New Books in World Affairs
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New Books in World Affairs
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000...
Recent Episodes
1850 episodes
Laurie Parsons, "Carbon Colonialism: How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown" (Manchester UP, 2023)
Climate change is devastating the planet, and globalisation is hiding it. Laurie Parsons's book Carbon Colonialism: How Rich Countries Export Climate...
Ines Prodöhl, "Globalizing the Soybean: Fat, Feed, and Sometimes Food, c. 1900–1950" (Routledge, 2023)
Ines Prodöhl’s Globalizing the Soybean: Fat, Feed, and Sometimes Food, c. 1900-1950 (Routledge, 2023) is a history of how, why, and where the soybean...
Gonzalo Lizarralde, "Unnatural Disasters: Why Most Responses to Risk and Climate Change Fail But Some Succeed" (Columbia UP, 2021)
Unnatural Disasters: Why Most Responses to Risk and Climate Change Fail But Some Succeed (Columbia UP, 2021) offers a new perspective on our most pres...
Kerry Gottlich, "From Frontiers to Borders: How Colonial Technicians Created Modern Territoriality" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
How did modern territoriality emerge and what are its consequences? From Frontiers to Borders: How Colonial Technicians Created Modern Territoriality ...
Bruno J. Strasser and Thomas Schlich, "The Mask: A History of Breathing Bad Air" (Yale UP, 2025)
The Mask: A History of Breathing Bad Air (Yale UP, 2025) by Dr. Bruno J. Strasser and Dr. Thomas Schlich presents a history of masks protecting agains...
Harold James, "Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization" (Yale UP, 2023)
In Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization (Yale UP, 2023), distinguished economic historian Harold James offers a fresh perspect...
Andrew I. Port, "Never Again: Germans and Genocide After the Holocaust" (Harvard UP, 2023)
As reports of mass killings in Bosnia spread in the middle of 1995, Germans faced a dilemma. Should the Federal Republic deploy its military to the Ba...
Amitav Acharya, "The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West" (Hachette UK, 2025)
Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the West has been in crisis. Social unrest, political polarization, and the rise of other great powers—esp...
Sarah Kunz, "Expatriate: Following a Migration Category" (Manchester UP, 2023)
Who are expatriates? How do they differ from other migrants? And why should we care about such distinctions? Expatriate: Following a Migration Categor...
Dylan Loh, "China's Rising Foreign Ministry: Practices and Representations of Assertive Diplomacy" (Stanford UP, 2025)
How has China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs transformed itself into one of the most assertive diplomatic actors on the global stage? What explains the...
Peter Frankopan, "The Earth Transformed: An Untold History" (Knopf, 2023)
The Earth Transformed. An Untold History (Knopf, 2023) is a captivating and informative book that reveals how climate change has been a driving force...
Aaron Bateman. "Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative" (MIT Press, 2024)
A new and provocative take on the formerly classified history of accelerating superpower military competition in space in the late Cold War and beyond...
Kerry Brown, "The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power" (Yale UP, 2024)
In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I tried to send several letters to her Chinese counterpart, the Wan Li Emperor. The letters tried to ask the...
Sven Beckert, "Capitalism: A Global History" (Allen Lane, 2025)
No other phenomenon has shaped human history as decisively as capitalism. It structures how we live and work, how we think about ourselves and others,...
Samuel Helfont, "The Iraq Wars: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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,...
Emanuel Deutschmann, "Mapping the Transnational World: How We Move and Communicate Across Borders, and Why It Matters" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Increasingly, people travel and communicate across borders. Yet, we still know little about the overall structure of this transnational world. Is it r...
Caitlin Schroering, "Global Solidarities Against Water Grabbing: Without Water, We Have Nothing" (Manchester UP, 2024)
Conflicts over water are human-caused events with socio-political and economic causes. From Brazil's Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (MAB) to en...
Joanna Siekiera, "International Law and Security in Indo-Pacific: Strategic Design for the Region" (Routledge, 2025)
International Law and Security in Indo-Pacific: Strategic Design for the Region (Routledge, 2025) edited by Dr. Joanna Siekiera uses an interdisciplin...
Kwame Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism’s High Tide: A Conversation with Howard W. French
The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (Liveright, 2025), the second work in a trilogy from best-selling...
