Rules of the Game: Detention, Deportation, and Disappearance
by Asim Quereshi

As leading advocates of human rights, the United States and Britain have found themselves in an uncomfortable spotlight thanks to numerous violations of human rights and legal standards perpetrated during the war on terror. Asim Quereshi’s book uses the voices of victims of torture and unlawful detention to demonstrate the ways the post 9/11 counterterrorism policy violates human rights. By prioritizing the war on terror, nations have rationalized the violent treatment of prisoners at places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Meanwhile, governments have used the vague terms of the Patriot Act to support their actions or relied on clauses in UNSC Resolution 1566 that permit any anti-terror protocols that uphold international law. Suspects seldom receive fair trials and can be kidnapped or outsourced to CIA black sites without notice. Many innocent people are detained and questioned at airports or tourist sites after being identified as Muslim. Qureshi’s chronicling of these abuse victims’ powerful first-hand experiences demonstrate a different face of the anti-terror game: one in which ideals of fairness and justice always take a back seat to fighting terrorism.  -Trisha Parikh

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The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It
by Julian Cribb

We buy, sell and use oil, but, according to Cribb, we also eat it. Nearly everything on an ordinary dinner table has been produced with the use of tractors, harvesters, or other farm equipment. Unfortunately, we waste a great deal: so much, in fact, that Cribb predicts rampant food shortages by the middle of this century. The author suggests a few methods to avoid the grim scenario of a global food crisis: increasing our reliance on vegetables (which yield more food per acre farmed than grains or meat), raising livestock in areas where they can graze (to avoid a grain shortage brought about by the current diet of factory-farmed animals) and simply wasting less of the food we consume at each meal. Ultimately, Cribb argues, “the absolute test of our self-lauding title sapiens” will be whether we are wise enough to confront the crescendo of shortages – not by competing against each other for dwindling resources, but by cooperating to make sure they never run out. -Lina Kaisey

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Strengthening Peace in Post-Civil War States: Transforming Spoilers into Stakeholders
Edited by Matthew Hoddie and Caroline Hartzell

Is long-lasting peace possible in a post-civil war state? The costs of civil war extend beyond the borders of a warring state, so third party actors are invested in the answer as well. In Strengthening Peace in Post-Civil War States: Transforming Spoilers into Stakeholders, the various authors present individual case studies that suggest different strategies for maintaining post-war peace. Their focus is not on the traditional “peacekeeping missions” of the UN or on forced military intervention. Rather, they argue for a combination of soft intervention – characterized by minimal use of force and no military occupation – and restructuring institutions. The goal is to use coercion not only to create peace, but to establish a culture in which individuals see how peace will benefit their individual interests to end violence permanently. Third parties can catalyze this healing process and help countries restructure themselves by establishing new, post-war institutions and elections. While the authors address potential weaknesses of their solutions, leading readers to question their practicality, the notion that long-lasting peace is attainable remains. -TP

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The Atlas of Human Rights: Mapping Violations of Freedom Around the Globe
by Andrew Fagan

In 127 pages of color-coded maps and concise descriptions, Fagan sums up the rates of an array of affronts to human rights, from the drafting of child soldiers to domestic violence. In doing so, he makes a complicated global issue accessible and emphasizes its importance. Fagan reminds us that “all nation-states everywhere violate human rights to some degree,” presenting data to illustrate the where, why and how. He also points out the interrelated nature of human rights abuses: For example, a high rate of internally displaced persons (those seeking asylum within their home country) generally goes hand-in-hand with political instability and systematic persecution. As with any other set of maps, Fagan’s atlas lays out all the information for those interested in confronting human rights abuses. He gives readers an understanding of the landscape, while leaving the ultimate goal and route up to the user. -LK

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Failed Sanctions: Why the U.S. Embargo against Cuba Could Never Work
by Paolo Spadoni

Since the Cold War, the United States has maintained an embargo against Cuba in an effort to halt economic progress and create “economic pain” there. In Failed Sanctions: Why the U.S. Embargo against Cuba Could Never Work, Spadoni argues that the “black knights” of today’s society have assisted Cuba’s recovery instead of stalling it. He explores the influence of transnational actors, such as multinational corporations, and demonstrates how their involvement has sustained the flow of capital into Cuba despite the U.S.’s harsh restrictions. Not only did the 1996 Helms-Burton Act fall short of its goal of preventing firms from operating in Cuba, the sanctions actually reinforced the Castro regime. Although he presents a grim picture the effectiveness of the embargo, Spadoni’s predictions for future U.S.-Cuba relations are optimistic: more business organizations in the U.S. are lobbying to loosen restrictions, and Obama has pursued open-door policies. Cuba is crucial to the global agricultural, oil, tourism and export industries, Spadoni argues, so it is imperative that the United States lift the embargo and advance relations with Cuba if it hopes to achieve its broader foreign policy goals. -TP

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*Photo courtesy of Biblioteca de Arte-Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.

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No Man’s Land: Globalization, Territory, and Clandestine Groups in Southeast Asia
by Justin V. Hastings

In the time of Skype and YouTube, it’s easy to believe that rampant globalization breaks down borders. But it is important to remember the distinction between these figurative borders and actual ones. For terrorists attempting to conduct day-to-day operations under the noses of government agencies and patrol groups, literal borders still pose great obstacles. Hastings analyzes three clandestine transnational operations in Southeast Asia, a region he describes as “the Wild West with Internet access.” Yet his findings provide insight into the actions of all non-state actors operating against the governments who control the borders they seek to leapfrog. Hastings argues that the more these organizations seek to incorporate themselves into a globalizing world, the more they become dependent on “chokepoints” such as airports and shipment ports. Leaving an examination of the root causes and motivations of clandestine organizations to another author, Hastings focuses on the lowest common denominator among these groups: they need to move people and things across borders without being noticed. Hastings’ detailed account of three transnational entities support the conclusion that ultimately, it is up to a state and its neighbors to decide how hard they want to crack down on clandestine terrorist organizations.
– Lina Kaisey

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Power and the Past: Collective Memory and International Relations
Edited by Eric Langenbacher and Yossi Shain

Prior to 9/11, the word “terrorism” seldom evoked specific memories that all Americans could relate to. Nearly 10 years after the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked, “terrorism” has come to symbolize a collective memory to everyone who lived through it. In Power and the Past, the various authors use examples ranging from the Holocaust to 9/11 to demonstrate the influence that collective memories can have upon foreign relations. As visceral results of historical events, collective memories influence identity and culture, and thus shape individuals’ views on foreign policy. As the authors explain how these memories influence international institutions and laws, they convincingly argue that collective memory is shaped by the politics of the time and is then used for political purposes. The political culture created by collective memories has reformulated the way nations interact with each other as they work to improve relations.
– Trisha Parikh

