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Eyck Freymann, "One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World" (Harvard UP, 2020) Aug 25, 2024

Show notes

China’s One Belt One Road policy, or OBOR, represents the largest infrastructure program in history. Yet little is known about it with any certainty. How can something so large be so bewildering?

In One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World(Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2020), Eyck Freymann, a DPhil Candidate in China Studies at the University of Oxford, explores the nature, function, and purposes of OBOR. Drawing on primary documents in five languages, interviews with senior officials, and on-the-ground case studies in Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Greece, Freymann sifts through the purposeful ambiguity of the Chinese Communist Party and unravels a series of popular myths about OBOR.

He finds that OBOR is not controlled by a monolithic state apparatus; that recipient nations do not consider OBOR a debt trap; and that appeal of OBOR is growing, not shrinking.

Ultimately, Freymann argues that the infrastructure projects are a sideshow to something else: Xi Jinping’s project to restore China’s greatness in world affairs and to solidify his place at the helm of the new Chinese empire.

John Sakellariadis is a 2020-2021 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a Master’s degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University.

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Robert McCorquodale, "Business and Human Rights" (Oxford UP, 2024) Aug 22, 2024

Show notes

Business and Human Rights Law is a rapidly growing area of law, which has dramatically transformed many parts of international law. In this new volume in the Elements series, Robert McCorquodale explores how the responsibility for human rights abuses has transitioned from a purely state obligation to also being the responsibility of businesses. Business responsibility for human rights impacts have become subject both to legislation and to court decisions whenever their activities lead to human rights abuses anywhere in the world.

Business and Human Rights (Oxford UP, 2024) shows the importance of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in these developments, and examines their influence on international, regional, and national law. It also analyses the changes on state obligations to protect human rights, on the corporate responsibility for human rights abuses, and on effective access to remedies for those adversely affected by business activities. Each of these shifts has consequences on core tenets of international law, such as sovereignty and jurisdiction, and has implications for crafting new international law in areas such as climate change and technology.

Robert is a member of the United Nations Working Group on Business and Human Rights, and brings his decades of experience in scholarship and legal practice in business and human rights law, as well as his extensive engagement with businesses, governments, civil society, and international organisations, to bear on his understanding and analysis of this increasingly important field.

Alex Batesmith is a Lecturer in Legal Profession in the School of Law at the University of Leeds, and a former barrister and UN war crimes prosecutor, with teaching and research interests in international criminal law, cause lawyering and the legal profession, and law and emotion. His University of Leeds profile page can be found here. Twitter: @batesmith. LinkedIn

His recent publications include:

“Cambodia and the progressivist ‘imaginary’: The limitations of international(ised) criminal tribunals as mechanisms for implementing human rights” in Louisa Ashley and Nicolette Butler (eds), The Incoherence of Human Rights in International Law: Absence, Emergence and Limitations (Routledge, 2024 ISBN13: 978-1-032638-03-4)
“‘Poetic Justice Products’: International Justice, Victim Counter-Aesthetics, and the Spectre of the Show Trial” in Christine Schwöbel-Patel and Rob Knox (eds) Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice (Counterpress, 2024 ISBN 978-1-910761-17-5)
"Lawyers who want to make the world a better place – Scheingold and Sarat’s Something to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyering" in D. Newman (ed.) Leading Works on the Legal Profession (Routledge, July 2023), ISBN 978-1-032182-80-3)
“International Prosecutors as Cause Lawyers" (2021) Journal of International Criminal Justice 19(4) 803-830 (ISSN 1478-1387)

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Gregory Makoff, "Default: The Landmark Court Battle over Argentina's $100 Billion Debt Restructuring" (Georgetown UP, 2024) Aug 20, 2024

Show notes

The dramatic inside story of the most important case in the history of sovereign debt law Unlike individuals or corporations that become insolvent, nations do not have access to bankruptcy protection from their creditors. When a country defaults on its debt, the international financial system is ill equipped to manage the crisis. Decisions by key individuals—from national leaders to those at the International Monetary Fund, from holdout creditors to judges—determine the fate of an entire national economy. A prime example is Argentina’s 2001 default on $100 billion in bonds, which stands out for its messy outcomes and outsized impact on sovereign debt markets, sovereign debt law, and IMF policy.

