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11. The History of Modern Sports in South America: An Interview with Matthew Brown

Author:
Matthew Brown and Salvador Lima
Publication Date:
03-2024
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Toynbee Prize Foundation
Abstract:
In addition to this moment as the starting point of the FIFA World Cup’s trajectory in becoming the most widely viewed sporting event in the world, to historian Matthew Brown, it is the culmination of a long story that begins around the mid-19th century with the diffusion and development of modern sports in the South American continent. Brown is a Professor of Latin American History at the University of Bristol, and his latest work is Sports in South America (Yale University Press: 2023), a comprehensive examination of the sporting cultures in the South American republics from the 1860s until the 1930s, an extraordinary story that explores intertwined histories of sports, globalisation, politics and culture. While conventional narratives have focused on British pioneers as the great ones responsible for introducing organised sports to the region and on football as the preeminent sport in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, Brown expands on these previous trends. He shows how indigenous and colonial sporting cultures existed long before the influence of the British informal empire and provided the foundation for South American countries' global recognition as soccer strongholds. In a period marked by the obsession with the idea of ‘progress’, South American elites saw the institutionalisation of modern sports as an opportunity to claim their place among the ‘civilised nations’. Thus, Sports in South America significantly contributes to the field by addressing the relevance of sporting cultures in constructing national identities and political discourse in the region. According to Brown, such research has been an adventure that implied several years of archive travel and immersion in South America's sporting landscapes and experiences, as he notes in the introduction of his work, “engaging with contemporary sporting environments, whether spectating, walking or playing, has contributed a hard-to-quantify element to the book” (Brown, 15).
Topic:
History, Sports, Interview, FIFA, and Soccer
Political Geography:
South America

12. Pax Economica: An Interview with Marc-William Palen

Author:
Seokju Oh and Marc-William Palen
Publication Date:
03-2024
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Toynbee Prize Foundation
Abstract:
In his new book Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World (Princeton University Press, 2024), historian Marc-William Palen offers a counter-history of free trade as an ideology and policy. In the nineteenth century, before it became a cherished possession of the Right, free trade was proudly claimed as their own by Left-wing activists, intellectuals, and politicians, those who were unswervingly committed to equality for all and peace among nations. Palen recovers this forgotten history of the “Left-wing free traders” of the late-nineteenth century, showing how liberal radicals, socialists, feminists, and Christian pacifists all viewed free trade as the key antidote to the social problems they encountered. Palen also upends the conventional understanding of the world of the late nineteenth and the early-twentieth centuries and argues that the fin-de-siècle was not the “Golden Age’ of the First Globalization, but actually the “Iron Age” of market enclosures and imperial competition. In February 2024, I had a great pleasure to discuss Pax Economica with Palen. Below is an edited version of the conversation.
Topic:
Economics, Globalization, Markets, History, Free Trade, and Interview
Political Geography:
Global Focus

13. The Interwar World: Where, When, and How?

Author:
Poorvi Bellur, Andrew Denning, and Heidi Tworek
Publication Date:
05-2024
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Toynbee Prize Foundation
Abstract:
This interview engages the co-editors of the new edited volume, The Interwar World (Routledge 2023), Andrew Denning and Heidi J. S. Tworek. Expansive both in its breadth as well as in methodological scope, the volume engages more than 50 authors around the critical questions of where and when was the "interwar", as well as the more existential question of the usefulness of this framework of historical temporality and spatiality. The scholarly value of such an endeavour lies perhaps most acutely in its collaborative ethos, at a time when the professionalization of the academy seems only to further ossify the silos of spatial, temporal, and theoretical specializations. Thematically organized, the framing of this volume seems to push its contributors to engage with broader communities of historical scholarship and subsequently be unflinchingly self-reflexive in their use of the "interwar" as an analytic. I had a chance to interview the architects of this volume, Andrew Denning and Heidi Tworek, about the impetus behind such a massive project as well as some of the challenges and questions they faced in both in its planning and its ultimate execution.
Topic:
History, Interview, and Interwar Period
Political Geography:
Global Focus