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NATO: In Search of a Vision
by Gulnur Aybet and Rebecca Moore

“Take time off after pursuing a number of various projects to reconnect with yourself and establish an inner vision.” This may sound like advice for an actor after a busy movie-making season, but it is the course of action suggested by the authors of NATO: In Search of a Vision to remedy the international organization. After 60 years of existence, the authors argue, the North American Trade Organization has strayed from its primary function of serving as a collective organization that provides territorial defense for its members. The authors show that NATO’s shift to a mission-driven approach after the Cold War has made it less a protector of territory than a protector of values – an outcome appreciated by some members (among them the United States) and opposed by others. To avoid the dangers of a “bifurcated Alliance” in which some members support expeditions while others hold tight to the original mission of static defense, the authors argue, NATO needs a new common threat assessment to determine when and where it will get involved. It also needs to pursue new partnerships with organizations like the European Union, to make sure that it can be effective when it does decide to get involved. Along with promoting member solidarity so that nations don’t pursue deals that harm the group’s unity, these measures are meant to promote a new “strategic vision”–one that is not just reactionary, but suited to NATO’s propagation long past its 60th anniversary.
– LK

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Deradicalizing Islamic Extremists
by Angel Rabasa et al.

As an effort to fight terrorism, deradicalizing Islamist extremists is particularly effective because it targets the root cause of the violence. Rabasa and his co-authors convincingly argue that successfully combating terrorist groups means not just pulling individuals out of the extremist system, but actually changing their ideologies so that they renounce extremism entirely and develop a new identity to reintegrate into society. But deradicalization is an extremely difficult goal to achieve due to the faith-based motivations of Islamist jihadist groups. A more realistic accomplishment, the authors argue, would be to foster disengagement from extremist ideology, which would be sufficient to prevent extremists from pursuing their goals in the short term. Although the results of deradicalization programs in Saudi Arabia seem to be effective, the success rates of these programs vary widely depending on the amount of government resources, time, money and labor committed. These institutional programs are a viable counterterrorism approach because they result in decreased membership in Islamic extremist groups while allowing governments to obtain information and discredit the extremist ideology; positively impacting global counterterrorism goals.
– TP

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The UN Secretary-General and Moral Authority: Ethics and Religion in International Leadership
by Kent J. Kille

The power of the United Nations Secretary-General is matched only by the diversity in backgrounds of the eight men who have held the position. Secretaries-General have ranged in religious affiliations from Buddhism to Coptic Christianity, and for each, religion informed their notions of what role the United Nations should play. This collection of essays, each detailing one past Secretary-General, describes how each one’s religious background informed decisions they made in office. The various authors arrive at the conclusion that, while personal “inner codes” do govern a Secretary-General’s overarching goals, the “external code” of international relations, United Nations Charter Principles and era-specific job expectations also have a role to play. So, while Dag Hammarskjold promoted growth and Boutros Boutros-Ghali valued maintenance, each appreciated Trygve Lie’s observation that the Secretary General’s power is moral rather than tangible. It is much easier to lose moral power, so Secretaries-General have generally been careful not to overstep their bounds and turn the office of Secretary General into that of a “secular Pope.”
– LK

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European Unions: Labor’s Quest for a Transnational Democracy
by Roland Erne

The emergence of the European Union and its emphasis on democracy has had extensive implications for the political regimes in place throughout Europe. While the countries within the EU appear to follow democratic policies individually, evaluating the nations in a transnational context shows that, too often, citizens are relegated to the role of powerless spectators. But because the EU was formed as a trade union, its unifying policies are primarily fiscal and monetary, limiting the pro-democratic actions it can take. In his analysis of labor unions and democracies, Erne attributes blames innate cultural and socioeconomic differences among European nations for the failure to agree on political philosophy. His pragmatic plan to move toward democracy relies on labor unions, which he characterizes as universal groups that span many borders and can connect the public sphere and encourage political mobilization. Once the EU embraces labor unions, collective bargaining and corporatism, it can progress toward becoming a more democratic union.
– TP

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*Photo courtesy of rubygoes.

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Borderlines and Borderlands: Political Oddities at the Edge of the Nation-State
by Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen

When the only thing demarcating the end of one tract of land and the start of another is a highway sign, it is easy to regard such a “border” as arbitrary. Diener and Hagen argue that even the most iconic international borders – from the Strait of Gibraltar to the “Green Line” separating the West Bank and Israel – are no less artificial. The authors point to examples of politically charged borders across the globe to illustrate that once political boundaries become “naturalized” by both sides, they take on new and symbolic meaning. Their argument about the influence of borders on geopolitical identity stretches to a region that lacks borders entirely: the Kurd-inhabited territories of Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. The authors cite the lack of an identifiable and demarcated Kurdistan as a source of divisiveness within the Kurdish population. Kurdistan is only one among ten cases of oddly-shaped borders, each with a history as peculiar as its appearance. Examples – from Russia’s Kaliningrad Exclave to Argentina’s Misiones Province – demonstrate that these “arbitrary pen lines of men gathered around maps” can have far-reaching and long-lasting implications for the populations they bisect.
– Lina Kaisey

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Outsourcing War & Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs
by Laura A. Dickinson

The gradual shift from “the large bureaucratized military and foreign policy apparatus” of the 20th century to an increasingly privatized foreign security service has major ramifications for the United States, according to Outsourcing War & Peace. Dickinson argues that we need not discuss whether the U.S should outsource security – private contractors have become a staple of American involvement in foreign countries, and their role is unlikely to diminish – but how the government should address the threats to human rights, security and transparency that results. For example, when the contractors involved in the scandal at Abu Ghraib were identified, how should they have been held accountable for their “gross abuses” of power and violations of key democratic principles? Dickinson’s solution for protecting “core public values” and eliminating accountability loopholes boils down to four logical steps: reconciling international and domestic law, reforming contracts and enforcement, creating public participation, and changing the organizational structure of contracting firms. Her portrayal of this newly privatized military world benefits from the added context of examples from the Vietnam War up to current conflicts in the Middle East.
– Trisha Parikh

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How Insurgencies End
by Ben Connable and Martin C. Libicki

Connable and Libicki, analysts for The RAND Corporation, argue insurgencies end not with a bang, but a tipping point. Analyzing 89 insurgencies across the globe from 1934 to the present, the authors identify several factors that contribute to their demise. For example, a decrease in the flow of intelligence from local civilians to insurgents belies a potentially fatal decrease in civilian loyalty.  And, unsurprisingly, the nation’s system of government plays a role: an “anocracy,” or democracy in name only, is particularly weak against insurgency because it cannot employ the effective repressive tactics of an autocracy, yet enjoys none of the benefits of a truly reformed government. Connable and Libicki are clear that there is no reliable shortcut to end any particular insurgency; even the tipping point can tip back and forth between insurgents and the government. In particularly messy cases, there is no tipping point at all; both sides end up feeling like they lost.
– LK