Default: The Landmark Court Battle over Argentina's $100 Billion Debt Restructuring(Georgetown UP, 2024) is the riveting story of Argentina’s sovereign debt drama, which reveals the obscure inner workings of sovereign debt restructuring. This detailed case study describes the intense fight over the role of the IMF in Argentina’s 2005 debt restructuring and the ensuing bitter decade of litigation with holdout creditors, demonstrating that outcomes for sovereign debt are determined by a complex interplay between financial markets, governments, the IMF, the press, and the courts. This cautionary tale lays bare the institutional, political, and legal pressures that come into play when a country cannot repay its debts. It offers a deeper understanding of how global financial capitalism functions for those who work in or study debt markets, international finance, international relations, and international law.

Gregory Makoff, PhD, is a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and an expert on sovereign debt management. A former banker specializing in debt advice, liability management, and derivatives, he has also advised the US Department of the Treasury.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Angela Geck, "The Power to Persuade: Strategic Arguing at the World Trade Organization" (U Toronto Press, 2024) Aug 20, 2024

Show notes

The Power to Persuade: Strategic Arguing at the World Trade Organization (University of Toronto Press, 2024) by Dr. Angela Geck provides an innovative and eye-opening analysis of strategic arguing as a means of power in global politics. Based on an empirical case study of arguing processes in the World Trade Organization (WTO), the book shows how discursive contexts, institutional norms and procedures, and unequal human resources condition who has the power to persuade.

While accounts of arguing in international relations are typically based on a notion of arguing as a power-free mode of interaction oriented towards understanding, Dr. Geck shows how such an approach precludes the question of persuasive power. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Geneva diplomats and a document-based analysis of the negotiations on two Doha Round issues, the book examines the practices governing strategic arguing in the WTO and uncovers two sources of persuasive power: firstly, prevalent discourses and connected regime norms empower some actors over others; secondly, their ability to debate is conditioned by exclusionary procedures and unequal human resources.

Offering a grounded theory of strategic arguing in trade politics, The Power to Persuade presents a novel analysis of the relationship between arguing and power.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Matthew Archer, "Unsustainable: Measurement, Reporting, and the Limits of Corporate Sustainability" (NYU Press, 2024) Aug 16, 2024

Show notes

In recent years, companies have felt the pressure to be transparent about their environmental impact. Large documents containing summaries of yearly emissions rates, carbon output, and utilized resources are shared on companies’ social media pages, websites, and employee briefings in a bid for public confidence in corporate responsibility.

And yet, Matthew Archer argues, these metrics are often just hollow symbols. Unsustainable: Measurement, Reporting, and the Limits of Corporate Sustainability(New York University Press, 2024) contends with the world of big banks and multinational corporations, where sustainability begins and ends with measuring and reporting. Drawing on five years of research among sustainability professionals in the US and Europe, Unsustainable shows how this depoliticizing tendency to frame sustainability as a technical issue enhances and obscures corporate power while doing little, if anything, to address the root causes of the climate crisis and issues of social inequality. Through this obsession with metrics and indicators, the adage that you can’t manage what you can’t measure transforms into a belief that once you’ve measured social and environmental impacts, the market will simply manage them for you.

The book draws on diverse sources of evidence―ethnographic fieldwork among a wide array of sustainability professionals, interviews with private bankers, and apocalyptic science fiction―and features analyses of name-brand companies including Volkswagen, Unilever, and Nestlé. Making the case for the limits of measuring and reporting, Archer seeks to mobilize alternative approaches. Through an intersectional lens incorporating Black and Indigenous theories of knowledge, power and value, he offers a vision of sustainability that aims to be more effective and more socially and ecologically just.

Robin Steiner is an economic anthropologist based in Miami, FL. His published work explores economic development, labor, and citizenship in Oman and the Arab Gulf. He teaches in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. Robin can be reached at rsteiner@fiu.edu.

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Nick Grono, "How to Lead Nonprofits: Turning Purpose into Impact to Change the World" (BenBella Books, 2024) Aug 16, 2024

Show notes

Non-profit organizations play an indispensable role in the world today, and are consistently rated higher than governments, the media or businesses in term of public trust. Yet many non-profit organizations suffer from dysfunction. New non-profit leaders find themselves unprepared for the challenges ahead, and even seasoned leaders often struggle to ensure their organizations achieve the impact they aim for.

In How to Lead Non-Profits: Turning Purpose into Impact to Change the World(BenBella Books, 2024), Nick Grono, CEO of the Freedom Fund and former Deputy President of the International Crisis Group (ICG), provides a leadership framework that focuses on what truly drives success: maximizing impact by staying true to your organization's purpose, fostering an inclusive culture that inspires and empowers your team, and collaborating with the communities you serve, as well as with funders and peer organizations, to amplify your impact.

There are countless books on organizational management and leadership. But most of them come from the business, for-profit, world, whose solutions do not translate well to the fundamentally different world of NGOs and charities. How to Lead Non-Profits fills that gap.

