New Books in World Affairs

As the United Nations faces mounting geopolitical tensions, financial pressures, and new global challenges, what would meaningful reform actually look like? In this episode of International Horizons , RBI Fellow Peter Hoffman speaks with economist and Global Governance Forum Executive Director Augusto López-Claros about the UN’s record of achievements and shortcomings, the limits of past reforms,...

Recent years have seen a striking resurgence of anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric on the international stage, from Global South to Global North and from the Left to the Right. Why do states deploy these forms of rhetoric in global politics? How do practitioners from the so-called non-Western world differ in their use and performance of rhetoric, and in what ways do they shape international o...

When an election turns violent and neither side will concede, why is the usual answer to put both sides in the same government? Alex Noyes has spent nearly two decades asking whether that reflex works. Compromised Coalitions: The Paradox of Post-Conflict Power Sharing in Africa  out in 2026 from the University of Pennsylvania Press, draws on more than 120 interviews with senior politicians an...

From the dawn of the modern era to the end of the Cold War, global history was defined by rivalries between Great Powers. In the West, this meant the struggle for supremacy in Europe and the Americas, while in the East, it encompassed those vying for control over the successor states to Genghis Khan’s empire. Between 1989 and the year 2000, Great Power rivalry temporarily gave way to globalization...

Great Power Diplomacy. The Skill of Statecraft from Attila the Hun to Kissinger  (Princeton UP, 2025) is a captivating history of diplomacy—and an urgent reminder of why we need to revive its lost arts to survive in a dangerous era of great power competition. From the beginning of time, human societies have found themselves confronted by enemies too numerous or ferocious to defeat solel...

Could humanity’s most powerful invention become a threat to its survival? In this episode of The Survival Curve , we examine the disturbing prospect behind the “ten percent” debate: a risk of catastrophe that cannot be precisely calculated, but whose consequences demand serious attention. We explore three routes to disaster: machines escaping human control, people using AI to unleash devastating c...

Thomas Gregory is Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.  His new book,  Weaponizing Civilian Protection (Oxford UP, 2025), exposes how coalition efforts to minimize and mitigate civilian casualties during the recent conflict in Afghanistan also worked to rationalize the harm inflicted upon Afghan civilians.  Drawing o...

What happens when the United States launches an unconventional foreign aid program in the aftermath of a national uprising? In this behind-the-scenes account of the Egyptian-American Enterprise Fund--a private investment fund created by the U.S. Congress to jumpstart Egypt's private sector after the 2011 Egyptian revolution-- A Daring Enterprise: A Us-Egyptian Partnership and the Case for Soft Pow...

In June 1968, a twenty-four-year-old Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan B. Sirhan assassinated Senator Robert F. Kennedy, marking yet another killing in a decade haunted by political violence. As he was being subdued, Sirhan shouted, “I can explain. I did it for my country,” by which he meant Palestine. On trial, he testified that his motives included opposition to Zionism, with particular anger d...

When powerful states go to war, why do they bother asking permission? In Strategies for Approval: Building Support for Military Intervention at the UN Security Council (Yale University Press, 2025), Stefano Recchia argues that the answer reveals something surprising about how power actually works.  Drawing on hundreds of declassified documents and more than fifty interviews with senior diplom...

In this episode of New Books Network, Željko Stanojević speaks with historian Giuseppe Motta about Jewish Refugees and the International Community Between the Two World Wars: Beyond the State (Routledge, 2026), a study of Jewish displacement, statelessness, humanitarian action, international law, and international institutions between the First and Second World Wars. Drawing on extensive archival...

Contesting Pluralism(s): Islamism, Liberalism and Nationalism in Turkey and Beyond  (Cambridge UP, 2024) challenges a widespread tendency to limit studies of Turkish - and Muslim - politics to 'Islamist vs. secularist' or 'Islam vs. democracy' debates. Instead, Nora Fisher-Onar's innovative argument centers on coalitions for and against pluralism. Retelling Turkey's story from the lat...

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, governments around the world have expelled, en masse, more than 30 million people. Yet despite its prevalence, mass expulsion remains an understudied phenomenon as scholarly attention has been directed toward the gravest atrocities—genocide and mass killing—or toward forced migration more broadly. Mass Expulsion: The Politics of Forced Population Remov...

Drawing on an original data set of interventions and wars from 1945 to the current day, as well as numerous short case studies, Richard Ned Lebow offers a novel account of their origins and outcomes - one that emphasises miscalculation, failure to conduct meaningful risk assessments, and cultural and political arrogance. A successive work to Why Nations Fight (2010), in this book  Why Nations Sti...

Brought to you by the BISA Environment and Climate Politics Working Group. Decolonizing Environmentalism: Alternative Visions and Practices of Environmental Action (Bloomsbury, 2024) helps us reimagine our approach to environmental stewardship critically interrogating the problems associated with existing legacies of environmentalism and how we imagine other ways to addressing the multiple planeta...

In a matter of decades, a spectacular cold-water paradise thirty million years in the making is succumbing to warming oceans. Kelp forests are largely out of sight, hidden under the ocean’s surface, yet they are one of Earth’s most wondrous and underappreciated marine habitats. It’s an ethereal light-infused realm of sharks, otters, eels, sea stars, crabs, rockfish, and myriad other species vital...

With commentary on the emergence of a ‘multipolar’ world, of transatlantic rifts and the rise of ‘middle powers’ ubiquitous, tales of the decline of something called ‘the West’ seem to be everywhere. Yet the meanings the idea of ‘the West’ acquires in spaces beyond it tell us at least as much about the state of the world as portents of its demise. Based on a combination of cultural analysis of hi...

Russian leader Vladimir Putin, at 73 years old, is still very much alive, yet the “After Putin” conversation is an active one inside and outside of Russia. What could come next and how to think about that question? My guest is Julian G. Waller, a political scientist at George Washington University and author of a recent Foreign Affairs article “After Putin: Russia’s Coming Succession Crisis.” In o...

Purges: How Dictators Fight to Survive (Cornell University Press, 2026) by Dr. Edward Goldring delves into one of the key tactics that autocrats deploy to maintain power: the removal of individuals from within the regime. From Kim Jong Un's execution of his uncle to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's removal of over a hundred Turkish generals, purges bear significant consequences for the survival and enduran...

Steve Feldstein's Bytes and Bullets: Global Rivalries, Private Tech, and the New Shape of Modern Warfare (St. Martin's Press, 2026) opens with a juxtaposition: China spending vast sums to reach the far side of the moon, and Ukraine using cheap drones to blunt a far larger military. Both are stories about technology and power, but they point in opposite directions. In our conversation, Feldstein a...

"Expansive visions. Universal institutions. Ideas of progress. It was on the back of these that the West surged ahead and built a global order. I was born into that world. But my children have entered a world of Un-order." We live in an explosive world. Trump is blowing up political order. Xi Jinping is scrambling the economy. And Putin is redrawing the map of Europe. At a time when every crisis b...

 Nuclear Archipelago: Secrets, Power and the Biggest Atomic Blast in Australia  (NewSouth, 2026) tells the shocking story of the two British atomic weapons test series held at Western Australia's Monte Bello Islands in 1952 and 1956. Operation Hurricane and Operation Mosaic took place at a rugged archipelago 100 kilometres off the Pilbara coast, and each of the three bombs sent fallout over vast...

Shadow Negotiators: How UN Organizations Shape the Rules of World Trade for Food Security (Stanford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Matias E. Margulis is the first book to demonstrate that United Nations (UN) organizations have intervened to influence the discourse, agenda, and outcomes of international trade lawmaking at the World Trade Organization (WTO). While UN organizations lack a seat at the...

A sweeping history of humanity’s most fundamental creation―the home―and its effects on the land, cities, and people themselves. Americans spend, on average, 90 percent of their lives indoors, with two-thirds of that time spent in their homes. Globally, the construction and maintenance of residential buildings account for a staggering portion of carbon emissions. In this timely and fascinating wor...

In A Post-Liberal Peace: How Emergent Powers Are Reshaping Global Conflict Management (Cornell UP, 2026), Dr. Monalisa Adhikari shows how rising powers like India and China are reshaping global peace governance. Over recent decades, both countries have deepened engagement with institutions built on liberal principles, including those related to peacebuilding. Their growing role raises critical que...