Antonian publications

Nayef R. F. Al-Rodhan (Senior Academic Member, Honorary Fellow, 2009-Present)

On Power: Neurophilosophical Foundations and Policy Implications
Vernon Press, 2021

This book seeks to provide a historical, contemporary and predictive analysis of power. It aims to explain the history of political power in a unique way by approaching the concept of power through the lens of neurophilosophy – the application of neuroscientific principles to practical questions of governance, ethics, political and moral philosophy.

In this book, Professor Nayef Al-Rodhan provides an accessible, incisive, and provocative take on the history, nature, and future of power. His insights go beyond conventional wisdom by exploring some of the themes that will become increasingly relevant to analysing power in the decades to come.

A central idea of the book is the highly addictive universal nature of power at the neurochemical level, the craving for it, and the intense resistance to giving it up in all walks of life and circumstances. This can be applied directly to thinking about governance, political change, public policy, national and international peace, security, and prosperity. Al-Rodhan formulates an innovative conceptual picture of power by integrating the findings of neuroscience with the broader implications of power in the era of digital connectivity and cognitive and physical enhancement technologies. In doing so, he guides our approach to political power and public policy, influenced by ubiquitous, disruptive, and intrusive technologies.

Robert William Aspinall (DPhil Politics, 1994)

Middle-class boys’ schools in England and Japan
Routledge, 2024

Drawing on the author’s own experience as a student and a teacher in England and Japan, this book is a comparative study of boys’ secondary schools in these two countries.

By comparing two nations that are very different in their history, culture, and geographical location, and by focusing on schools that are affordable to the majority of the population, the analysis carried out in this book takes the onus away from money, national culture, and religion, allowing for a more insightful understanding of those elements of schooling, which prove essential to successful class reproduction and those that are contingent. The book also explores the experiences of boys who do not fit orthodox images of heterosexual masculinity, discussing their interaction with teenage subcultures which encourage non-conformity to middle-class norms.

Representing a novel contribution to the understanding of the relationship between education, gender, and class, this book will be a valuable resource to scholars and students of education studies, Japanese studies, and the sociology of education.

Bilal Baloch (DPhil Politics, 2013)

When Ideas Matter: Democracy and Corruption in India
Cambridge University Press, 2021

Comparativist scholarship conventionally gives unbridled primacy to external, material interests–chiefly votes and rents–as proximately shaping political behaviour. These logics tend to explicate elite decision-making around elections and pork barrel politics but fall short in explaining political conduct during credibility crises, such as democratic governments facing anti-corruption movements.

In these instances, Baloch shows, elite ideas, for example concepts of the nation or technical diagnoses of socioeconomic development, dominate policymaking. Scholars leverage these arguments in the fields of international relations, American politics, and the political economy of development. But an account of ideas activating or constraining executive action in developing democracies, where material pressures are high, is found wanting.

Resting on fresh archival research and over 120 original elite interviews, When Ideas Matter traces where ideas come from, how they are chosen, and when they are most salient for explaining political behaviour in India and similar contexts.

Erica Benner (DPhil Political Theory and International Relations, 1987)

Adventures in Democracy: The Turbulent World of People Power
Penguin Allen Lane, 2024

Democracy is a living, breathing thing and Erica Benner has spent a lifetime thinking about the role ordinary citizens play in keeping it alive: from her childhood in post-war Japan, where democracy was imposed on a defeated country, to working in post-communist Poland, with its sudden gaps of wealth and security. This book draws on her experiences and the deep history of self-ruling peoples – going back to ancient Greece, the French revolution and Renaissance Florence – to rethink some of the toughest questions that we face today.

What do democratic ideals of equality mean in a world obsessed with competition, wealth, and greatness? How can we hold the powerful to account? Can we find enough common ground to keep sharing democratic power in the future? Challenging well-worn myths of heroic triumph over tyranny, Benner reveals the inescapable vulnerabilities of people power, inviting us to consider why democracy is worth fighting for and the role each of us must play.

Alexander Betts (DPhil International Relations, 2003)

Social Science: A Very Short Introduction
Oxford University Press, 2024

Social science is the study of human behaviour. It offers the tools to understand and explain people’s choices and actions, and how they live together in communities. With insights from social science, organisations and individuals may be persuaded to change their behaviour, making a difference in addressing societal challenges, from climate change to fighting pandemics and alleviating poverty.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this Very Short Introduction offers an accessible overview of social science, explaining how methods and theory from different disciplines can be applied and combined to address major global challenges. It aims to equip students, scholars, and practitioners to analyse, interpret, and undertake social science research.

Drawing upon inspiring examples, it shows how social scientists can have real-world impact and change the world for the better. It unpacks cutting-edge themes such as behavioural science, human data science, and the ways in which social science can work collaboratively with the natural sciences and humanities. It offers a vision for the future of social science that is interdisciplinary, inclusive, and impactful.

Thomas J. Biersteker (Senior Member, 1990)

Informal Governance in World Politics [edited with Kenneth W. Abbott]
Cambridge University Press, 2024

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cooperation among nations was based on international regimes and formal intergovernmental organizations. However, since the 1990s, informal intergovernmental organizations and transnational public-private governance initiatives have proliferated. Even within formal intergovernmental organizations, informal means of influence and informal procedures affect outcomes whilst, around all these institutions, even more informal networks shape agendas.

This volume introduces and analyzes these three types of informality in governance: informality of, within, and around institutions. An introductory chapter traces the rise of informal governance and suggests a range of theoretical perspectives and variables that may explain this surge. Empirical chapters then apply these and other explanations to diverse issue areas and cross-cutting issues, often using newly developed datasets or original case study research. The concluding chapter sets out a research agenda on informality in global governance, including its normative implications.

Priyanka Bijlani (MSc Comparative and International Education, 2019)

The Essence of Karak
Austin Macauley Publishers, 2023

In this contemporary collection of poems, Priyanka embraces the transformative power of storytelling through multicultural crafted verse to illuminate the threads that connect us all. Through her tapestry of anecdotes and shared lived experiences, she conveys a message of what it takes to be strong or karak.

Florencia Lopez Boo (DPhil Economics, 2009)

The Science of Details
Paidos Argentina, 2024

The science of details is not just another scientific book on behavioural economics. It brings the lessons of years of research in Latin America and globally to real life, from the laboratory to the centre of the policy-making process.

Mohamed A. El-Erian (MPhil and DPhil Economics, 1980)

Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix a Fractured World (Hardback)
Simon & Schuster Ltd, 2023 [with Gordon Brown and Michael Spence]

Do you feel like we’re in a permacrisis? Chances are you feel some anxiety about the state of the world. Gordon Brown, Mohamed A. El-Erian and Michael Spence certainly did.

Three of the most internationally respected and experienced thinkers of our time, these friends found their pandemic Zooms increasingly focused on a cascade of crises: sputtering growth, surging inflation, poor policy responses, an escalating climate emergency, worsening inequality, increasing nationalism and a decline in global co-operation.

They shared their fears and frustrations. And the more they talked, the more they realised that while past mistakes had set the world on this bumpy course, a better path leading to a brighter future exists. Informed by their different perspectives, they sought a common goal: achievable solutions to fix our fractured world. This book is the product of that thinking.

At the heart of today’s permacrisis are broken approaches to growth, economic management, and governance. While these approaches are broken, they are not beyond repair. An explanation of where we’ve gone wrong, and a provocative, inspiring plan to do nothing less than change the world, Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix a Fractured World, written with Reid Lidow, sets out how we can prevent crises and better manage the future for the benefit of the many and not the few.

Simon Escoffier (DPhil Sociology, 2011)

Mobilizing at the Urban Margins: Citizenship and Patronage Politics in Post-Dictatorial Chile
Cambridge University Press, 2023

In October 2019, unprecedented mobilizations in Chile took the world by surprise. An outburst of protests plunged a stable democracy into the deepest social and political crisis since its dictatorship in the 1980s. Although the protests involved a myriad of organizations, the organizational capabilities provided by underprivileged urban dwellers proved essential in sustaining collective action in an increasingly repressive environment.