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The End of Arrogance: America in the Global Competition of Ideas
by Steven Weber & Bruce W. Jentleson

In Weber and Jentleson’s latest work, they explore the increasingly apparent fact that the United States is no longer at the center of the world. Although U.S. influence remains strong, new countries have entered the “international game” as competitive players. The authors argue that the changing power structure in international relations has eliminated hegemony, and the U.S. must “face the facts, as they say, with both eyes open,” by adapting to the new global system in order to remain competitive and not fall behind. Furthermore, they write, conceptions of justice, war, capitalism, and democracy must change to meet the demands of a rapidly growing globalized society. Unlike during most of the 20th century, power cannot be the main U.S. objective; rather, leaders must focus on the growth and acceptance of new ideas. Thus, the competition among nations is not a race to establish power and become a hegemon, but an ideological battle to resolve the problems arising from globalization.
– TP

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Dangerous But Not Omnipotent:  Exploring the Reach and Limitations of Iranian Power in the Middle East
by Frederic Wehrey et al.

Iran is sandwiched between Iraq and Afghanistan in more ways than the obvious geographic one. For American foreign policy experts, Iran has always been considered as much of a threat as its neighbors. But according to this RAND analysis, Iran is being too closely compared to a nation that once topped the list of hostile countries: the Soviet Union. The authors characterize the United States’ current policy towards Iran as unnecessarily reliant upon a good-versus-evil paradigm similar to that during the Cold War. The authors list several examples – from Iran’s overlapping and factionalized power structure to its lack of conventional military capabilities – to draw a contrast between the two. Iran views itself as a status quo power, less interested in inciting widespread Islamic revolution than finding a prominent place for itself within the current system. As a result, they argue, the United States’ Cold War tactics don’t address the threats Iran really poses, so the U.S. must a less confrontational stance toward Iran. Their plan for U.S. policy is characterized by direct cooperation on common issues (for example, local narcotics control) when possible, combined with multilateral international pressure on contentious issues (like nuclear arms) when necessary. This thorough analysis of Iran’s true domestic and regional intentions is a definitive rejoinder to those that say Iran has hegemonic desires that need to be contained.
– LK

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India and Pakistan: Continued Conflict or Cooperation?
by Stanley Wolpert

In the aftermath of India’s 1947 partition following decades of British rule, India and Pakistan began fighting over the state of Jammu and Kashmir, near India’s northern border. As British forces fled the country, they left behind “new border rivers of blood,” Wolpert writes in his new book. The clash resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties and an ill-planned division of the two nations that remains evidence of their political and religious conflicts. In his comprehensive historical account, Wolpert analyzes the conflict from both Indian and Pakistani perspectives. He argues that neither nation can afford the human and political costs of a repeat of the 1999 Kargil War or more acts of terrorism. After several failed attempts by the United Nations Security Council to broker a long-term truce, Wolpert writes, both countries’ governments must accept the Line of Control that divides Jammu and Kashmir at the border. Meanwhile, diplomatic leaders must accept new measures that respect India and Pakistan, Hindus and Muslims, Kashmiris – and the rest of the world.
– TP

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*Photo courtesy of cromacom.

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City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain
by Andrew M. Gardner

Over one third of the 30 million people living in the Gulf Coast region are foreigners, nearly all of whom have migrated to the region in search of jobs. In City of Strangers, Andrew M. Gardner analyzes the impacts of transnational labor on the Gulf region and stresses the mistreatment-often brutal mistreatment-of Indian migrant workers by native Bahrainis. Much of this violence is made possible by the “kafala system,” under which most menial labor is done by migrants sponsored by Bahraini citizens. While the Indian laborers come to Bahrain with the belief that they are being given a viable avenue to escape poverty and marginalization in India , they often enter into something bordering on indentured servitude. Gardner’s anthropological viewpoint sheds light on how this system operates, often leading to violence against foreigners of all classes-both poor and elite-and to the ostracism of the Indian community. The solution Gardner offers is as simple and laudable as it is unlikely: an elimination of the deeply entrenched kafala system.

— Trisha Parikh

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Laws, Outlaws, and Terrorists: Lessons from the War on Terrorism
by Gabriella Blum and Phillip B. Heymann

“Keep calm and carry on” was once considered a reasonable response to foreign threats.  In Laws, Outlaws, and Terrorists, Harvard Law professors Gabriella Blum and Phillip B. Heymann discuss a much different response: that of the United States to the threat of terrorism over the last nine years. Rather than carrying on with existing paradigms of domestic and international law, the US government in the wake of September 11th operated within what the authors describe as a “No-Law Zone.” The authors argue that such an approach hindered rather than helped counter-terrorism efforts. Instead, Blum and Heymann advocate a measured response that balances short-term desires for physical security with long-term desires for the preservation of American ideals, and they suggest that the threat of terrorism requires fewer adjustments to our legal system than we’ve been made to think. With examples from the Bush and Obama presidencies, Blum and Heymann make a persuasive case for an approach that preserves American laws while thwarting terrorists in their ultimate aim: keeping us from keeping calm.

—Lina Kaisey

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Exporting Security: International Engagement, Security Cooperation, and the Changing Face of the U.S. Military
by Derek S. Reveron

The Cold War left myriad legacies, one of them being the new direction of the U.S. military. Instead of pursuing a confrontational role, the U.S. military has frequently played a more cooperative role, offering assistance rather than combat. In his book Exporting Security, Naval War College professor Derek S. Reveron argues and lauds this increase in military partnerships, calling it a “key pillar of U.S. military strategy.” Security has become increasingly globalized, and, today, the U.S. military has close working relationships with the militaries of India, China, and Russia. It also involves itself in humanitarian assistance efforts such as the prevention of HIV and AIDS in Africa. Many of these roles are played in order to overcome the limitations of international organizations and local governments, which are constrained by their lack of resources and influence. Reveron uses a clear and compelling rationale to demonstrate the utility of these noncombat activities in generating security cooperation, sustainable peace, and growth for all nations.

—Trisha Parikh

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The New Foreign Policy: Power Seeking in a Globalized Era
by Laura Neack

With textbook detail and accessible clarity, political scientist Laura Neack offers an overview of current foreign policy discourse, traversing topics from the “rational actor model” to more subtle topics such as groupthink, the media, and national self-perception. Each chapter is prefaced with a list of illustrative cases and capped with a few bullet points of takeaway information. Her chapter about “Cognitive Misers and Distrusting Leaders” takes the examples of Blair, Gorbachev, Sharon, and Sadat and ties them together to illustrate how slight differences among individual “belief sets” can amount to drastic discrepancies in international strategy. The author concludes with a tidy review of how the study of cognition is relevant to the study of foreign policy. “Foreign policy analysis needs to be multilevel and multifaceted in order to confront the complicated sources and nature of foreign policy,” Neack writes. Her book is a helpful first step in that direction.

—Lina Kaisey

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Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia
by Toby Craig Jones

Saudi Arabia’s rise as a significant regional-and even world-power has commonly been attributed to its expansive oil reserves. In Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia, author Toby Craig Jones contends that the rise of Saudi Arabia as a political power was due not solely to oil, but rather, to the control and development of other natural resources as well-especially of water. Saudi Arabia undertook massive desalination projects in the 1970s, and these provide nearly half of its water supply. Not that all this desalinized water is even so urgently needed: the kingdom has enough oil to trade away for an essentially limitless supply of fresh water from other nations. In general, Saudi Arabia has been driven by an “environmental imperative,” the author’s term for nation-building through the controlling of nature. While the decisions of the Saudi government are deeply guarded, Jones attempts to “pry open this black box” by focusing on the efforts of American mining engineer Karl Twitchell, whose oil endeavors in the 1930s set the entire growth of the Saudi empire in motion. Jones relates an interesting story but leaves some questions unanswered, such as the role of cultural and religious factors in the “environmental imperative.”

—Trisha Parikh

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Globalization and Empire: The U.S. Invasion of Iraq, Free Markets, and the Twilight of Democracy
by Laura Ann Stengrim and Stephen Hartnett

The United States’ invasion of Iraq has been ascribed to a number of factors, from misinformation to messianism. But what about “Evangelical Capitalism”?   That’s the term Laura Ann Stengrim and Stephen Hartnett use in their book Globalization and Empire, which argues that we’ve lost sight of the largest factors underlying the invasion of Iraq. According to the authors, the invasion of Iraq amounted to “globalizing crony capitalism,” and all of the rhetoric of the Bush administration had a uniform underlying message: democracy and capitalism are the same value, one that applies equally to any place on the map. What the authors find most distressing is that Americans went along with it, forgetting their habits of “democratic integrity.” While the authors tend to pepper their arguments with strident buzzwords, they nevertheless make a meticulous case, ending with a salutary reminder of the need to relearn how to question our leaders and scrutinize their answers.

—Lina Kaisey

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*Photo courtesy of Abe World!.

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The Uyghurs: Strangers in Their Own Land
by Gardner Bovingdon

—Reviewed by Angilee Shah

The plight of Uyghurs in China entered U.S. consciousness after 9/11. Since 2002, 22 migrant Uyghurs were detained at Guantánamo Bay after being turned over to the United States by bounty hunters in Pakistan. By 2008, the men were no longer considered enemy combatants. Seventeen of them have been released to Switzerland, Palau, Bermuda and Albania. The United States so far has not accepted any of the innocent detainees, nor is the State Department willing to send them back to China where they would likely be persecuted as separatists.

What makes relocating innocent men so difficult? Gardner Bovingdon fills a large gap in our understanding and misunderstanding of Uyghurs’ political lives. The Uyghurs, a scholarly history that is both cognizant of the past and relevant to the present, illustrates not only how the minority group was oppressed in the northwest province of Xinjiang, but also how its stories have been twisted to fit a “war on terror” narrative. “Many journalists and government officials throughout the world now routinely depict Uyghur independence activists as terrorists tout court,” Bovingdon writes.

The East Turkestan Islamic Movement, the State Department-designated terrorist organization that the Guantánamo Bay prisoners were accused of supporting, should not be confused with the wider and more disjointed East Turkestan independence movement. What The Uyghurs painstakingly details are the nuances of a deep conflict in China’s northwest, where a largely Muslim and Turkic-speaking ethnic group lacks political freedom and agency in their homeland and fight for a cause unrelated to the aims of Islamist groups proscribed by the United States.

Bovingdon’s history is based on his over 160 interviews and 20 months of field work in Xinjiang, where having conversations about a minority group’s national aspirations and grievances against the Chinese Communist Party is a risky endeavor. Xinjiang covers one-sixth of China’s land and is the resource-rich home to a large population of Uyghurs, whose cultures and customs are distinct from the majority Han population of greater China. In the deep conflict between Uyghurs and the Chinese state, even the name of the region is contested. Officially, the province is called the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, but Uyghurs are more likely to call their home Uyghurstan or East Turkestan.

While protest in China is on the rise overall, the party is much more likely to accept and respond to the local grievances of Han Chinese. For Uyghurs, “the government has emphasized the message that protest is unacceptable and that any form of public dissent will be regarded as ‘splittism’ and punished severely,” Bovingdon writes. Even if Uyghurs are asking for improved governance by the existing state, they are treated as separatists and forcefully silenced. State campaigns and arrests of Uyghurs suspected of political organizing intensified through the late 1990s: “September 11 provided an excellent opportunity to ratchet up the force of repression again.” Beijing was “shielded by international concern about global terrorism” in its long and severe campaign against “threats to state security.”

As broad as The Uyghurs is as a history, it is clear that Bovingdon had rare intimacy with people and life in Xinjiang, He conducted interviews mostly informally, in Uyghur and Mandarin. What is missing from the history are characters; readers are not introduced to individual Uyghurs except for short quotations or passages about particular interviewees.

For example, we learn about “one ardently anticommunist man” who was forced to “praise CCP policies” in political crackdowns in the ’90s. “He was to go from house to house within ‘suspect’ villages, chaperoned by two Hans, patiently correcting people’s misconceptions and erroneous political views,” Bovingdon writes. “It was, he observed, like being forced to eat a steaming plateful of pork.”

What we don’t find out is what happened to this man afterward, what his life and prospects were like and how he coped with the indignity of praising an oppressor. Scholarly texts are not necessarily designed for this kind of narrative, but the material Bovingdon has amassed is so compelling that a reader can’t help but wish that interviewees’ lives might have been more thoroughly developed. The humanity that comes with actually knowing a people is, after all, precisely what was missing when the United States detained Uyghurs at Guantánamo Bay.

Excerpt: “One aim of this book is to demonstrate that most Uyghur resistance to Chinese rule is prompted by nationalism, not Islamism. But a wider purpose is to explore, first, how and why large numbers of Uyghurs have resisted their incorporation into the Chinese nation-state and second, how and why the Chinese government has attempted to overcome that resistance. Finally, my main aim is to elucidate how the global currents just described – the renewed significance of nationalism, the tension between sovereignty and self-determination, the possibility of humanitarian intervention, and the heightened perception of an Islamic threat in the non-Muslim world – have  combined to make the contention between Uyghurs and the Chinese state and international, rather than a merely national, problem.”

