New Books In National Security

In Quagmire in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020) Dr. Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl provides the first treatment of quagmire in civil war, moving beyond the notion that quagmire is intrinsic to certain countries or wars. In a rigorous but accessible analysis, he explains how quagmire can emerge from domestic-international interactions and strategic choices. To support the argument, Dr. Schulhofer-Wohl draws upon field research on Lebanon's sixteen-year civil war, structured comparisons with civil wars in Chad and Yemen, and rigorous statistical analyses of all civil wars worldwide fought between 1944 and 2006. Dr. Schulhofer-Wohl demonstrates that quagmire is made, not found. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts. Her qualitative work has examined the Angolan, Mozambican, and Lebanese civil wars, all of which fit Dr. Schulhofer-Wohl’s definitions of quagm

In mid-November, Washington and Beijing mutually agreed to start granting journalist visas again, putting an end to months of reciprocal visa rejections and denials. A perhaps minor, yet still important, thawing among grander narratives of decoupling and worsening relations between the two countries. Cheng Li’s Middle Class Shanghai: Reshaping U.S.-China Engagement (Brookings, 2021) plots out a new way to understand the U.S.-China relationship. Cheng Li’s book attempts to show the importance of the city of Shanghai to China’s economic and political development, and studies its population to show the continued value of engagement between Americans and Chinese. Readers can find an excerpt from Middle Class Shanghai on the Brookings website: Shanghai’s dynamic art scene. Cheng Li is the director of the John L. Thornton China Center and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. He is also a director of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. We’re joined in this interview by Brian Wong.

The Deportation Express: A History of America Through Forced Removal (University of California Press, 2021) details the history of the United States' systematic expulsion of "undesirables" and immigrants, told through the lives of the passengers who travelled from around the world, only to be locked up and forced out aboard America's first deportation trains.  The United States, celebrated as a nation of immigrants and the land of the free, has developed the most extensive system of imprisonment and deportation that the world has ever known. The Deportation Express is the first history of American deportation trains: a network of prison railroad cars repurposed by the Immigration Bureau to link jails, hospitals, asylums, and workhouses across the country and allow forced removal with terrifying efficiency. With this book, historian Ethan Blue uncovers the origins of the deportation train and finds the roots of the current moment, as immigrant restriction and mass deportation once again play critical and troub

Since 1945, America has spent more resources on nuclear technology than any other national project. Although it requires a massive infrastructure that touches society on myriad levels, nuclear technology has typically been discussed in a limited, top-down fashion that clusters around powerful men. In Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex (U Minnesota Press, 2020), Jessica Hurley turns this conventional wisdom on its head, offering a new approach that focuses on neglected authors and Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American perspectives. Exchanging the usual white, male “nuclear canon” for authors that include James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ruth Ozeki, Infrastructures of Apocalypse delivers a fresh literary history of post-1945 America that focuses on apocalypse from below. Here Hurley critiques the racialized urban spaces of civil defense and reads nuclear waste as a colonial weapon. Uniting these diverse lines of inquiry is Hurley’s belief that apocalyptic th

In International Intervention and the Problem of Legitimacy (Cornell UP, 2020) Andrew C. Gilbert, who is assistant professor in anthropology at the University of Toronto-Mississauga, argues for an ethnographic analysis of international intervention as a series of encounters, focusing on the relations of difference and inequality, and the question of legitimacy that permeate such encounters. He discusses the transformations that happen in everyday engagements between intervention agents and their target populations, and also identifies key instabilities that emerge out of such engagements. Gilbert highlights the struggles, entanglements and inter-dependencies between and among foreign agents, and the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina that channel and shape intervention and how it unfolds. Drawing upon nearly two years of fieldwork studying in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, Gilbert’s probing analysis identifies previously overlooked sites, processes, and effects of international intervention, and suggests new compa

Over the last 20 years the world's most advanced militaries have invited a small number of military legal professionals into the heart of their targeting operations, spaces which had previously been exclusively for generals and commanders. These professionals, trained and hired to give legal advice on an array of military operations, have become known as war lawyers. In The War Lawyers: The United States, Israel, and Juridical Warfare (Oxford University Press, 2021), Craig Jones examines the laws of war as applied by military lawyers to aerial targeting operations carried out by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Israel military in Gaza. This book shows just how important law and military lawyers have become in the conduct of contemporary warfare, and how it is understood. Craig Jones is a Lecturer in Political Geography in the School of Geography, Sociology and Politics at Newcastle University. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community Coll

Why do some armies fare better than others on the battlefield? In Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War (Princeton UP, 2020), Jason Lyall argues that a state's prewar treatment of ethnic groups within its population determine subsequent battlefield performance. Treating certain ethnic groups as second-class citizens, either by subjecting them to state-sanctioned discrimination or, worse, violence, undermines interethnic trust, fuels grievances, and leads victimized soldiers to subvert military authorities once war begins. The author tests this argument using Project Mars, a new dataset on conventional wars fought since 1800. Combining historical comparisons and statistical analysis, he also marshals evidence from nine wars, ranging from the Eastern Fronts of World Wars I and II to less familiar wars in Africa and Central Asia, to illustrate inequality's effects. Divided Armies was awarded the 2021 Peter Katzenstein Book Prize, the 2020 Joseph Lepgold Prize, and was named a "Best

How has “cybersecurity” become a catch-all for everything that touches our digital world? In his new book, The Politics of Cybersecurity in the Middle East (Hurst, 2021), Dr. James Shires shows how myriad actors have exploited the prominent yet esoteric nature of the field, appropriating its symbolic power to serve their own interests. In the process, cybersecurity has grown to incorporate a series of seemingly distinct practices. An Assistant Professor at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs at the University of Leiden, Dr. Shires explores four discursive spaces where the language of cybersecurity permeates: cybersecurity as interstate digital conflict, cybersecurity as the protection of human rights, cybersecurity as domestic information control, and cybersecurity as the prevention of foreign interference. Through a close examination of each of these spaces within the Middle East, Dr. Shires deconstructs how various actors disguised value-laden arguments as technological imperatives—and how they rea

Today's guest is former US Army general, Stanley McChrystal. A retired four-star general with 34 years of service, Stanley was the commander of all US and coalition forces in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010. Previously, he served as commander of JSOC or the Joint Special Operations Command, overseeing the US military’s most elite units including Delta Force and SEAL Team 6. According to journalist Sean Naylor, in his Book, Relentless Strike, McChrystal was, “the general whose vision and intensity transformed JSOC into a global man-hunting machine.” His tenure included the capture of Saddam Hussein and the killing infamous terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Today Stanley is founder and CEO of the McChrystal Group, a strategic consulting firm. He is also a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. His new book is, Risk. A User’s Guide, published by Portolio in October of 2021. Colin Miller and Dr. Keith Mankin host the popular medical podcast, PeerSpectrum. Colin works in the medical

Suspect Communities: Anti-Muslim Racism and the Domestic War on Terror (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) is a powerful reassessment of the U.S. government’s “countering violent extremism” (CVE) program that has arisen in major cities across the United States since 2011. Drawing on an interpretive qualitative study, Nicole Nguyen, Associate Professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, examines how the concept behind CVE—aimed at combating homegrown terrorism by engaging Muslim community members, teachers, and religious leaders in monitoring and reporting on young people—has been operationalized through the everyday work of CVE actors, from high-level national security workers to local community members, with significant penalties for the communities themselves. By undertaking this analysis, Nicole Nguyen offers a vital window into the inner workings of the U.S. security state and the devastating impact of the CVE program on local communities. In our conversation we discussed counterterrorism policy, ra

In this interview, I speak with Till F. Paasche and James D. Sidaway about their new book, Transecting Securityscapes: Dispatches from Cambodia, Iraq, and Mozambique (University of Georgia Press, 2021). In addition to the book's methodological and theoretical contributions, we also discussed the extensive field research and important personal experiences informing this project. This is an innovative book on the everyday life of security, told via an examination of three sites: Cambodia, the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and Mozambique. The authors' study of how security is enacted differently in these three sites, taking account of the rich layers of context and culture, enables comparative reflections on diversity and commonality in "securityscapes." The book puts into practice a diverse and contextual approach to security that contrasts with the aerial, big-picture view taken by many geopolitics scholars. In applying this grounded approach, Paasche and Sidaway develop a method of urban and territorial transects

The next world war is 13 years away—that is, if you live in the world envisioned by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War (Penguin, 2021). When writing about the intersection of combat and diplomacy, the co-authors draw from experience. Ackerman has worked in the White House and served five tours of duty as a Marine in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. Stavridis, a retired United States Navy admiral, served as NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe and, after leaving the Navy, as the dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. 2034 plays out a what-if scenario, starting with an incident between the Chinese and U.S. that escalates into a major conflict. “You could certainly say right now, vis-a-vis the United States’ relationship with China, that if we’re not in a Cold War, we are at least in sort of the foothills of a Cold War,” Ackerman says. Told through the eyes of multiple mai

What does America’s growing dependence on modern information technology systems mean for the management of its nuclear weapons? In his new book, Cyber Threats and Nuclear Weapons (Stanford University Press, 2021), Dr. Herb Lin explores the promise and peril of managing the bomb in the digital age. A Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, Dr. Lin cautions that management of the future nuclear enterprise will require a series of difficult tradeoffs: between integrity and reliability, functionality and security, and usability and security. Moving beyond a historical focus on the command and control of nuclear forces, Lin argues that these compromises will affect each aspect of the US nuclear enterprise, from technology acquisition and maintenance to operations and employment. On the podcast, I talk to Dr. Lin about what historical near-misses can tell us about future nuclear threats, how digitization could magnify the risks of deception and misper