Featuring insights and examples from nonprofit and charity leaders around the world, and informed by Grono's extensive experience, this book offers practical advice on how to use the power of purpose to shape every aspect of non-profit organizations—both internally and externally—as they work to make a difference in the world.

This is an excellent guide not only for people in leadership positions, but also for anyone who works—or is considering working—in the non-profit sector; wants to start their own non-profit; serves on a non-profit Board or is simply curious about what good leadership in the non-profit sector looks like, regardless of who is in charge.

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Zvi Schreiber, "Money, Going Out of Style: The Story of Money and the Mystery of Its Decline" (2021) Aug 15, 2024

Show notes

What is money? Why are trillions of dollars, euros, pounds, and yen being printed, but not spent, and what does this reveal about the state of our society?

Money, as we know it, was born in 1971 when currencies unlinked from gold. During its adolescence, money was hyperactive, causing rampant inflation. Three decades of mature growth followed. But as it reaches the age of fifty, money is changing again, and facing a figurative mid-life crisis.

Zvi Schreiber's book Money, Going Out of Style: The Story of Money and the Mystery of Its Decline(2021) first offers the reader a clear understanding of economics and the role of money, by following a fictional island tribe as they develop money and an ever more sophisticated economy. The book never forgets that money is secondary to the real economy of goods, services, and tools.

Armed with this deeper appreciation of money and economics, the book returns to the present day to examine money's midlife crisis: the effect of rising inequality, the puzzle of near-zero interest rates, and how this is causing money to go out of style.

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Tehila Sasson, "The Solidarity Economy: Nonprofits and the Making of Neoliberalism after Empire" (Princeton UP, 2024) Aug 14, 2024

Show notes

After India gained independence in 1947, Britain reinvented its role in the global economy through nongovernmental aid organisations. Utilising existing imperial networks and colonial bureaucracy, the nonprofit sector sought an ethical capitalism, one that would equalise relationships between British consumers and Third World producers as the age of empire was ending. The Solidarity Economy: Nonprofits and the Making of Neoliberalism after Empire (Princeton University Press, 2024) by Dr. Tehila Sasson examines the role of nonstate actors in the major transformations of the world economy in the postwar era, showing how British NGOs charted a path to neoliberalism in their pursuit of ethical markets.

Between the 1950s and 1990s, nonprofits sought to establish an alternative to Keynesianism through their welfare and development programs. Encouraging the fair trade of commodities and goods through microfinance, consumer boycotts, and corporate social responsibility, these programs emphasised decentralisation, privatisation, and entrepreneurship. Tehila Sasson tells the stories of the activists, economists, politicians, and businessmen who reimagined the marketplace as a workshop for global reform. She reveals how their ideas, though commonly associated with conservative neoliberal policies, were part of a nonprofit-driven endeavour by the liberal left to envision markets as autonomous and humanising spaces, facilitating ethical relationships beyond the impersonal realm of the state.

Drawing on dozens of newly available repositories from nongovernmental, international, national, and business archives, The Solidarity Economy reconstructs the political economy of these markets—from handicrafts and sugar to tea and coffee—shedding critical light on the post imperial origins of neoliberalism.

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Craig Gent, "Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work" (Verso, 2024) Aug 13, 2024

Show notes

Across the world, algorithms are changing the nature of work. Nowhere is this clearer than in the logistics and distribution sectors, where workers are instructed, tracked and monitored by increasingly dystopian management technologies.

In Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work(Verso, 2024), Craig Gent takes us into workplaces where algorithms rule to excavate the politics behind the newest form of managerial power. Combining worker testimony and original research on companies such as Amazon, Uber, and Deliveroo, the cutting edge of algorithmic management technology, this book reveals the sometimes unexpected effects these new techniques have on work, workers and managers. Gent advances an alternative politics of resistance in the face of digital control.

Louisa Hann attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester in 2021, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres.

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Benjamin C. Waterhouse on "One Day I'll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America" Aug 12, 2024

Show notes

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Benjamin Waterhouse, full-as-full-can- be Professor of History at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, about his book, One Day I’ll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion that Conquered America(Norton, 2024). The book examines how the ideal of self-employment became so prominent in the United States after the 1970s, and how the idea has had damaging consequences for many groups, who often are attracted to working for themselves not because it is so great but because they have so few other good options. Vinsel and Waterhouse also roast entrepreneurship, small businesses, and other golden calves. They end by discussing a new collaborative project, a forthcoming podcast on the political, cultural, and economic history of the United States in the 1990s.

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