New Books in World Affairs

In this episode, Dr. Ismail Patel sits down with Prof. Nazia Kazi to discuss her book “Islamophobia, Race and Global Politics” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

What does Xi Jinping want, and what is he afraid of? What is the future of China's relationship with Russia? What should the United States be doing to counter China? Matt Pottinger, Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and former Deputy National Security Advisor, joins Madison's Notes to answer these questions and others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

For 40 months, Wang Xiyue was imprisoned in Iran on false charges of espionage. A doctoral candidate in history at Princeton University, Wang Xiyue joins the show to discuss his imprisonment and U.S.-Iranian relations.  Xiyue's essay "What I learned in an Iranian prison" is here. His essay "Don’t let Iran’s human rights be sacrificed at the altar of a nuclear deal is here.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

What is the relationship between America's Founding principles and her foreign policy? What are unalienable rights and how do we know they exist? How have other nations responded to the final report of the U.S. Department of State's Commission on Unalienable Rights? Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo and Mary Ann Glendon, Chair of the Commission on Unalienable Rights, join Madison's Notes to answer these questions and others.  The Final Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights is here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

American wars in Iraq were a defining feature of global politics for almost thirty years. The Gulf War of 1991, the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the campaign against the Islamic State beginning in 2014 each had their own logic. Each occurrence was a distinct conflict; however they must not only be considered in isolation. The United States spent the 1990s trying but failing to implement the Gulf War's cease fire agreement. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, American leaders decided to settle the open-ended aftermath of the Gulf War by launching the Iraq War of 2003. The Iraq War unleashed resistance, civil war, insurgency and eventually the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Thus, following the Gulf War, each war was fought to finish the previous conflict. The Iraq Wars, therefore, are perhaps best understood as a chain of events.Academics, journalists, statesmen, and soldiers have produced many library shelves of books on the Iraq Wars. Yet, no short, easily digestible volume exists to synthesize this vast literature of both English and Arabic sources. The Iraq Wars: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Dr. Samuel Helfont covers this series of important conflicts as a whole, in a highly succinct and uniquely readable way. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Increasingly, people travel and communicate across borders. Yet, we still know little about the overall structure of this transnational world. Is it really a fully globalized world in which everything is linked, as popular catchphrases like “global village” suggest? Through a sweeping comparative analysis of eight types of mobility and communication among countries worldwide—from migration and tourism to Facebook friendships and phone calls—Mapping the Transnational World demonstrates that our behavior is actually regionalized, not globalized.Emanuel Deutschmann shows that transnational activity within world regions is not so much the outcome of political, cultural, or economic factors, but is driven primarily by geographic distance. He explains that the spatial structure of transnational human activity follows a simple mathematical function, the power law, a pattern that also fits the movements of many other animal species on the planet. Moreover, this pattern remained extremely stable during the five decades studied—1960 to 2010. Unveiling proximity-induced regionalism as a major feature of planet-scale networks of transnational human activity, Deutschmann provides a crucial corrective to several fields of research.Revealing why a truly global society is unlikely to emerge, Mapping the Transnational World highlights the essential role of interaction beyond borders on a planet that remains spatially fragmented. This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool, a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies. Her research focuses on human mobilities and her new book has just been published (2025, Oxford University Press).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Conflicts over water are human-caused events with socio-political and economic causes. From Brazil's Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (MAB) to environmental activists in Pittsburgh, people are coming together to fight for control of their water. In Global Solidarities against water grabbing: Without water, we have nothing, Caitlin Schroerer examines how movements are communicating and organizing against water privatization and other forms of water grabbing, and explores how movements engage with and learn from each other. Water is at the heart of this book, but Global solidarities against water grabbing is as much about collective struggle and popular organization as it is about water. Based on extensive fieldwork with two movements fighting against water privatization, the book uses anticolonial and feminist research methods to show how global communications and organizing are occurring around water and how Global North movements are engaging with and learning from the Global South and vice versa. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Sociology at William Penn University, where he specializes in the cultural and interpretive study of space, behavior, and identity. His scholarship examines how designed environments shape social interaction, connectedness, and moral life across diverse settings. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His current research projects include ethnographic studies of escape rooms as emotion-structured environments, the use of urban aesthetics in rural downtown districts, and the lived experience of belongingness among college and university students. To learn more about his work, visit his personal website, Google Scholar profile, or connect with him on Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social) or Twitter/X (@ProfessorJohnst). He can also be reached directly by email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (Liveright, 2025), the second work in a trilogy from best-selling author Howard W. French about Africa's pivotal role in shaping world history, underscores Adam Hochschild's contention that French is a "modern-day Copernicus." The title--referring to a brief period beginning in 1957 when dozens of African colonies gained their freedom--positions this liberation at the center of a "movement of global Blackness," with one charismatic leader, Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972), at its head.That so few people today know about Nkrumah is an omission that French demonstrates is "typical of our deliberate neglect of Africa's enormous role in the birth of the modern world." Determined to re-create Nkrumah's life as "an epic twentieth-century story," The Second Emancipation begins with his impoverished, unheralded birth in the far-western region of Ghana's Gold Coast. But blessed with a deep curiosity, a young Nkrumah pursued an overseas education in the United States. Nowhere is French's consummate style more vivid than in Nkrumah's early years in Depression-era America, especially in his mesmerizing portrait of a culturally effervescent Harlem that Nkrumah encountered in 1935 before heading to college. During his student years in Pennsylvania and later as an activist in London, Nkrumah became steeped in a renowned international Black intellectual milieu--including Du Bois, Garvey, Fanon, Padmore, and C.L.R. James, who called him "one of the greatest political leaders of our century"--and formed an ideology that readied him for an extraordinarily swift and peaceful rise to power upon his return to Ghana in 1947.Four years later, in a political landslide he engineered while imprisoned, Nkrumah stunned Britain by winning the first general election under universal franchise in Africa, becoming Ghana's first independent prime minister in 1957. As leader of a sovereign nation, Nkrumah wielded his influence to promote the liberation of the entire continent, pushing unity as the only pathway to recover from the damages of enslavement and subjugation. By the time national military and police forces, aided by the CIA, overthrew him in 1966, Nkrumah's radical belief in pan-African liberation had both galvanized dozens of nascent African states and fired a global agenda of Black power.In its dramatic recasting of the American civil rights story and in its tragic depiction of a continent that once exuded all the promise of a newly won freedom, The Second Emancipation becomes a generational work that positions Africa at the forefront of modern-day history. Howard W. French is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and a former New York Times bureau chief for Central America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Japan and the Koreas, and China, based in Shanghai. The author of six books, including Born in Blackness, French lives in New York City. Ayisha Osori is a lawyer and Director at Open Society Foundations Ideas Workshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

International Law and Security in Indo-Pacific: Strategic Design for the Region (Routledge, 2025) edited by Dr. Joanna Siekiera uses an interdisciplinary approach to discuss international law and conflict in the Indo-Pacific region, covering topics such as maritime security, climate change and international relations. Detailing how international relations and particular state interests govern regional and global partnerships, the book provides suggestions for the future of the Indo-Pacific region. Exploring how conflict within the region has international repercussions, topics covered include the role of South-East Asian countries, and the role of statehood of small islands in Oceania. Detailing harmonization of laws and policies in the context of international security and maritime law, the book focuses on the impact of climate change and other topical issues such as cyber security and the protection of cultural identity. The book will be of interest to researchers in the field of international law, law of the sea, international relations and security.Dr. Joanna Siekiera is an expert in international law, NATO consultant, trainer, and educator. She currently works as the Assistant Professor at the War Studies University in Warsaw, Poland. She is also a fellow at the U.S. Marine Corps University in Quantico and supports various military institutions as a legal SME and course facilitator.Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Historian Tim Bouverie, the renowned author of the very well received Appeasement, gives us another brilliant history Allies at War: How the Struggles Between the Allied Powers Shaped the War and the World (Crown, 2025). This time exploring the diplomatic history of the Allied Powers during the Second World War. This being the second in a planned trilogy of diplomatic histories from the early Nineteen-Thirties to the early years of the Cold War. A work of history, which if completed will stand comparison with the brilliant, two volume treatment of the late Zara Steiner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In The Remote Revolution: Drones and Modern Statecraft (Cornell UP, 2025), Erik Lin-Greenberg shows that drones are rewriting the rules of international security, but not in ways one would expect. Emerging technologies like drones are often believed to increase the likelihood of crises and war. By lowering the potential risks and human costs of military operations, they encourage decision-makers to deploy military force. Yet, as Lin-Greenberg contends, operations involving drones are, in fact, less likely to evolve into broader, more intense conflicts than similar operations involving traditionally crewed assets. Even as drones increase the frequency of conflict, the decreased costs of their operations reduce the likelihood of conflict escalation. Leveraging diverse types of evidence from original wargames, survey experiments, and cases of US and Israeli drone operations, Lin-Greenberg explores how drone operations lower risks of escalation. First, they enable states to gather more or better intelligence that may avert or reduce the chances of high-stakes conflict. Second, drone attacks are less likely to affront a target state's honor and therefore less likely to provoke aggressive responses. Lastly, leaders are less likely to take escalatory actions when drones are attacked than they are with incidents involving inhabited assets. Lin-Greenberg's findings prove conclusively that drones are far less destabilizing than commonly argued. Drones add rungs to the proverbial "escalation ladder" and, in doing so, have brought about a fundamental change—a revolution—in the character of statecraft. With the use of unmanned technologies set to grow in the coming years, The Remote Revolution is a critical examination of their possibilities and politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

It is often assumed that only sovereign states can join the United Nations. But this was not always the case. At the founding of the United Nations, a loophole drafted by British statesmen in its predecessor organisation, the League of Nations, was carried forward, allowing colonies to accede as member-states. Colonies such as India, Ireland, Egypt, and many more were afforded a tokenistic representation at the League in Geneva during the interwar years, decades before their independence. Thomas Gidney’s An International Anomaly unites three geographically distinct case studies to demonstrate the evolution of Britain's policy from a range of different viewpoints, exploring how this policy came into being, and why it was only exploited by the British Empire. He argues that this membership shaped colonial norms around sovereignty and international recognition in the interwar period and to the present day. Thomas Gidney is a postdoctoral researcher in international history and politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Lucas Tse is an Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

An analysis of advances in military technology that illustrates the importance of organizational flexibility in both an attacker’s innovations and an opponent’s adaptations.How important is military innovation in determining outcomes during armed conflict? In Innovation and Adaptation in War, Matthew Tattar questions the conventional wisdom that, to succeed, military organizations must innovate early and often. Because successful methods of warfare are soon widely imitated or countered on the international stage, the advantages of a particular innovation quickly evaporate. Therefore, Tattar argues, large-scale innovations at the cost of organizational flexibility and the ability to adapt to an adversary’s innovations may not be the optimal path—not just because force readiness is vital but also because innovation does not provide as long-lasting and decisive an advantage as may have been previously thought.Although other scholars have analyzed the sources of military innovation, Tattar is the first to focus on the relationship between innovation and specific military outcomes. Looking at several different types of military organizations and many different types of battles, he draws on theoretical works, in-depth historical research, and case studies, and finds that the initial advantages that are generated by innovation disappear far too rapidly in wartime for militaries to depend on them for victory. Furthermore, as Tattar demonstrates, emphasizing innovation in defense planning at the expense of organizational flexibility can have significant negative consequences. The decisive factor in successful adaptation, more often than not, is a well-positioned and flexible organization. Providing both a new framework for studying military innovation and a comprehensive review of the current literature in this field, Innovation and Adaptation in War offers crucial policymaking insights into when and under what circumstances militaries should innovate and adapt. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

From Argentina’s recent vote under the shadow of a threatened $20 billion U.S. aid package to Russia’s covert operations in the 2016 U.S. election, foreign meddling at the ballot box is more common and more dangerous than many citizens realize. In this episode of International Horizons, RBI interim director, Eli Karetny speaks with Dov Levin, Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Hong Kong and author of Meddling in the Ballot Box (Oxford University Press). Drawing on a unique global dataset, Levin explains how often great powers intervene in elections, why most operations are “inside jobs” coordinated with local elites, and why overt interventions frequently work better than covert ones. The conversation explores dirty tricks, founding elections, democratic backsliding, and how new voting technologies could reopen the door to old-fashioned ballot manipulation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Covert action is generally understood as unacknowledged interference by one state in the affairs of another state or non-state actor to affect change. This definition, inspired from the US approach, dominates the debate in intelligence policy and scholarship and provides a prism through which most observers (mis)understand this form of secret statecraft.  Covert Action: National Approaches to Unacknowledged Intervention (Georgetown UP, 2025) moves the intelligence studies and analysis of covert action beyond the Anglosphere. It provides a truly global analysis of covert operations, comparing different states' histories and approaches, acrid five continents. In doing so, it produces a more holistic understanding of the variation in covert action traditions across states and cultures over time. Several key themes emerge from the book. It pays particular attention to the language of covert operations, to the euphemisms used, and to the efforts (where present) to protect decision-makers. Different states, the book show, adopt covert operations for different reasons. Some do not distinguish between domestic and foreign realms. Signalling, strengthening regimes, eliminating real and perceived threats all feature as rationales for covert operations. Similarly, the methods of covert operations vary, from more direct interventions to creating the conditions for others to act. While making clear that all states (democracies and authoritarian regimes) conduct covert operations, the volume highlights differences in the degree of institutionalisation and legalisation of covert operations. It also highlights how different degrees of risk-aversion and the alertness of public opinion can influence policymakers.  The volume brings together an international group of distinguished scholars to examine the history of covert action in twenty countries. Such a breadth and depth of expertise will serve as a foundational study for scholars, students, and policymakers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The way we govern the past to ensure peaceful futures keeps conflict anxieties alive. In pursuit of its own survival, permanence and legitimacy, the project of transitional justice, designed to put the 'Never Again' promise into practice, makes communities that ought to benefit from it anxious about potential repetition of conflict. Governing the Past: 'Never Again' and the Transitional Justice Project (Cambridge UP, 2025)challenges the benevolence of this human rights-led global project. It invites readers to reflect on the incompatibility between transitional justice and the grand goal of ensuring peace, and to imagine alternative and ungovernable futures. Rich in stories from the field, the author draws on personal experiences of conflict and transition in the former Yugoslavia to explore how different elements of transitional justice have changed the structure of this Bosnia and Herzegovina and neighbouring societies over the years. This powerful study is essential reading for students, scholars and practitioners interested in human rights and durable international peace. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Adnan Husain (Queen's, Canada) is joined by Salman Sayyid (Leeds) and Rabab Abdulhadi (San Francisco State) in this episode to discuss the Bandung Conference of 1955 in the year of its seventieth anniversary. This conference brought together leaders of states that had only recently decolonised, and was an important moment of Global South solidarity that would give rise to resistance movements around the world. Their discussion takes a critical look at the history of this conference and its context, and shows how Bandung is still relevant for resistance movements around the world. (First hosted by The Adnan Hussain Show [Aug 24 2025 - Linked here]) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Following the end of the Cold War, the world experienced a remarkable wave of democratization. Over the next two decades, numerous authoritarian regimes transitioned to democracies, and it seemed that authoritarianism as a political model was fading. But as recent events have shown, things have clearly changed.In Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics (Oxford UP, 2025), authors Dr. Alexander Cooley and Dr. Alexander Dukalskis reveal how today's authoritarian states are actively countering liberal ideas and advocacy surrounding human rights and democracy across various global governance domains. The transformed global context has unlocked for authoritarian states the possibility to contend with Western liberal soft power in new, traditionally "non-political" ways, including by plugging or even reversing the very channels of influence that originally spread liberalism. Dr. Cooley and Dr. Dukalskis ultimately advance a theory of authoritarian snapback, the process in which non-democratic states limit the transnational resonance of liberal ideas at home and advance anti-liberal norms and ideas into the global public sphere.Drawing from a range of evidence, including field work interviews and comparative case studies that demonstrate the changing nature of consumer boycotts, a database of authoritarian government administrative actions against foreign journalists, a database of global content-sharing agreement involving Chinese and Russian state media, and a database of transnational higher education partnerships involving authoritarian and democratic countries, this book doesn't just reveal the limits of the liberal influence taken for granted across the world. It offers a novel theory of how authoritarian governments figured out how to exploit and repurpose the same actors, tools, and norms that once exclusively promoted and sustained US-backed liberalism. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

It’s no secret that the Paris Agreement and voluntary efforts to address climate change are failing. Governments have spent three decades crafting international rules to manage the climate crisis yet have made little progress on decarbonization. In Existential Politics: Why Global Climate Institutions Are Failing and How to Fix Them (Princeton UP, 2025), Jessica Green explains why this is unsurprising: governments have misdiagnosed the political problem of climate change, focusing relentlessly on measuring, reporting, and trading emissions. This technical approach of “managing tons” overlooks the ways in which climate change and climate policy will revalue assets, creating winners and losers. Policies such as net zero, carbon pricing, and offsets primarily benefit the losers—owners of fossil assets.Ultimately, Green contends, climate change is a political problem. Climate politics should be understood as existential—creating conflicts that arise when some actors face the prospect of the devaluation or elimination of their assets or competition from the creation of new ones. Fossil asset owners, such as oil and gas companies and electric utilities, stand to lose trillions in the energy transition. Thus, they are fighting to slow decarbonization and preserve the value of their assets. Green asset owners, who will be the basis of the decarbonized economy, are fewer in number and relatively weak politically.Green proposes using international tax, finance, and trade institutions to create new green asset owners and constrain fossil asset owners, reducing their clout. Domestic investments in green assets, facilitated by global trade rules, can build the political power of green asset owners. Our guest is Jessica Green, a Professor in the Department of Political Science and the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto. Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In this episode, Joe Williams speaks to historian Anne Irfan about her new book, A Short History of the Gaza Strip (Simon & Schuster, 2025). Drawing on more than a decade of research, Irfan traces the political, social, and humanitarian history of Gaza from 1948 to the present, situating the territory’s current devastation within a much longer trajectory of displacement, occupation, and international governance. The book examines six key junctures in Gaza’s modern history — from the mass refugee influx of 1948 and the Egyptian administration, through decades of Israeli occupation, the First Intifada, the Oslo process, and the rise of Hamas. Irfan also addresses the contemporary crisis, including the 2023–25 assault and the international legal debates surrounding it. Throughout the conversation, Irfan reflects on the role of historians in documenting ongoing violence, the impact of practically permanent displacement, and the need for historically grounded public understanding. Her work offers a concise but rigorously contextualised account of Gaza, illuminating both the structural forces that have shaped life in the Strip and the human experiences at its centre. Joe WilliamsHistory PhD researcher at the University of Coimbra and translator (website)- Censorship and Sacralisation of Politics in the Portuguese Press during the Spanish Civil War- "Year X of the National Revolution" — Salazarist Palingenetic Myth in the Diário da Manhã Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs