Victor D. Cha, "The Black Box: Demystifying the Study of Korean Unification and North Korea" (Columbia UP, 2024)
North Korea is, to this day, still one of the world’s most mysterious countries. What little we know about daily life in the country comes from defectors or foreigners who’ve spent time there–some of ...
2 Jan 202543min
Taomo Zhou, “Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War” (Cornell UP, 2019)
If tales of China’s radical ‘opening up’ to the world over the last 30 years imply that the country was somehow ‘closed’ before this, then one need only think of Beijing’s dalliances with various pote...
1 Jan 20251h 8min
Enze Han, "The Ripple Effect: China's Complex Presence in Southeast Asia" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Many studies of China's relations with and influence on Southeast Asia tend to focus on how Beijing has used its power asymmetry to achieve regional influence. Yet, scholars and pundits often fail to ...
26 Dec 202427min
Emily Mitchell-Eaton, "New Destinations of Empire: Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States" (U Georgia Press, 2024)
In 1986 the Compact of Free Association marked the formal end of U.S. colonialism in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, while simultaneously re-entrenching imperial power dynamics between the two c...
22 Dec 20241h 11min
Mattias Fibiger, "Suharto's Cold War: Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and the World" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Conventional accounts of the Cold War focus on competition between the United States and Soviet Union as key to shaping world events. In focusing on the agency of Indonesia’s Suharto regime during its...
17 Dec 202451min
Brian Martin, "From Underground Railroad to Rebel Refuge: Canada and the Civil War" (ECW Press, 2022)
Despite all we know about the Civil War, its causes, battles, characters, issues, impacts, and legacy, few books have explored Canada’s role in the bloody conflict that claimed more than 600,000 lives...
16 Dec 202438min
Azad Essa, "Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel" (Pluto Press, 2023)
Under Narendra Modi, India has changed dramatically. As the world attempts to grapple with its trajectory towards authoritarianism and a 'Hindu Rashtra' (Hindu State), little attention has been paid t...
13 Dec 20241h 14min
Tristan A. Volpe, "Leveraging Latency: How the Weak Compel the Strong with Nuclear Technology" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Over the last seven decades, some states successfully leveraged the threat of acquiring atomic weapons to compel concessions from superpowers. For many others, however, this coercive gambit failed to ...
8 Dec 20241h 9min
