A joint project of the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations and Zócalo Public Square

City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain
by Andrew M. Gardner

Over one third of the 30 million people living in the Gulf Coast region are foreigners, nearly all of whom have migrated to the region in search of jobs. In City of Strangers, Andrew M. Gardner analyzes the impacts of transnational labor on the Gulf region and stresses the mistreatment-often brutal mistreatment-of Indian migrant workers by native Bahrainis. Much of this violence is made possible by the “kafala system,” under which most menial labor is done by migrants sponsored by Bahraini citizens. While the Indian laborers come to Bahrain with the belief that they are being given a viable avenue to escape poverty and marginalization in India , they often enter into something bordering on indentured servitude. Gardner’s anthropological viewpoint sheds light on how this system operates, often leading to violence against foreigners of all classes-both poor and elite-and to the ostracism of the Indian community. The solution Gardner offers is as simple and laudable as it is unlikely: an elimination of the deeply entrenched kafala system.

— Trisha Parikh

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Laws, Outlaws, and Terrorists: Lessons from the War on Terrorism
by Gabriella Blum and Phillip B. Heymann

“Keep calm and carry on” was once considered a reasonable response to foreign threats.  In Laws, Outlaws, and Terrorists, Harvard Law professors Gabriella Blum and Phillip B. Heymann discuss a much different response: that of the United States to the threat of terrorism over the last nine years. Rather than carrying on with existing paradigms of domestic and international law, the US government in the wake of September 11th operated within what the authors describe as a “No-Law Zone.” The authors argue that such an approach hindered rather than helped counter-terrorism efforts. Instead, Blum and Heymann advocate a measured response that balances short-term desires for physical security with long-term desires for the preservation of American ideals, and they suggest that the threat of terrorism requires fewer adjustments to our legal system than we’ve been made to think. With examples from the Bush and Obama presidencies, Blum and Heymann make a persuasive case for an approach that preserves American laws while thwarting terrorists in their ultimate aim: keeping us from keeping calm.

—Lina Kaisey

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Exporting Security: International Engagement, Security Cooperation, and the Changing Face of the U.S. Military
by Derek S. Reveron

The Cold War left myriad legacies, one of them being the new direction of the U.S. military. Instead of pursuing a confrontational role, the U.S. military has frequently played a more cooperative role, offering assistance rather than combat. In his book Exporting Security, Naval War College professor Derek S. Reveron argues and lauds this increase in military partnerships, calling it a “key pillar of U.S. military strategy.” Security has become increasingly globalized, and, today, the U.S. military has close working relationships with the militaries of India, China, and Russia. It also involves itself in humanitarian assistance efforts such as the prevention of HIV and AIDS in Africa. Many of these roles are played in order to overcome the limitations of international organizations and local governments, which are constrained by their lack of resources and influence. Reveron uses a clear and compelling rationale to demonstrate the utility of these noncombat activities in generating security cooperation, sustainable peace, and growth for all nations.

—Trisha Parikh

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The New Foreign Policy: Power Seeking in a Globalized Era
by Laura Neack

With textbook detail and accessible clarity, political scientist Laura Neack offers an overview of current foreign policy discourse, traversing topics from the “rational actor model” to more subtle topics such as groupthink, the media, and national self-perception. Each chapter is prefaced with a list of illustrative cases and capped with a few bullet points of takeaway information. Her chapter about “Cognitive Misers and Distrusting Leaders” takes the examples of Blair, Gorbachev, Sharon, and Sadat and ties them together to illustrate how slight differences among individual “belief sets” can amount to drastic discrepancies in international strategy. The author concludes with a tidy review of how the study of cognition is relevant to the study of foreign policy. “Foreign policy analysis needs to be multilevel and multifaceted in order to confront the complicated sources and nature of foreign policy,” Neack writes. Her book is a helpful first step in that direction.

—Lina Kaisey

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Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia
by Toby Craig Jones

Saudi Arabia’s rise as a significant regional-and even world-power has commonly been attributed to its expansive oil reserves. In Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia, author Toby Craig Jones contends that the rise of Saudi Arabia as a political power was due not solely to oil, but rather, to the control and development of other natural resources as well-especially of water. Saudi Arabia undertook massive desalination projects in the 1970s, and these provide nearly half of its water supply. Not that all this desalinized water is even so urgently needed: the kingdom has enough oil to trade away for an essentially limitless supply of fresh water from other nations. In general, Saudi Arabia has been driven by an “environmental imperative,” the author’s term for nation-building through the controlling of nature. While the decisions of the Saudi government are deeply guarded, Jones attempts to “pry open this black box” by focusing on the efforts of American mining engineer Karl Twitchell, whose oil endeavors in the 1930s set the entire growth of the Saudi empire in motion. Jones relates an interesting story but leaves some questions unanswered, such as the role of cultural and religious factors in the “environmental imperative.”

—Trisha Parikh

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Globalization and Empire: The U.S. Invasion of Iraq, Free Markets, and the Twilight of Democracy
by Laura Ann Stengrim and Stephen Hartnett

The United States’ invasion of Iraq has been ascribed to a number of factors, from misinformation to messianism. But what about “Evangelical Capitalism”?   That’s the term Laura Ann Stengrim and Stephen Hartnett use in their book Globalization and Empire, which argues that we’ve lost sight of the largest factors underlying the invasion of Iraq. According to the authors, the invasion of Iraq amounted to “globalizing crony capitalism,” and all of the rhetoric of the Bush administration had a uniform underlying message: democracy and capitalism are the same value, one that applies equally to any place on the map. What the authors find most distressing is that Americans went along with it, forgetting their habits of “democratic integrity.” While the authors tend to pepper their arguments with strident buzzwords, they nevertheless make a meticulous case, ending with a salutary reminder of the need to relearn how to question our leaders and scrutinize their answers.

—Lina Kaisey

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*Photo courtesy of Abe World!.