New Books

Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America

By Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey

African American history from 1900 to 2000 cannot be told without accounting for the significant influence of Pan-African thought, just as the story of twentieth-century US foreign policy cannot be told without accounting for fears of an African World. In the early 1900s, Marcus Garvey and his followers perceived the North American mainland, particularly Canada following US authorities' deportation of Garvey to Jamaica, as a forward-operating base from which to liberate the Black masses from colonialism. After World War II, Vietnam War resisters, Black Panthers, and Caribbean students joined the throngs of cross-border migrants to denounce militarism, imperialism, and capitalism. In time, as urban uprisings proliferated in northern US cities, the prospect of coalitions among the Black Power, Red Power, and Quebecois Power movements inspired US and Canadian intelligence services to collaborate, infiltrate, and sabotage Black organizations across North America. Assassinations of "Black messiahs" further radicalized revolutionaries, rekindling the dream for an African World from Washington, DC, to Toronto to San Francisco to Antigua to Grenada and back to Africa. Alarmed, Washington's national security elites invoked the Cold War as the reason to counter the triangulation of Black Power in the Atlantic World, funneling arms clandestinely from the United States and Canada to the Caribbean and then to its proxies in southern Africa. (Read more at the University of North Carolina Press)

Former William Lyon Mackenzie King Postdoctoral Fellow Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey is an assistant professor of history and William Dawson Chair at McGill University. 

Making Bureaucracy Work: Norms, Education and Public Service Delivery in Rural India

By Akshay Mangla

What makes bureaucracy work for the least advantaged? Across the world, countries have adopted policies for universal primary education. Yet, policy implementation is uneven and not well understood. Making Bureaucracy Work investigates when and how public agencies deliver primary education across rural India. Through a multi-level comparative analysis and more than two years of ethnographic field research, Mangla opens the 'black box' of Indian bureaucracy to demonstrate how differences in bureaucratic norms—informal rules that guide public officials and their everyday relations with citizens—generate divergent implementation patterns and outcomes. While some public agencies operate in a legalistic manner and promote compliance with policy rules, others engage in deliberation and encourage flexible problem-solving with local communities, thereby enhancing the quality of education services. This book reveals the complex ways bureaucratic norms interact with socioeconomic inequalities on the ground, illuminating the possibilities and obstacles for bureaucracy to promote inclusive development. (Read more at Cambridge University Press) 

Former Faculty Associate Akshay Mangla is an associate professor in international business at the University of Oxford.

Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State

By Anna M. Grzymała-Busse

Sacred Foundations argues that the medieval church was a fundamental force in European state formation. Existing accounts focus on early modern warfare or contracts between the rulers and the ruled. In contrast, this major study shows that the Catholic Church both competed with medieval monarchs and provided critical templates for governing institutions, the rule of law, and parliaments.

The Catholic Church was the most powerful, wealthiest, and best-organized political actor in the Middle Ages. Starting in the eleventh century, the papacy fought for the autonomy of the church, challenging European rulers and then claiming authority over people, territory, and monarchs alike. Anna Grzymała-Busse demonstrates how the church shaped distinct aspects of the European state. Conflicts with the papacy fragmented territorial authority in Europe for centuries to come, propagating urban autonomy and ideas of sovereignty. Thanks to its organizational advantages and human capital, the church also developed the institutional precedents adopted by rulers across Europe—from chanceries and taxation to courts and councils. Church innovations made possible both the rule of law and parliamentary representation. (Read more at Princeton University Press)

Advisory Committee member Anna M. Grzymała-Busse is the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies at Stanford University. 

State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya

By Egor Lazarev

State-Building as Lawfare explores the use of state and non-state legal systems by both politicians and ordinary people in postwar Chechnya. The book addresses two interrelated puzzles: why do local rulers tolerate and even promote non-state legal systems at the expense of state law, and why do some members of repressed ethnic minorities choose to resolve their everyday disputes using state legal systems instead of non-state alternatives? The book documents how the rulers of Chechnya promote and reinvent customary law and Sharia in order to borrow legitimacy from tradition and religion, increase autonomy from the metropole, and accommodate communal authorities and former rebels. At the same time, the book shows how prolonged armed conflict disrupted the traditional social hierarchies and pushed some Chechen women to use state law, spurring state formation from below. (Read more at Cambridge University Press)

Academy Scholar Egor Lazarev is an assistant professor of political science at Yale University.