14. The Fiftieth Anniversary of India’s Peaceful Nuclear Explosion: An Interview with Jayita Sarkar

Author:
Marc Reyes and Jayita Sarkar
Publication Date:
03-2024
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Toynbee Prize Foundation
Abstract:
Today, May 18, 2024, marks the fiftieth anniversary of India’s peaceful nuclear explosion or PNE. To mark the occasion, the Toynbee Prize Foundation facilitated a conversation between historian Jayita Sarkar and myself. Dr. Sarkar explained what the PNE was and how it shaped Indian and nuclear history. In addition to the PNE, Dr. Sarkar and I also spoke about her acclaimed 2022 book, Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War which received the Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies and Honorable Mention for Global Development Studies Book Award from the International Studies Association. The book can be freely read through its publisher, Cornell University Press, and here is a link to read my January 2023 Toynbee review of Ploughshares and Swords. Below is an edited version of our conversation.
Topic:
Nuclear Weapons, History, Global South, and Interview
Political Geography:
South Asia and India

15. Finding Law in the History of Global Violence: An Interview with Lauren Benton

Author:
Lauren Benton and Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín
Publication Date:
07-2024
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Toynbee Prize Foundation
Abstract:
Violence is, in the public imagination, the law’s radical Other. Brutality and cruelty, we tend to believe, are elements that flourish in law’s absence. Not only is the appearance of violence a symptom of the absence of order, but its bloody outbursts are taken to be utterly meaningless. The narrative of the emergence of “modern” law —both within, and beyond, the nation-state— is usually that of the triumph of reason and deliberation over violence. This progression supposedly entailed the prohibition (or at least, the domestication) of force in local and global politics. Against this rather rosy narrative, Lauren Benton invites us to read the ways in which violence and law act, together, to cement claims of global order. Benton does so by placing so-called “small wars” at “the center of a new history” of interpolity relations (p. xii). Instead of seeing them as mere “manifestations of insurgency and counterinsurgency,” she studies how a variety of practices (“raiding and other sporadic violence as well as conflicts that were small in scale, remained undeclared, or lasted for relatively brief periods”) were central to how European empires justified the legality of their expansion over the globe (p. 7). Such “small” wars, in fact, could be quite “big” in scale or “long” over time. What matters is that all these instances of violence oscillated at the “threshold of war and peace” (p. 8) —and, as such, raised thorny questions about their legal basis all long the imperial chain of command. The productive ambiguities offered by this “law of neither war nor peace” offered enormous opportunities for those who knew who to exploit them —as Benton shows by tracing how imperial agents negotiated this threshold at different times and places, from the Iberian Conquistadores “discovering” the Americas all the way to their successors in our own day and age (p. 184-185). The contours of this vague threshold were not, as Benton argues, predetermined by the metropolitan laws of expanding European empires. Pushing against histories of “diffusion” of laws of war from the West to the Rest (p. 9), Benton instead analyzes how agents in different imperial locales —for instance, in both the colonial frontier and heartland— raised arguments about the legality of violence within and beyond the threshold (p. 60). Moreover, “not just Europeans, and not just law-trained elites” were productively exploiting the ambiguities of this threshold (p. 17). The book is replete with cases in which non-lawyers (for example, a British captain patrolling distant seas) or local elites (for instance, rulers in South Asia) were active interpreters of the law applicable to the violence they encountered (p. 146). By bringing together a variety of materials from different continents and periods, Benton provides a thoroughly global account of the interpenetration of law and violence in the making of empire —past, present, and perhaps even future.
Topic:
International Law, Law, Violence, Interview, and Armed Conflict
Political Geography:
Global Focus

16. Historicizing a planetary future: A discussion with Emma Rothschild on the convergence of climate science and historical thinking in the “1800 Histories” project.

Author:
Glenda Sluga and Heidi Tworek
Publication Date:
08-2024
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Toynbee Prize Foundation
Abstract:
TPF Executive board members Glenda Sluga and Heidi J.S. Tworek interviewed Emma Rothschild on her latest project “1800 Histories”; a collaborative effort to bring together climate science methodologies and various micro-histories of methane production, and to push historical scholarship towards a global history of climate change.
Topic:
Climate Change, History, Interview, and Climate Science
Political Geography:
Global Focus

17. Colonizing Kashmir: An interview with Hafsa Kanjwal

Author:
Mahia Bashir and Hafsa Kanjwal
Publication Date:
10-2024
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Toynbee Prize Foundation
Abstract:
Joining a new wave of critical scholarship on global decolonization, Hafsa Kanjwal’s 2023 monograph Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation(Stanford University Press) offers a compelling and provocative account of Indian state-building in Kashmir in the aftermath of the British withdrawal and argues that independent India’s attempts at state-building in Kashmir were fundamentally colonial. In recasting the Indian national project in Kashmir as a colonial enterprise and highlighting the role of Kashmir’s client regimes in this process, Kanjwal lays bare the “politics of life” that was central to bringing Kashmir within the Indian national orbit without the popular consent of its people. Ultimately, this account offers a critique of the liberatory character of narratives around decolonization and offers an alternative lens to understand national consolidation in the aftermath of the second World War.
Topic:
History, Decolonization, Interview, and Colonization
Political Geography:
South Asia and Kashmir

18. Fletcher, Russia, and a Path Forward: A Conversation with Evelyn Farkas

Author:
Evelyn Farkas
Publication Date:
07-2024
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Fletcher Security Review
Institution:
The Fletcher School, Tufts University
Abstract:
I always tell the young people: always ask. If you see something you want to do, an opportunity… I was at the Council on Foreign Relations, and I heard about a trip to Hungary, and this was in 1989, and the Wall had just come down, and I was really junior, and I just asked. I said, “Look, I speak fluent Hungarian; maybe you can use me as your rapporteur on this trip.” And in fact, the first time I asked, the Vice President said, “Oh, I don’t know if we have the money.” So I did some quick calculations because I knew at the time that a charter flight to Hungary was like $600, or something, round-trip from New York. So I said, “Well, I’ll pay my airfare.” It is a good thing I didn’t offer to pay for the hotel because they stayed in quite a swanky hotel. But the lesson I learned was: Oh my god! You have to ask! So, I think always ask and be open to opportunities. You can’t plan your career. I had this hokey calendar growing up with little phrases. One that always stuck with me was, “Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.” You’re getting prepared at Fletcher, and then your luck is going to be when you’re already prepared, and some opportunity comes along. You can take that opportunity because you’re prepared and because you have the guts to take it.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, National Security, Memoir, and Interview
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and United States of America

19. Minds in Exile: On Palestinian Thought After 1948

Author:
Vicki Valosik
Publication Date:
06-2024
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS)
Abstract:
An interview with CCAS Qatar Postdoctoral Fellow Adey Almohsen on his research historicizing Palestinian thought in the years between the Nakba and the Six Day War
Topic:
History, Research, Interview, Nakba, and Six Day War
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, and Palestine

20. Spring 2024 edition of Strategic Visions

Author:
Joseph Johnson, Alan McPherson, and Andrew Santora
Publication Date:
05-2024
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Strategic Visions
Institution:
Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy, Temple University
Abstract:
Contents News from the Director……… 2 Note from the Davis Fellow…. 7 News from the Community…. 8 Research Reports….. 11 Checking in with the CENFAD Emerging Scholar…. 13 CENFAD Community Interviews Dr. Michael Brenes……. 15 Dr. Stephanie Freeman…… 20 Retrospective: The “All Roads Lead to Gettysburg Conference”….. 26 Book Reviews The Third Reich’s Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas by Helen Roche, reviewed by Andrew Santora …………………….. 30
Topic:
History, Book Review, Higher Education, Interview, and Use of Force
Political Geography:
Europe, Global Focus, and United States of America