japan. In the first moral crisis after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5, opium became a symbol of difference between Japan and an “Other” epitomized by Qing China, as Japan sought to “leave Asia” and “enter” the West. Here, Kingsberg traces a series of attempts to regulate drug use in Taiwan in the wake of Japan’s transformation into a formal empire. Between the end of WWI and Japan’s defeat in WWII, Japan saw its second moral crisis as it navigated the most protracted and intense moral crusade against narcotics in its history. The central chapters of Kingsberg’s book trace this second crisis, paying special attention to Japanese colonial rule in Korea and in the Kwantung Leased Territory (KLT) in southern Manchuria as Korea became the “global capital of morphine” and the KLT port handled “the second-highest volume of banned drugs in the world.” The third moral crisis brings us to the end of Moral Nation and the thick of the “hiropon age” of the 1950s, when methamphetamine production and usage skyrocketed in postwar Japan and the nation saw its first full-fledged domestic drug plight. Kingsberg locates a changing cast of “moral entrepreneurs” who motivated these three crises, shedding light on the formative roles of merchants and mass society in this chapter of global narcotic history. It is a wonderful, meticulously researched book that contributes significantly to the histories of Japan, of drugs, and of global politics. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Professor Sean D. Murphy is the Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor of Law at George Washington University and co-author of the book Litigating War: Mass Civil Injury and the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission (Oxford University Press, 2013) with Won Kidane, Associate Professor of Law at the Seattle University Law School, and Thomas R. Snider, an international arbitrator at Greenberg Taurig. Their book goes to the heart and intricacies of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission. Its analysis and comprehensiveness is certainly insightful and is a must-read for anyone wanting to learn about the commission and its context.  Professor Murphy discusses with us some of the contents of the book, providing details on the war that occasioned the commission, the commission’s establishment, its jurisdiction and other very pertinent issues relating to the commission’s work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In 1927 Russian-American legal theorist Alexander Sack introduced the doctrine of “odious debt.” Sack argued that a state’s debt is “odious” and should not be transferable to successor governments after a revolution, if it was incurred without the consent of the people; and not for their benefit. This doctrine has largely been rejected, with a firm presumption of “sovereign continuity” emerging instead: post-revolutionary governments must repay sovereign debt even if it was incurred to cover the personal expenses of plutocrats. If they fail to do so, their credit reputation is harmed. As Odette Lienau explains in a striking line, “we can now imagine prosecuting the leaders of a fallen regime for crimes against a state’s population while simultaneously asking that population to acknowledge and repay the fallen regime’s debts.” In Rethinking Sovereign Debt: Politics, Reputation, and Legitimacy in Modern Finance (Harvard University Press, 2014), Lienau unfolds the historical conditions from which this seeming inconsistency emerged. Seamlessly moving between case studies from the early 20th century to the present, Lienau discusses several different versions of this puzzle. Ultimately, Lienau ends up rejecting “sovereign continuity,” and arguing for the recognition of “principled default.” With revolutions and uprisings across the Middle East, and in Ukraine, this book’s argument will likely provoke lively discussion among lawyers, economists, political theorists, and historians. But lay people should ideally engage with the ideas as well. The book gives an extraordinary point of access into what is at stake in the work of enormous international organizations, such as the World Bank. *Photo by Frank DiMeo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Americans are moving to the ocean. Every year, more and more Americans move to–or are born in– the coasts and fewer and fewer remain in–or are born in–the interior. The United States began as a coastal nation; it’s become one again. According to John R. Gillis‘s provocative new book The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (University of Chicago Press, 2012), the same may be said of the entire world. Humans, he says, started–or rather quickly became after they evolved in eastern Africa 200,000 ago–a coastal species. We stayed very close to the oceans and seas until the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Thereafter, we moved into various interiors. Now, he says, we are moving back to the shore in force. We are transforming it and, alas, destroying much of it. Gillis calls on us to think of the shore not as a place to settle, but a habitat that is essential to our future prosperity and, one might say, survival. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Emma Teng‘s new book explores the discourses about Eurasian identity, and the lived experiences of Eurasian people, in China, Hong Kong, and the US between the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 and the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943. Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842-1943 (University of California Press, 2013) situates this history within a broader frame of competing scientific, cultural, and political notions of racial hybridity as a detrimental or positive force, as a transformative power leading to racial degeneration or eugenic improvement. Placing special emphasis on the importance of self-narratives of some of the main figures of Teng’s account, Eurasian is built around the stories of families who lived through and contributed to early debates over Chinese-Western intermarriage in the US and China, tracing the histories of many of these families through the experiences of their children and the transformations they help shape, and understanding these stories alongside larger social and political discourses of Eurasian identity. It is a fascinating, sensitively wrought, and carefully argued book that both engages and shifts debates in the many fields that intersect in this modern history of Eurasian identity and its many voices, and offers a polyvocal accounting of the many ways that Eurasian identity was claimed by individuals and communities from British Columbia to Hong Kong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Aswin Punthamabekar‘s From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry (New York University Press, 2013) offers a deeply researched and richly theorized look at the evolution of the world’s largest film industry over the past few decades. Combining ethnographic research with close textual analyses of Bollywood films, Punthamabekar shows how the media industry’s growth has