Month: July 2022

Late last year, Ordering Violence was released by Cornell. For purely scholarly books, there then seems to ensue quite a long lag before anything happens. That lag is now coming to an end. A couple of pieces of news:

1. In a Perspectives on Politics Critical Dialogue, I reviewed Ioana Emy Matesan’s excellent The Violence Pendulum, she reviewed Ordering Violence, and we responded to each other. You can find my review of The Violence Pendulum here, and Matesan’s review of Ordering Violence here.
2. Ordering Violence won the Giovanni Sartori Book Award from the Qualitative and Multi-Method Research section of the American Political Science Association. The committee’s commendation is here; the list of past winners here. Sartori’s 1970 article “Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics” has had a huge impact on how I think about social science, so I was particularly thrilled.
3. Ordering Violence won the Book of the Year Prize from the Conflict Research Society. The shortlist is full of excellent books, and it was honestly quite a surprise to have won. Please check out the shortlist/honorable mentions for both awards – great books.

I’m working on a new book and something I like to do at this stage is read novels about the topic (for instance, the last project included Manto and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss). I’m doing this now for the project, which focuses on how international geopolitical competitions refract into domestic politics of smaller states.

I asked on twitter for recommendations of novels on the broad theme of “the Cold War in Asia” and got a bunch of recommendations directly (see the thread here) and then via email and DM. They ended up ranging pretty broadly, including before and after and maybe not totally all that much about the Cold War, which is a lot of the fun.

Here are some of them:

• Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland
• Graham Greene, The Quiet American
• Tan Twang Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists
• Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer
• Andre Malraux, Man’s Fate
• Christopher Koch. The Year of Living Dangerously
• John Le Carre, The Honourable Schoolboy
• Duong Thu Huong, The Zenith
• Duong Thu Huong, Novel Without a Name
• Duong Thu Huong, Paradise of the Blind
• Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War
• Eugenia Kim, Kinship of Secrets
• Ha Jin, War Trash
• Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke
• Mohammed Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes
• Paul Yoon, Run Me to Earth
• McCarry, the Tears of Autumn
• Neamat Imam, The Black Coat
• Min Jin Lee, Pachinko
• Tahmina Anam, A Golden Age
• Intizar Hussain, Basti
• Jing Jing Li, How We Disappeared