Further Reading: The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa by Deborah Brautigam, Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present by Peter Hessler, and Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China by Ian Johnson

Angilee Shah is a freelance journalist who writes about globalization and politics. You can read more of her work at www.angileeshah.com.

*Photo of Carrefour and KFC at Grand Bazaar in Urumqi, Xinjiang, China courtesy Remko Tanis.

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Jo Tatchell grew up in Abu Dhabi in the 1970s and watched as “it went from being a tiny backwater to being the richest city in the world.” But the city is now a misunderstood place, she said, thanks to media coverage that focuses on the political, the military, and the financial and thinks of Abu Dhabi as a “bumper sticker kind of story – the Arab state, rich with oil, brash with wealth.” Below, Tatchell, author of A Diamond in the Desert: Behind the Scenes in Abu Dhabi, the World’s Richest City, chats with Zócalo about her early years in Abu Dhabi, the rise of the city, and whether it’ll still be standing in 200 years.

Q. What role has oil played in making Abu Dhabi what it is today?

A. There is indeed a substance called oil. Everybody was united around that common goal of getting oil. From the Emirati perspective, they wanted progress and they wanted to play a part in moving their own people forward. The founding father of the UAE and the ruler of Abu Dhabi, Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, had without a doubt a vision for his people. He believed his people should have, could have, the comforts, the education, the healthcare, the infrastructure of a modern nation. He made sure with careful and prudent planning that that happened. But no one could have predicted just how quickly that initial wealth would double and redouble. You can’t just import health, housing, education, food, utilities, and stop there. As soon as you start sending your people abroad to, say, learn engineering, they’re soaking up a way of life.

I thought it would be really interesting to explore how the city-state, which is Islamic but has shown some compatibility with the West, came to be that way, why, and to look at the mix of people that exist there. My very firm sense is that this very glittery wealthy layer is a façade, and around it and beneath it you have 85 percent of a population who are not Emirati, and who are primarily from Asia, with 40 percent from India and huge numbers from Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Eastern Europe. There are also the white expatriates – the Americans, the Australians, the British. You walk the streets and you’re aware that the people who built the city, who laid brick upon brick, are not Emiratis.

Q. How has the city changed since you knew it in the 1970s?

A. The city definitely wasn’t a city. I moved there as a child with my parents. My father was not in oil, but he was in food. When you have people who are starting to work somewhere and build an industry, they  need to eat. My father ran a supermarket. That was a great way of plugging into the layers of society. He ran a team of 31 nationalities, from top to bottom – other Arabs, Indians, Emiratis, all playing different roles. Everybody was focusing on making it work. There was a real sense of motivation, as there often are at the beginning of things. There is that flurry of anticipation, of butterflies – you’re all in it together.

When my parents first went it was considered by their British employers as a hardship posting. The house we lived in was a portable cabin on the beach. There were some actual houses, but an actual house didn’t exist for us yet. You arrive and you make do. Three sets of tarmac rose, and then a few tracks led off, and then three roads became ten, and they became a grid. You have a small town that becomes a large town. Through the 70s that’s what you saw rolling out in real time. To imagine a city would have taken great vision. It was a sandy island with a few roads at one end. Now you can barely see any sand.

Q. To what extent is Abu Dhabi today the result of its ruler’s vision alone?

A. Zayed has a unique ability – he was known for bringing together different tribes and groups that were in disagreement. He could negotiate and build consensus. He was already respected by the tribes out in the deserts of Abu Dhabi when the opportunity came. The oil men were coming whether the tribes liked it or not, and Zayed recognized the moment, and took it. The question was never are the oil men coming – it was going to happen – but where the Abu Dhabians would fit into the industry that was going to establish itself on their sand and their sea, and whether they would take that industry and use it as a springboard for establishing a culture.

When people talk about Abu Dhabi, it’s easy to say, of course they have everything – they’re really rich. But actually having huge oil reserves does not automatically lead to a stable, civilized, wealthy society. We know that. There are other countries in the world that have huge oil reserves and have not deployed the profit to build a culture and a society. Zayed absolutely took that opportunity.

Before Zayed was the ruler it was his brother, Shakhbut. Shakhbut wanted oil to be found because his people were in the middle of the worst depression even by the standards of the deserts of Abu Dhabi. Making ends meet and surviving were the most anyone could hope to do and had done for hundreds of years. The mainstay industry, pearls, dried up. The Japanese began making cultured pearls, and nobody wanted uncultured pearls. People were starving, so it was a huge relief when oil was found. But Shakhbut was terrified. He took the money, he hid it in chests, he refused to build a city. He knew that change would be irreversible and it would change the character of his people. In that sense he was right, but Zayed’s vision was, we have this oil, let’s take the bull by the horns. He set out a vision for a glittering city by the sea. He worked very closely with town and city planners to draw up how the city would develop. He looks to Britain, France, and America in terms of educational models. He looked at European healthcare models. All of that learning he took and used to springboard his people from poverty. He gave every citizen an amount of land on which to build property and create a business. He was really keen on giving people a leg up. Once they had their leg up, they became self-motivated.

Very early on he encouraged diversification of business investments. There was a sense you shouldn’t rely on oil. as a child he had seen his tribes rely so heavily on pearling, and when the Japanese cultured pearl came along, he saw everything fall. Putting all your eggs in one basket did not pay off. Physically and socially, his vision has been entirely realized. I think not even he could imagine the city would grow as fast as it has.

Q. You mentioned building a culture – what does Abu Dhabi’s culture look like today, given its tribal history?

A. Within any country, and you only need to think of your own, there’s the country, and within that, there is the character of Los Angeles or Kentucky or Boston. There are some commonalities and some differences. The same obviously applies to any region of the globe. Within even the UAE, Abu Dhabi was the largest state and the poorest, because of the immense aridity of the land. The geology of it was ideal for oil. Moving to the north, they were better off in Dubai, which had been known as a seafaring, trading, mercantile group of tribes.

The Abu Dhabi tribes had two layers. First is the culture they had before oil is very, very close to the surface today. We’re only a generation or two away from that. The second aspect is the culture they’ve adopted, and how younger generations are revolving out of the ways of the past and into something more international. What’s really clear to me about the Abu Dhabians – even in comparison to people in Dubai-is that they were extremely poor. You had a number of tribes who lived in different parts of the land. Deep in the desert were the tribes who lived off livestock, with camels and herds of goats. Then there were tribes towards the Hajar Mountains that run down the spine of the UAE peninsula, round a city called Al Ain, where you had date farming and basic agriculture. That was the most fertile part of Abu Dhabi. Out at the coasts and running down the gulf peninsula, you had lots of little islands around which the water was extremely shallow. There you had a very well-evolved pearling industry. There were two pearling seasons, and all the men would go off and fish for them for weeks, in boats, singing and chatting.