Based on a comparative ethnography and over six years of fieldwork, Mobilizing at the Urban Margins uses the case of Chile to study how social mobilization endures in marginalized urban contexts, allowing activists to engage in large-scale democratizing processes. The book investigates why and how some urban communities succumb to exclusion, while others react by resurrecting collective action to challenge unequal regimes of citizenship. Rich and insightful, the book develops the novel analytical framework of ‘mobilizational citizenship’ to explain this self-produced form of political incorporation in the urban margins.

Leandro Prados de la Escosura (Modern History, 1976)

A Millennial View of Spain’s Development: Essays in Economic History
Springer, 2024

This open access book presents the evolution of the Spanish economy over the past seven centuries since the end of the Reconquest and examines how much economic progress Spain has achieved, as well as its impact on living standards and income distribution over the very long run. It shows that pre-industrial Spain was far from stagnant, although levels of output per head in the early nineteenth century were not much different from those on the eve of the Black Death (1348). It further discusses how phases of simultaneous per capita output and population expansion and shrinkage alternated, lending support to the recurring growth and frontier economy hypotheses.

While a collapse in the 1570s gave way to sluggish growth and higher inequality after a long phase of sustained growth and lower inequality, the book shows how real per capita income has improved substantially over the last two centuries, driven by increased labour productivity, and derived from more intense and efficient use of physical and human capital per worker. Presenting exposure to international competition as a stimulus for this development, the book sheds light on the underperformance of Spain up to 1950 in a European comparison and describes the catch-up of Spain’s economy with more advanced countries until 2007. Finally, the book explains how modern economic growth is associated with an increase in the material well-being of its inhabitants, as the most dynamic economic phases of the last century have been associated with an improvement in income distribution, although the relationship between growth and inequality has not been linear.

John L. Esposito (Senior Member (Academic Visitor, SAM, SCR), 1983)

Global Islamophobia and the Rise of Populism [edited with Sahar F. Aziz]
Oxford University Press, 2024

Global Islamophobia and right-wing populism have grown and intensified at an alarming rate. Each chapter in this volume demonstrates how the ubiquity of these negative and fallacious stereotypes across continents has harmed Muslims economically, politically, and socially. In the most egregious cases, Islamophobia has cost Muslims their lives and liberty.

In India, for example, Muslims are bearing the brunt of the alarming rise of Hindutva—a right-wing Hindu-supremacist political movement endorsed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Thousands of Muslim Indians have been killed by sectarianism fuelled by Hindutva. Millions of Chinese Uyghur Muslims have been rounded up into labour and so-called re-education camps intended to coercively convert them out of Islam and to assimilate them into Han culture. In Europe, right-wing populists leveraged anti-Muslim racism after 9/11 to further polarize Western societies for their political gain. Right-wing politicians’ core principles that are opposed to the European Union and immigrants are deliberately framed in Islamophobic terms.

In all the nations examined in this volume, populism is a powerful mechanism through which Islamophobia spreads. The book is a must-read for anyone concerned with the erosion of civil and human rights locally and globally.

Sir Richard John Evans (Modern History, 1969)

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich
Penguin Books, 2024

A biographical study of Hitler’s inner circle offers a new way to understand the horrors of the Nazi regime.

Why did so many Germans take part in the crimes of Nazi Germany? How did they come to support Hitler and follow him almost to the very end? For too long, the Nazis have been presented as little more than psychopaths or criminals. In his major new work, renowned historian Richard J. Evans makes use of a mass of recently unearthed new evidence to strip away the veneer of myth and legend from the faces of the Third Reich and present a more realistic view of Nazi perpetrators as human beings who were disturbingly like us.

Evans offers rounded, fresh and often startling new portraits of the men and women who created and served Nazi Germany, beginning with Hitler himself and going on to encompass leading figures like Göring, Goebbels and Himmler, enforcers of Hitler’s orders such as Eichmann and Heydrich, propagandists like Leni Riefenstahl, low-level perpetrators such as the notorious Irma Grese and unknown sympathizers and fellow-travellers who helped the regime in myriad ways.

Elham Fakhro (DPhil Socio-Legal Studies, 2014)

The Abraham Accords: The Gulf States, Israel, and the Limits of Normalization
Columbia University Press, 2024

In August 2020, Donald Trump announced that his administration had brokered a groundbreaking treaty between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, the first normalization agreement between Israel and an Arab state in more than twenty years. Soon afterward, Bahrain joined the agreements, known as the Abraham Accords. How were these treaties achieved, and why did the parties involved see normalization as in their interest? In what ways have the accords altered the Middle East’s political landscape, and how have they affected the question of Palestine?

This book is a groundbreaking in-depth analysis of the Abraham Accords, shedding new light on their causes and consequences. Elham Fakhro demonstrates how shared security concerns, economic interests, and regional political shockwaves led to a surprising strategic convergence between the Gulf states and Israel, setting the stage for covert relations to come out into the open. She examines the role of the Trump administration in negotiating the agreements and shows how the UAE and Bahrain have instrumentalized the accords to burnish their reputations in Western capitals. Fakhro underscores how Washington’s Middle East policy shifted toward expanding the agreements at the expense of attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—with profound costs. Offering a critical lens on a much-hailed agreement, this book argues that the pursuit of normalization in isolation from a lasting solution to the conflict has entrenched the conditions that continually plunge the Middle East into crisis.

Sheila Fitzpatrick (DPhil Modern History, 1969)

Lost Souls: Soviet displaced persons and the birth of the Cold War
Princeton University Press, November 2024

A vivid history of how Cold War politics helped solve one of the twentieth century’s biggest refugee crises.

When World War II ended, about one million people whom the Soviet Union claimed as its citizens were outside the borders of the USSR, mostly in the Western-occupied zones of Germany and Austria. These ‘displaced persons,’ or DPs―Russians, prewar Soviet citizens, and people from West Ukraine and the Baltic states forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1939―refused to repatriate to the Soviet Union despite its demands. Thus began one of the first big conflicts of the Cold War. In Lost Souls, Sheila Fitzpatrick draws on new archival research, including Soviet interviews with hundreds of DPs, to offer a vivid account of this crisis, from the competitive maneuverings of politicians and diplomats to the everyday lives of DPs.

American enthusiasm for funding the refugee organizations taking care of DPs quickly waned after the war. It was only after DPs were redefined―from ‘victims of war and Nazism’ to ‘victims of Communism’―in 1947 that a solution was found: the United States would pay for the mass resettlement of DPs in America, Australia, and other countries outside Europe. The Soviet Union protested this ‘theft’ of its citizens. But it was a coup for the United States. The choice of DPs to live a free life in the West, and the West’s welcome of them, became an important theme in America’s Cold War propaganda battle with the Soviet Union.

Sheila Fitzpatrick (DPhil Modern History, 1969)

The Shortest History of the Soviet Union
Old Street Publishing, 2023

Soviet Russia arrived in the world accidentally and departed unexpectedly. More than a hundred years after the Russian Revolution, the tumultuous history of the Soviet Union continues to fascinate us and influence global politics.

Here is an irresistible entree to a sweeping history. From revolution and Lenin to Stalin’s Great Terror, from World War II to Gorbachev’s perestroika policies, this is a lively, authoritative distillation of seventy-five years of communist rule and the collapse of an empire.

Sheila Fitzpatrick shows us the fate of countries often left out of discussions of the Soviet age, provides vivid portraits of key Soviet figures and traces the aftermath of the regime’s unexpected fall: the rise of Vladimir Putin, a creature of the Soviet system but not a Soviet nostalgic; and how China learned from the Soviet collapse.

Tom Fowdy (MSc Chinese Studies, 2017)

The North Star
Olympia Publishers, 2024

The North Star is an urban fantasy novel set in the North East of England that strives to blend the themes of traditional Northumbrian folklore with the issues of modernity. In doing so it explores the challenges of socio-economic decline, post-industrialism and right-wing populism through the metaphor of one girl’s journey to becoming an ancient hero.

