New Books in World Affairs
Interviews with Scholars of Global Affairs about their New Books
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- Update frequency
- every day
- Average duration
- 55 minutes
- Episodes
- 1951
- Years Active
- 2008 - 2025
Jim Storr, "War and Warfare in the Twentieth Century" (Howgate Publishing, 2025)
What can we learn from war, and warfare, in the twentieth century? What observations and deductions can we make, and what lessons can we draw? ‘War and Warfare in the Twentieth Century’ examines both…
00:55:40 |
Tue 25 Mar 2025
Adam K. Webb, "The World's Constitution: Spheres of Liberty in the Future Global Order" (Routledge, 2025)
“One thing I would note about the Trumpian populists and their counterparts elsewhere in the West today is that they're a very peculiarly tribal kind of post conservative right. It's almost a kind of…
01:51:40 |
Sun 23 Mar 2025
Andrew Clapham, "War" (Oxford UP, 2021)
This book poses the question: How relevant is the concept of war today? Professor Andrew Clapham of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva examines how notions abou…
01:00:06 |
Sat 22 Mar 2025
Vuk Vuksanovic, "Serbia’s Balancing Act: Between Russia and the West" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Even before its rebirth as a nation in the 1990s, Serbia had acquired a reputation abroad as Russia’s stalwart Slavic ally in the Western Balkans.
Yet, as Vuk Vuksanović argues in Serbia’s Balancing …
00:41:58 |
Fri 21 Mar 2025
Paul Seabright, "The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People" (Princeton UP, 2024)
Religion in the twenty-first century is alive and well across the world, despite its apparent decline in North America and parts of Europe. Vigorous competition between and within religious movements…
01:10:36 |
Thu 20 Mar 2025
Rahul Rao, "The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire" (Pluto Press, 2025)
From Cape Town to Bristol and Richmond, statues have become sites of resistance and contestation of our imperial past and postcolonial present. The Psychic Lives of Statues by Rahul Rao offers an ins…
00:57:48 |
Wed 19 Mar 2025
Daniela Richterova, "Watching the Jackals: Prague's Covert Liaisons with Cold War Terrorists and Revolutionaries" (Georgetown UP, 2025)
The untold history of Czechoslovakia's complex relations with Middle Eastern terrorists and revolutionaries during the closing decades of the Cold War
In the 1970s and 1980s, Prague became a favorite…
01:30:45 |
Tue 18 Mar 2025
Luca Trenta, "The President's Kill List: Assassination and Us Foreign Policy Since 1945" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
Investigative reporter Bob Woodward once noted that assassination was the Scarlett letter of American politics because targeted killings challenge the image of the United States as a liberal democrac…
01:00:17 |
Mon 17 Mar 2025
Tycho van der Hoog, "Comrades Beyond the Cold War: North Korea and the Liberation of Southern Africa" (Hurst, 2025)
North Korea was an important player in the decolonisation of Africa. Freedom fighters across the continent received vital assistance from Pyongyang, and almost all southern African independence leade…
00:41:30 |
Sun 16 Mar 2025
Fractured Alliances: Trump, Ukraine, and Europe's Security Dilemma
In this episode, RBI director John Torpey speaks with Estonian parliamentarian and defense expert Kalev Stoicescu about the recent tensions between the United States and Ukraine following a contentio…
00:31:14 |
Sat 15 Mar 2025
Matthew Fuhrmann, "Influence without Arms: The New Logic of Nuclear Deterrence" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
How does nuclear technology influence international relations? While many books focus on countries armed with nuclear weapons, this volume puts the spotlight on those who have the technology to build…
00:57:10 |
Wed 12 Mar 2025
Cotton, Central Asia and the New Great Game
On this episode, rural sociologist Dr. Irna Hofman explores how Tajikistan’s cotton fields illuminate shifting power dynamics in Central Asia, historically and in the present. She discusses how the S…
00:44:02 |
Mon 10 Mar 2025
Kimberly Clausing, "Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital" (Harvard UP, 2019)
Critics on the Left have long attacked open markets and free trade agreements for exploiting the poor and undermining labor, while those on the Right complain that they unjustly penalize workers back…
00:59:54 |
Sat 08 Mar 2025
Margaret Peacock, "Frequencies of Deceit: How Global Propaganda Wars Shaped the Middle East" (U California Press, 2025)
On June 8, 1967, Egypt's most famous radio broadcaster, Ahmed Said, reported that Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian forces had defeated the Israeli army in the Sinai, had hobbled their British and US a…
01:04:03 |
Sat 08 Mar 2025
Maria Kaika and Luca Ruggiero, "Class Meets Land: The Embodied History of Land Financialization" (U California Press, 2024)
Class Meets Land: The Embodied History of Land Financialization (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Maria Kaika & Dr. Luca Ruggiero reveals something seemingly counterintuitive: that ninete…
01:00:07 |
Thu 06 Mar 2025
John Coakley ed et al., "The Problem of Piracy in the Early Modern World: Maritime Predation, Empire, and the Construction of Authority at Sea" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)
In the early modern period, both legal and illegal maritime predation was a common occurrence, but the expansion of European maritime empires exacerbated existing and created new problems of piracy a…
00:46:49 |
Tue 04 Mar 2025
Noam Leshem, "Edges of Care: Living and Dying in No Man's Land" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
“No man’s land” invokes stretches of barren landscape, twisted barbed wire, desolation, and the devastation of war. But this is not always the reality. According to Noam Leshem in Edges of Care: Livi…
01:12:06 |
Sat 01 Mar 2025
Kishore Mahbubani, "Living the Asian Century: An Undiplomatic Memoir" (Public Affairs, 2024)
Kishore Mahbubani, longtime Singaporean diplomat and academic, opens his new memoir with a provocative line: “Blame it on the damn British.” Kishore, who later served as Singapore’s ambassador to the…
00:41:27 |
Thu 27 Feb 2025
Doina Anca Cretu, "Foreign Aid and State Building in Interwar Romania" (Stanford UP, 2025)
The decades following World War I were a period of political, social, and economic transformation for Central and Eastern Europe. Foreign Aid and State Building in Interwar Romania (Stanford UP, 2025…
00:58:17 |
Wed 26 Feb 2025
Philip A. Martin, "Strong Commanders, Weak States: How Rebel Governance Shapes Military Integration after Civil War" (Cornell UP, 2025)
In Strong Commanders, Weak States: How Rebel Governance Shapes Military Integration after Civil War (Cornell University Press, 2025), Dr. Philip A. Martin investigates a fundamental political challen…
01:03:01 |
Wed 26 Feb 2025
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