Rarely did any of these single things create a living. What you typically have is people who might have spent one part of the year wandering the desert with camels. But then they went off pearling for the other part of the year. They needed somebody to stay behind to watch their livestock or their date groves. Over many generations then, what you had is distinct tribes and sub-tribes that worked very closely together, that were able to collaborate, and I think that characteristic of tolerance and collaboration has put Abu Dhabi in the position it is in today. It’s why Zayed, unlike some other rulers in the region, have been able to create an integrated relationship with the West. This sense that others – whether from a tribe nearby or from another country, culture, or religion – they have something to offer. It’s possible to collaborate and build something. That doesn’t mean you absorb everything, and perhaps you don’t even like everything, but you respect what you both bring to the table. You have something that’s part of the DNA almost.

You also have a people who operated and succeeded in operating a tribal structure. That’s really feudal. You have one leader, and that leader makes the decisions. He needs to be strong and charismatic. People would revolt when the leader does not act in the interests of his people. His people could vote with their feet, as it were. This has been the hardest part to translate into a larger and modern scenario, particularly the system they had in which any person from the tribe could talk directly to the ruler. If you had an issue, whatever that issue might be, there was a time of day, a coming together of the ruler and his people. You would stand in line and you could discuss your problems or your opportunities. This direct governance is not possible when you have a city that’s as large as Abu Dhabi is, and is united under one supreme ruler rather than many tribes with their own rulers. It’s not possible when you have 200 nationalities or something approaching that. I think this is where the political heat will build up. In that model, while it did work, everything was done privately and behind closed doors. That will and has to evolve.

Q. What is the future of the city of Abu Dhabi – can it survive, say, an oil crash?

A. People think they can predict, but nobody actually knows. However, Abu Dhabi is a city that is in the black. It has, yes, large amounts of oil, but has diversified and is continuing to diversify its business base and its investments. It has vast amounts invested in, for example, American real estate – including significant stakeholdings in buildings like the Chrysler – and a lot of European real estate and investments.

Will this city be around in 200 years? It’s hard to know. But it could still have money and influence. Money can move. The significant players, with or without a city, could continue to be significant players. But as to the fate of the city, the predictions of how little or how much oil is left in the world are one aspect. The other part of the conundrum is how much it costs to extract the oil. As soon as it becomes more expensive to extract it than the value of the energy it liberates, that is the end. These figures are massaged daily by different experts.

Oil aside, there is one aspect of Abu Dhabi that could be really interesting. It is moving into nuclear technology, but it’s also looking at and beginning to invest in solar technology. As much as it has a lot of oil, it has a lot of sun, and still quite a lot of unused desert space. How it manages to do that, and whether it manages to do it with any sort of significant effects – it’s too early to tell. They’re beginning to have their leading engineers work on creating a prototype of a mini-city that should be entirely carbon neutral. It may be they take the leadership position in something like that. If the energy crisis around the world plays out the way pessimists or even realists think it might, I think having an expertise and taking a leadership position on the development of such technology may give Abu Dhabi a strong future. I don’t think it’ll necessarily be the cultural center it wants to be. It has the idea of becoming that – building a Guggenheim and a Louvre. There will be a rush of tourist traffic around that. But alternative technology may be the place where its future is more likely to prosper.

Buy the Book: Skylight, Powell’s, Amazon, Borders.

*Photo of city lights in Abu Dhabi courtesy Jake Brewer.

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War is Not Over When it’s Over: Women Speak Out From the Ruins of War
by Ann Jones

–Reviewed by Angilee Shah

You don’t need to go much further than the table of contents to know that Ann Jones’ War is Not Over When It’s Over is not an easy read. Among the chapter titles: “The Democratic Republic of Congo: Rape” and “Iraqi Refugees in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon: Blown Apart.”

What happens in conflict is so terrible, so unspeakable, that Jones’ challenge is to convince comfortable people to listen. She writes of girls in a Sierra Leone hospital: “Many were stuck in silence, but here in the hospital, in the presence of countless survivors, and with the support of counselors, some opened up and told us their stories, several on videotape. But their stories were so awful, I wondered if the world could bear to hear them.”

War is Not Over When It’s Over gives readers that chance, the opportunity to really listen. Personal stories as told by women who endure atrocities are the driving force behind the book. Still, you can’t escape the numbers: In Liberia’s three recent wars, 90 percent of women suffered physical or sexual violence; three out of four women were raped. Sierra Leone’s “trademark atrocity” was amputation, but an estimated 250,000 women and girls were sexually assaulted in that country’s civil war. Even after the war officially ended, rape persists, perpetrated mostly against girls aged six to 15. In the Kivus, a region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, 79 percent of women surveyed in 2005 reported that they had been raped by at least two attackers (but as many as 20) at once. Over 70 percent say they were tortured during rape.

Jones writes about the people behind this data with deep empathy, the result of a lifetime of writing, photographing and devoting herself to the plight of women who endure extreme violence. She argues that when wars officially end they actually just move from public spaces into private homes. She recounts her work documenting women’s lives with the International Rescue Committee, where she facilitated a program that gave women cameras and a chance to tell their own stories.

But her first feat in War is to frame extreme suffering, often seen as something “over there” and “far away,” with immediacy for readers in their comfortable and safe homes. She introduces her book about women in Africa, Asia and the Middle East with a story about her own experience. Her father was a decorated veteran of the Great War, and Jones writes: “That war is now commemorated with paper poppies, the Great War, in which my father served with uncommon distinction and from which he returned a hero, irrevocably changed, subject to nightmares and sudden rages and drunken assaults upon innocent furniture and my mother and me, and tearful reconciliations we were not permitted to reject.” She asks where her father learned “to act so swiftly, so effectively, so violently,” placing her global sojourn in context of a search for answers about her own life.

And so it is that the stories of these women are the stories of any country engaged in war. As we read the news about American veterans coming home, receiving medals of honor, committing violent crimes, being incarcerated, committing suicide, War is Not Over When It’s Over is no longer an abstraction in faraway places. For anyone with the fortitude to internalize its chapters, it implicitly begs the question, do we really understand the costs of our own long wars?

Buy the book: Skylight, Powell’s, Amazon, Borders.

