New Books in World Affairs

James Whitman wants to revise our understanding of warfare during the eighteenth century, the period described by my late colleague and friend Russell Weigley as the “Age of Battles.” We commonly view warfare during this period as a remarkably restrained affair, dominated by aristocratic values, and while we recognize their horrors for the participants, we often compare battles to the duels those aristocrats fought over private matters of honor. Not true, claims Whitman, who argues instead that battles during the period 1709 (Battle of Malplaquet) and 1863/1870 (Gettysburg/Sedan) were understood by contemporaries not to be royal duels but “legal procedure[s], a lawful means of deciding international disputes through consensual collective violence.” [3] Understanding war as a form of trial is what gave warfare of the era its decisiveness (sorry Russ) and forces us, according to Whitman, to change the way we interpret, for example, Frederick the Great’s invasion of Silesia. Whitman, who is the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School and an academically trained historian (PhD Chicago 1987), brings the perspective of both lawyer and historian to his work ways that teach us much about both the military history and the law of the period he considers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Muzammil Hussain and Phillip Howard have authored Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2013) which explores the role social media (Twitter, Facebook, and texting) have played in political activism in Tunisia, Egypt, and Lebanon.  Hussain is a new Assistant Professor of Global Media Studies at the University of Michigan and Phillip Howard is Professor of Communication, Information, and International Studies at the University of Washington. Through extensive data collection and fieldwork, the authors bring a multi-method and multi-disciplinary approach to their timely subject. They argue that digital activism typically travels through six steps of protest mobilization starting with capacity building and ends with post-protest information war. This is the third book from the Oxford Studies in Digital Politics series featured on the podcast. As with the previous, Political Scientists can learn a lot from the disciplinary perspective brought to the subject of activism from those in Communications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

When I went to college long ago, everyone had to read Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848). I think I read it in half-a-dozen classes. Today Marx is out. Benedict Anderson, however, is in. You’d be hard-pressed to get a college degree without reading or at least hearing about his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983). That book says, in a phrase, that nations were invented, and quite recently at that. The trouble is that according to Azar Gat, Anderson is wrong. In his new book Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Gat musters a significant amount of evidence suggesting that humans are more-or-less hardwired for kin and ethnic preference–we’ve always liked people who look, talk and act like “us” more than “strangers” because we are built to do so. We didn’t “invent” the nation; it was–and remains–in us. Moreover, he shows that the historical record itself makes clear that something like nations have been with us since the state appeared 5,000 years ago. To be sure, their form has; but they were always around. This is important for the way we think about the world today. Marx thought classes were going to disappear. They didn’t. Anderson and those who follow him seem to think that nations are going to disappear. They aren’t. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Is there an “American Empire?” A lot of people on the Left say “yes.” Actually, a lot of people on the Right say “yes” too. But Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman says “no.” In her stimulating new treatment of the history of American foreign policy American Umpire (Harvard UP, 2013), Hoffman lays out the case that America have never been an “empire” in any real sense. Rather, she says America has been and (for better or worse) still is an “umpire,” making calls according to an evolving set of rules about what makes a legitimate state. She points out that not all of the calls have been good ones–Vietnam and Iraq II being the most obvious examples. Nonetheless, America has long served the world as a kind of fair broker. Whether America should continue in this role is, as she says, an open question. 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

