New Books in National Security

The attacks on the luxurious Taj Hotel in Mumbai in 2008 put Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, a jihadist terrorist group, in the international / Western spotlight for the first time, though they had been deadly active in India and Afghanistan for decades. In her book In Their Own Words: Understanding Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (Oxford University Press, 2018), Christine Fair reveals a little-known aspect of how LeT funct...

Sanjib Baruah’s latest book In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast (Stanford University Press, 2020) completes a trilogy on India’s northeastern borderland region of which the first two are India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (1999) and Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India (2005). Writing about a region that is 'an artifact of a delibe...

Global history records an astonishing variety of forms of social organization. Yet almost universally, males subordinate females. How does the relationship between men and women shape the wider political order? Valerie M. Hudson, Donna Lee Bowen, and Perpetua Lynne Nielsen's new book The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide (Columbia University Press, 20...

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight...

The 9/11 attacks fundamentally transformed how the US approached terrorism, and led to the unprecedented expansion of counterterrorism strategies, policies, and practices. While the analysis of these developments is rich and vast, there remains a significant void. The diverse actors contributing to counterterrorism increasingly consider, engage and impact women as agents, partners, and targets of...

Americans since the beginning of their history, have constantly made moral judgments about presidents and foreign policy. Unfortunately, many of these assessments are poorly thought through and assessed. An American President is either praised for the moral clarity of his statements or judged solely on the results of their actions. In Do Morals Matter?: Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Tr...

The former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt grew up as a devout Anglophile, yet he clashed heavily and repeatedly with his British counterparts Wilson, Callaghan, and Thatcher during his time in office between 1974 and 1982. Helmut Schmidt and British-German Relations: A European Misunderstanding (Cambridge University Press, 2019) looks at Schmidt's personal experience to explore how and why...

Is a rising power – like China – a threat to the world order? The conventional wisdom in international relations says that power transitions – particularly increases in military power – are intrinsically destabilizing to the international order. In her new book The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations: Status, Revisionism, and Rising Powers (Oxford UP, 2020), Michelle Murray counter...

Sarah Burns’ new book The Politics of War Powers: The Theory and History of Presidential Unilateralism (University Press of Kansas, 2020) pulls together distinct threads in analyzing the theoretical framing of presidential power in the American constitutional system and then tracing that power through forty-five presidents. Burns begins by assessing Locke’s impact on the constitutional design of t...

America's war on terror is widely defined by the Afghanistan and Iraq fronts. Yet, as this book demonstrates, both the international campaign and the new ways of fighting that grew out of it played out across multiple fronts beyond the Middle East. Maria Ryan explores how secondary fronts in the Philippines, sub-Saharan Africa, Georgia, and the Caspian Sea Basin became key test sites for developin...

The Baltics are about to be thrust onto the world stage. With a 'belligerent' Vladimir Putin to their east (and 'expansionist' NATO to their west), Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are increasingly the subject of unsettling headlines in both Western and Russian media. But how real are these fears, subject as they are to media embellishment, qualification and denial by both Russia and the West? What d...

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books,...

With the world’s attention riveted to the nuclear threat from Iran, Yaakov Katz’s new book could not be more timely. In Shadow Strike: Inside Israel’s Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power (St. Martin's Press, 2019), Jerusalem Post Editor-in-Chief Katz tells the inside story of how Israel stopped Syria from becoming a global nuclear nightmare. On September 6, 2007, shortly after midnigh...

The Rhodesian Unilateral Declaration of Independence was one of the last crises of formal imperialism. British settlers in present-day Zimbabwe, then known as Rhodesia, refused to accept demands from London that they accept requirements for majority rule before they could receive independence. In 1965, they declared independence and attempted to establish their own state that would preserve white...

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections t...

In April 2014, a cohort of twenty-five hip hop artists assembled in Washington, D.C. for the first orientation meeting of a new cultural diplomacy program sponsored by the United States State Department. Next Level brings hip hop practitioners from the United States to other countries where they collaborate with local artists in workshops and other events in short residencies. Mark Katz, a hip hop...

In The New Battle for the Atlantic: Emerging Naval Competition with Russia in the Far North (Naval Institute Press, 2019), Magnus Nordenman explores the emerging competition between the United States and its NATO allies and the resurgent Russian navy in the North Atlantic. This maritime region played a key role in the two world wars and the Cold War, serving as the strategic link between the Unite...

Seven decades of military spending during the cold war and war on terror have created a vast excess of military hardware – what happens to all of this military waste when it has served its purpose and what does it tell us about militarism in American culture? Josh Reno’s Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness (University of California Press, 2019), explores the myri...

A trade war with China has dangerous implications for the global economy. What began more than a year ago with President Trump’s decision to impose tariffs has become an unpleasant economic reality for many businesses. Recently, the U.S. labeled China a “currency manipulator.” But an even larger long-term threat comes from China’s aggressive espionage offensive that is playing out in behind-the-sc...

Climate change impacts-more heat, drought, extreme rainfall, and stronger storms-have already harmed communities around the globe. Even if the world could cut its carbon emissions to zero tomorrow, further significant global climate change is now inevitable. Although we cannot tell with certainty how much average global temperatures will rise, we do know that the warming we have experienced to dat...

One of the central pillars of US counterterrorism policy is that capturing or killing a terrorist group's leader is effective. Yet this pillar rests more on a foundation of faith than facts. In Leadership Decapitation: Strategic Targeting of Terrorist Organizations (Stanford University Press, 2019), Jenna Jordan examines over a thousand instances of leadership targeting—involving groups such as Ha...

Recent debates over the building of a border wall on the U.S.-Mexico divide have raised logistical and ethical issues, leaving the historical record of border building uninvoked. A recent book, written by UT Austin professor Dr. C.J. Alvarez, offers an over one-hundred-year history that extends to before the building of a border wall in 1990. Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on...

Italy's current crisis of Mediterranean migration and detention has its roots in early twentieth century imperial ambitions. Stephanie Malia Hom's new book Empire's Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy's Crisis of Migration and Detention (Cornell University Press, 2019) investigates how mobile populations were perceived to be major threats to Italian colonization, and how the state's historica...

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump broke not only from the Republican Party consensus but also from the bipartisan consensus on the direction of recent U.S. foreign policy. Calling the Iraq war a terrible mistake and lamenting America's nation building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Trump has shown little interest in maintaining the traditional form of American leadership of the...

The Versailles Treaty of 1919, celebrates its one-hundred anniversary this year. And, yet unlike the more recent centenaries, such as that of the outbreak of the Great War or the Russian Revolution, the Versailles Treaty, notwithstanding its importance as perhaps the most important of the twentieth-century, has not seen the same level of interest? Is this relatively indifference due to the fact th...