New Books In National Security

Allison B. Wolf's Just Immigration in the Americas: A Feminist Account (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) proposes a pioneering, interdisciplinary, feminist approach to immigration justice, which defines immigration justice as being about identifying and resisting global oppression in immigration structures, policies, practices, and norms. In contrast to most philosophical work on immigration (which begins with abstract ideas and philosophical debates and then makes claims based on them), this book begins with concrete cases and immigration policies from throughout the United States, Mexico, Central America, and Colombia to assess the nature of immigration injustice and set us up to address it. Every chapter of the book begins with specific immigration policies, practices or sets of immigrant experiences in the U.S. and Latin America and then explores them through the lens of global oppression to better identify what makes it unjust and to put us in a better position to respond to that injustice and improve immig

During the Cold War, cultural diplomacy was one way that the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union tried to cultivate goodwill towards their countries. As Anne Searcy explains in her book, Ballet in the Cold War: A Soviet-American Exchange (Oxford University Press, 2020), dance was part of this effort. She focuses on two tours of the USSR undertaken by American troupes when the American Ballet Company visited the Soviets in 1960, and when choreographer George Balanchine returned to the country of his birth in 1962 with his New York City Ballet Company. These popular tours functioned as an important symbolic meeting point for Soviet and American officials, creating goodwill and normalizing relations between the two countries in an era when nuclear conflict was a real threat. Although geo-political tensions feature in the book, Searcy is just as concerned with the reception of these tours by Soviet and American critics, and how they filtered their opinions on the dances and performers they saw t

The field of US foreign-relations history is not what it used to be, and that’s a good thing. Earlier historians narrowly defined the field as diplomatic history­­ and kept vast swathes of the United States’ interactions with the world from being explored. In the middle of the 1990s, for example, even the very consideration of gender in the history of US foreign policy could cause controversy (as demonstrated in the 1997 H-Diplo listserv feud about a ground-breaking article on the role of gender in US Cold War strategy). Today, however, gender is a key object of study in the history of US foreign relations, along with race, the environment, globalization, technology, and a myriad of other topics. Thankfully, we now have an edited volume that comprehensively catalogues the current field’s exciting diversity of approaches and subjects. Entitled A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations: Colonial Era to the Present, it was published last year by Wiley-Blackwell and was edited by the indefatigable Christopher Dietric

“Economics is the long-run driver” in the history of Europe’s monetary union, writes Richard Pomfret in the first of a new Cambridge Elements series on the Economics of European Integration: The Road to Monetary Union (Cambridge University Press, 2021). “Politics often determined the timing of the next step ... but it has not determined the direction of change”. In this "Element" – intended to be “longer than standard journal articles yet shorter than normal-length book manuscripts”, according to series editor Nauro Campos – Pomfret runs through the 50-year history of the project but with that core theme. While decisive political moments like German reunification are acknowledged, it is the economic drivers – the development of common policies, the single market and global value chains – that assume a central role in the process. Richard Pomfret is professor of economics at the University of Adelaide and was, until 2020, the Jean Monnet Chair in the Economics of European Integration. Before moving to Australi

Dina Hassan (Lecturer, Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, University of Oklahoma, USA) speaks with Nicola Pratt (Associate Professor, International Politics of the Middle East, University of Warwick, UK) about Pratt’s recent book, Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon (University of California Press, 2020). Waves of protests drew women and men, young and old across the Middle East into the streets to demonstrate against authoritarian regimes during 2011. Nicola Pratt’s sweeping new monograph provides essential context for the gendered significance of that activism. In over one hundred oral histories with activists, Pratt locates the long roots and diverse aims of women’s participation in anticolonial and egalitarian movements in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon from the 1950s to the present day. Grappling with the legacies of state feminism in Egypt or vibrant voluntary societies in Jordan requires scholars develop analytical tools attuned to the dynamism o

In Training for Catastrophe: Fictions of National Security After 9/11 (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), author Lindsay Thomas studies the relationship between fiction and U.S. national security — specifically, the instrumentalization of fiction in preparedness materials, in which fictional events are phrased not only as real, but as producing eligible information and ‘intelligence.’ Approaching the subject from literary studies, Thomas finds the consequences of realism, genre, character, and plot in materials ranging from a Center for Disease Control comic about a zombie apocalypse to the political thrillers of former national security advisor Richard Clarke. Tackling U.S. national security’s often overlooked intrusion into questions of literature and life, Training for Catastrophe is a pertinent intervention into how we respond to crisis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-securi

Faced with a major terrorist threat, states seem to reach instinctively for the most coercive tools in their arsenal and, in doing so, risk exacerbating the situation. This policy response seems to be driven in equal parts by a lack of understanding of the true nature of the threat, an exaggerated faith in the use of force, and a lack of faith that democratic values are sufficiently flexible to allow for an effective counter-terrorism response. Drawing on a wealth of data from both historical and contemporary sources, Thomas David Parker's Avoiding the Terrorist Trap: Why Respect for Human Rights is the Key to Defeating Terrorism (World Scientific, 2019) addresses common misconceptions underpinning flawed counter-terrorist policies, identifies the core strategies that guide terrorist operations, consolidates the latest research on the underlying drivers of terrorist violence, and demonstrates how a comprehensive and coherent counter-terrorism strategy grounded in respect for human rights and the rule of law i

Winston Churchill was no stranger to storms. They had engulfed him in various ways throughout his long career and he had always turned to face them with jutting jaw and indomitable spirit. Dark clouds had hovered over him from the moment he became Britain’s Prime Minister in May 1940. Now, fifteen harrowing months later, he was setting out to meet President Franklin Roosevelt, the one man who could offer real assistance in his hour of need. And another storm awaited—this time one of a meteorological kind as his ship, HMS Prince of Wales, ran into a howling gale within hours of leaving its base at Scapa Flow. After five days, the coast of Newfoundland hove into view and Britain’s Prime Minister was piped aboard USS Augusta at Placentia Bay to meet with FDR. The meeting produced a document, strangely never signed, called The Atlantic Charter—an eight-point agreement designed to act as a guide for how the world’s nations should behave towards each other in the post-war years. Many of the principles laid out in t

In the decade after World War I, German-American relations improved swiftly. While resentment and bitterness ran high on both sides in 1919, Weimar Germany and the United States managed to forge a strong transatlantic partnership by 1929. But how did Weimar Germany overcome its post-war isolation so rapidly? How did it regain the trust of its former adversary? And how did it secure U.S. support for the revision of the Versailles Treaty? Elisabeth Piller, winner of the Franz Steiner Preis für Transatlantische Geschichte 2019, explores these questions not from an economic, but from a cultural perspective.  In Selling Weimar: German Public Diplomacy and the United States, 1918-1933 (Franz Steiner Verlag/German Historical Institute, 2020), she illustrates how German state and non-state actors drew heavily on cultural ties - with German Americans, U.S. universities and American tourists - to re-win American trust, and even affection, at a time when traditional foreign policy tools had failed to achieve similar suc

When Europe’s Great War engulfed the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalists rose in revolt against their Turkish rulers and allied with the British on the promise of an independent Arab state. In October 1918, the Arabs’ military leader, Prince Faisal, victoriously entered Damascus and proclaimed a constitutional government in an independent Greater Syria. Faisal won American support for self-determination at the Paris Peace Conference, but other Entente powers plotted to protect their colonial interests. Under threat of European occupation, the Syrian-Arab Congress declared independence on March 8, 1920 and crowned Faisal king of a “civil representative monarchy.” Sheikh Rashid Rida, the most prominent Islamic thinker of the day, became Congress president and supervised the drafting of a constitution that established the world’s first Arab democracy and guaranteed equal rights for all citizens, including non-Muslims. But France and Britain refused to recognize the Damascus government and instead imposed a system

How do we make sense of Turkey’s recent turn against the West – after decades of Turkish cooperation and desire to be integrated into the European and wider Western community in terms of foreign policy? Dr. Oya Dursun-Özkanca’s new book Turkey-West Relations: The Politics of Intra-alliance Opposition (Cambridge UP, 2019) interrogates the dynamics of the relationship between Turkey and the West, particularly the EU, NATO, and the United States. The compelling book develops a framework of intra-alliance opposition to explain this shift from Turkey’s engagement with the West as a desirable ally to Turkey’s increasingly hostility to the West after 2010. Moving beyond the power and personality of Erdogan, Dursun-Özkanca develops an analytical framework of the politics of intra-alliance opposition and provides a comprehensive and nuanced account of how and why Turkish foreign policy has changed within the transatlantic alliance. She offers three categories of intra-alliance opposition behavior: boundary testing; bo

Has 'migrant' become an unshakeable identity for some people? How does this happen and what role does the media play in classifying individuals as 'migrants' rather than people? How Media and Conflicts Make Migrants (Manchester UP, 2020) challenges the idea of the 'migrant', pointing instead to the array of systems and processes that force this identity on individuals, shaping their interactions with the state and with others. Kirsten Folkert, Gargi Bhattacharyya, and Janna Graham speak to Pierre d'Alancaisez about their research carried out in the United Kingdom and Italy and examine how media representations construct global conflicts in a climate of changing media habits, widespread mistrust, and fake news. Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemprary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-securit

'The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our life-time.' The words of Sir Edward Grey, looking out from the windows of the Foreign Office in early August 1914, are amongst the most famous in European history, and encapsulate the impending end of the nineteenth-century world. The man who spoke them was Britain's longest-ever serving Foreign Secretary (in a single span of office) and one of the great figures of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Statesman of Europe: A Life of Sir Edward Grey (Penguin, 2020) is a magnificent portrait of an age and describes the three decades before the First World War through the prism of his biography, which is based almost entirely on archival sources and presents a detailed account of the main domestic and international events, and of the main personalities of the era. In particular, it presents a fresh understanding of the approach to war in the years and months before its outbreak, and Grey's role in the unfolding of events. Thomas Ott

A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy (US Naval Institute Press, 2019), is a readable introduction to the world of maritime strategy. While Prof Holmes bases his narrative on the writings of Mahan and Corbett, he weaves in a wide-range of naval, political and philosophical thinkers who describe the universal importance of maritime strategy. His book guides junior officers and sailors in the art of strategic thinking and action. Prof. Holmes outlines the global importance of maritime strategy, emphasizing how it supports all of a nation’s endeavors, not just during war, but especially at peace. It forms an indispensable introduction to naval essentials and serves as a companion to more contemporary writers like Geoffrey Till and Wayne Hughes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Theodore Roosevelt was a titan of American politics, society, and culture. Rarely soft spoken, always eager to brandish a big stick, and animated by an inexhaustible energy, Roosevelt used his considerable might to leave an indelible mark on the United States. As a trust buster, Roosevelt forever altered American attitudes toward corporate monopolies. As a conservationist, Roosevelt left a legacy of stewardship over the nation’s natural resources. As a statesman and jingo, Roosevelt expanded the United States’ global reach and international standing. And as a cultural icon, Roosevelt’s maxims, disposition, and image permeated American life, defining a rugged American masculinity for generations to come. Roosevelt’s impact in these arenas is well documented in the existing historiography—hundreds of scholarly works examine nearly every aspect of his life and career. Virtually absent from this vast literature, however, is an understanding of Roosevelt’s role in constructing the foundations of the modern United