been complexly intertwined with India’s emerging place in the global economy. The book offers a nuanced look at globalization, bringing to light the tensions and productivities that emerge when a highly powerful, historically localized industry enters the world of multinational capitalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy: Once Upon a Time in a Globalized World (Ashgate, 2013), a new book by Constance DeVereaux (Colorado State University) and Martin Griffin (University of Tennessee) sets out to challenge assumptions about policy making and culture in the contemporary world. The book has, at its centre, an understanding of narrative as both a practice that is central to what it means to be human and an analytical tool for understanding policy and culture. The book uses a wide range of case studies to illustrate the importance of this dual understanding of narrative to account for debates and differences between understandings of global culture as potentially threatening, in the form of globalization, or liberating, in the form of transnationalism. The case studies range from film and media studies, historical examples of Berlin and the USA’s National Endowment for the Arts, as well as questions over cultural heritage, through to readings of fictional case studies using the same narrative methods. The book will be essential reading for all scholars working in cultural policy and cultural studies, but also represents a challenge to the mainstream approaches of political science thinking about public policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The 22nd Winter Olympics are underway. It’s safe to say that the lead-up has not gone smoothly. Of course, there have been the obligatory cost overruns, crony contracts, displacement of locals, and environmental despoliation–all the problems we’ve seen with past Olympics. But this year’s games have come with new wrinkles. It’s possible, though, that the various ills plaguing the Sochi games, from security concerns to shambolic accommodations, might stir deeper changes in the Olympic movement. For all the spectacle, for all the competitive drama and remarkable performances, more and more people are questioning whether the Olympics are worth the expense and trouble that they bring. A series of reports this week on National Public Radio cast light on the financial losses and expensive white elephants saddling cities that have hosted recent games. Meanwhile, a writer for an Australian sports site declared flatly: “It is time to get rid of this anachronistic political farce.” Political scientist Jules Boykoff isn’t ready to go that far. As he explains at the start of our interview, he’s a fan who looks forward to this year’s winter games. But in his book Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games (Routledge, 2013), Jules offers a sharp critique of the way the Olympics are funded, organized, and run. Based on work in London two years ago and research into other recent games, Jules shows that the Olympics turn massive public funding into private profits, while an ideological para-state, the IOC, subverts local authorities and citizens’ rights. In the weeks ahead, fans will enjoy their quadrennial dose of ski-jumping, giant slalom, and (my favorite!) curling. And this year, we’ll get plenty of laughs from tweeted photos of absurd plumbing arrangements and babushkas painting the grass green. But Jules Boykoff reminds us that the Olympics have deep problems that need to be addressed in order for the games to go on. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard University Press 2010) takes the reader on a sweeping journey through the history of international law from the ancient world to the present in search for an answer to the question: where did human rights come from? The book’s author, Columbia University intellectual historian Samuel Moyn examines, in turn, Enlightenment humanism, socialist internationalism, horror at twentieth-century genocide, anti-colonialism, and the civil rights movement. But he concludes that these were not sufficient individually or collectively to account for the emergence this key term of our contemporary political vocabulary. Human rights has, as Moyn tells us in this interview, a more recent and surprising vintage. I have never read a book that devoted so much space to where something wasn’t and to why it wasn’t there. Yet in Moyn’s explanation of the non-existence of human rights until its breakthrough moment in the 1970s, we learn a great deal not only about the importance of the nation-state to the conception of individual rights, but about the nature of historical change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

We spend a lot of time arguing about the meaning and implications of words in the field of genocide studies. Buckets of ink have been spilled defining and debating words like genocide, intent, ‘in part,’ and crimes against humanity. Philip Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan are certainly invested in the process of careful definitions and descriptions.  Theaters of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killing, and Atrocity through History (Berghahn Books, 2012)and the special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research that form the basis of our discussion are both a plea for and a move toward a thorough, theoretically sound understanding of the concept of a massacre.  In doing so, they offer a thoughtful commentary on the notion of genocide and its relationship to massacres and atrocities. But these volumes are more than a theoretical engagement with a concept.  They are a rich exploration of the nature of mass killing, as the subtitle puts it, throughout history.  The essays here range from individual case studies to attempts to discover patterns and consistencies from the fractal landscape of violence that has typified human existence.  They offer readers a chance to come to grips with the disturbing reality that human beings have always been willing to destroy other humans at exactly the moment when they are most vulnerable. A brief note for those listeners unfamiliar with the Journal of Genocide Research.  The journal is one of the leading venues for researchers from a variety of academic disciplines to report on their research about genocide and related topics.  It offers scholars from across the world a chance to propose new ideas, publicize new discoveries, and launch new conversations about important books or developments in the field.  As such, it is a must read for those interested in new research on genocide studies. This podcast begins an attempt to expand our coverage slightly beyond the ‘new book’ format of the channel.  Most interviews will remain focused on new books published in the field.  But the Journal publishes special issues periodically that function much like books in their focus on specific issues or events.  So the podcast will occasionally feature the editors of these special issues. I hope you’ll find these interviews as interesting and as important as you do those with books you can get at the library.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs