New Books in National Security

To better understand the lasting legacy of international relations in the post-Ottoman Middle East, Amit Bein's Kemalist Turkey and the Middle East: International Relations in the Interwar Period (Cambridge University Press, 2017), reexamines Turkey’s engagement with the region during the interwar period.  Long assumed to be a period of deliberate disengagement and ruptured ties between Turkey and...

How do ideologies of development shape the perceptions of security threats of US foreign policymakers and the political and military leaders of developing countries? What is the relationship between development, democracy, and military coups? How does US foreign aid affect political stability in recipient countries? These are some of the questions addressed in Thomas Field’s fantastic book  From D...

From facial recognition to online shopping, artificial intelligence has become the backbone of the internet and has led to an unprecedented extraction and utilization of personal data. As a result, AI has rapidly outpaced existing free speech, privacy, and national security law. In The Centaur’s Dilemma: National Security Law for the Coming AI Revolution (Brookings Institute Press, 2020), Judge Ja...

How can multiple theoretical approaches yield a better understanding of international political politics? In Understanding and Explaining the Iranian Nuclear 'Crisis': Theoretical Approaches (Lexington Books, 2020), Dr. Halit M. E. Tagma, assistant professor in the department of politics and international affairs at Northern Arizona University and Dr. Paul E. Lenze, senior lecturer in the departme...

In the past decade, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden became household names. They were celebrated by many as truth-tellers who blew the whistle on governmental abuses. Yet, in the eyes of the state, Manning and Snowden had made so-called “unauthorized disclosures” that jeopardized the nation’s security. Described as such, they could not be labelled “whistleblowers.” This is an example of what th...

Few human enterprises are as complex, dynamic, and unpredictable as war. Armed conflict substitutes the relatively ordered reality of peace with the undeniably chaotic reality of combat. Militaries, by design, seek to make sense of and prepare for that chaos. And as long as there have been organized militaries, there have been military officers, theorists, and observers, like Ardant du Pique or B....

Jeremy Pressman is Associate Professor of Political Science and the Director of Middle East Studies at the University of Connecticut. Jeremy is the author of The Sword is Not Enough: Arabs, Israelis, and the Limits of Military Force (Manchester UP, 2020), an exploration of the dominance of military force as the go-to option for political and social leaders on both sides of the Arab Israeli conflic...

Since the early twentieth-century, Kurds have challenged the borders and national identities of the states they inhabit. Nowhere is this more evident than in their promotion of the 'Map of Greater Kurdistan', an ideal of a unified Kurdish homeland in an ethnically and geographically complex region. This powerful image is embedded in the consciousness of the Kurdish people, both within the region a...

Andrew Hom’s new book examines what he calls the “problem of time” in context of international relations and international relations theory. The subject of time is a growing field of research and scholarship in political science and political theory, and Hom’s book spans both these areas by focusing on the way that time and the theory of timing contributes to and shapes our understanding of intern...

In The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention (Oxford University Press, 2020), Rajan Menon shows that this belief, while noble, is naïve. He considers it ancient artifact belonging to the brief period right after the end of the cold war- the ‘Unipolar Moment’ With the end of the Cold War has come an upsurge in humanitarian interventions-military campaigns aimed at ending mass atrocities. These wars...

During the 1940s, many Americans began to rethink America’s place in the world, and they did so with the help of Wendell Wilkie. Wilikie, the 1940 Republican nominee for president, businessman, and unofficial presidential envoy, made international issues easy to understand for many Americans. His particular brand of internationalism, outlined in his bestselling book One World (1943), challenged Am...

This is a Special Series on Third World Nationalism. In the wake of a rise in nationalism around the world, and its general condemnation by liberals and the left, in addition to the rise of China and Russia, we have put together this series on Third World Nationalism to nuance the present discourse on nationalism, note its centrality to anti-imperial, anti-colonial politics around the world, the r...

In June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. This key event in 20th-century history continues to fascinate the public imagination, yet few historians have examined in depth the regional context which allowed this assassination to happen or the murder's ripples which quickly spread out across the Balkans, Austria-Hungary and Europe as a whole. In Saraj...

Today we are joined by Heather Dichter, Associate Professor of Sports History and Sports Management at DeMontfort University and fellow at the international Centre for Sports History and Culture. She is also an author in and the editor of Soccer Diplomacy: International Relations and Football since 1914 (University Press of Kentucky, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of soccer d...

In The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties (Duke UP, 2020), Professor Eric Zolov retells the history of 1960s Mexico by focusing on the way that Mexican political leaders pursued a paradoxical foreign policy agenda. This agenda consisted reaffirming Mexico’s close and amicable relationship with the United States, while, at the same time, aggressively asserting a much more radical, ant...

Although World War II had been largely remembered in the People’s Republic of China as an experience of victimization since its founding in 1949, that view has been changing since the Deng Xiaoping era in the 1980s. Rana Mitter’s newest book on modern China, China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard University Press 2020), traces this transformation in the Chinese in...

Harmony and Normalization: US-Cuban Musical Diplomacy (University Press of Mississippi, 2020) explores the channels of musical exchange between Cuba and the United States during the eight-year presidency of Barack Obama, who eased the musical embargo of the island and restored relations with Cuba. Musical exchanges during this period act as a lens through which to view not only US-Cuban musical re...

Donald Trump campaigned on a great many things in 2016, but one of the issues he used to criticize Democrats was their role in supporting sequestration and cuts to the military budget. While partisan rhetoric about the country being unsafe or the military being underfunded plays well, it obscures an important reality about the relative size of U.S. military funding. The United State spends more th...

Anyone doing business with China will have been shocked by the speed with which political and economic relations with Western, and some other, countries – like India – have deteriorated in 2020, but especially the USA and the UK. A crucial issue for the future is whether this is a passing phase, caused by temporary shocks like the Pandemic and by the personalities of leaders in China and the USA....

Hate crimes. Misinformation and conspiracy theories. Foiled white-supremacist plots. The signs of growing far-right extremism are all around us, and communities across America and around the globe are struggling to understand how so many people are being radicalized and why they are increasingly attracted to violent movements. Hate in the Homeland shows how tomorrow’s far-right nationalists are be...

In the past few years isolationism, which had long been derided in the national discourse, has been making a comeback as a political force. In Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World (Oxford University Press, 2020), Charles A. Kupchan traces the history of the concept in American politics and considers its future influence on American foreign policy. As he demo...

In his latest monograph, All Against All: The Long Winter of 1933 and The Origins of the Second World War (Harper, 2020), Professor Paul Jankowski (Brandeis University) provides a wide-angled account of a critical period of world history, the interwar years, in which the world transitioned from postwar to the prewar and saw the disintegration of collective security and international institutions c...

History and geography delineate the operation of power, not only its range but also the capacity to plan and the ability to implement. Approaching state strategy and policy from the spatial angle, Jeremy Black argues that just as the perception of power is central to issues of power, so place, and its constraints and relationships, is partly a matter of perception, not merely map coordinates. Geop...

David Rundell brings to his book, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads (I. B. Tauris, 2020), a granular analysis and insider’s understanding of the inner workings of the kingdom garnered as a US foreign service officer who served a total of 15 years in the country. Rundell skilfully weaves history into a multi-layered portrait of the transformation for good and bad that Saudi Arabia is...

Dr. Victoria Phillips adeptly tells the story of Martha Graham's role as diplomat, arts innovator, and dancer. Her book Martha Graham's Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy (Oxford UP, 2019) is a look at the years that her company toured the world as an example of American democracy and freedom. Martha Graham's Cold War frames the story of Martha Graham and her particular brand of dance moder...