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FACULTY & EXPERTS
15 July 2024

Summer Readings: Nine Recent Faculty Publications

Early 2024 saw the publication of nine books by Geneva Graduate Institute faculty. From an evaluation of the depoliticisation of the world, to a global ethnography of Afghanistan, a volume on youth sexuality in postward Britain, a consideration of the Kremlin vs the West, and more, these recent publications span the Institute's areas of expertise and provide exceptional insight on the contemporary world. 

The International Legal Order

The International Legal Order in the XXIst Century
 

Essays in Honour of Professor Marcelo Gustavo Kohen

This collection of essays celebrating the work of Professor Marcelo Kohen from the Geneva Graduate Institute brings together the leading scholars and practitioners of public international law from different continents and generations to explore some of the most challenging issues of contemporary international law. The volume, edited by Jorge E. Viñuales, Andrew Clapham, Laurence Boisson de Chazournes and Mamadou Hébié, is a testimony of esteem and friendship from colleagues and former Institute students, and it covers a vast expanse, reflecting the width and diversity of Professor Kohen’s own contribution. Written in English, French and Spanish, the essays in this volume will appeal to a broad public of academics, practitioners and students of international law from around the world.

Brill. November 2023. Learn More. 

A Slow Reckoning

A Slow Reckoning: The USSR, the Afghan Communists, and Islam

Vassily Klimentov

A Slow Reckoning examines the Soviet Union’s and the Afghan communists’ views of and policies toward Islam during the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989). As Vassily Klimentov demonstrates, the Soviet and communist Afghan disregard for Islam was telling of the overall communist approach to reforming Afghanistan and helps explain the failure of their modernisation project. The book reveals how during most of the conflict Babrak Karmal, the ruler installed by the Soviets, instrumentalised Islam in support of his rule while retaining a Marxist-Leninist platform. This approach to Islam only changed after Mikhail Gorbachev replaced Karmal with Mohammad Najibullah and prepared to withdraw Soviet forces. A Slow Reckoning also shows how the Soviet elites perceived Islamism as an ideology the United States, Iran, or Pakistan could instrumentalise at will. They believed the Islamists had no agency and that their retrograde ideology could not find appeal among progressive Soviet Muslims.

Cornell University Press. February 2024. Learn More. 

La dépolitisation du monde

La dépolitisation du monde

Lucile Maertens et Marieke Louis

Les débats sur l’(in)utilité des organisations internationales pendant la pandémie de COVID-19 ou, de nos jours, la guerre en Ukraine rappellent les attentes qui pèsent sur ces institutions qui prétendent toutefois « ne pas faire de politique ». Cet ouvrage prend au sérieux cette revendication et étudie comment des organisations internationales très diverses la mettent en pratique pour « dépolitiser le monde ». Comment s’y prennent-elles ? S’appuyant sur différents cas d’étude allant de la gestion de la crise environnementale à la réforme du Conseil de sécurité de l’ONU, cet ouvrage analyse les pratiques d’expertise, les prétentions à la neutralité et le jeu sur la temporalité des négociations comme des marqueurs de dépolitisation. Qu’est-ce qui conduit une organisation internationale à dépolitiser le monde ? L’ouvrage met au jour trois grandes logiques de dépolitisation qui s’inscrivent dans une posture pragmatique, des stratégies de légitimation et des tentatives d’évitement de la responsabilité.

Les presses de l'Universit- de Montréal. Mai 2024. Se renseigner. 

International Trade Law and Global Data Governance

International Trade Law and Global Data Governance: Aligning Perspectives and Practice

Neha Mishra

Digital trade and global data governance are at a unique crossroads, raising significant policy challenges. This book focuses on five such policy areas at the interface of digital trade and data governance: privacy, cybersecurity, government access to data, data divide, and competition. It investigates whether international trade law can regulate digital flows in a manner that aligns with these policy priorities and can thus contribute to a more meaningful and inclusive global framework for data governance. Drawing upon these findings, the book proposes a multilayered framework for aligning international trade law with evolving norms and practices in global data governance. Its key message is that international trade law must meaningfully align with and contribute to the development of transnational data governance norms and practices.

Bloomsbury Publishing. February 2024. Learn more. 

Homo Itinerans Afghanistan

Homo Itinerans: Towards a Global Ethnography of Afghanistan

Alessandro Monsutti

Afghan society has been marked in a lasting way by war and the exodus of part of its population. While many have emigrated to countries across the world, they have been matched by the flow of experts who arrive in Afghanistan after having been in other war-torn countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Palestine or East Timor. This book builds on more than two decades of ethnographic travels in some twenty countries, bringing the readers from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran to Europe, North America and Australia. It proposes a transnational perspective on Afghanistan politics and offers a glimpse into the everyday life and circulations of refugees as well as expatriates. A new preface reacts to the ease with which the Taliban took control over the whole of Afghanistan in summer 2021. Could it be that the hegemonic project of liberal peace and democracy conducted after 2001 by the central government and its international sponsors did not convince large segments of the Afghan population?