Excerpt: “One day I returned to the office in Voinjama to find a young American colleague visibly upset. She was reading a report on Liberia issued by a prominent international organization that repeated the popular historical theory about Liberian violence springing from the resentment of ‘marginal young people.’ Amid a hundred pages detailing the grievances of deprived young men, grievances so serious that they led the resentful young men – seemingly inevitably – to kill thousands of people and wreck their country, my colleague had come upon a single paragraph devoted to the subtopic ‘Gender.’ It included this sentence: ‘Women suffered greatly during the war.’

‘Suffered greatly? Suffered greatly?’ Her voice slid up the scale. ‘Is that all they can say? This report goes on and on about what these poor men must have felt that turned them into such butchers. But they don’t even say what happened to women, much less what they felt. Just this ‘suffered greatly.’ What does it mean?’”

Further Reading: Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan by Ann Jones, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah, War and the Health of Nations by Zaryab Iqbal

Angilee Shah is a freelance journalist who writes about globalization and politics. You can read more of her work at www.angileeshah.com.

*Photo of a shelter for victims of sexual abuse in the Congo courtesy United Nations Photo.

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The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons
by Richard Rhodes

–Reviewed by Angilee Shah

Like the training scenes in “The Karate Kid”, it’s hard to understand why we are reading Twilight of the Bomb‘s historical minutiae while in the midst of it. If Richard Rhodes’ history is a review of nuclear challenges since the Cold War, it is also a political history, a technical manual, and a diffuse tome to culminate his monumental four-part series on the subject. We learn about every politician and diplomat who negotiated or affected negotiations with the remnants of the Soviet Union, Iraq and North Korea, the difference between krytons and zirconium powder, capacitors and implosion bombs. Wax on, wax off.

But we do know we are learning something important: the 1993 exchange of American and Russian scientists had large value as a cultural exchange; South Africa is the only nation with an indigenously produced nuclear arsenal that has voluntarily disarmed; and the International Atomic Energy Agency firmly concluded that Iraq did not have the facilities to build a nuclear arsenal without detection before the U.S. invasion in 2003.

Of course, like any good training montage, there is a catharsis at the end. After explaining 30 years of back-and-forth on disarmament, draw-downs, test bans and intelligence gathering, here’s what Rhodes concludes: We will inevitably rid the world of its nuclear threat. “Nuclear weapons, never weapons of warfare except in the grandiose imaginations of air-power fantasists, have reverted to their original function: they are terror weapons,” he writes, diving into his own voice near the end of the book. He challenges us, asking, “Are we terrorists?”

It’s almost as though Rhodes wrote this history precisely so that we can put it behind us. His series about nuclear weapons began with the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1986 book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and continued with Dark Sun and Arsenals of Folly. Twilight is a dense book that completes the longer narrative. It holds a new fact on every line, replete with detail, long quotes and pull-outs from memoirs and documents as the world falls in and out of danger (or, often just perceived danger) from nuclear annihilation. Rhodes deconstructs George W. Bush’s case for war in Iraq, offering particularly damning and specific evidence that he willfully lied about the possibility of Saddam Hussein’s stockpile and ability to build weapons of mass destruction. On North Korea, Rhodes outlines the maneuvers of the Clinton administration, culminating with and South Korean press interview with Kim Jong-il. It turns out he never had any intention of using his nuclear weapons – he realized that his country would never survive the United States’ retaliation – and was primed for negotiation to end its nuclear program all together. The Bush administration took a hard line instead of continuing with the hard-won diplomacy of the Clinton era.

This is all to say that Rhodes’ history challenges the idea that deterrence is a good long-term strategy. Ultimately, nuclear weapons beget nuclear weapons, and even if there is no country in the world that intends to use them, their existence is a threat. The Obama administration’s moves to reduce the U.S. arsenal – it is now pushing for the Senate to pass a stalled treaty with Russia, for example – is an inevitable and necessary movement toward global eradication of nuclear weapons. If we are we worried about terrorists’ use of weapons of mass destruction, Rhodes says that we have to worry about the arsenals that we harbor ourselves. However protected, the danger of those weapons falling into the hands of someone willing to use them is more potent than the safeguard of deterrence. Terrorists won’t be deterred by nuclear weapons, he argues. Going through the all-important exercise of understanding how the nuclear threat has been used politically and exaggerated over the years might take us all a long way toward changing our mindset about harboring nuclear weapons.

Buy the Book: Random House, Skylight Books, Powell’s, Amazon, Borders

Excerpt: “Here in brief, early in 1998, more than three years before the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, was the basic argument the administration of George W. Bush would use to justify starting a second war against Iraq in 2003 and forcing Saddam Hussein from power. It would be possible later to question if Iraq might have reconstituted its WMD during the five-year hiatus when the U.N. Was barred from inspections; both Butler and Blix told me they initially believed that Iraq had done so when the U.N. prepared to reenter the country for inspections in 2003. But the war had already been framed by its chief instigators in 1998, when years of inspections were just coming to an end, when all Iraq’s nuclear materials and infrastructures had been discovered and destroyed, and when the relatively primitive state of Iraq’s missile development was obvious — when, in other words, there was no threat to the United States to justify an invasion. The authors of the 1998 letter did not dare make such a claim, but pointed instead to the supposed vulnerability of American troops in the region, of Israel, and of the supply of Middle Eastern oil.”

Further Reading: Plan of Attack: The Definitive Account of the Decision to Invade Iraq by Bob Woodward and The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Angilee Shah is a freelance journalist who writes about globalization and politics. You can read more of her work at www.angileeshah.com.

*Photo of bomb shelter courtesy slworking2.

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The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?
by Linda Polman

–Reviewed by Erica E. Phillips

The Red Cross set the standard for humanitarian aid one and a half centuries ago: that it is to be “impartial, neutral, and independent…irrespective of the people involved and the situation on the ground.”

But in 1995 at Goma, a camp for Rwandan refugees, the Red Cross and more than 300 other aid organizations – including big names like UNICEF, Oxfam, and the World Health Organization – had a difficult time upholding these principles. In The Crisis Caravan, journalist Linda Polman paints a grim picture of this and a handful of other humanitarian missions that raise the question of whether aid is ever or even if it should be impartial.

Through extensive interviews with aid workers, law enforcement, civilian refugees, and doctors on site, Polman tells quite a different story of Goma than those that appeared in the press at the time. As a firsthand witness, Polman describes how Hutu militias would cross into Goma to hunt Tutsis. Some refugees at Goma were in fact Hutu militants who had international warrants out for their arrest – for crimes of genocide. Suspected Hutu “traitors” would arrive at the infirmary with missing arms and legs. But when an epidemic of cholera broke out at the camp, horrified media reports drew more and more funding to the site. “The Hutus were presented to the public in the West mainly as innocent victims of the cholera bacterium,” Polman writes. “What the aid organizations and journalists failed to mention was that some of the dead in Goma had not succumbed to cholera but had been murdered by Hutu militias, on suspicion of disloyalty.” Meanwhile, many Tutsi refugees remained without aid or access to the international community.

