Cornell University Press

In The Latecomer's Rise, Muyang Chen reveals the nature and impact of a rapidly growing form of international lending: Chinese development finance. Over the past few decades, China has become the world's largest provider of bilateral development finance. Through its two national policy banks, the China Development Bank (CDB) and the Export-Import Bank of China (China Exim), it has funded infrastructure and industrial projects in numerous emerging markets and developing countries. Yet this very surge and magnitude of capital has raised questions about the characteristics of Chinese bilateral lending and its repercussions on the international order. Drawing on a variety of novel Chinese primary sources, including interviews and official bank documents, Chen pinpoints the distinctiveness of Chinese bilateral development finance, explains its origins, and analyzes its effects. She compares Chinese policy banks with their foreign counterparts to show that the CDB and China Exim, while state-supported, are in fact also market-oriented - they are as much government organs as they are profit-driven financial agencies that serve both state and firms' interests. This approach, which emerged out of China's particular economic history, suggests that Chinese overseas lending is not merely a tool of economic statecraft that challenges Western-led economic regimes. Instead, China's responses to extant rules, norms, and practices across given issue areas have varied between contestation and convergence. Rich with empirical detail and penetrating insights, The Latecomer's Rise demystifies the little-known workings of Chinese development finance to revise our conceptions of China's role in the international financial system.

The Sudans tells the story of the African Union's efforts to make peace in the Sudans during the years 2009 to 2013. It details the work of the AU High-Level Panel, led by former South African President Thabo Mbeki, to resolve the war in Darfur, promote democracy in Sudan, steer the independence of South Sudan, and make peace between Sudan and South Sudan. It was Africa's most ambitious peace-making effort. Meticulously documenting every step, Alex de Waal and Willow Berridge show how Mbeki's team handled disputes over borders, resources, and citizenship, and channeled fractious international actors into a consensus. They document the panel's consultative, people-focused strategy in Darfur and its patient, unflagging mediation between north and south. Ultimately, however, the leaders of Sudan and South Sudan squandered opportunities to establish two viable, mutually supporting states, setting both countries on the path toward calamity. Authoritative and clear-eyed, The Sudans pulls back the curtain on this pioneering effort, demonstrating the potential of African-led peacemaking.

Rightless Resistance investigates why resistance to land grabbing so often fails. The rapid expansion of oil palm plantations has triggered widespread conflict across rural Indonesia as communities lose their land with little compensation. Based on an unprecedented study of 150 such conflicts, this book uncovers how villagers fight back against palm oil companies, and what their struggles reveal about power, law, and citizenship in postcolonial Indonesia. Enduring colonial legacies and collusive politics have left rural Indonesians virtually rightless, so villagers turn to customary traditions and social norms instead of formal law – a strategy that rarely gets results. By analyzing this resistance to corporate land grabbing, Ward Berenschot, Ahmad Dhiaulhaq, Afrizal, and Otto Hospes offer a new perspective on why land rights movements often fall short. When the legal system is unreliable, people aim lower—and the deeper power imbalances facilitating their dispossession go unchallenged.

Taking Territory is an eye-opening account of why territorial conquest remains a phenomenon today. The end of World War II seemingly brought about a decline of territorial conquest. Many have argued that a strong territorial integrity norm in the postwar era explains this decline. Yet as Dan Altman shows, states have seized territory numerous times since 1945. Large-scale conquests have waned, but small, targeted seizures have persisted. The relationship between conquest and war has also shifted. While states attempting conquest before 1945 often initiated war, then sought to occupy large territories, challengers today more often seize small regions, then try to avoid war. This strategy, the fait accompli, has become the predominant mode of conquest. Drawing on his own original data consisting of 175 conquest attempts between 1918 and 2024, Altman explains why conquest persists, what motivates it, when it turns violent, and when it succeeds. He shows how miscalculated faits accomplis have sparked many post-1945 wars and why the motives behind many territorial grabs are often about image, domestic politics, and the ambitions of military officers. Incisive and illuminating, Taking Territory cuts against what we think we know about post-1945 conquest to reveal its true causes and consequences.

Women and Resistance in the Annals of Tacitus explores how Tacitus often represents a Roman woman's relationship to the imperial household and its members as one of resistance. Throughout his Annals, women discover ways to resist without relying on traditional forms of power. Women engage in political protests, legal disputes, public processions, and subversive religious rituals. They demonstrate resistance in acts of mourning and commemoration and overturn gender stereotypes by enduring pain and displaying courage in death. Tacitus illustrates how women's public movements, rituals, suicides, and survivals become sites of resistance and opportunities for civic engagement open to women. Caitlin C. Gillespie situates nonimperial Roman women at the fore, reading them in comparison with Tacitus's narratives of imperial women and hierarchies of power. With this new analytical approach, stereotypes against women are variously confirmed or denied, challenged or evoked as evidence, or employed as a means of attack or defense. Women emerge to claim agency over their bodies, reputations, and actions, and though a vulnerable population, refuse to be passive victims of their circumstances.

The Great Repair explores how Jews and Germans began reparations discussions fewer than seven years after the Holocaust – a momentous achievement relegated to the margins of Holocaust scholarship and memory – and the complexities that emerged from the resulting settlement. Gideon Reuveni illuminates the swift transition and extraordinary chapter in postwar history from the horrors of the Holocaust to a negotiating table where Germans and Jews discussed reparations. Both sides faced the monumental challenge of addressing the injustices of National Socialism through complex deliberations on compensation for collective and individual losses, restitution of property, support for survivors, and formal acknowledgment of Nazi crimes. These negotiations marked a crucial step toward acknowledging historical responsibility and pursuing meaningful redress. The Great Repair reveals the events, actors, and decisions that led to the signing of the agreement on September 10, 1952, by West Germany, Israel, and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. Ultimately, the enactment of this settlement set a global precedent that genocide cannot go unpunished and moral debts must be paid. It was a historic undertaking of immense scope – unmatched in the history of international relations, just as the extermination of the Jewish people was unprecedented in human history.

Always Under Siege presents a remarkable and harrowing account of life in dark times that describes and embodies strategies of physical and moral survival. Irina Paperno brings to light the autobiographical chronicle (her "notes") of Olga Freidenberg (1890–1955), a pioneering Russian philologist and cultural theorist (and cousin of Boris Pasternak), who endured Stalin's purges, the Leningrad blockade during World War II, and the suffocating repression that followed. Using concepts of scholarship to understand what was happening to her and around her, Freidenberg transformed daily ordeal into what Paperno calls a "diary-theory," not just a record of events but a reflection on how power invades home, body, and mind. Analyzing Freidenberg's personal writings, kept hidden for decades, Paperno shows how she used myth, metaphor, and ethnographic description to interpret the everyday terror of life under Stalin. Comparing Freidenberg's ideas, developed in isolation, with those of contemporaries like Hannah Arendt, who witnessed Hitler's rise, Paperno identifies in Freidenberg's "notes" a compelling theory of totalitarian oppression. Presenting a singular testament of resilience, despair, and stubborn creative intellect, Paperno's book shows what it means to live and to think in a state of siege.

Does torture "work?" Can controversial techniques such as waterboarding extract crucial and reliable intelligence? Since 9/11, this question has been angrily debated in the halls of power and the court of public opinion. In Anatomy of Torture, Ron E. Hassner mines the archives of the Spanish Inquisition to propose an answer that will frustrate and infuriate both sides of the divide. The Inquisition's scribes recorded every torment, every scream, and every confession in the torture chamber. Their transcripts reveal that Inquisitors used torture deliberately and meticulously, unlike the rash, improvised methods used by the United States after 9/11. In their relentless pursuit of underground Jewish communities in Spain and Mexico, the Inquisition tortured in cold blood. But they treated any information extracted with caution: torture was used to test information provided through other means, not to uncover startling new evidence. Hassner's findings in Anatomy of Torture have important implications for ongoing torture debates. Rather than insist that torture is ineffective, torture critics should focus their attention on the morality of torture. If torture is evil, its efficacy is irrelevant. At the same time, torture defenders cannot advocate for torture as a counterterrorist "quick fix": torture has never located, nor will ever locate, the hypothetical "ticking bomb" that is frequently invoked to justify brutality in the name of security.

