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FACULTY & EXPERTS
11 July 2025

Summer Reads: Six Recent Faculty Publications

The first half of 2025 saw the publication of a selection of books by Geneva Graduate Institute faculty, covering a wide range of topics from the global history of family planning to development in education and more.

The Gospel of Family Planning: An Intimate Global History Nicole C. Bourbonnais

The Gospel of Family Planning: An Intimate Global History

Nicole C. Bourbonnais

Historical accounts of the twentieth-century global family planning movement have largely focused on the most prominent activists and those at the helm of international organisations, philanthropic foundations, and government programmes. In The Gospel of Family Planning, however, Nicole Bourbonnais shifts our attention to frontline workers — doctors, social workers, nurses, fieldworkers, consultants, church groups, and volunteers — who, she compellingly shows, played a central (if complicated) role.

Through a mix of collective biography and microhistory, the author visits clinics, doorsteps, and bedrooms, revealing the everyday, groundlevel workings of grassroots family planning campaigns, state population control programmes, and the movements for reproductive rights and justice that arose to contest them. Throughout the book, she invites readers to consider how the intertwined histories of missionary work, humanitarianism, feminism, decolonisation, and international development shaped intimate interventions into people’s reproductive lives around the world.

University of Chicago Press. 2025. 272 p.

Cover for Transforming Development in Education  From Coloniality to Rethinking, Reframing and Reimagining Possibilities Edited by Moira V. Faul

Transforming Development in Education: 
From Coloniality to Rethinking, Reframing and Reimagining Possibilities

Edited by Moira V. Faul 

In this thought-provoking book, expert contributors challenge dominant global development and education narratives through an academic critique of contemporary coloniality in education, and move beyond critique to provide constructive ways forward to challenge and reinvent relations of domination and empower marginalised communities.

Ultimately, the book argues that continuing to develop decolonial dialogue and practice enables education to live up to its potential as a catalyst for societal transformation and for the sustainability of our planet. Transforming Development in Education is a key resource for academics, researchers and students in education policy, comparative and international education, development studies and international relations. It presents key knowledge at the intersection between research, analysis, policy and practice, making it invaluable to international education policymakers and professionals.

Edward Elgar Publishing. 2025. 234 p.

Cover of International History of the Twentieth Century and Beyond

International History of the Twentieth Century and Beyond

Jussi M. Hanhimäki, Antony Best, Joseph A. Maiolo, and Kirsten E. Schulze

Now in its fourth edition, this highly successful global history of the twentieth century is written by four prominent international historians for first-year undergraduate level and upward.

Using their thematic and regional expertise, the authors have produced an authoritative yet accessible and seamless account of the history of international relations in the last century, covering events in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas. They focus on the history of relations between states and on the broad ideological, economic and cultural forces that have influenced the evolution of international politics over the last 120 years.

The fourth edition is thoroughly updated to take account of the most recent research and global developments, including new material on the impact of the Trump administration on international politics, the rise of China under the leadership of Xi Jinping and the origins of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

Fourth edition. Routledge. 2025.

Imagining Malaya Peranakan Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Belonging at the End of Empire, 1945–1957

Imagining Malaya: Peranakan Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Belonging at the End of Empire, 1945–1957

Bernard Z. Keo 

Over the course of British colonial rule in Malaya, the Peranakan Chinese community attempted to bring to life a complex imagination of nationhood predicated on an inclusive and multi-ethnic approach to integrating Malaya’s plural society. Peranakan political actors campaigned for the extension of citizenship rights to all Malayan residents regardless of race, class, or religion. Yet, this political history has been overlooked.

Imagining Malaya explores one of the many alternatives of a Malayan nation that were possible at one point or another and that are yet to be studied. Centring the Peranakan into Malaysia’s story of decolonisation and nation-making, it sheds new light on Malaysia’s path to nationhood and who is included (or not) within that story. This monograph reveals how seemingly disparate political acts by the Peranakan were in reality bound together by a cosmopolitan sense of identity and belonging as leading figures from the community sought to build an inclusive nation.

Oxford University Press. 2025. 256 p.

The Pathology of Plenty  Natural Resources in International Law

The Pathology of Plenty:
Natural Resources in International Law

Lys Kulamadayil 

Since the 1990s, expressions such as the “resource curse” and “paradox of plenty” have been associated with unequal patterns of power and wealth distribution in postcolonial and neocolonial countries as well as with the ecological and social cost of natural resources exploitation and the planetary costs of mineral resources-based production and consumption patterns. These negative effects of natural resources wealth can be described as a “pathology of plenty”.

Taking various resource-curse and paradox-of-plenty theories as a starting point, this book offers a critical examination of the role law plays in the pathology of plenty. It illustrates how the law’s role in resource-cursed countries is at once constitutive, preventive, remedial and punitive.

This will be important reading for scholars in the field of international law and international development.

Hart Publishing. 2025. 208 p.

Cultivating Fields of Progress  Agriculture and the International Labour Organization, 1920s–1950s

Cultivating Fields of Progress: 
Agriculture and the International Labour Organization, 1920s–1950s

Amalia Ribi Forclaz

This book explores how the improvement of working and living conditions in agriculture became an international issue. It focuses on the international debates, knowledge production, and policymaking that took place within the International Labour Organization and related organisations, as well as among expert networks, agrarian interest groups, trade unionists, and farmer representatives. It traces the shifting thematic and geographical scope of these debates, from the plight of landless farmworkers in Europe in the early 1920s to the conditions of plantation workers in the 1950s.

Based on extensive archival research, Cultivating Fields of Progress tells a broader story about how questions of rural development made their way to the world stage. If today we tend to associate calls for social justice and decent work with rural economies in the “Global South”, the book shows that not so long ago, Europe’s rural populations were a major point of attention for social reform.

Oxford University Press. 2025. 224 p.