Goma isn’t the only aid project that Polman indicts. She recounts her 2002 travels to Sierra Leone, which had then received the most humanitarian aid money per capita for three years running, yet was still named the world’s poorest country by the United Nations Development Program. In Freetown she dined with donors and NGO managers, who, anticipating still more funding for their organizations, raised glasses of champagne to celebrate the UNDP’s designation.

In Liberia that same year, Polman traveled through villages outside the capital of Monrovia. Along the way, her transport vehicle was stopped at checkpoints where she had to pay food or money to pass. “No access to war zones without payment, whatever form it may take,” she writes. “Especially if you’re a humanitarian.” According to Médecins Sans Frontières, the president of Liberia required 15 percent of aid be paid to him, in cash. In Somalia, there were “entrance fees” of nearly 80 percent, which had to be paid to warlords. And in 2006, the U.N. mission in Afghanistan reported that aid groups in the province of Uruzgan directed one-third of their support directly to the Taliban.

Polman headed to Afghanistan in 2007 to find the aid community in hiding. After former Secretary of State Colin Powell called aid workers “an important part of our combat team” in 2001, many groups found themselves in constant danger. As they told Polman, “Since the start of the war on terror and the military-humanitarian reconstruction projects in frontline states, people can no longer tell the difference between ‘real,’ neutral humanitarians and reconstruction troops disguised as humanitarians.” Because of this confusion, aid workers often had to delegate the funds and management of their project to local partners, often losing track of where the money went. Polman quotes one U.N. investigator who tells the story of a $150 million housing project: the funds exchanged hands so many times, with each person taking a cut of the money, that it ultimately ended up buying only a bit of firewood.

With 37,000 NGOs and nearly $120 billion in annual funds in their hands, it is nearly impossible to track accountability in the humanitarian aid system. Polman puts the burden for review on journalists and donors. “Most donor governments and private donors give money based on newspaper headlines, not the extent and urgency of human suffering,” she writes.

After what happened in Goma, hundreds of NGOs developed a handbook of standards – the Sphere Project – and another NGO network began publishing an annual Review of Humanitarian Action. But as recently as May 2008, the publication again lamented the lack of “a systematic and regular means of assessing…overall performance,” saying aid groups ought to function more as a collective than what has become, in practice, an unregulated free market industry. The limited number of contracts creates antagonism between groups, Polman argues, and puts every altruistic dollar at risk for manipulation and misuse.

Ultimately, she says, regulation among humanitarian aid groups is imperative. “If the aid industry is left to control itself instead of being controlled,” Polman laments, “then reforms aren’t going to happen any time soon.”

Buy the Book: Metropolitan Books, Skylight Books, Powell’s, Amazon, Border’s.

Further Reading: A Bed for Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis by David Rieff and Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen.

*Photo of a refugee camp courtesy Western Sahara.

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Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth Century World
by Rebecca E. Karl

–Reviewed by Angilee Shah

The most interesting thing about Mao Zedong are the paradoxes that surround him. The “cultural worker” who created art for the benefit of mass politics was Mao’s ideal artist; now his own image is an icon of pop art, overlayed by Warhol hypercolors and juxtaposed with commercial symbols. The kitsch of his anti-capitalist Red Guard – the little red books and propaganda posters that were powerful ideological tools during the Cultural Revolution – have become commodified collectibles.

The greatest conundrum surrounding Mao Zedong, however, is the legacy he left to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This is the complex thread that runs implicitly through Rebecca E. Karl’s history of Mao Zedong’s life, which she situates in China’s politics from the Opium War to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Even though we know how the story ends, the suspense and drama of how the People’s Republic of China evolved is palpable. Mao, who brought the CCP to power, was an advocate of mass politics and protracted struggle: “Revolution is not a dinner party,” he famously said. Today, a far cry from Maoist dedication to the struggling peasant and proletariat, the middle-class dinner-party-going aspirations of “Harmonious Society” dominate the Party’s political rhetoric. It’s what Karl describes as a “reduction of Mao’s dream of socialist modernization to a crass fulfillment of national pride” and the only way for the CCP to maintain the power that Mao gained for it.

“Recalling Mao’s challenge is to recall a time when many things seemed possible,” Karl writes. “It is to remember possibility against the pressure to concede to the world as it now appears.” From this point of view, Mao’s vision for China has failed.

Karl’s history is a take on Mao’s life from the inside out. But it is also a book about “Mao Zedong Thought,” how his philosophies evolved and how they gripped a nation. It is difficult to just see Mao as a tyrant when his stated politics were to empower the peasant and proletariat masses in anti-imperialist and anti-colonial revolution. Though Karl does not put Mao on a pedestal, she does present him from his own point of view. Early in his political career, for example, Mao advocated that the CCP join rather than lead the peasant class. “In this view, peasants…were the true bearers of revolution, they were the ones on whom China’s Marxist revolution was to rest,” Karl writes. He combined dictatorship and democratic rhetoric, centralized rule through class unity and maintained some local decision-making power.

Karl self-consciously avoids sensational stories about Mao, She notes when she refrains from extrapolating further from her source material, and mildly critiques other biographers who have not shown such restraint. But she references Mao’s personal life – his relationships with his three wives, his penchant for swimming in the nude and his dislike of formal clothes, for example – just enough to create compelling characters.

This is not a review of Mao’s leadership of China. Karl’s history offers readers a chance to see China as Mao might have seen it. She implicitly begs the reader to ask, what might Mao, whose portrait still looks out over Tiananmen Square, have thought of China as it rises today? And perhaps more importantly, does it matter? Given the proliferation of interest and intrigue surrounding Mao Zedong’s life, Karl’s history included, the CCP has done wonders to maintain the authority he created while forsaking the China he imagined.

Buy the Book: Duke University Press, Skylight Books, Powell’s, Amazon, Border’s.

Excerpt: “Mao had patience for neither plodding planners nor overly cautious bureaucrats. He had even less patience for leaders at any level who said higher production targets could not be achieved. Indeed, in Mao’s view, one key to achieving higher production was ‘permanent revolution,’ This meant, for him, that revolution was not a one-time event, but a long-term, ever-deepening, neverending process. If revolution waned, bureaucracy took over. That spelled the death of historical progress.”

Further Reading: Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, On Guerrilla Warfare by Mao Zedong, China Watcher by Richard Baum, and China in the 21st Century by Jeffrey Wasserstrom.

Angilee Shah is a freelance journalist who writes about globalization and politics. You can read more of her work at www.angileeshah.com.

*Photo courtesy punxutawneyphil.

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