Berghahn. November 2023. Learn more. 

Responsible Pleasure: The Brook Advisory Centres and Youth Sexuality in Postwar Britain

Responsible Pleasure: The Brook Advisory Centres and Youth Sexuality in Postwar Britain

Caroline Rusterholz

The period between the 1960s and the 1990s has traditionally been associated with sexual liberation and a growing sense of permissiveness in Britain, during which cultural and social norms of young people’s sexuality went through a dramatic shift. Using the Brook Advisory Centre (Brook) as a case study, Responsible Pleasure examines how and why this occurred, providing a sociocultural history of youth sexuality in Britain over these three decades. It focuses on Brook as a pioneering sexual health charity operating on the cusp of voluntary and state-financed sectors. From the opening of its first centre in London, followed by other centres across Britain, to the present day, Brook has been a major provider of contraceptive advice and sexual counselling to unmarried people and teenagers and remains a key player in sexual health services today. Drawing on a wide range of archived and published materials, as well as oral history interviews conducted by the author, this book provides a substantial and original contribution to scholarship on the forging of the modern sexual subject.

Oxford University Press. May 2024. Learn more. 

Radical Acts HIV/AIDS Activism in Late Twentieth-Century England

Radical Acts HIV/AIDS Activism in Late Twentieth-Century England

George J. Severs

Drawing on campaign materials, broadcast media, and new oral history interviews, this book reconstructs and discusses the overlooked world of radical AIDS activism in England. It offers one of the first histories of the radical HIV/AIDS movement in England, following ACT UP’s travels from New York to London via prominent queer intellectuals, and reconstructing the vibrant theatrical campaigns staged by ACT UP groups across England. Radical Acts explores expressions of activism that were far more common than demonstrations and marches. Manifestations of a political commitment to ameliorating the injustices facing people living with HIV permeated most aspects of everyday life. These forms of “everyday activism” played out in workplaces, universities and church halls across England, as well as through transnational networks. This book breaks new ground by studying the radical alongside the everyday, presenting a diverse constellation of activist responses to the epidemic.

Bloomsbury. May 2024. Learn more. 

Money at the Margin

Money at the Margin: Sovereignty and Measures of Value in the Imperial Age, 1871–1923

Mischa Suter

“Money, as an entrenched notion has it, is the great equaliser. It reduces disparate things to a common unit; it smooths over differences; it serves as the universal equivalent.” But what if we look at money differently, namely as a medium of conflict? In his comprehensive study (in German), Mischa Suter historicises the political functions of money and highlights striking constellations in capitalism around 1900: the discourse on Wucher, that is to say, on “usury” and “profiteering” in the 1870s in the Habsburg Empire and in Germany, which became a catalyst for a new type of political anti-Semitism; the introduction of a colonial cash economy that provided the basis for colonial rule in Tanzania; and the street protests and policy debates over currency stabilisation in Germany’s great inflation after the First World War. Mischa Suter illustrates to what extent questions of social order always resonate in the definition of monetary values – and he formulates urgent questions today: Was money neutral, uniform and fungible at all times? Was it actually ever the means that could make values transparent?

Relations Internationales 196

Le Kremlin et les Occidentaux depuis la fin de la guerre froide: Aux origines des guerres russo-ukrainiennes (I et II)

Comment et pourquoi l’Europe est-elle devenue à nouveau le théâtre d’une guerre majeure, alors qu’elle semblait entrer, après la guerre froide, dans un « nouvel ordre international » ? Dans ces actes d’un colloque organisé par Matthias Schulz, Nicolas Badalassi, Frédéric Bozo, Jussi Hanhimäki et Marie- Pierre Rey, 30 spécialistes du monde slave et des relations internationales de la Russie et de l’Ukraine, de l’Europe centrale et orientale, des pays d’Europe occidentale et de l’Union européenne, de l’OTAN, des États-Unis et de la Turquie cherchent à expliquer les causes profondes des guerres russo-ukrainiennes qui ont débuté en 2014. Un examen par des historiennes et historiens professionnels, ainsi que par des juristes et politistes intégrant des méthodes de l’histoire des relations internationales, de l’histoire sociétale transnationale, de l’histoire des institutions et des relations économiques et sécuritaires, paraît d’autant plus impératif pour ancrer solidement dans la recherche le débat public sur les causes de ces conflits.

Presses Universitaires de France.