This chapter analyzes the use of transnational repression by the United States. While typically associated with authoritarian regimes, we argue that the American government has a long history of transnational repression. The target of this activity has evolved over time: the Cold War featured a focus on Communist, Black Panther, and anti-war leftists while post-9/11 transnational repression focused on Muslim Americans and suspected terrorist sympathizers in foreign countries. Although tactics have shifted over time, Washington’s approach has long featured an emphasis on transnational surveillance and collaboration with foreign governments. Except for drone strikes in the 2000s, we find the U.S. has largely abstained from unilateral, direct physical violence in its transnational repression practices. Furthermore, we argue this distinctive approach is a product of its unique position in the international system. The United States’ democratic status and role as a leading architect of the liberal international order have led it to exercise transnational repression in a way that minimizes accusations of hypocrisy. Thus, the U.S. tends to rely on covert and “outsourced” methods of transnational repression which can avoid public scrutiny and redirect backlash. Relatedly, Washington often relies on post hoc legal justifications when its activities are visible.

This chapter shows how, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the WCC sought to spread the liberationist form of human rights activism developed in response to authoritarianism in Latin America to other world regions. In Asia and Africa, the ecumenical movement sought to apply lessons derived from the Latin American context while at the same time developing approaches suited to the particular contexts at play. South Korea’s minjung theology, which played a prominent role in resistance to the country’s military dictatorship as well as its deep economic inequality, was a widely influential example of Asian liberation theology that mixed with human rights advocacy. In sub-Saharan Africa, the All-Africa Conference of Churches encouraged churches to resist their political leaders’ efforts to deflect criticism of their own human rights records, though the struggle against apartheid and skepticism of human rights as essentially Western hampered such efforts. For Christians in Western Europe and North America, meanwhile, taking up a liberationist human rights agenda meant applying a critical lens to Western societies, but especially finding ways to act in solidarity with the Third World.

Sets forth the attitudes and institutions that determine the interaction of science and democracy in the United States, Sweden, and Japan. While the United States has a strong populist, anti-intellectual tradition, Sweden tends to defer more to experts with sometimes uneven results. Japan has a consensus-based culture which filters expertise through bureaucracy and political parties with no precise parallel elsewhere.

While noncareer diplomats are seldom appointed to posts in post-conflict situations nowadays, the chapter contends that earlier noncareer envoys sometimes proved remarkably effective in such circumstances. The chapter examines how the academic background and cultural fluency of Jacob G. Schurman, former president of Cornell University and US ambassador to Germany from 1925 to 1929, advanced US–German rapprochement after World War I. It first traces the longstanding pattern of sending professors to Berlin, reflecting deep US academic ties to Germany and recognition of professors’ social standing and access to elites. The subsequent analysis examines the range of factors that contributed to Schurman’s diplomatic success in 1920s Germany, juxtaposing it with the relative diplomatic ineffectiveness of his successor, historian William Dodd, under the Nazi regime. Collectively, these cases highlight the role of individuals in shaping foreign relations and underscore the promise and peril of noncareer envoys in post-conflict diplomacy.

One of the defining episodes of postwar US–Japanese relations was the so-called Girard incident, in which specialist third-class William Girard shot and killed Sakai Naka, a Japanese woman who was picking up shell casings on a US firing range in January 1957. The shooting sparked a diplomatic crisis that shook the US–Japan alliance, leading many historians to situate the incident in the history of the two nations’ diplomatic relations after World War II. This chapter attempts to resituate the incident, in part, by showing that it was only one of at least 200 instances in which US sentries and soldiers fired on Japanese civilians from the start of the Allied Occupation through the beginning of the 1960s.