Ronald Deibert is a professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and the Director of The Citizen Lab, a public interest research organization that uncovers privacy and human rights abuses on the internet. In his latest book, Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society (House of Anansi Press, 2020), Deibert unites a growing corpus of academic literature on the perils of surveillance capitalism to show how today’s data-hungry communications technologies have poisoned our political institutions, our minds, and even our environment. Deibert believes that it is not too late to rescue our politics from our technology, and he argues that the answer lies not in silicon or code but age-old political principles. Look to Montesquieu, not Zuckerberg, Deibert tells us, if you want to find a stable framework for digital governance in the 21st century. On this episode, in addition to all the above, Professor Deibert and I explore the economic engines of surveillance capitalism, the dangers of ritualistic

When John Foster Dulles died in 1959, he was given the largest American state funeral since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s in 1945. President Eisenhower called Dulles—his longtime secretary of state—“one of the truly great men of our time,” and a few years later the new commercial airport outside Washington, DC, was christened the Dulles International Airport in his honor. His star has fallen significantly since that time, but his influence remains indelible—most especially regarding his role in bringing the worldview of American exceptionalism to the forefront of US foreign policy during the Cold War era, a worldview that has long outlived him.  God's Cold Warrior: The Life and Faith of John Foster Dulles (Eardmans, 2021) recounts how Dulles’s faith commitments from his Presbyterian upbringing found fertile soil in the anti-communist crusades of the mid-twentieth century. After attending the Oxford Ecumenical Church Conference in 1937, he wrote about his realization that “the spirit of Christianity, of which I

In Strategic Instincts: The Adaptive Advantages of Cognitive Biases in International Politics (Princeton University Press, 2020), Dominic Johnson challenges the assumption that cognitive biases led to policy failures, disasters, and wars. Instead, he explains that moderate and appropriate irrational behavior may actually supply favorable results in international politics and lead to political and strategic success. Johnson draws upon biology and behavioral sciences to look at three cognitive biases--overconfidence, the fundamental attribution error, and in-group/out-group bias. Examining historical case studies of the American Revolution, the Munich Crisis, and the Pacific campaign in World War II, he then explores the advantages and disadvantages of these biases. After acknowledging hubris, paranoia, and prejudice, Johnson argues for a more nuanced understanding of the causes and consequences of cognitive biases. Arguing that in the complex world of international relations, strategic instincts can, in the ri

For years, cybersecurity experts have debated whether cyber-weapons represent a destabilizing new military technology or merely the newest tool in the spy’s arsenal. In This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends (Bloomsbury, 2021), Nicole Perlroth argues that the digital arms race is quickly spiraling out of control. Worse, the United States set us down the precarious path we’re now on. A cybersecurity reporter at the New York Times, Nicole makes her case by taking us on a journey from the shadowy underworld of the cyber arms market, to Silicon Valley, the White House, and the NSA’s elite offensive hacking unit, Tailored Access Operations. On this episode, I talk to Nicole about the nature of the cyber arms underground, why the NSA has traditionally favored offense over defense, and why no one—not Congress and not the public—seems to understand the gravity of the threat posed by digital weapons. We wrap up with a story sure to interest the whole NBN community: someone—we’re not sure who yet—is hacking authors’ e

Embracing ‘Asia’ in China and Japan: Asianism Discourse and the Contest for Hegemony (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) by Torsten Weber examines how Asianism became a key concept in mainstream political discourse between China and Japan and how it was used both domestically and internationally in the contest for political hegemony. It argues that, from the early 1910s to the early 1930s, this contest changed Chinese and Japanese perceptions of ‘Asia’, from a concept that was foreign-referential, foreign-imposed, peripheral, and mostly negative and denied (in Japan) or largely ignored (in China) to one that was self-referential, self-defined, central, and widely affirmed and embraced.  As an ism, Asianism elevated ‘Asia’ as a geographical concept with culturalist-racialist implications to the status of a full-blown political principle and encouraged its proposal and discussion vis-à-vis other political doctrines of the time, such as nationalism, internationalism, and imperialism. By the mid-1920s, a great variety of