José Galindo (MPhil Latin American Studies, 2000)

Este libro ofrece una nueva forma de comprender la magnitud y el impacto del capitalismo de amigos en el desarrollo institucional de México. Comenzando con el Porfiriato (1876-1911), el autor identifica patrones de comportamiento de la elite política y económica mexicana a lo largo de los años y analiza aspectos de la economía política que han persistido hasta ahora, moldeando y, en ocasiones, limitando el desarrollo económico del país: falta de competencia justa en el mercado, distribución desigual de ingresos y movilidad social limitada. Aun así, las instituciones mexicanas formales se fueron fortaleciendo, aunque con vacíos legales y con prácticas que permitieron que el modelo de negocio basado en el capitalismo de amigos haya pervivido. Los fuertes vínculos entre empresarios y políticos permitieron a los primeros obtener apoyos privilegiados tales como crédito barato, exenciones fiscales y protección arancelaria. Asimismo, los sucesivos gobiernos, apoyados por las empresas, implementaron políticas públicas que consintieron que funcionaros públicos, en ocasiones, recibieran sobornos. Esta narrativa, basada en la elite franco-mexicana, se desarrolla en gran parte a través de la historia de una de las familias más ricas de México, los Jean y su imperio en la industria textil del algodón y en otros sectores, y la que ha mantenido poder y riqueza hasta el día de hoy.

Bruno Garschagen (Visiting Student, 2010)

O Mínimo sobre Conservadorismo
O Mínimo, 2023

The book explains the concepts and core elements of conservative thought from three traditions: British conservatism, American conservatism and Brazilian conservatism from the 19th century. [Portuguese]

Mina Ghosh (MSc Japanese Studies, 2020)

Hyo the Hellmaker
Scholastic UK, 2024

A breath-taking YA fantasy, illustrated with stunning Japanese-inspired artwork by the author, perfect for fans of Leigh Bardugo, Xiran Jay Zhao and RF Kuang. Meet the Hakai Family Hellmakers: Purveyors of artisan hells and unlucky days to inflict upon your enemies. They’ll make it personal…for a price! Hyo Hakai is a hellmaker. But when a curse destroys her village, she and her brother are forced to flee to the Island of Onogoro – a place where Gods live among humans. Hyo expects the bodies when they show up, but as she investigates she is drawn into a tangled web of ens, death, conspiracy and secrets. A unique YA debut from author and illustrator Mina Ikemoto Ghosh. This beautiful package is highly illustrated with Manga style art. Drawing on Japanese traditions and classic mystery storytelling, Hyo’s world will captivate readers from start to finish.

Paul Gootenberg (MPhil Latin American Studies, 1979)

Hecho en el Perú: Ensayos Históricos sobre la Cocaína
Fondo Editorial, 2023

Ensayos históricos sobre la cocaína es una colección de textos del renombrado historiador norteamericano Paul Gootenberg que apuntan a superar este desconocimiento o negación.

Los ocho ensayos de Hecho en el Perú, publicados entre 2003 y 2012, exploran una amplia variedad de temas, aunque juntos aportan una compleja perspectiva histórica sobre la coca y la cocaína peruana, y analizan cómo las condiciones locales del Perú y de sus actores se entrecruzan activamente con fuerzas globales y políticas en la elaboración de la cocaína moderna. Los peruanos contribuyeron a inventar la cocaína como una mercancía global y también, durante las décadas de 1940 a 1970, contribuyeron a su creación como un producto ilegal. Buena parte de este libro concierne al Perú y está basado en fuentes peruanas, por lo que cubre un enorme vacío histórico, al ser la única historia de la cocaína peruana en la actualidad. Debido a este retorno del Perú como el centro de la cocaína mundial, Hecho en el Perú está llamado a concitar, en los próximos años, una importante polémica nacional e internacional.

Robert Gorwa (DPhil International Relations, 2016)

The Politics of Platform Regulation: How Governments Shape Online Content Regulation
Oxford University Press, 2024

As digital platforms have become more integral to not just how we live, but also to how we do politics, the rules governing online expression, behaviour, and interaction created by large multinational technology firms—popularly termed ‘content moderation,’ ‘platform governance,’ or ‘trust and safety’—have increasingly become the target of government regulatory efforts.

This book provides a conceptual and empirical analysis of the important and emerging tech policy terrain of ‘platform regulation.’ How, why, and where exactly is it happening? Why now? And how do we best understand the vast array of strategies being deployed across jurisdictions to tackle this issue?

The book outlines three strategies commonly pursued by government actors seeking to combat issues relating to the proliferation of hate speech, disinformation, child abuse imagery, and other forms of harmful content on user-generated content platforms: convincing, collaborating, and contesting. It then outlines a theoretical model for explaining the adoption of these different strategies in different political contexts and regulatory episodes, and goes on to look at policy development in Germany, Australia and New Zealand, and the United States.

Agnia Baranauskaite Grigas (MPhil International Relations, 2024)

How to Win the Million Dollar College Admissions Game: The Ultimate Guide for Getting into the College of Your Dreams
College Admissions Secrets, 2024

You’ve heard the horror stories. Brilliant kids getting rejection letters, acceptance rates plummeting, an elusive and impossible selection process. Not to mention, all of the contradictory advice that leaves you with more questions than answers. If this sounds all too familiar, this book is what you need.

Dr Agnia Grigas has cracked the college admission code, and she shares it all here, in her groundbreaking book, How to Win the Million Dollar College Admissions Game. Dr Grigas reveals her best-kept secrets in this fun, relatable, inspiring guidebook so you and your child can also play and win the college admissions game.

Jun Han (DPhil Sociology, 2017)

Impact Investing: Global Trends and China’s Practices
Springer Singapore, 2023

This book aims to clarify the concept of impact investing by combing the international experience and the practices in China, promote the standardization of the measurement and evaluation system of impact investing, contribute to the establishment of an impact investing ecosystem in China, and guide investment to consider both the social and environmental impact and profitability.

This book mainly contains four parts: the definition of impact investing and the similarities and differences with other related concepts; the development, characteristics and trends of global impact investing; the development and the current situation of impact investing in China; and a case study in China.

Jun Han (DPhil Sociology, 2017)

(How does Impact Investing Infrastructure work? A Case Study on GIIN)

影响力投资的行业基础设施是如何运作的?——以全球影响力投资网络（GIIN）为例

Social Sciences Academic Press, 2024

Peter David Harris (MPhil International Relations, 1977)

Cold Mountain Poems
Penguin Random House Everyman’s Library, 2024

The best of Hanshan’s beloved poems—among the earliest of Zen-style Buddhist poetry, beloved by the Beat Generation—here newly translated by Peter David Harris and organized thematically in a beautiful Pocket Poets hardcover.

Often ranked among the most inspiring works of world literature, the poems of Hanshan (whose name means Cold Mountain) were traditionally thought to have been written at least twelve centuries ago on rock walls by a Buddhist monk living in the mountains of southeastern China.

The best of his poems, collected here and organized by theme, reflect the sense of humour, deep love of solitude, and vivid descriptions of nature that have endeared these poems to generations of readers.

Sune Haugbølle (DPhil Modern Middle Eastern Studies, 2001)

The Fate of Third Worldism in the Middle East
OneWorld, 2024

In the latter half of the twentieth century, a revolutionary idea promised to upend the global order. Anti-imperialist militancy, bolstered by international solidarity, would lead to not only the national liberation of oppressed peoples but universal emancipation, shattering the division between the prosperous nations of the capitalist West and the poorer countries of the Global South.

The idea was Third Worldism, and among others it inspired struggles in Iran and Palestine. By the early 1980s, however, progressive visions of independence and freedom had fallen to the reality of an oppressive Islamic theocracy in Iran, while the Palestinian Revolution had been eclipsed by civil war in Lebanon, Israeli aggression and intra-Arab conflict.

This thought-provoking volume explores the dramatic decline of Third Worldism in the Middle East. It reveals the lived realities of the time by focusing on the key protagonists – from student activists to guerrilla fighters, and from volunteer nurses to militant intellectuals – and juxtaposes the Iranian and Palestinian cases to offer a riveting re-examination of this defining era. Ultimately, it challenges us to reassess how we view the end of the long 1960s, prompting us to reconsider perennial questions concerning self-determination, emancipation, change and solidarity.

Alvaro Herrero (DPhil Politics, 2002)

Disruptive Cities. How to be prepared for the next pandemics
Inter-American Open University, 2023

Analyzes the role of cities in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemics, with a special focus on innovative public management capacities and the use of the 2030 Agenda framework.

[Spanish]

Professor Renée Hirschon (DPhil Social Anthropology, 1971)

Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: the Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus [3^rd Edition]
Berghahn Books, 2023

Originally published by Clarendon in 1989, the book was reissued in a 3^rd edition, updated and including an Afterword by Ayhan Aktar. The book describes the life and philosophy of people forcibly displaced in 1923 through the Lausanne Treaty. Professor Hirschon lived with them in 1970, sharing their lives through anthropological fieldwork so it constituted an early and innovative study of urban life in Europe.