Arend Lijphart is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a past president of the American Political Science Association. In this interview, we discuss his book Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (Yale University Press, 2012), now in a newly updated edition. The book is an empirical study of power-concentration and power-sharing in 36 democracies around the world during the period 1945 to 2010. Professor Lijphart finds strong correlations between institutional arrangements, such as a country’s electoral system, and quantifiable aspects of democratic quality, including political and economic equality, governmental accountability, rates of incarceration, and gender equality. Patterns of Democracy has been called “controversial,” “magnificent,” and “the best-researched book on democracies in the world today.” 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 tend to think of 1776 as the year when the United States began making history on its own terms. That is simply untrue. Building on recent scholarship that challenges this assumption is Eliga Gould‘s Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Harvard University Press, 2012). Gould seeks to correct this anachronistic tendency by placing the nascent American state in the context of its time, artfully dissecting the rhetoric and writing of early American citizens and statesmen. Though many of the founding fathers wrote and spoke optimistically about the prospects and goals of the new nation, the success and future of the nation was far from certain. Gould acknowledges this and deftly couches such rhetoric in the reality that the only way for the United States to achieve these goals was to “conform to European norms and expectations.” That the Americans were trying to establish themselves as a nation among other nations, he contends, was no minor consideration. It was a necessity upon which the commercial and political future of the nation hinged. The founders understood this well, as Gould skillfully showcases via a scrupulous survey of contemporary sources. Thus, this quest for legitimacy–what Gould terms “treaty-worthiness”–had a profound influence on the creation of early American republic. Placing the American Revolution in an Atlantic context makes this book a fun and informative read. Departing from the typical narrative of the thirteen colonies allows Gould to bring in a variety of characters and stories that do not often appear in traditional histories of the Revolution–from French Acadians and their forcible removal from Nova Scotia to African slaves in the Caribbean, maroon communities, and absentee sugar planters living in London­­–offering a more comprehensive view of the Revolution and its meaning across the entire British Empire. Gould’s masterful command of primary sources and his adroit ability as an author make this work enjoyable for both students of history and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Globalization is one of those words we hear on an almost daily basis. The world today is interconnected in ways that would have been unimaginable even twenty years ago. It seems as if everyone knows what globalization is, but what does it really consist of, and does it even really exist? Is the world really all that different? In Sociology of Globalization: Globalizing Cultures, Economies and Politics (Westview Press, 2012), Keri E. Iyall Smith gathers the writing of a variety of scholars, journalists and researchers and their views on this complex phenomenon. Each chapter contains resources for further research and study, and in each of the three sections – Culture, Economy and Politics – Smith also shares her own thoughts and research into globalization, covering both positive and negative aspects of our new world order. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

You wouldn’t know from the 2012 president race but the United States remains engaged in a fairly bloody conflict in Afghanistan. In addition to boots on the ground, we deploy scores of drones in Pakistan, Yemen and the Horn of Africa to keep Al Qaeda and its affiliates at bay. In the post-9/11 world does the US have any other option aside from semi-permanent war against non-state actors that operate in developing and/or failed states? Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld thinks American policymakers have viable options, alternatives and policies that can address the national security challenges of the 21st century. In Let There Be Light: Electrifying the Developing World With Markets and Distributed Energy, co-authored with Drew Sloan, (Truman National Security Institute, 2012), they reveal that “energy,” or the lack thereof, keeps many nations mired in poverty. To jump start-developing economies, Kleinfeld offers some relatively doable innovations to make energy plentiful. In so doing, failed states could very well become success stories or, at the very least, less likely to incubate poverty, lawlessness and threats to international security. In the same vein, Kleinfeld’s second book, Advancing the Rule of Law Abroad (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2012), offers additional policies to promote the rule of law in developing nations. In both cases, these books give viable policy solutions that address the national security challenges of the 21st century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

What if genocide scholars have been approaching the field the wrong way? When I first opened Extremely Violent Societies in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2010), I was immediately struck by the immense depth of research and learning. Christian Gerlach chooses his case studies from among the lesser studied cases of genocide and immersed himself in the literature. Moreover, he surveys the history and theory of counterinsurgency warfare in roughly 20 countries over the space of 50 years. His knowledge of the field is encyclopedic, and one must admire his tenacity, not to mention the persuasiveness clearly necessary to persuade the publisher to include such an extensive set of notes. More important, however, than the breadth and depth of research are the conclusions Gerlach reaches. For Gerlach’s book argues that people who study genocide need to approach the subject in a different way, one that is broader, is more grounded in primary research, and one that uses the categories of race and ethnicity much more carefully. Whether you agree with this contention or not, it’s a book that makes you think hard about your own ideas–one of the highest compliments you can pay an author. I have no doubt that Gerlach’s book will be one of the most talked about works in the field. I hope you find the interview just as stimulating. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Citizens of well-developed liberal democracies enjoy an unprecedented standard of living, while a staggering number of people worldwide live in unbelievable poverty. It seems obvious that the well-off have moral obligations to those who are impoverished. But there’s a question regarding the nature and extent of these obligations. Some hold that well-off societies and their citizens own substantial duties of humanitarian assistance to the global poor. Others claim that our duties are stronger than this; they claim that our duties to the global poor are a matter of justice. In her new book, Globalization and Global Justice: Shrinking Distance, Expanding Obligations (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Nicole Hassoun proposes a new kind of argument for what she calls “serious moral duties to the global poor.” She claims that in our globalized world, people all over the globe are subject to the coercive power of international institutions. She then argues that these coercive institutions are legitimate only if they can win the consent of those subject to them. From this, she concludes that international institutions owe to the global poor whatever is required in order to enable them to exercise a kind of minimal autonomy; and this autonomy requires access to food, shelter, water, and education. Hassoun’s argument, then, is that familiar minimal requirements for legitimate coercion entail more extensive positive duties to the global poor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs