New Books in World Affairs

Interviews with Scholars of Global Affairs about their New Books

Society & Culture
History
1601
Gregory Mann, “From Empires to NGOs in the West...
Today we spoke to Gregory Mann about his book From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road to Non-Governmentality (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Gregory Mann investigates how the effectiveness of government institutions declined in the...
53 min
1602
Reina Lewis, “Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Styl...
Fashion is often dismissed as trivial, but Reina Lewis‘s Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures (Duke University Press, 2015) takes both it and what Muslims specifically wear and devotes and 300+ eye-opening pages to it. Defining it as,
62 min
1603
Keren Weitzberg, “We Do Not Have Borders: Great...
Somalis have lived in Kenya for generations, in many cases since long before the founding of the country. Yet, Kenyan officials and citizens often perceive them as a dangerous and alien presence, with attendant civil and human rights abuses.
38 min
1604
Andrew Copson, “Secularism: Politics, Religion,...
Secularism is an increasingly hot topic in public, political, and religious debate across the globe. It is embodied in the conflict between secular republics—from the US to India—and the challenges they face from resurgent religious identity politics; ...
47 min
1605
Edin Hajdarpasic, “Whose Bosnia? Nationalism an...
It seemed that everyone wanted Bosnia in the late nineteenth century: Serbian and Croatian nationalists; Ottoman, Habsburg, Muslim and Yugoslav movements. At the same time, they all felt frustration with the Bosnian peasants for not living up to their ...
67 min
1606
Johan Swinnen and Devin Briski, “Beeronomics: H...
Beer has been a part of human civilization dating back to its beginnings. In summarizing the role it has played over the millennia, Johan Swinnen and Devin Briski’s book Beeronomics: How Beer Explains the World (Oxford University Press,
34 min
1607
Ricardo D. Salvatore, “Disciplinary Conquest: U...
Ricardo D. Salvatore‘s new book, Disciplinary Conquest: U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900-1945 (Duke University Press, 2016) offers an alternative narrative on the origins of Latin American Studies in the United States.
2 min
1608
Eric J. Pido, “Migrant Returns: Manila, Develop...
The government of the Philippines has for decades encouraged its citizens to seek work abroad and send money back to the country in remittances. But in recent years it has increasingly sought to entice Filipinos who have settled abroad to come home,
36 min
1609
Daromir Rudnyckyj and Filippo Osella, eds., “Re...
Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, there has been a widespread affirmation of economic ideologies that conceive the market as an autonomous sphere of human practice. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis,
2 min
1610
Ryan D. Enos, “The Space Between Us: Social Geo...
Ryan Enos is the author of The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Enos is associate professor of government at Harvard University. Scholars have long wrestled with the impact of segregation on politics.
23 min
1611
Mya Guranieri Jaradat, “The Unchosen: The Lives...
In The Unchosen: The Lives of Israel’s New Others (University of Chicago/Pluto Press, 2017), Mya Guarnieri-Jaradat offers her readers an intimate, often devastatingly gloomy portrait of the lives of Southeast Asian migrant workers and African asylum se...
24 min
1612
Walter Scheidel, “The Great Leveler: Violence a...
In 2017 half of the world’s wealth belongs to the top 1% of the population. In his new book, The Great Leveler Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2017),
24 min
1613
Ronnie Perelis, “Narratives from the Sephardic ...
In Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic: Blood and Faith (Indiana University Press, 2016), Ronnie Perelis, Chief Rabbi Dr. Isaac Abraham and Jelena (Rachel) Alcalay Chair and Associate Professor of Sephardic Studies at the Bernard Revel Graduate Scho...
52 min
1614
Hugh Urban, “Zorba the Buddha: Sex, Spiritualit...
Many contemporary spiritual movements are characterized by denial of material pleasures, subjugation of the self, and focus on transcendence. A spiritual program that cultivates embodied satisfaction is often seen as inauthentic and fraudulent.
42 min
1615
Michael Wintroub, “The Voyage of Thought: Navig...
If you are an enthusiast of The Cheese and the Worms (1976), The Great Cat Massacre (1984), or The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), then Michael Wintroub‘s The Voyage of Thought: Navigating Knowledge Across the Sixteenth-Century World (Cambridge Univers...
56 min
1616
Cyrus Schayegh, “The Middle East and the Making...
The question of how to write the history of the modern Middle East is a much contested one. Do we write national histories, focused on modern-nation states? Do we treat the Middle East as an integrated unit? What even constitutes the Middle East?
74 min
1617
Jane McCabe, “Race, Tea and Colonial Resettleme...
In her new book, Race, Tea and Colonial Resettlement: Imperial Families, Interrupted (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Jane McCabe, Lecturer in the Department of History and Art History at the University of Otago, explores the tale of the “Kalimpong Kids,
16 min
1618
Alessandro Duranti, “The Anthropology of Intent...
Alessandro Duranti is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, where he served as Dean of Social Sciences from 2009-2016. In his book The Anthropology of Intentions: Language in a World of Others (Cambridge University Press, 2015),
71 min
1619
Christopher R. Cotter and David G. Robertson, e...
When undergraduate students look through a course catalog and see the title World Religions they probably have some idea what the course will be about. But why is that? Why do World Religions seem so self-evident in this historical moment?
60 min
1620
Asher Orkaby, “Beyond the Arab Cold War: The In...
The civil war in Yemen today harkens back to a similar conflict half a century ago, when the overthrow of the ruling imam, Muhammad al-Badr, in 1962 sparked a conflict that dragged on for the rest of the decade.
57 min
1621
Jocelyn Olcott, “International Women’s Year: Th...
Jocelyn Olcott is an associate professor of History and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Her book International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-raising Event in History (Oxford University Press,
59 min
1622
Ernesto Bassi, “An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Ge...
Where is the Caribbean? In An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World (Duke University Press, 2017) Ernesto Bassi makes the case for a transimperial space shaped by ships’ journeys and sailors’ imag...
44 min
1623
Michael Allan, “In the Shadow of World Literatu...
Michael Allan‘s In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2016) challenges traditional perceptions of world literature: he argues that the disciplinary framework of world literature levels the di...
30 min
1624
Carla Pestana, “The English Conquest of Jamaica...
Carla Pestana’s new book The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Harvard University Press, 2017) is a rousing look at a transformative moment in Caribbean history. Pestana details the various political, economic,
61 min
1625
Alejandra Mancilla, “The Right of Necessity: Mo...
We are accustomed to the thought that individuals facing dire circumstances may rightfully take use of others’ property in order to save their own lives. For example, one thinks it obvious that in order to avoid freezing to death,
64 min