New Books in National Security

Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the People's Republic of China (Palgrave, 2018) by Daniel Vukovich analyzes the 'intellectual political culture' of post-Tiananmen China in comparison to and in conflict with liberalism inside and outside the P.R.C. It questions how mainland politics and discourses challenge ‘our’ own, chiefly liberal and anti-‘statist’ political frameworks and how can...

In his book  Peacemakers: American Leadership and the End of Genocide in the Balkans (University of Kentucky Press, 2017), Ambassador James W. Pardew describes the role of the U.S. involvement in ending the wars and genocide in the Balkans.  As a soldier-diplomat, Pardew reminds us of the human nature of diplomacy.  Pardew was the one of the major players in U.S. policy making, leading Balkan task...

If today’s geopolitical fragmentation and the complexities of a ‘multipolar’ world order have led some to reminisce about the apparent stability of the Cold War era’s two ‘camps’, it should be remembered that things were of course never so straightforward. As Jeremy Friedman shows in Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World, the 1960s-1980s Sino-Soviet Split(UNC Press, 2018...

In this provocative challenge to United States policy and strategy, former Professor of Strategy & Policy at the US Naval War College, and author or editor of eleven books, Dr. Donald Stoker argues that America endures endless wars because its leaders no longer know how to think about war in strategic terms and he reveals how ideas on limited war and war in general have evolved against the backdro...

The practice of Partition understood as the physical division of territory along ethno-religious lines into separate nation-states is often regarded as a successful political "solution" to ethnic conflict. In their edited volume Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism (Stanford University Press, 2019), Laura Robson and Arie Dubnov uncover the collective hist...

With the US in the midst of on-going negotiations with Iran, North Korea, and China, how is Congress playing a part? How is the new generation of Congress advocating for and against US action? Jeffrey Lantis’ new book answers these questions. He is the author of Foreign Policy Advocacy and Entrepreneurship: How a New Generation in Congress Is Shaping U.S. Engagement with the World(University of Mi...

Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America (Basic Books, 2019) places religion and oil at the center of American history. As prize-winning historian Darren Dochuk reveals, from the earliest discovery of oil in America during the Civil War, citizens saw oil as the nation's special blessing and its peculiar burden, the source of its prophetic mission in the world. Over the cen...

Why do international peacebuilding organizations sometimes succeed and sometimes fail, even within the same country? Bridging the gaps between the peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and global governance scholarship, this book argues that international peacebuilding organizations repeatedly fail because they are accountable to global actors, not to local institutions or people. International peacebuildi...

In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between space—from “shatter zone” to borderland. Far from the centers of authority of contending empires, the North African and Southern Iberian coast was a place where imperial, colonial, private, and piratical...

Someday we may say that we never saw it coming. After seventy-five years of peace in the Pacific, a new challenger to American power has emerged, on a scale not seen since the Soviet Union at its height. With a deep if partially contrived sense of national destiny, the Chinese Communist Party is guiding a country of 1.4 billion people towards what it calls "the great rejuvenation of the Chinese na...

Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill and the Road to War(Tim Duggan Books, 2019) is a groundbreaking history of the disastrous years of indecision, failed diplomacy and parliamentary infighting that help to make Hitler’s domination of Europe possible. Drawing on the available archival research, Oxford graduate, professional writer and one-time Channel 4 news journalist, Tim Bouverie has cre...

In recent years, Confucius Institutes—cultural and language programs funded by the Chinese government—have garnered attention in the United States due to a debate over whether they threaten free speech and academic freedom. In addition to this, much of the scholarly work on Confucius Institutes analyzes policy documents. Anthropologist Jennifer Hubbert seeks to ask more complex questions and in-de...

There are countless ways to study the history of U.S. foreign policy. David Milne, however, makes the case that it is “often best understood” as “intellectual history.” In his innovative book, Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015), follows the lives and ideas of several foreign policy thinkers, from the naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan at the tu...

Paul Thomas Chamberlin has written a book about the Cold War that makes important claims about the nature and reasons for genocide in the last half of the Twentieth Century. In The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (Harper, 2018), Chamberlin reminds us that the Cold War was not at all Cold for hundreds of millions of people.  He argues that the Soviet Union and the US competed f...

The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia (Yale University Press, 2018) by Mark Galeotti is an engrossing read about a topic mainstream scholarship has largely ignored: Russia’s criminal underworld. With Galeotti as our guide, we delve into the colorful world of the vory v zakone or “thieves of the code,” with their flamboyant nicknames, esoteric rituals, and vibrant body tattoos, which Galeotti explains are...

History has tended to measure war's winners and losers in terms of its major engagements, battles in which the result was so clear-cut that they could be considered "decisive." Marathon, Cannae, Tours, Agincourt, Austerlitz, Sedan, Stalingrad--all resonate in the literature of war and in our imaginations as tide-turning. But were they? As Cathal J. Nolan demonstrates in The Allure of Battle: A His...

Practical Terrorism Prevention: Reexamining U.S. National Approaches to Addressing the Threat of Ideologically Motivated Violence (RAND Corporation, 2019), examines past countering-violent-extremism (CVE) efforts, evaluates Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and interagency efforts to respond to ideological radicalization to violence, and recommends strengthening programs focused on non-law enf...

For most people, geopolitics is something that happens out there, in boardrooms and on battlefields. But critical geographers, and feminist political geographers in particular, have in recent years shown how the geopolitical is something that comes into being in the intimate and the everyday. Enter Jennifer Fluri and Rachel Lehr's 2017 book, The Carpetbaggers of Kabul and Other American-Afghan Ent...

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization regularly appears in newspapers and political science scholarship. Surprisingly, historians have yet to devote the attention that the organization’s history merits. Timothy A. Sayle, an Assistant Professor of history at the University of Toronto, attempts to correct this. His fascinating new book, Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Or...

Beginning in the mid-1850s, a number of people in Europe and the United States undertook a range of efforts in response to the horrors of war. In his book War, Law and Humanity: The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1853-1914 (Bloomsbury, 2018) James Crossland describes the emergence of various movements in the second half of the 19th century designed to address the suffering caused by military conflic...

Jeremy Black, professor of history at Exeter, is well-known as one of the most prolific of publishing historians. His latest book, War and its Causes (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), returns to a subject upon which he has already published several ground-breaking contributions. With an argument that reflects recent work in the field, and a breadth of reference that stretches from the beginnings of hu...

In a series of riveting and in depth interviews, America's senior statesman, former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, discusses the challenges of directing foreign policy during times of great global tension. With insights which are pertinent to the present and indeed the future. As National Security Advisor to President Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger utterly transformed America's approach to d...

Andreas Krieg’s edited volume, Divided Gulf: The Anatomy of a Crisis(Palgrave, 2019), brings together a group of prominent Gulf scholars to discuss the Gulf crisis that pits a Saudi-United Arab Emirates-led alliance against Qatar. The alliance’s economic and diplomatic boycott of Qatar since 2017 has implications that go far beyond the regional dispute. The book highlights the fact that strategies...

Thailand is one of the world’s last remaining military dictatorships, and the last in Asia. While we are familiar with the Thai military’s frequent interventions in Thai politics, we know rather less about its external security role. As rivalry between the superpowers, the United States and China, has grown in recent years, Thailand’s strategic position in the East Asian region has become increasi...

Michael J. Mazarr has written a history of the policy planning process leading up to the Iraq War in 2003.  Mazarr has conducted over one hundred interviews with senior policy officials from the George W. Bush administration, combined with a comprehensive review of published memoirs and declassified government documents, to provide a richly detailed history of America’s involvement in Iraq.  In hi...