Top 5 books: May 2024
All issues of International Affairs feature a comprehensive book review section, which surveys the latest writing on international politics. In this latest Top 5 Books series, Book Reviews Editor Mariana Vieira presents her choices from the May 2024 issue. This selection includes worthy titles published in the last year that you might have missed or might still be hesitating to read, spotlighting indictments of international governance and women’s resilience in politics and international affairs.
1) Expert ignorance
Written by Deval Desai. Published in Cambridge by Cambridge University Press.
Deval Desai has written a refreshing and truly interdisciplinary book that showcases how ‘rule of law experts’ leverage their self-proclaimed ignorance when advising global South countries on what ‘good’ legal systems should look like. Expert ignorance explores how these actors simultaneously deny and wield their expertise in a way that becomes constitutive of the recommended reforms. To illustrate his argument, Desai draws on his experiences as a reformer, including in projects in Africa and workshops in New York. The author persuasively urges readers to take these narratives of ignorance and their performativity seriously. This open access book will be of interest to anyone working in governance studies and international law.
Read the full review here.
2) Merze Tate
Written by Barbara D. Savage. Published in London and New Haven, CT, by Yale University Press.
Merze Tate lived a long, awe-inspiring and consequential life. In the book, Barbara D. Savage takes readers on a journey from Tate’s childhood in rural Michigan, to her adventures as a young adult with impressive skills of persuasion, which she used to convince Oxford University to take her on as an undergraduate student. In the largely white and male-dominated field of twentieth-century International Relations, Tate became accustomed to the label of ‘first Black woman’ with her stellar academic achievements and prestigious university appointments. The author expertly documents Tate’s travels, her university posts and her passion for uncovering the links between race and technologies of modern imperialism, without losing sight of how Tate herself escaped some of the race and gender barriers of her time.
Read the full review here.
3) A thousand cuts
Written by Alexandros Kentikelenis and Thomas Stubbs. Published in Oxford by Oxford University Press.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is turning 80 this year, making this book a timely and critical appraisal of the conditionality practices that the IMF has attached to its lending policies. A thousand cuts explores the impacts of the IMF’s continuous push for austerity, deploying an impressive dataset with thousands of loan-related documents and therefore offering robust evidence for its argument. Looking at the past 40 years, Alexandros Kentikelenis and Thomas Stubbs aptly demonstrate that the IMF’s conditionality has affected the provision of social services and led to a decline in health standards in credit-seeking countries. So, what next? Find out below what our reviewer thinks of the book’s recommendations.
Read the full review here.
4) Epidemic Orientalism
Written by Alexandre I. R. White. Published in Stanford, CA by Stanford University Press.
From law to political economy, this entry turns to global health practices. In a nod to Edward Said, Epidemic Orientalism carries out a discursive investigation of the colonial legacies within modern international disease control. Alexandre I. R. White focuses on the International Sanitary Conferences of the nineteenth century and reveals that the language and mindset of empires, regarding disease-free versus disease-ridden places, have not changed in the context of the World Health Organization’s International Health Regulations. As the book demonstrates with a plethora of examples, the primary objective of infectious disease control remains the same: to keep the civilized world safe from the ‘other’. The book is an important call to recognize and unlearn old governance habits.
Read the full review here.
5) White torture
Written by Narges Mohammadi. Published in London by Oneworld Publications.
This 2023 Nobel Peace prize winner needs little introduction — only more attention! Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi is currently incarcerated, having been sentenced to spend 31 years in prison. In White torture, Mohammadi shares her experiences of confinement, alongside interviews that she conducted with 12 other Iranian female activists who have been unjustly imprisoned and tortured. Collating and sharing the haunting experiences of life in Iranian prisons, Mohammadi documents how women are repressed, deprived of basic necessities and subject to additional threats to their families. Their perseverance and bravery culminate in a gripping, grim, yet inspiring tale of despair and remarkable agency.
Read the full review here.
Mariana Vieira is the Book Reviews Editor of International Affairs.
Find the latest book reviews section in our May 2024 issue here.
For more reading suggestions, check out the IA Bookshelf series.
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