Professor Renée Hirschon (DPhil Social Anthropology, 1971)

Women and Property, Women as Property [edited by]
Routledge Revivals, 2023

Originally published by Croom Helm, St Martin’s Press in 1984, the book went out of print but has been reissued in a facsimile. It is an edited volume exploring the complicated relationship between gender and power with case studies from 9 different societies (China, India, Turkey, Portugal, New Guinea, east, west and South Africa). Concepts such as ownership, what constitutes property, legal as well as traditional rights, are discussed showing their great cross-cultural variation.

Florian Hoffman (MPhil European Politics and Society, 2006)

Fünf Gründe, warum die Welt nicht untergeht // Five reasons why the world won’t end
Brand Eins Books, 2024

Everywhere we look, there are problems: a burning planet, an economy that is changing too slowly. Societies that are splitting. And in the middle of all this, us – people for whom it often becomes too much. This book shows that there is enough reason for hope that we can even have a desire for the future. To help shape it.

Florian Hoffmann guides us through innovative projects that create role models for a better future worldwide. Because the change on a small scale can be a template for the upheavals on a large scale.

[German]

Dr William D James (DPhil International Relations, 2015)

The British Grand Strategy in the Age of American Hegemony
Oxford University Press, 2024

Is the United Kingdom capable of grand strategy? Common wisdom suggests otherwise. Some think it implausible amid the maelstrom of domestic politics, while others believe the UK lacks the necessary autonomy, as a cog in the US-led order.

British Grand Strategy in the Age of American Hegemony challenges these claims. William D. James contends that grand strategy is an unavoidable part of governing. Grand strategy is the highest level of national security decision-making, encompassing judgements over a state’s overarching objectives and interests, as well as its security environment and resource base. Getting these decisions ‘right’ is vital in moments of geopolitical flux.

Employing several historical case studies between 1940-2003 and marshalling a host of primary sources, James argues that British politicians and officials have thought in grand strategic terms under American hegemony – even if they do not realise or admit to this. He also demonstrates that the role of allies in shaping British grand strategy has been overstated. Finally, James highlights the conditions under which domestic political actors can influence grand strategic decision-making. Written for practitioners as well as scholars, the book concludes with several policy recommendations at this inflection point in British history.

Hartmut Kaelble (Research Fellow, 1975-76)

The Rich and the Poor in Modern Europe, 1890-2020
Berghahn Publishers, 2023

As social inequality grows, historical analysis on wealth and income distribution across the 20th century often does not take into account inequality of education, health, housing and chances of social mobility, nor does it differentiate statistical inequality from the realities of peoples’ actual experience.

With this broad understanding in mind, in a long look back on the history of social inequality in Europe, The Rich and the Poor in Modern Europe addresses these neglected subjects. It also tackles the commonplace notion that modern capitalism inevitably produces wealth gaps and asks whether the facts and figures we possess also lead to alternate interpretations of examples of mitigated inequality.

Covering the 20^th century and the beginnings of the 21^st century in Europe through wars, and economic crises, through periods of unprecedented economic prosperity and staggering economies, both exacerbating and dampening the problem, acclaimed historian Hartmut Kaelble offers a rigorous response to understanding our present-day challenge of social inequality.

Sami Kent (MSc African Studies, 2014)

The Endless Country
Picador, 2024

The Endless Country takes a journey through Turkey’s past – the nation the author’s father left decades ago and he returns to as a young man.

It is not about Erdogan or Atatürk, the two towering Presidents who have book-ended that history, and at times have appeared impossible to escape. Instead Sami Kent’s book goes deep beyond them, revealing a history as rich, layered and absurd as his family’s favourite dessert, künefe: a shredded wheat pastry with a core of melted cheese, a topping of pistachios, and a drowning of syrup.

From tiny weightlifters to the world’s biggest prison, from a failed socialist commune to a wildly successful orchid ice cream, the book is a tribute to the sheer bewildering diversity of Turkey’s past: its people, their ideas and their struggles.

Naotaka Kimizuka (Visiting Student, 1993-94)

Constitutional Monarchy of the Twenty-First Century
Springer, 2024

This is the first book to investigate how constitutional monarchy could survive in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, during which many monarchies were overthrown by revolutions or coups d’état in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe.

Today we have about 200 countries in the world, but there are only 28 which have their own monarchical sovereigns – emperor, king, queen, grand duke, prince, sultan or emir – and even if we add the Commonwealth realms to these, we would find almost three-quarters of the globe are republics at this moment. So will monarchy disappear from human history in the not-too-distant future?

This book shows how the European monarchs have played important roles not only as heads of state, but also as heads of nation, in which they are symbols of unity and national identity, of continuity and stability, fountainheads of national achievement and success, and supporters of social service. Consequently they have grappled with difficult contemporary issues such as social welfare, the global environment, the protection of wildlife, multiculturalism and the LGBT movement which national governments would not be able to deal with sufficiently in each country. This book also suggests reforming the existing emperor system of Japan in reference to the activities of European constitutional monarchy.

Prof. Dr. Ludger Kühnhardt (Senior Member)

Connected Worlds. Notes from 235 Countries and Territories, vol. 1 (1960-1999), vol. 2 (2000-2020)
Wiesbaden: Springer, 2024

As journalist, contemporary historian and political advisor, Ludger Kühnhardt, Director at the Center for European Integration Studies (ZEI) at Bonn University, St Antony’s Senior Associate in 1990/1990 and Visiting Professor (‘Stifterverband Fellow’) in 2005/2006, has recorded impressions, noticed conversations and reflected on links between the different worlds of this one planet.

The two volumes of Connected Worlds, travel notes written on the spot in all independent states and many non-sovereign territories on all continents for over six decades, offer fascinating reading. The texts are reconstructing the puzzle of a world that has gradually discovered itself as a single entity over a period of just over half a century. With the coronavirus pandemic, an intermediate epoch between old resolutions and new connections has come to an end. Kühnhardt’s unique travel notes taken by a global citizen in 235 countries and territories offer exciting impulses for multi-dimensional reflections and creative re-assessments of the years 1960 to 2020. The two volumes of Connected Worlds, now available in English, are a rich and stimulating source of contemporary history.

Katerina G Lagos (DPhil Modern History, 2001)

The Fourth of August Regime and Greek Jewry, 1936-1941
Palgrave, 2023

Delving into a traditionally underexplored period, this book focuses on the treatment of Greek Jews under the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas in the years leading up to the Second World War. Almost 86% of Greek Jews died in the Holocaust, leading many to think this was because of Metaxas and his fascist ideology. However, the situation in Greece was much more complicated; in fact, Metaxas in his policies often attempted to quash anti-Semitism.

The Fourth of August Regime and Greek Jewry, 1936-1941 explores how the Jews fit (and did not fit) into Metaxas’s vision for Greece. Drawing on unpublished archival sources and Holocaust survivor testimonies, this book presents a ground-breaking contribution to Greek history, the history of Greek anti-Semitism, and sheds light on attitudes towards Jews during the interwar period.

Tomila Lankina (DPhil Politics, 2001)

The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle Class
Cambridge University Press, 2022

A devastating challenge to the idea of communism as a ‘great leveller’, this extraordinarily original, rigorous, and ambitious book debunks Marxism-inspired accounts of its equalitarian consequences.

It is the first study systematically to link the genesis of the ‘bourgeoisie-cum-middle class’ – Imperial, Soviet, and post-communist – to Tzarist estate institutions which distinguished between nobility, clergy, the urban merchants and meshchane, and peasants. It demonstrates how the pre-communist bourgeoisie, particularly the merchant and urban commercial strata but also the high human capital aristocracy and clergy, survived and adapted in Soviet Russia. Under both Tzarism and communism, the estate system engendered an educated, autonomous bourgeoisie and professional class, along with an oppositional public sphere, and persistent social cleavages that continue to plague democratic consensus.

This book also shows how the middle class, conventionally bracketed under one generic umbrella, is often two-pronged in nature – one originating among the educated estates of feudal orders, and the other fabricated as part of state-induced modernization.