In 1850 Charles Dickens wrote that Great Britain had “no political police,” adding that “the most rabid demagogue” could speak out “without the terror of an organised spy system.” In his book State Surveillance, Political Policing, and Counter-Terrorism in Britain: 1880-1914 (Boydell Press, 2021), Vlad Solomon describes how Britain gradually developed a system of “high policing” during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras that contradicted Britons’ popular belief in their tolerant society. As Solomon demonstrates, contrary to Dickens’s blithe assurance, Britain had irregularly employed political policing prior to the 1880s. The threat posed by Fenian terrorism, however, compelled the British home secretary, William Harcourt, to create a specialized section of the London Metropolitan Police in response. This evolved into Special Branch, which subsequently found its remit expanded to include monitoring political radicals, aliens, and even militant suffragists. Yet despite their increased range of duties, the n

Did you know that you're more likely to die from a catastrophe than in a car crash? The odds that a typical US resident will die from a catastrophic event—for example, nuclear war, bioterrorism, or out-of-control artificial intelligence—have been estimated at 1 in 6. That's fifteen times more likely than a fatal car crash and thirty-one times more likely than being murdered. In What's the Worst That Could Happen?: Existential Risk and Extreme Politics (MIT Press, 2021), Andrew Leigh looks at catastrophic risks and how to mitigate them, arguing provocatively that the rise of populist politics makes catastrophe more likely. Leigh explains that pervasive short-term thinking leaves us unprepared for long-term risks. Politicians sweat the small stuff—granular policy details of legislation and regulation—but rarely devote much attention to reducing long-term risks. Populist movements thrive on short-termism because they focus on their followers' immediate grievances. Leigh argues that we should be long-termers: bro

Geographic and temporal limits have typically contained modern wars—rulers can ask their populace to risk lives and treasure for so long before losing legitimacy. But wars have also been horrifyingly unlimited in cruelty. Over the course of the past two decades, American activists and government officials have sought to make war less cruel and more humane. The consequence of this, Samuel Moyn argues in his well-reasoned and polemical book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, has been the elimination of those earlier geographic and temporal guardrails on war. And the evidence isn’t hard to find. The contemporary US military may leave a smaller body count than it did during, say, the Vietnam War, but it has also entered the third decade of a War on Terror across a so-called “global battlefield.” This scope is unprecedented. Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (FSG, 2021) is a book about war and peace, specifically about how Americans have “made a moral c

Katherine Chandler's Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare (Rutgers UP, 2020) studies the conditions that create unmanned platforms in the United States through a genealogy of experimental, pilotless planes flown between 1936 and 1992. Characteristics often attributed to the drone--including machine-like control, enmity and remoteness--are achieved by displacements between humans and machines that shape a mediated theater of war. Rather than primarily treating the drone as a result of the war on terror, this book examines contemporary targeted killing through a series of failed experiments to develop unmanned flight in the twentieth century. The human, machine and media parts of drone aircraft are organized to make an ostensibly not human framework for war that disavows its political underpinnings as technological advance. These experiments are tied to histories of global control, cybernetics, racism and colonialism. Drone crashes and failures call attention to the significance of hu

Interpreting International Politics (Routledge, 2014) is a short and lively account of how international relations was founded and developed as an interpretivist discipline, and why it matters that it was. Its author, Cecelia Lynch, joins this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science to discuss the interplay between interpretivist philosophies and realist, critical and feminist traditions in studies of international politics; the epistemological stakes for IR scholars embarking on new projects; and, the book’s location at a nexus between substantive questions, conceptual articulations, and ethical reflections about the role of the researcher in the study of international politics. Rather than a guide for how to interpret international politics and relations, this is a book that encourages researchers who feel a kinship or have an aesthetic inclination towards interpretive methods to identify and work with the rich materials that their discipline offers for robust and trustworthy inter

With an estimated 250,000 people killed in 15 years, the Mexican drug war is the most violent conflict in the Western world. It shows no sign of abating. In Mexican Drug Violence: Hybrid Warfare, Predatory Capitalism and the Logic of Cruelty (2020), Dr Teun A. Voeten analyzes the dynamics of the violence. He argues it is a new type of war called hybrid warfare: multidimensional, elusive and unpredictable, fought at different levels, with different intensities with multiple goals. The war ISIS has declared against the West is another example of hybrid warfare. Voeten interprets drug cartels as ultra-capitalist predatory corporations thriving in a neoliberal, globalized economy. They use similar branding and marketing strategies as legitimate business. He also looks at the anthropological, individual level and explains how people can become killers. Voeten compares Mexican sicarios, West African child soldiers and Western jihadis and sees the same logic of cruelty that facilitates perpetrating 'inhumane' acts t

These days, anyone paying close attention to Peru is awash in déjà vu: the ghosts of Peru’s once-brutal war with the Maoist insurgent group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) have resurfaced time and again following the surprise victory of the country’s new left-leaning president. To understand how and why that conflict continues to shape Peruvian society, we invited Dr. Jo-Marie Burt onto the podcast to discuss her (not so) new book, Political Violence and the Authoritarian State in Peru: Silencing Civil Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). An Associate Professor of Political Science at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, Dr. Burt first traveled to Peru in the 1980s during the height of the civil conflict. The research she conducted across Peru and in Lima’s shantytowns led her to two major conclusions about the conflict. Despite its brutality, Sendero Luminoso had made inroads with Peru’s disaffected because it was able to provide a form of stability in areas the Peruvian state