Walking Among Pharaohs: George Reisner and the Dawn of Modern Egyptology

By Peter Der Manuelian

Pyramids with hidden burial chambers. Colossal royal statues and minuscule gold jewelry. Decorated tomb chapels, temples, settlements, fortresses, ceramics, furniture, stone vessels, and hieroglyphic inscriptions everywhere. This is the legacy of forty-three years of breathtakingly successful excavations at twenty-three different archaeological sites in Egypt and Sudan (ancient Nubia). George Reisner (1867–1942) discovered all this and more during a remarkable career that revolutionized archaeological method in both the Old World and the New. Leading the Harvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition, Reisner put American Egyptology on the world stage. His uniquely American success story unfolded despite British control of Egyptian politics, French control of Egyptian antiquities, and an Egypt yearning for independence, all while his Egyptian teams achieved the fieldwork results and mastered the arts of recording and documentation. (Read more at Oxford University Press)

Faculty Associate Peter Der Manuelian is the Barbara Bell Professor of Egyptology at Harvard University.

Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War

By Jayita Sarkar

India's nuclear program is often misunderstood as an inward-looking endeavor of secretive technocrats. In Ploughshares and Swords, Jayita Sarkar challenges this received wisdom, narrating a global story of India's nuclear program during its first forty years. The book foregrounds the program's civilian and military features by probing its close relationship with the space program. Through nuclear and space technologies, India's leaders served the technopolitical aims of economic modernity and the geopolitical goals of deterring adversaries.

The politically savvy, transnationally-connected scientists and engineers who steered the program obtained technologies, materials, and information through a variety of state and nonstate actors from Europe and North America, including both superpowers. They thus maneuvered around Cold War politics and the chokepoints of the nonproliferation regime. Hyperdiversification increased choices for the leaders of the nuclear program but reduced democratic accountability at home. The nuclear program became a consensus-enforcing device in the name of the nation.

Ploughshares and Swords is a provocative new history with global implications. It shows how geopolitical and technopolitical visions influence decisions about the nation after decolonization. (Read more at De Gruyter)

Former Visiting Scholar Jayita Sarkar is an assistant professor of international relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University.

The 1947 Partition of British India: Forced Migration and Its Reverberations

Edited by Jennifer Leaning and Shubhangi Bhadada

The 1947 Partition of British India remains the largest instance of forced migration in the recorded human history. Despite the passage of time, it is still widely seen as a process of singular distress and sorrow. Yet, for those in the subcontinent, the Partition also offers a process of self-exploration for subsequent generations. This book is the first collection of chapters related to the Partition studies wherein experts of various disciplines from the three major modern nation-states affected by this cataclysm—Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan—have closely collaborated to develop a nuanced assessment of the Partition as active in the present. The book casts a somber yet uplifting light on the enormous challenges the Partition imposed on societies struggling to emerge from generations of colonial rule into a post-war world depleted of resources and a future of uncertain prospects. (Read more at SAGE Spectrum)

Faculty Associate Jennifer Leaning is a senior research fellow at the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Soft Power and the Future of US Foreign Policy

Edited by Hendrik W. Ohnesorge

This volume explores the role of soft power in US foreign policy past, present and future. It addresses vital issue areas—including terrorism threats, foreign economic policy and cultural diplomacy—as well as crucial bilateral relations—including Sino-American, Russian-American and transatlantic. In so doing, it offers an assessment of Joe Biden's first year in office as well as future perspectives and recommendations regarding the role of soft power in US foreign policy. The book is an essential and unique resource for understanding how soft power informs US foreign policy and diplomatic practice today and how it will continue to do so in the years to come. (Read more at Manchester University Press)

Weatherhead Scholars Program Associate Hendrik W. Ohnesorge is the managing director at the Center for Global Studies, University of Bonn.

Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life

By Asad L. Asad

Asad L. Asad brings together a wealth of research, from intimate interviews and detailed surveys with Latino immigrants and their families to up-close observations of immigration officials, to offer rare perspective on the surveillance that undocumented immigrants encounter daily. He describes how and why these immigrants engage with various institutions—for example, by registering with the IRS or enrolling their kids in public health insurance programs—that the government can use to monitor them. This institutional surveillance feels both necessary and coercive, with undocumented immigrants worrying that evasion will give the government cause to deport them. Even so, they hope their record of engagement will one day help them prove to immigration officials that they deserve societal membership. Asad uncovers how these efforts do not always meet immigration officials’ high expectations, and how surveillance is as much about the threat of exclusion as the promise of inclusion. (Read more at Princeton University Press)

Former Graduate Student Associate Asad L. Asad is an assistant professor of sociology at Stanford University.