María de los Ángeles Lasa (Master of Public Policy, 2018)

País de vinalón: mi viaje a Corea del Norte
Center for the Opening and Development of Latin America (CADAL), 2024

The book offers a rare and insightful glimpse into the Hermit Kingdom, through the lens of the author and her mother, who traveled to Pyongyang in 2018. With fewer than four thousand Western visitors there each year, this narrative stands out for its unique perspective and deep reflections on themes like power, time, and mortality. Accompanied by nearly forty original photographs, the book transcends traditional travel writing, inviting readers to reconsider their own perceptions of a totalitarian regime.

Carol Leonard (Governing Body Fellow 1997-2011, Emeritus Fellow 2011-present)

The Russian Revolution of 1917 – Memory and Legacy [edited with Daniel Orlovsky and Jurej Petrov]
Routledge, 2024

This book, which brings together a range of leading historians of the Russian Revolution—from both Russia and the West, and both younger and older historians—explores the changes in the way in which the October 1917 Revolution is commemorated, and also examines fundamental questions about what the Russian Revolution—indeed what any revolution—was anyway.

Overall, the book provides a major reassessment of one of the twentieth century’s most important events. Carol was the author of two of these chapters, with co-authors, Governing Revolution in Russia in 1917 and in the 1990s: Comparative Political Economy (Vladimir Mau and Carol Leonard) and Railroads and Strikes in Russia, 1894–1904: Revolution in Times of Railroad Building (Carol S. Leonard, Zafar Nazarov, Leonid Borodkin, Roman Konchakov and Maria Karpenko).

Iftikhar Haider Malik (Senior Member, 1989)

Pearls and Shards
Lightstone, April 2024

Iftikhar Malik’s Pearls and Shards seeks to redefine the genre by bringing together multiple campuses from various continents. Malik’s novel is not about financial constraints; he weaves together characters that belong to diverse backgrounds and are brought together by the campus which is as material as it is symbolic.

Saleem Awan, the protagonist, moves around various campus worlds which are multi-cultural and multi-dimensional. He is a child of local and historical cultures, and his independent mind does not allow him to settle down in one place and form a lasting relationship, because his universal personality would not afford him a single identity.

Kuukuwa Manful (MSc African Studies, 2014)

Building African Futures: 10 Manifestos for Transformative Architecture and Urbanism [edited by]
iwalewa books, 2023

How do young African professionals imagine a future for the continent’s cities? Building African Futures presents ten essays by young architects, urban planners and activists that offer innovative solutions to big challenges, including housing shortages, informality, legal roadblocks and misunderstandings between architects, policy-makers and local people. Their ideas are grounded yet transformative. They reflect the authors’ direct experiences across a range of African cities, but the issues they speak to resonate across the continent.

This collection is a rich resource for urban activists, built environment professionals, local governments and a general audience with an interest in African urbanism.

Simon Mayall (Defence Fellowship, 1996)

The House of War, the Struggle between Christendom and the Caliphate
Bloomsbury/Osprey, 2024

A powerful new history detailing the most significant military clashes between Islam and Christendom over the 1,300 years of the Muslim caliphate.

From the taking of the holy city of Jerusalem in the 7^th century AD by Caliph Umar, to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following the end of World War I, Christian popes, emperors and kings, and Muslim caliphs and sultans were locked in a 1300-year battle for political, military, ideological, economic and religious supremacy.

In this powerful new history of the era, acknowledged expert on the history of the Middle East and the Crusades Simon Mayall focuses on some of the most significant clashes of arms in human history: the taking and retaking of Jerusalem and the collapse of the Crusader states; the fall of Constantinople; the sieges of Rhodes and Malta; the assault on Vienna and the ‘high-water mark’ of Ottoman advance into Europe; culminating in the Allied capture of Jerusalem in World War I, the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the dissolution of the sultanate and the caliphate, and the formation of modern Europe and the modern Middle East.

Eugene Mazo (DPhil Politics, 1997)

The Oxford Handbook of American Election Law [edited by]
Oxford University Press, 2024

The Oxford Handbook of American Election Law offers a sophisticated introduction to one of the most dynamic, contested, and consequential areas of American law. Election law plays a critical role in regulating the political arena at a time when the USA is witnessing unprecedented levels of polarization.

The Handbook is the first of its kind, bringing together 47 leading scholars of American election law to offer definitive perspectives on their field. The book begins by explaining how election law relates to several of its closest academic cousins, including constitutional law, democratic theory, and empirical social science. It then goes on to explore the major topics in election law, including the right to vote, the rules of running for office, the role of political parties, the dynamics of redistricting and gerrymandering, the history and necessity of the Voting Rights Act, the intricacies of campaign finance, and the recurring controversies surrounding election administration in the individual states.

Stephanie Evaline Mitchell (DPhil History, 1997)

Women’s Suffrage in the Americas [edited by]
University of New Mexico Press, 2024

The first hemispheric study to trace how women in the Americas obtained the right to vote, Women’s Suffrage in the Americas pushes back against the misconception that women’s movements originated in the United States.

The volume brings Latin American voices to the forefront of English-language scholarship. Suffragists across the hemisphere worked together, formed collegial networks to support each other’s work, and fostered advances toward women gaining the vote over time and space from one country to the next.

The collection as a whole suggests several models by which women in the Americas gained the right to vote: through party politics; through decree, despite delays justified by women’s supposed conservative politics; through conservative defence of traditional roles for women; and within the context of imperialism. However, until now historians have traditionally failed to view this common history through a hemispheric lens.

Paul Morland (MPhil International Relations, 1992)

No One Left: Why The World Needs More Children
Forum, 2024

A population calamity is unfolding before our eyes. It started in parts of the developed world and is spreading to the four corners of the globe. There are just too few babies being born for humanity to replace itself.

Leading demographer Paul Morland argues that the consequences of this promise to be calamitous. Labour shortages, pensions crises, ballooning debt: what is currently happening in South Korea – which faces population decline of more than 85% within just two generations – threatens to engulf us all, and sooner than we think. In the developed world we may be able temporarily to stave off the worst of its effects with immigration, but many countries, including those the immigrants come from, will get old before they get rich.

No One Left charts this future, explains its causes and suggests what might be done. Unless we radically change our attitudes towards parenthood and embrace a new progressive pro-natalism, argues Morland, we face disaster.

Eiichi Motono (DPhil Oriental Studies, 1986)

From Piracy to Imitation: China-Japan-British Trademark Infringement, 1880-1931
Waseda University Press, December 2023

Christine Murphy (MPhil Modern South Asian Studies, 2008)

Notes on Surviving the Fire
Penguin Random House, 2025

When Sarah’s only friend in her graduate program is found dead of an alleged heroin overdose, Sarah is forced back into the orbit of the man in their department who assaulted her. A hurtling ride of a novel—darkly funny and propulsive.

At a Ph.D. program in Southern California, Sarah and her best friend, Nathan, spend their time working on their theses, getting high, and keeping track of the poor air quality due to nearby forest fires. No one believes Sarah when she reports a fellow student for raping her at a party—’He’s such a good guy!’—and the Title IX office simply files away the information, just like the police. Nathan is the only person who cares.

When Sarah finds Nathan dead of an overdose from a drug he’s always avoided, she knows something isn’t right. She starts investigating his death as a murder, and as the pieces fall into place, she notices a disturbing pattern in other student deaths on campus.

As a girl, Sarah grew up in the forests of Maine, following her father on hunts, learning how to stalk prey and kill, but only when necessary. Now, she must confront a different type of killing—and decide if it can be justified.

Notes on Surviving the Fire is a story about vengeance, the insidious nature of rape culture, and ultimately, a woman’s journey to come back to herself.

Wim Naudé (Senior Associate Member, 1995)

Economic Growth and Societal Collapse: Beyond Green Growth and Degrowth Fairy Tales
Palgrave Macmillan, 2023

It has been said that, in the light of ecological overshoot, human civilization faces two future possibilities: a Great Decoupling or a Great Collapse. In this book, two distinct positions to achieve the Great Decoupling are critically evaluated: Green Growth and Degrowth. It is concluded that neither Green Growth nor Degrowth will be able to achieve the Great Decoupling.  The possibility for society to collapse is then raised, with the potential for a civilizational rebound pondered.  Whether collapse may be a feature, and not a bug, of the long-run evolution of complex civilization is discussed.

