They are unpopular all over the world, with one exception. According to a new Pew Research Center poll, the only country where a majority of citizens support drone strikes is the country that uses the new technology most regularly: the United States. Only 28 percent of U.S. citizens oppose drone strikes, compared to 62 percent who… Continue reading Guarding the Empire from Four Miles Up
Noam Chomsky has seen a lot of social movements. He cut his teeth on the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s. He participated in the anti-intervention struggles of the 1980s as well as in the World Social Forums that began in the 1990s. Now in his 80s, Chomsky has hardly slowed… Continue reading Review: Chomsky’s “Occupy”
Middle East Reads, November 8, 2011 The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda by Fawaz Gerges (Oxford University Press, 2011), 272 pages. Reviewed by John Feffer Even after the death of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, the routing of his organization in Afghanistan, and the assassination of the leadership of the Arabian Peninsula affiliate, the U.S.… Continue reading Review: The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda
Foreign Policy in Focus, September 29, 2011 Despite the predictions of many obituary writers, North Korea is still around. It was supposed to collapse with the Eastern European communist regimes, but it didn’t. It was supposed to crumble during the great famine of the mid-1990s, but it didn’t. The hard-line policies of the George W.… Continue reading Review: The Survival of North Korea
Korean Quarterly, Spring 2011
Korean Quarterly, Fall 2010
Review of B. R. Myers, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves – And Why It Matters (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2010), 200 pages Brian Myers has a peculiar literary fetish. He spends an enormous amount of his time reading literature that he intensely dislikes. A specialist in North Korean literature, Myers wrote his… Continue reading The Cleanest Race (Review)
Christian Century, November 30, 2010
International Politik, January 2010
International Politik, March 2010
Review of Ray Takeyh, Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 310 pages. Of all the relationships between the United States and its adversaries, the rift with Iran appears to be particularly long, deep, and difficult to repair. Iran’s seizure of U.S.… Continue reading Guardians of the Revolution (Review)
Review of Sergio Fabbrini, America and Its Critics: Virtues and Vices of the Democratic Hyperpower (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008); Sergio Fabbrini, Compound Democracies: Why the United States and Europe Are Becoming Similar (New York: Oxford, 2007); Sergio Fabbrini, ed., The United States Contested: American Unilateralism and European Discontent (New York: Routledge, 2006). During… Continue reading Transatlantic Clash of Civilizations (Review)
The end of the Cold War ushered in a new period of unipolar American power. In this country, liberals and conservatives alike celebrated the triumph of market democracies under the leadership of the United States. The Clinton administration attempted to consolidate America’s geoeconomic power. The Bush administration attempted to consolidate America’s military and geopolitical power.… Continue reading Review: The Future of Global Relations
Securing Japan: Tokyo’s Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia. By Richard J. Samuels. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007. ix, 277 pp. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Grand strategy is all the rage in Tokyo these days. The Japanese political and military establishment senses a new world of possibilities now that it has… Continue reading Review: Securing Japan
Korean Quarterly, Winter 2009
Review of Theodore Jun Yoo, The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 316 It is the unusual academic book that begins with a double suicide. Playwright Kim U-jin and singer Yun Sim-dok are the tragic lovers who open Theodore Jun Yoo’s new… Continue reading The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea (Review)
Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Winter/Spring 2009
The United States wasn’t the only country transformed by the social activism of the 1960s. Peace activists, Greens, and cultural hippies practically turned Germany upside down. And the man who has symbolized this thoroughgoing change more than any other German is Joschka Fischer. As Paul Hockenos details in Joschka Fischer and the Making of the… Continue reading Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic (Review)
One of the most profound migrations in history is taking place today. Cities are swelling all over the world with the influx of farmers and peasants. But it is in China, the world’s most populous country, that this great migration has the potential to remake geopolitics. The numbers are staggering. There are 182 Chinese cities… Continue reading A Floating City of Peasants (Review)
A little over a decade after a terrifying genocide left a million people dead, Rwanda has recovered enough to become a tourist destination in central Africa. As veteran journalist Stephen Kinzer reports in his new book A Thousand Hills, Rwanda is an orderly, peaceful, and economically developing oasis in an otherwise strife-torn region. Kinzer points… Continue reading A Thousand Hills (Review)
In the 1960s, a subculture of Americans became obsessed with alien abductions. Their ur-narrative revolved around the experience of Betty and Barney Hill, a sober, middle-aged, interracial couple who told of being taken from their car one night in 1961 and subjected to medical investigation by extraterrestrials with small bodies and large foreheads. They were… Continue reading North Korea, Japan, and the Abduction Narrative of Charles Robert Jenkins
Headquarters was worried. Complaints were flooding in from the Chinese countryside about the quality of the new Haier washing machines. The water pipes were defective, the peasants told the Chinese manufacturer. But when the Haier team went to investigate, they were surprised to discover that the pipes were not broken or poorly fitted. Rather, they… Continue reading The Big Yam
Korean Quarterly, Spring 2007
Review of Andrei Lankov, North of the DMZ (McFarland and Co., Inc. 2007), 346 pages. In general, scholars love the countries they study. Those who focus on Nicaragua can’t wait to visit the country. Experts on Morocco eagerly await the day they can live there to do fieldwork or archival research. But when… Continue reading North of the DMZ (Review)
Review of Roland Bleiker, Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation (University of Minnesota Press, 2005) and Richard Saccone, Living with the Enemy (Hollym, 2006) According to the ideology of South Korean nationalism, all Koreans are one: one people, one blood. Korea can claim thousands of years of common history. The last 60 years… Continue reading Living with the Enemy (Review)
Far East Economic Review, June 2007
International Politik, Winter 2007
Review of Hyejin Kim, Jia, A Novel of North Korea (San Francisco: Midnight Editions, 2007) During the famine that struck North Korea in the mid-1990s, thousands of hungry refugees poured into northeast China in search of food and work. They often brought with them little more than the clothes on their backs. But they… Continue reading Jia: A Novel of North Korea (Review)
“The glory of Our Empire shines on this universe with brilliance,” a ruler once declared in a letter to courtiers in London. “Not one single person or country is excluded from Our kindness and benevolence.” He had good reason to be pleased. His country sat astride the global economy. His army was large, his domains… Continue reading Big Red Checkbook
Korean Quarterly, Fall 2006