The seventh chapter of this book reviews the several waves of expansion of foreign banks in Latin America during the last third of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century. This story is of special interest for readers interested in aspects of a complex and diverse phase of financial globalization. Foreign banks participated in several phases of capital flows from Europe, and much later from the United States and Canada, marking a new stage of capitalism that was becoming truly global. The entry of banks of different nationalities into Latin America was pioneered by British overseas banks from the 1860s, which established offices and branches in many countries. They were followed by French investment banks that participated in many public works projects such as canals and railroads, as well as in government banks. Then came the powerful German universal banks from the 1890s, which specialized in trade finance and in some foreign debt transactions. From the 1850s onwards there appeared Spanish colonial banks in Cuba and Puerto Rico that continued to operate until the Spanish American War of 1898. Last of all arrived Canadian and United States commercial banks, in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Right-wing extremism continues to increase in western liberal democracies, in response to the challenges globalization poses for the economic security and cultural identity of the white West.The white power music scene, including the alt-right with its fashwave genre, has played a major role in these developments, particularly in online efforts to recruit teens to white supremacy.Fascist regimes have long used music as propaganda, but the contemporary use of white supremacist hate music began in Britain in the 1970s with the emergence of racist skinhead bands.This chapter discusses the most essential functions white power music performs today:creating ambiguity, building community, and solidifying identity.I argue that western democracies need to educate citizens about the role white power music plays in right-wing extremist movements in order to build critical listening publics that can dismantle the cultural politics of white supremacy.

This chapter offers the first comprehensive study of the relationship between music and politics in Greece during periods when the country was under political regimes with a fascist profile. In this context, the study focuses on the Metaxas dictatorship (1936-41), the period of the Axis Occupation (1941-44) and the Junta period (1967-74). The chapter focuses on the particular ideological and cultural factors that affected musical practice and creation, the restrictions that were imposed in each case (and the means used to implement them), as well as the ways in which the musical world reacted to the political conditions at each time. Through the sequential examination of musical life during these periods, both continuities and discontinuities emerge, regarding the ways in which music was influenced by politics. Although particular emphasis is placed on Western art music, the analysis also includes some aspects of popular music, mainly with regard to rebetiko.

This chapter is a comparative long-term community study of Muslim Roma who migrated from North Macedonia to New York City starting in the 1960s and who now number several thousand people. Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, it illustrates the multiple identities of varied community members via family, work, ritual and cultural productions. It especially examines music as a window into community expression; tellingly, song lyrics often deal with migration. Music is highly valued in all social occasions and as part of the ritual and economic web. Music is shared in a wide transatlantic social media network that forms the soundscape of Macedonian Romani family and community life. In fact, some musicians are the most mobile members of their communities. Ethnographic fieldwork from which this chapter has developed took place among Macedonian Roma in North Macedonia, the United States, Western Europe, Canada and Australia since 1988.

This chapter explores the debates over Romani assimilation during the period between World War I and World War II. The debates pitted Gypsylorists and literary figures such as Konrad Bercovici (1882–1961), a popularizer of Romani culture through some forty books, against Romani activists and leaders who sought to improve the lives of their community members. Most notable among the latter group are Steve Kaslov (ca. 1888–1949), who as a leader of various Romani communities in New York City accepted that change was inevitable, and Marco, a Russian Romani who responded to Bercovici’s question, “What made you come here,” with a question of his own: “And why shouldn’t I have come? Because there was a strip of water between this country and the one I was last in?” For the latter, the Atlantic was neither a barrier nor an assimilator, but a conduit to new worlds and new identities.

The Franklin Book Programs (FBP), an American translation and publishing initiative that operated from 1952 to 1978, opened an office in Baghdad in 1957. Based on an analysis of the entirety of the correspondence between the New York headquarters of FBP and its satellite office in Baghdad, a total of 3,771 documents – over 5,000 pages of material in all – held at the Harry Ransom Center, this chapter addresses the inner workings of Franklin’s Iraq office, with special attention to the FBP’s connections to Iraqi poet Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb and the Palestinian intellectual Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā, who lived in Baghdad, as part of its translation activities. Overall, it follows the rise and demise of FBP Baghdad to offer further evidence of Franklin’s changing priorities during the 1960s, which track the realignment of global politics during the cultural Cold War.