Wim Naudé (Senior Associate Member, 1995)

Artificial Intelligence: Economic Perspectives and Models [with Thomas Gries and Nicola Dimitri]
Cambridge University Press, 2024

Is Artificial Intelligence a more significant invention than electricity? Will it result in explosive economic growth and unimaginable wealth for all, or will it cause the extinction of all humans?

Artificial Intelligence: Economic Perspectives and Models provides a sober analysis of these questions from an economics perspective. It argues that to better understand the impact of AI on economic outcomes, we must fundamentally change the way we think about AI in relation to models of economic growth. It describes the progress that has been made so far and offers two ways in which current modelling can be improved: firstly, to incorporate the nature of AI as providing abilities that complement and/or substitute for labour, and secondly, to consider demand-side constraints.

Outlining the decision-theory basis of both AI and economics, this book shows how this, and the incorporation of AI into economic models, can provide useful tools for safe, human-centered AI.

Ana María Otero-Cleves (DPhil Modern History, 2008)

Plebeian Consumers: Global Connections, Local Trade, and Foreign Goods in Nineteenth-Century Colombia
Cambridge University Press, 2024

Plebeian Consumers is both a global and local study. It tells the story of how peasants, day workers, formerly enslaved people, and small landholders became the largest consumers of foreign commodities in nineteenth-century Colombia, and dynamic participants of an increasingly interconnected world.

By studying how plebeian consumers altered global processes from below, Ana María Otero-Cleves challenges ongoing stereotypes about Latin America’s peripheral role in the world economy through the nineteenth century, and its undisputed dependency on the Global North.

By exploring Colombians’ everyday practices of consumption, Otero-Cleves also invites historians to pay close attention to the intimate relationship between the political world and the economic world in nineteenth-century Latin America. She also sheds light on new methodologies and approaches for studying the material world of men and women who left little record of their own experiences.

Kunle Patrick Owolabi (MPhil Latin American Studies, 2003)

Ruling Emancipated Slaves and Indigenous Subjects: The Divergent Legacies of Forced Settlement and Colonial Occupation in the Global South
Oxford University Press, 2023

This book examines why forced settlement colonies, where European colonists established large-scale agricultural plantations with enslaved African labour, show favourable developmental outcomes relative to colonies of occupation, whose indigenous non-white populations predate the onset of European colonial expansion. Both patterns of imperial control were extractive and labour-repressive, yet forced settlement colonies emerged from European domination with higher levels of education attainment, greater postcolonial democratisation, and favourable human development outcomes relative to Global South countries that emerged from colonial occupation after 1945.

The paradox is explained by examination of the distinctive legal-administrative institutions used to control emancipated Afro-descendants and indigenous colonial subjects in the Global South.

Arzu Öztürkmen (MEC Lecturer and Collaborator, 2005)

The Delight of Turkish Dizi: Memory, Genre and Politics of Television in Turkey
The University of Chicago Press, 2021

The first comprehensive study of dizi, a television genre unique to Turkey akin to soap opera or telenovela.

Standing at the crossroads of folklore, media, and performance studies, Arzu Öztürkmen explores the rise of the dizi genre in Turkey since the 1970s, when national television broadcasting began in the country. The Delight of Turkish Dizi approaches this unique genre—not quite soap opera or telenovela—as an art form that developed with the collective creative input of writers, producers, directors, actors, editors, musicians, and, lately, international distributors.

Öztürkmen shows how dizi-making is a marathon run by sprinters, where production and broadcasting processes have been tightly interwoven, offering a mode of communication and consumption that is distinct to the Turkish television industry. The research consists of oral history with key figures in dizi production and ethnographic surveys of film sets, international content markets, and award ceremonies. This first-ever monograph on Turkish dizi will be a valuable addition to the field of performance and media studies while delighting the general reader as well.

HB Paksoy (DPhil Oriental Studies, 1982)

Uga and Wuga

Baker Academia Edu

A play at the Theatre of the Absurd.

Maria Clara R M do Prado (Economic Development, 1981)

A real História do Plano Real
e-galáxia, 2020

O Real revolucionou o cenário econômico do país ao garantir a estabilidade após um largo período de hiperinflação. A memória inflacionária, que alimentava a remarcação automática dos preços, desapareceu com a ajuda do engenhoso mecanismo da Unidade Real de Valor (URV), a moeda virtual que antecedeu o real, um feito único no mundo, mas não foi suficiente para acabar com a memória do curto prazo no país. Quase trinta anos depois, as relações econômicas funcionam como se o Brasil ainda vivesse na era da inflação descontrolada, enquanto que o desequilíbrio fiscal mantém-se como um perigoso foco de instabilidade.

Em A real história do Plano Real, Maria Clara conta em uma narrativa de fôlego minúcias do processo de criação do Real e das discussões entre os economistas que o conceberam. Traz a reprodução de alguns escritos de autoria dos formuladores sobre os aspectos mais sensíveis do plano que circularam em meio à equipe econômica, à medida em que evoluíam as discussões para a implementação do Plano Real. Revela, ainda, os desdobramentos e implicações na esfera financeira internacional, no âmbito da economia interna, no campo das pressões políticas e das iniciativas de comunicação que ajudaram a rápida aceitação da nova moeda pela população.

Patrick Quinton-Brown (MPhil and DPhil International Relations, 2014)

Intervention before Interventionism: A Global Genealogy
Oxford University Press, 2024

Intervention before Interventionism is about the ways in which statespeople have re-ordered intervention and non-intervention since the middle of the twentieth century; it is concerned primarily with non-Western contestations of Western-dominated order. Illustrating institutional change in and through decolonization; it provides a conceptual roadmap for understanding dilemmas of intervention and non-intervention today, particularly in relation to contestation as it has re-emerged in the twenty-first century.

Christos Retoulas (DPhil Oriental Studies, 1999)

The Glory of the ‘Byzantine’-Ottoman Continuum: Romanity, God’s Neighbourhood on Earth
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023

This is the story of Ecumenical Romanity (ʽΡωμαιοσύνη/Rûmîyâne) – a story that has remained hidden from the eyes of the world, physical and metaphysical, for too long. Romanity concerns Supraness, God’s own mode of Being, which is His by nature and belongs to His cohabitants by His uncreated divine Energy, Glory or Operations.

Roman Ecumenicity, or else, the ‘Byzantine’-Ottoman Continuum, was born of the historically enacted theophilosophical commensurability between Roman Christianity (Orthodoxy, intimately related to the Reality of ἡ τῶν πάντων ἑνότης – the unity of all being/existents) and the central Ottoman religiosity of Islamic vahdet-i vücud tasavvuf (‘the unity-of-Being’ Sufism) (Sunni and Alevi) — including their organic connections to Judaism (canonical and evolved, such as Sabataism).

This historical trajectory, which has been adversely affected by the Frankish Augustinian/(neo)Gnostic ouroborian West after 800 AD, is approached here from the point of view of the Real, religion and secularisation/secularisation theory from ancient times until 1938 AD.

Christos Retoulas (DPhil Oriental Studies, 1999)

The Christian-Islamic Vision of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror: Engenderings of Ecumenical Romanity
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024

In its telos, this book is about debt, a debt to a martyr of Ecumenical Romanity: Mehmed the Conqueror. From the point of view of holistic comprehensiveness, his Christian-Islamic Roman vision constituted the apex of Orthodox Christian and Seljuk/Ottoman vahdet-i vücud Islamic Ecumenicity in the cosmocratic line of Alexander the Great (especially his Sogdian/Bactrian heritage), Julius Ceasar, and above all, Constantine the Great.

Nevertheless, his struggle for its engendering was stopped in its tracks. The flow of the uncreated undercurrent that fed its life was turned from a pounding river into a limping creek by the worldly forces of the cacodoxical West, a perfidiously conspiratorial and parochial son, and a lurking doctor in the service of that adulterous daughter of Constantinople, Venice. All in all, Fatih Ceasar Basileus Sultan Mehmed Manuel encountered Estombol (Εἰς τήν πόλιν/Is·tin·polin/Istanbul), who he restored into Konstantiniyye/Constantinople. It is this debt that Ecumenical Romanity owes him.