Erik Lin-Greenberg, "The Remote Revolution: Drones and Modern Statecraft" (Cornell UP, 2025)
In The Remote Revolution: Drones and Modern Statecraft (Cornell UP, 2025), Erik Lin-Greenberg shows that drones are rewriting the rules of internatio...
Tim Bouverie, "Allies at War: How the Struggles Between the Allied Powers Shaped the War and the World" (Crown, 2025)
Historian Tim Bouverie, the renowned author of the very well received Appeasement, gives us another brilliant history Allies at War: How the Struggle...
Thomas Gidney, "An International Anomaly: Colonial Accession to the League of Nations" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
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...
Matthew A. Tattar, "Innovation and Adaptation in War" (MIT Press, 2025)
An analysis of advances in military technology that illustrates the importance of organizational flexibility in both an attacker’s innovations and an...
Inside Jobs: How Great Powers Meddle in Other Countries’ Elections
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, fo...
Inside Jobs: How Great Powers Meddle in Other Countries’ Elections
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, fo...
Magda Long et. al., "Covert Action: National Approaches to Unacknowledged Intervention (Georgetown UP, 2025)
Covert action is generally understood as unacknowledged interference by one state in the affairs of another state or non-state actor to affect change....
Radio ReOrient 13.8: Anticolonial Legacies of Bandung, with Adnan Husain, Rabab Abdulhadi, and Salman Sayyid
Adnan Husain (Queen's, Canada) is joined by Salman Sayyid (Leeds) and Rabab Abdulhadi (San Francisco State) in this episode to discuss the Bandung Con...
Maja Davidović, "Governing the Past: 'Never Again' and the Transitional Justice Project" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
The way we govern the past to ensure peaceful futures keeps conflict anxieties alive. In pursuit of its own survival, permanence and legitimacy, the p...
Alexander Cooley and Alexander Dukalskis, "Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Following the end of the Cold War, the world experienced a remarkable wave of democratization. Over the next two decades, numerous authoritarian regim...
Anne Irfan, "A Short History of the Gaza Strip" (Simon & Schuster, 2025)
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 o...
Jessica F. Green, "Existential Politics: Why Global Climate Institutions Are Failing and How to Fix Them" (Princeton UP, 2025)
It’s no secret that the Paris Agreement and voluntary efforts to address climate change are failing. Governments have spent three decades crafting int...
What is Happening in the Mediterranean Right Now – And Why You Should Care
Since 2014 more than 32,000 people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe. As the EU and its member states have been increasingly...
Can America Still Lead? Foreign Policy in an Age of Division with Joel Rubin
What happens when America loses its foreign-policy playbook? RBI acting director Eli Karetny talks with veteran diplomat and policy strategist Joel Ru...
Can Feminism be African?: A Conversation with Minna Salami
Transcript of the interview
Minna Salami is a writer, social critic, and thought leader on feminism, knowledge production, and the aesthe...
Carl Benedikt Frey, "How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations" (Princeton UP, 2025)
In How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (Princeton University Press, 2025), Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the convention...
Philip Gamaghelyan, "Conflict Resolution Beyond the International Relations Paradigm: Evolving Designs as a Transformative Practice in Nagorno-Karabakh and Syria" (Ibidem Press, 2017)
Conflict Resolution Beyond the International Relations Paradigm: Evolving Designs as a Transformative Practice in Nagorno-Karabakh and Syria (Ibidem P...
Lisa Vanhala, "Governing the End: The Making of Climate Change Loss and Damage" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
A searing account of how the international community is trying—and failing—to address the worst effects of climate change and the differential burdens...
Phillips Payson O'Brien, "War and Power: Who Wins Wars--And Why" (PublicAffairs, 2025)
A bold, revisionist study of modern warfare, showing that military victory is rooted not in large armies and decisive battles, but in the full spectru...
Wolfgang Wagner, "The Democratic Politics of Military Interventions" (Oxford UP, 2020)
According to a widely shared notion, foreign affairs are exempted from democratic politics, i.e. party-political divisions are overcome-and should be...
E. Alaverdov and M. W. Bari, "Cultural Heritage Protection and Restoration in Conflict and Post-Conflict Zones" (IGI Global, 2025)
The protection and restoration of cultural heritage is essential, especially in conflict and post-conflict zones. Armed conflicts frequently result in...