New Books in World Affairs

Catastrophic Diplomacy: US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century (UNC Press, 2023) offers a sweeping history of US foreign disaster assistance, highlighting its centrality to twentieth-century US foreign relations. Spanning over seventy years, from the dawn of the twentieth century to the mid-1970s, it examines how the US government, US military, and their partners in the American vo...

Orchestrating Power: The American Associational State in the First World War⁠ (Cornell University Press, 2025) explores how the expansion of the American state for the First World War reshaped the nature of governance. This wartime state expansion is examined through the creation, structure, activities, and impact of the Council of Defense system on the ability of the United States to mobilize for...

At the heart of the fiercest international conflicts is the struggle for the future of globalization. In the wake of a pandemic that tested economies and societies, geopolitical conflict has taken on a new intensity. The Rest and the West: Capital and Power in a Multipolar World (Verso, 2024) locates the origins of this development in the turbulent dynamics of the capitalist world market. Rather...

Why do states exit international organizations (IOs)? How often does exit from IOs – including voluntary withdrawal and forced suspension – occur? What are the effects of leaving IOs for the exiting state? Despite the importance of membership in IOs, a broader understanding of exit across states, organizations, and time has been limited. Exit from International Organizations: Costly Negotiation fo...

Helen Haas speaks with political scientist Sean Lee about the changing relationship between majorities and minorities in the Middle East, the collapse of the post-October 2023 regional order, and why questions of citizenship, identity, and political power remain at the centre of conflicts from Syria and Lebanon to Israel–Palestine. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Dr. Sean Lee, Assistan...

From a Distinguished International Relations Scholar comes The Unfinished Quest: India's Search for Major Power Status from Nehru to Modi (Oxford UP, 2024), an important book that looks at India's search for major power status. It is an unfinished quest with a long and winding road ahead. This is not to say that India's ambitions in world politics for greater peer recognition and institutional pos...

In Retrench, Defend, Compete: Securing America's Future Against a Rising China (Cornell UP, 2025), Charles L. Glaser advances a thought-provoking strategy for securing vital US interests in the face of China's rise. Many believe China's ascent will drive it to war with the United States. Yet this is far from inevitable; geography and nuclear weapons should ensure US security. The real danger, Glas...

In a world shaken by crises, why does the dollar continue to dominate? In Dollar Dominance: Why It Rules the Global Economy and How to Challenge It (Policy Press, 2025) Photis Lysandrou explores the interaction between global instability and the enduring strength of the dollar. Drawing on examples from the 2008 Great Financial Crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the a...

Robin Andersen's latest book, The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel's Genocide in Gaza (OR Books, 2026), is a forensic and unflinching examination of how establishment media abandoned journalistic integrity to manufacture consent for the genocide in Gaza, creating an environment in which unprecedented escalations and war crimes have become a terrifying new normal. Since October 7th 202...

This week on International Horizons, RBI interim director Eli Karetny interviewed Mallory Stewart, Chief Executive Officer of the Council on Strategic Risks. Stewart discusses the evolving role of the US Space Force and the shift in its doctrine toward achieving "space superiority" and orbital control. The blurry lines between the militarization and weaponization of space were widely noted, especi...

From a renowned Yale historian comes a chilling look at the looming threat of the next Great Power war and the urgent interventions necessary to avoid it in the twenty-first century. The vast majority of people alive today have come of age in a world of remarkable stability, presided over by either one or two Superpowers. This is not to say the world has been peaceful; but it has, to a great exten...

J. Michael Cole is a Taipei-based security analyst and writer who has spent over two decades documenting Taiwan’s political and security landscape. A former analyst with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), he is a Research Fellow and Executive Editor with the Prospect Foundation in Taiwan, and advises various private and governmental actors. He is also a Senior Non-Resident Fellow w...

The U.S. dollar is the world’s most important currency. Trade is priced in dollars, the world’s central banks keep U.S. dollars in reserve, some places–including my home of Hong Kong, peg their currencies to the dollar. But what explains the U.S. dollar’s success? And why have some challengers, like the Japanese yen or the Chinese yuan, failed to gain traction? Paul Blustein, author of King Dollar...

This week on Democracy Dialogues, host Esam Boraey speaks with Shandana Khan Mohmand and Marjoke Oosterom, democracy experts at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, to unpack the takeaways of the newly released Democracy Report “Where’s the Dēmos in Democracy? Building Democratic Futures and Resisting Autocracy.” At a moment when autocracies outnumber democracies for t...

Racializing the Ummah: Muslim Humanitarians Beyond Black, Brown and White (U Minnesota Press, 2026) is an ethnography of Islamic Relief (IR), the largest Islamic NGO based in the West. Racializing the Ummah explores how a Muslim organization can do good in a world that defines Muslimness as less than human. Rooted in more than a decade of international research, Rhea Rahman’s study on the organiz...

This week on Democracy Dialogues, host Maya Tudor speaks with two democracy experts at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Freedom House to understand the headlines from Freedom House’s 2026 Report, entitled the growing shadow of autocratization. We discuss the drivers behind the 20th consecutive year of global democratic decline and compare the similarities and differences between Free...

Noo Saro-Wiwa is an author and journalist. Born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and raised in England, she attended King's College London and Columbia University in New York.​ Her first book, Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria (Granta), was published to critical acclaim in 2012. It was selected as BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week in 2012; named The Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year, 2012;...

Kristan Stoddart's Russia's Hybrid Warfare Offensive Against the West (de Gruyter, 2025) is a timely and systematic analysis of Russian hybrid warfare with a particular focus on Russian cyberespionage and cyberwarfare. It especially analyzes Russian policy from the election of President Vladmir Putin in 2000 to date. It takes a long term, long lens, view of Russian policies and actions internation...

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, imperial powers around the world came into direct confrontation with local resistance in the form of maritime raiding. From the Atlantic basin to the western Mediterranean Sea, the Persian Gulf and the east coast of Africa, and Southeast Asia and China, imperial powers claimed that progress was being held back by the barbarity and greed of pirates,...

Why do adversaries sometimes cooperate to restrain their military competition? Why do they design arms control agreements with intrusive verification in some cases but rely on minimal transparency in others? Amidst ongoing international competition, arms control remains rare despite potential mutual benefits, and agreements vary dramatically in their approaches to monitoring. Enemies in Agreement:...

A bracing account of how our current planetary crisis emerged from the worst cataclysmic destruction in human history, which Clifton Crais terms the Mortecene—the killing age. We are used to speaking of the Anthropocene and the outsized impact humans have had on the planet. But we sometimes lose sight of a fundamental truth at the heart of modern world history: the legacy of human predation, slave...

In a region known for its export of oil, Monarchies of Extraction: The Gulf States in the Global Food System (Cambridge UP, 2026) explores how the Gulf states are simultaneously defined by the importation of food. Charting the economics and politics of the Gulf through an examination of its food system, Christian Henderson demonstrates how these states constitute a distinct social metabolism withi...

Nowhere is the dual threat of climate change and geopolitical contest felt more strongly than in the Arctic. Sea ice is declining rapidly, wildfires are burning, and permafrost is thawing. All the while, global interest is gathering apace as the region transforms from being a frozen desert into an international waterway. In this episode, Mia Bennett—co-author with Kalus Dodds of Unfrozen: The Figh...

This is Radio ReOrient. Welcome to our 14th season of navigating the post-Western and connecting the Islamosphere. We begin this season with Radio ReOrient’ s occasional series The State of the Ummah. In this episode Shehla Khan, Mona Makinejadbanadaki and Salman Sayyid go beyond the headlines in trying to understand the narratives that shape the War Against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Developin...

Lithium is necessary for the green transition but its mining comes with significant environmental and social harms. This is the conundrum at the core of decarbonisation, which host Licia Cianetti discusses with Thea Riofrancos. They talk about how Riofrancos’s book Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism (published by W.W. Norton in 2025) helps us understand the local and global politics of...