In Servants of God, Slaves of the Church, Lisa Kaaren Bailey uncovers the surprising intimacy between sacred devotion and coerced labor in early medieval Europe. From queens who scrubbed monastery floors to enslaved women forced into lifelong service, acts of humility and acts of subjugation often looked the same and were interpreted through the same religious lens. Drawing from sermons, letters, miracle stories, and hagiographies, Bailey shows how metaphors of service shaped not only elite piety but also the lived experience of those at the very bottom of the social order. This is a story of lives that were often absent from the historical record: those who lit church lamps, laundered liturgical linens, and sustained Christian worship through their unseen labor. Bailey weaves together theology, cultural history, and feminist historiography to trace how Christian ideas about virtue, sin, and the will both justified unfreedom and offered tools to contest it. Her use of "critical fabulation" animates the archive without fictionalizing it, allowing glimpses of agency in places where it was rarely recorded. By placing the metaphor of service alongside its social reality, Servants of God, Slaves of the Church reshapes how we think about labor, power, and religious meaning in the centuries after Rome. A deeply informed work of both historical scholarship and moral insight, this book gives voice to the voiceless and demands a reconsideration of what it meant to serve God.

In Rogue States, Matthew A. Frakes reveals the connection between US national security strategy at the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the War on Terror. Throughout a series of crises from 1981 to 1991, the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush recognized that emerging threats to global security – terrorism, regional aggression, weapons of mass destruction, and narcotics trafficking – converged into a single growing phenomenon that they eventually called "rogue states." In confronting Libya, Panama, and Iraq, Reagan and Bush created the strategies that drove US national security after 9/11. Frakes argues that Reagan and Bush's improvised responses to crises of terrorism, aggression, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction – culminating in the Gulf War of 1991 – established a lasting enforcement role for the United States against rogue states in the post–Cold War world. The effort to redefine US national security around this threat created a new framework to guide the country's approach to global security after the Cold War – one that ensured after 9/11 that the War on Terror became a war on rogue states.

In Shrines, Relics, and Saints,the eminent medievalist André Vauchez explores the evolution of spaces in Christianity – chapels, monasteries, holy wells, grottos, and other holy places – that are considered sacred because they house the relics of a saint or because they preserve the memory of an appearance by a saint, angel, or the Virgin Mary. From famous sanctuaries that still attract multitudes of pilgrims – in Jerusalem, Rome, Tours, Assisi, and Compostela – to local shrines in villages, towns, and wild places across the continent, these sanctuaries were frequented by pilgrims in search of miraculous healings of body and soul. Together, they formed a network comprising new forms of sacredness and spiritual practice. A masterwork in the history of Christianity, Shrines, Relics, and Saints traces pilgrimage routes to major sanctuaries, follows saints' relics as they were transferred from East to West, and examines the Church's ambiguous and sometimes antagonistic relationship to sites of popular worship.

Political Thinkers for Our Time explains the principles that are foundational to the Anglo-American political tradition by looking at leading thinkers and statesmen who wrote about them. In discussing each thinker, William T. Reddinger introduces such principles as the rule of law, property rights, religious liberty, and limited government. Throughout, Reddinger shows how these figures can inform our thinking about important issues in contemporary American political discourse. Following a collection of brief biographies, the remaining chapters treat each individual thinker's views about foundational principles, expositing their best-known writings. The second chapter explores Edmund Burke's understanding of liberty, and the third chapter looks at Alexis de Tocqueville's views on equality. Chapter 4 examines Abraham Lincoln's understanding of republican self-government. Chapter 5 discusses the Federalist Papers and the US Constitution. Chapter 6 focuses on George Washington and his contribution to religious liberty. The seventh and eighth chapters consider how twentieth-century economists Friedrich Hayek and Wilhelm Röpke can inform our thinking about the free market. Political Thinkers for Our Time will help readers better understand the ideals that have been central to the American political order for more than two centuries.

Networking Putinism explores the internet's impact on political discourse in Russia and the strategies adopted both by Vladimir Putin and his associates to secure and legitimate their authority, as well as by the regime's most determined critics. Michael S. Gorham shows that despite Putin's famously dismissive attitude toward the internet, the Russian leader, his political team, and a motley array of web-savvy sympathizers have been consistently fixated on the medium, deeply invested in its development, and keenly aware of its ability to shape public political discourse. The success of the regime's opponents in leveraging social media to criticize the regime forced Putin and his allies to find ways to more effectively exploit the new medium. In telling the story of these rhetorical online battles, Networking Putinism shows how, even in the most authoritarian of regimes, public language still matters, and digitally mediated communication remains a highly contested instrument of power.

The Filthiest Village in Europe traces how a community shrouded by "industrial fog," at the brink of gaping coal pits, became a symbol that galvanized grassroots ecology – campaigns by diverse local actors that exposed environmental and economic crises East Germany's political system could not resolve. Notoriously known by the late 1980s as "the filthiest village in Europe," Mölbis suffocated downwind from the massively polluting carbochemical Espenhain plant. Applying a myriad of private collections, interviews, and untapped archival sources, Andrew Demshuk reveals how pastors, parents, officials, inspectors, workers, and spies negotiated ossified party structures whose inability to reform was showcased by ever-worsening environmental conditions. After peaceful protests a few kilometers north in Leipzig triggered a revolution, pre-1989 grassroots players launched innovative reconstruction programs with financial and organizational expertise from West Germans. Together, they transformed Europe's filthiest village into a healthy place to live and imbued it with new symbolism, turning it into a sign of hope. The political will and social engagement that saved Mölbis and rejuvenated the surrounding wasteland can inform how to revitalize other postindustrial "filthy places" in our world today.

In The Greek Fire, Maureen Connors Santelli explores the early global influence of the United States through its fascination with the Greek Revolution of the 1820s and 1830s. The American philhellenic movement pushed U.S. interests into the eastern Mediterranean, shaping domestic conversations on freedom and reform. Believing Greece to be the birthplace of American democracy, Americans across the country raised funds, sent aid, and rallied against Turkish oppression. Northerners and southerners alike supported the Greek cause, with women-led philanthropic and missionary groups promoting humanitarianism, education reform, and evangelism. Despite public pressure, the U.S. government remained neutral, prioritizing commercial ties with the Ottoman Empire over intervention. The Greek Fire reassesses America's role in the Greek Revolution, revealing how early foreign engagements shaped national identity and diplomacy. Santelli highlights how these debates helped define what it meant to be an emerging global power in the nineteenth century.

"Though the book was first published in German in 1988, this English version includes many revisions and updates and will be the definitive English-language study of the Avar empire for years to come. It will be invaluable for those interested in medieval history or in the impact of nomadic steppe empires on sedentary civilizations."—ChoiceThe Avars arrived in Europe from the Central Asian steppes in the mid-sixth century CE and dominated much of Central and Eastern Europe for almost 250 years. Fierce warriors and canny power brokers, the Avars were more influential and durable than Attila's Huns, yet have remained hidden in history. Walter Pohl's epic narrative, translated into English for the first time, restores them to their rightful place in the story of early medieval Europe. The Avars offers a comprehensive overview of their history, tracing the Avars from the construction of their steppe empire in the center of Europe; their wars and alliances with the Byzantines, Slavs, Lombards, and others; their apex as the first so-called barbarian power to besiege Constantinople (in 626); to their fall under the Frankish armies of Charlemagne and subsequent disappearance as a distinct cultural group. Pohl uncovers the secrets of their society, synthesizing the rich archaeological record recovered from more than 60,000 graves of the period, as well as accounts of the Avars by Byzantine and other chroniclers. In recovering the story of the fascinating encounter between Eurasian nomads who established an empire in the heart of Europe and the post-Roman Christian cultures of Europe, this book provides a new perspective on the origins of medieval Europe itself.