Jun Saito (MPhil Economics, 1984)

Japan and the Growth-Equity-Small Government Impossible Triangle: Lessons from the United States and the Nordic Economies
Routledge, 2024

This volume examines and analyzes the current situation of, and the future prospects for, the Japanese economy, particularly in the context of inequality. The country’s economy is facing the ageing and the shrinking of its population, both of which will reduce the potential growth rate, which has already become very low.

By introducing a new policy framework, namely the `Equity-Growth-Small Government Impossible Triangle’, based on reviewing, comparing and contrasting the policies of the United States, the Nordic economies and Japan, the book proposes a policy direction that could be pursued by Japan. If Japan wants to sustain growth while preventing inequality to widen and preserve an egalitarian society, there is no other choice but to further promote globalization and innovation and, at the same time, surrender preserving a small government by reforming itself to become a dynamic and resilient welfare state.

Setsuya Sato (MPhil Economics, 1980)

New Perspectives on Globalization: Developing global literacy to catch up with the global trend
Bungeisha Publishing, 2021

Growing income inequality, the rise of populism, the absence of global leaders, the rise of China and the US-China trade war, the resurgence of Asia, demographic changes, the gender gap, refugees and migrants, climate change…

The global world has undergone a major transformation in the past decade. So, will the coronavirus crisis and border closures bring an end to globalization? Do we really understand how interconnected and interdependent we are in the first place? This book was written to help you prepare for a post-pandemic world by giving you the ‘global literacy’ you need to keep up with the latest global trends.

Victoria Schofield (Visiting Alistair Horne Fellow, 2004)

The Rescue Ships and the Convoys, Saving Lives during the Second World War [edited and expanded by Victoria Schofield]
Pen & Sword, 2024

The Rescue Ships and the Convoys tells the history of one of the least known aspects of Second World War maritime history. Despite the threat of heavy losses of ships and lives, no hospital ships, which had to be lit, could accompany the convoys as they would betray a convoy’s position. The solution was to create a fleet of 30 small Merchant Navy vessels of about 1,500 gross tons, mostly from coastal trade. These ‘Rescue Ships’, commanded and manned by Merchant Navy personnel, carried medical teams, and life-saving equipment including operating theatres, hospital beds, ‘Carley’ floats, and hoists. Undeterred either by  enemy action or atrocious weather conditions, these vessels accompanied close to 800 convoys and saved 4,194 lives from ships sunk in the North Atlantic and with the Arctic convoys. During their service, seven Rescue Ships were lost.

This is a story packed with suspense, danger, achievement and tragedy. As the author, Vice Admiral Schofield, who was closely involved in the establishment of the fleet, writes, it is a record ‘of great humanitarian endeavour, of superb acts of courage, of a display of seamanship of the highest order, of a devotion to duty by medical officers under the most arduous conditions imaginable, of great deeds by men of the Merchant Navy in little ships on voyages they were never designed to undertake.’

Tom Scott-Smith (MPhil Development Studies, 2009)

Fragments of Home: Refugee Housing and the Politics of Shelter
Stanford University Press, 2024

Abandoned airports. Shipping containers. Squatted hotels. These are just three of the many unusual places that have housed refugees in the past decade. The story of international migration is often told through personal odysseys and dangerous journeys, but when people arrive at their destinations a more mundane task begins: refugees need a place to stay. Governments and charities have adopted a range of strategies in response to this need. Some have sequestered refugees in massive camps of glinting metal. Others have hosted them in renovated office blocks and disused warehouses. They often end up in prefabricated shelters flown in from abroad.

This book focuses on seven examples of emergency shelter, from Germany to Jordan, which emerged after the great ‘summer of migration’ in 2015. Drawing on detailed ethnographic research into these shelters, the book reflects on their political implications and opens up much bigger questions about humanitarian action. By exploring how aid agencies and architects approached this basic human need, Tom Scott-Smith demonstrates how shelter has many elements that are hard to reconcile or combine; shelter is always partial and incomplete, producing mere fragments of home. Ultimately, he argues that current approaches to emergency shelter have led to destructive forms of paternalism and concludes that the principle of autonomy can offer a more fruitful approach to sensitive and inclusive housing.

Relli Shechter (Visting Fellow, 2002-3; Academic Visitor, 2018-19)

The Egyptian Social Contract: A History of State-Middle Class Relations
Edinburgh University Press, 2023

The Egyptian Social Contract explores the intricacies of the relationship between the state and its citizens, from the establishment of the semi-independent Egyptian nation in 1922 until the 2011 Uprising.

The book foregrounds the social history of the social contract: the analysis of state–middle class relations and how these relations have shaped Egyptian society. It studies why and how a social contract that had been reformed in the aftermath of World War II became the core of state-citizen relations under President Nasser.

Moreover, it looks at how this social contract channeled socioeconomic development over time, creating an Egyptian middle-class society. The book probes a political economy in which class vision and interests in development—state-supported mobility into the middle class and, later, the reproduction of this class—intertwined with the rise and entrenchment of authoritarianism in Egypt.

Since the 1970s, the perseverance of this social contract has mostly inhibited the necessary socioeconomic and political reforms, or the making of a new contract in Egypt, because such reforms would have challenged Egypt’s ruling elite, and no less so its ingrained, if increasingly struggling, middle-class society.

Lewis Siegelbaum (DPhil History, 1976)

Reflections on Stalinism [edited with J. Arch Getty]
Northern Illinois University Press, 2024

Reflections on Stalinism distils decades of historical thought and research, bringing together twelve senior scholars of Soviet history who began their careers during the Cold War to examine their views of Stalinism. They present insights into the role of personality in statecraft, the social underpinnings of dictatorship and state terrorism, historians’ attachments to their subjects, historical causality, the applicability of Marxist categories to Soviet history, the relationship of Soviet history to post-Soviet Russia, and more.

Essays address the transformation of a peasant country into a superpower and the causes and scale of domestic bloodshed. Reflections on Stalinism ultimately tackles an age-old question: Do powerful people make history or are they the product of it?

Sishuwa Sishuwa (MSc African Studies, 2010)

Party Politics and Populism in Zambia
James Currey, 2024

Analysis of the political history of Zambia through a study of Michael Sata. It shows the interaction between party politics and populism since the 1950s, the nature and competitiveness of electoral politics in single or dominant party regimes, and the importance of individual political leadership to the success of opposition parties in Africa.

Based on exclusive interviews with Sata, as well as with his friends, allies, opponents, and journalists, and on newspapers, archives, personal correspondence, and participant observation, Sata’s election to the Zambian presidency in 2011 is explained as the culmination of a political journey spanning the late colonial period (1953-1964), the years of one-party rule (1973-1991), and the era of multiparty democracy (since 1991).

The book explores the nature and style of his political strategy, the grievances that he articulated and played on, the constituencies he targeted and mobilised, the policy appeals around which he rallied support, and the language with which he expressed those appeals. At the same time, it uses the prism of Sata’s political life to examine the growth of populism in Zambia and its practice in party politics since the 1950s. As well as providing new insights into the long shadow of late colonialism on the country’s contemporary politics, this book illustrates the evolution of political ideas and populist strategies.

Liliane Stadler (DPhil History, 2014)

Liliane Stadler (DPhil History, 2014)

Between Neutrality and Solidarity: Swiss Good Offices in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1992
BRILL, 2024

After 1979, Switzerland became increasingly involved in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan as a provider of humanitarian aid and good offices. It delivered aid to the region, hosted Soviet prisoners of war and eventually mediated between the Afghan regime and the mujahideen. What is puzzling about this development is that initially, following the Soviet invasion, both government and parliament refused to become diplomatically involved in Afghanistan on account of Swiss neutrality.

The present study investigates how and why this changed between 1979 and 1992. While the practical impact of Switzerland’s good offices was modest, the crisis revealed that Switzerland continued to struggle to balance the competing imperatives of permanent neutrality and international solidarity in an increasingly multilateral world.

Yoav Javier Tenembaum (DPhil Modern History, 1991)

Historical Perspective and International Relations
Troubador, 2023

Composed of short articles, this book highlights some of the most momentous events in modern and contemporary history having an ongoing effect on the way international relations have evolved. Cardinal events in the history of international relations are assessed with historical perspective. A section is devoted to the role of history in the shaping of foreign policy. Some articles dwell on the more theoretical aspects of international relations and diplomacy, and others on the intersection of international law and diplomacy.

The book concludes with articles on imagination and the study of history, on the use of counterfactual history, and on historical truth and historical narrative and their relevance in current international relations. The book is aimed at a wide readership, interested in history and international relations.

Karan Behari Thapar (DPhil International Relations, 1977)

Devil’s Advocate: The Untold Story
Harper India, 2018

Sometime in the late summer of 1976, Sanjay Gandhi asked if I wanted to go flying with him…

After first attempting to teach Karan Thapar to fly (not very successfully), Sanjay Gandhi took the controls and performed a series of aerobatics, not particularly dangerous but nonetheless thrilling. Once they were further away from Delhi, he became even more daring. Suddenly, he decided to scare the farmers working in the fields below by aiming the aircraft straight at them. As he dived down, they scattered and ran, fearing for their lives. At the last moment, Sanjay pulled up dramatically and waved at the bewildered farmers, clearly chuffed with the whole performance. The manoeuvre required nerves of steel and tremendous self-confidence, both of which Sanjay possessed in plenty.

In Devil’s Advocate, Karan dives deep into his life to come up with many such moments. Included here are stories of warm and lasting friendships, such as with Benazir Bhutto, whom he met while he was an undergraduate. He also talks about his long association with Aung San Suu Kyi and Rajiv Gandhi. However, not all friendships lasted – for example, with L.K. Advani, with whom he shared a close bond until an unfortunate disagreement over an interview caused a falling-out. The tension generated during an interview has spilled over off-screen multiple times, and Karan discusses these incidents in detail. For instance, when Amitabh Bachchan lost his cool during a post-interview lunch or when Kapil Dev cried like a baby. And there’s the untold story of two of his most controversial interviews – with Jayalalithaa and Narendra Modi. While Jayalalithaa laughed it off later, the after-effects of Modi’s infamous walkout have grown worse with time. Riveting and fast-paced, Devil’s Advocate is as no-holds-barred as any of Karan Thapar’s interviews.

Karan Behari Thapar (DPhil International Relations, 1977)

Sound & Fury
Bloomsbury India, 2023

A famed and feared interviewer, Karan Thapar is known for his astute, probing questions and his persistence in getting clear answers. In this selection of tightly focused and penetrating interviews Thapar and the people he interviews examine hot-button issues of our times: India’s economic health, relations with China, independence of the judiciary, being Muslim in today’s India, how the nation fares 75 years after independence. Together, these interviews provide a comprehensive view of how India regards itself and its place in the world.

Sally Tomlinson (MSc Environmental Change and Management, 2002)

Ignorance
Agenda Publishing, 2024

As a universal experience school provokes strongly-held opinions. The views of teachers, parents and pupils compete with those of educational theorists, social engineers and ideologues. Although undoubtedly much improved since the time of Beveridge, the provision of education remains beset with challenges.

Sally Tomlinson’s engaging, and at times personal, journey through Britain’s postwar experience of schooling and education reform draws on her many years of working in the sector. She explains how legacies of different systems and countless policy initiatives have led to the persistence of social inequalities, entrenching them in society and perpetuated by the power dynamics that they create between class, race and gender.

Furthermore, she shows how the increasing mania for testing, targets, choice and competition, which has made schools into a marketplace and young people into consumers, threatens to undermine schools as a place where citizens can share learning and the democratic values that are needed as much today as they were in Beveridge’s time.

Steve Tsang (DPhil Imperial and Commonwealth History, 1981)

The Political Thought of Xi Jinping [with Olivia Cheung]
Oxford University Press, 2024

Xi Jinping has been pushing to make his Thought a major addition to China’s ideology, which guides China’s direction of travel. No other Chinese leader apart from Mao Zedong had their theoretical contributions elevated to this status. This book provides a contextualized reading of Xi Jinping’s Thought and examines how it has been implemented in practice.

While China’s political system remains a Leninist party-state, how it operates has been substantially modified following the introduction of Xi Thought. What has happened is akin to replacing the operating system of a computer. This book conceptualizes the modified system as a Sino-centric consultative Leninist system. The Chinese Communist Party is being reinvigorated as a Leninist machine, by which the Party leads everything. A new de facto social contract is offered to the Chinese people, who are being indoctrinated by Xi Thought so they will think like ‘one patriotic people.’

China’s economy is being restructured following Xi’s vision of a ‘socialist market economy,’ while its interactions with the rest of the world, his reconstruction of the ancient tianxia, or all-under-heaven, world order, which commits to a ‘China First’ principle. The end goal set in Xi Thought is the fulfillment of ‘the China Dream of national rejuvenation’ by 2050 at the latest. Whether this will come to pass or not, the introduction of Xi Thought has already changed China, with significant implications for the rest of the world.

Robert Upton (DPhil History, 2007)

An intellectual biography of the Indian nationalist thinker Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1920)
Oxford University Press, 2024

This work is a systematic study of Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s Thought, focusing on his views on ‘communal’ relations within the Indian polity, on caste and reform in Hindu society, and on political ethics regarding violence and non-cooperation. The Thought of Bal Gangadhar Tilak adopts a contextualist approach, situating his ideas in local Maharashtrian as well as pan-Indian and global cultural-intellectual contexts.

The work marks a departure from current interpretations, emphatically arguing that Tilak is misappropriated and/or misunderstood as a proto-Hindutva thinker. Instead, he is revealed to be a radical liberal who supports counter-autocratic violence, a majoritarian pluralist in terms of intercommunity relations, a self-strengthening reformer focused on masculinity, committed to reshaping India for the challenges of modernity— something fused in his thought with a resilient Brahmin supremacism.

This book lays emphasis on his remarkable recognition as the nation’s ‘founding father’ and particularly demonstrates how his appropriation by Gandhi was in turn contested by those emphasising Tilak’s embrace of violence, particularly in the crucial mid-1920s period when he was indelibly linked to re-emerging Hindutva. More recently, growing ahistorical demi-official insistence on his social progressivism illustrates a change in India’s public culture, as does the use of popular or even legal pressure to de-legitimize perennial criticism of Tilak’s socio-political positions.

The St Antony’s connection with the book is deep, as the late David Washbrook examined the thesis on which it’s based, and Faisal Devji has endorsed it on the back cover — where my old college affiliation is also proudly recorded!

Timothy C. Winegard (DPhil History, 2010)

The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity
New York, Dutton, 2024

Timothy C. Winegard’s The Horse is an epic history unlike any other. Its story begins more than 5,500 years ago on the windswept grasslands of the Eurasian Steppe; when one human tamed one horse, an unbreakable bond was forged and the future of humanity was instantly rewritten, placing the reins of destiny firmly in human hands.

Since that pivotal day, the horse has carried the history of civilizations on its powerful back. For millennia it was the primary mode of transportation, an essential farming machine, a steadfast companion, and a formidable weapon of war. Possessing a unique combination of size, speed, strength, and stamina, the horse dominated every facet of human life and shaped the very scope of human ambition. And we still live among its galloping shadows.

Horses revolutionized the way we hunted, traded, travelled, farmed, fought, worshipped, and interacted. They fundamentally reshaped the human genome and the world’s linguistic map. They determined international borders, moulded cultures, fuelled economies, and built global superpowers. They decided the destinies of conquerors and empires. And they were vectors of lethal disease and contributed to lifesaving medical innovations. Horses even inspired architecture, invention, furniture, and fashion. From the thundering cavalry charges of Alexander the Great to the streets of New York during the Great Manure Crisis of 1894 and beyond, horses have shaped both the grand arc of history and our everyday lives.

David Zakarian (DPhil Oriental Studies, 2011)

Armenia through the Lens of Time: Multidisciplinary Studies in Honour of Theo Maarten van Lint [edited with Federico Alpi, Robin Meyer and Irene Tinti]
Brill, 2022

From pilgrimage sites in the far west of Europe to the Persian court; from mystic visions to a gruesome contemporary ‘dance’; from a mundane poem on wine to staggering religious art: thus far in space and time extends the world of the Armenians.

A glimpse of the vast and still largely unexplored threads that connect it to the wider world is offered by the papers assembled here in homage to one of the most versatile contemporary armenologists, Theo Maarten van Lint.

This collection offers original insights through a multifaceted lens, showing how much Armenology can offer to Art History, History, Linguistics, Philology, Literature, and Religious Studies. Scholars will find new inspirations and connections, while the general reader will open a window to a world that is just as wide as it is often unseen.