New Books In National Security

What is at the heart of political resistance? Whilst traditional accounts often conceptualise it as a reaction to power, this volume (prioritising remarks by Michel Foucault) invites us to think of resistance as primary. The author proposes a strategic analysis that highlights how our efforts need to be redirected towards a horizon of creation and change.  In The Primacy of Resistance: Power, Opposition and Becoming (Bloomsbury, 2021), Checchi first establishes a genealogy of two main trajectories of the history of our present: the liberal subject of rights and the neoliberal ideas of human capital and bio-financialisation. The former emerges as a reactive closure of Etienne de la Boétie's discourse on human nature and natural companionship. The other forecloses the creative potential of Autonomist Marxist conceptions of labour, first elaborated by Mario Tronti. The focus of this text then shifts towards contemporary openings. Initially, Checchi proposes an inverted reading of Jacques Rancière's concept of po

During a pivotal few months in the middle of the First World War all sides-Germany, Britain, and America-believed the war could be concluded. Peace at the end of 1916 would have saved millions of lives and changed the course of history utterly. Two years into the most terrible conflict the world had ever known, the warring powers faced a crisis. There were no good military options. Money, men, and supplies were running short on all sides. The German chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, secretly sought President Woodrow Wilson's mediation to end the war, just as British ministers and France's president also concluded that the time was right. The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917 (PublicAffairs, 2021), by renowned author and former government official, Philip Zelikow, Professor of History at the University of Virginia, describes how tantalizingly close these far-sighted statesmen came to ending the war, saving millions of lives, and avoiding the total war that dimmed ho

World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. The Second World War was not Hitler’s war; it was Stalin’s war. Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin's War: A New History of World War II (Basic Books, 2021) by award winning historian, Sean McMeekin, Professor of History at Bard College, revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler’s genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, did the Pacific war of 1941–1945 fu

Does Southeast Asia face a stark choice between aligning with China or the United States? Can we understand domestic developments in the region as driven by wider geopolitics? Can the lacklustre regional organization ASEAN play a central role in mediating these dynamics, or are individual Southeast Asian countries locked into deeply unequal bilateral linkages? Is China a largely benevolent force in the region, or an untrustworthy would-be hegemon? In this session, we meet the authors of two recent books on interactions between China and Southeast Asia: Sebastian Strangio and Murray Hiebert. Both authors are veteran foreign correspondents who lived in Southeast Asia for many years. Sebastian Strangio’s book In the Dragon’s Shadow (Yale 2020) and Murray Hiebert’s Under Beijing’s Shadow (Rowman and Littlefield 2020) address closely related topics: how does Southeast Asia navigate relations with a much larger neighbour that has become increasingly powerful in recent decades, economically, politically and indeed m

In recent times, US-Russia relations have deteriorated to what both sides acknowledge is an “all time low.” Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election and Putin’s continued support for the Assad regime in Syria have placed enormous strain on this historically tense and complex relationship. In Russia and America: The Asymmetric Rivalry (Polity, 2019), Andrei Tsygankov challenges the dominant view that US-Russia relations have entered a new Cold War phase. Russia’s US strategy, he argues, can only be understood in the context of a changing international order. While America strives to preserve its global dominance, Russia—the weaker power—exploits its asymmetric capabilities and relations with non-Western allies to defend and promote its interests, and to avoid yielding to US pressures. Focusing on key areas of conflict and mutual convergence—from European security to China and the Middle East, as well as cyber, nuclear, and energy issues—Tsygankov paints a nuanced and unsentimental picture of t

States face choices when people forced to leave their states due to persecution or violence seek refuge. They may assert their sovereignty by either granting or denying entry or they may delegate refugee protection to an international organization. Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford UP, 2021) asks “why do states sometimes assert their sovereignty vis-aá-vis refugee rights and at other times seemingly cede it? Dr. Abdelaaty develops a two-part theoretical framework in which policymakers in refugee-receiving countries weigh international and domestic concerts. At the international level, policymakers consider relations with the refugee-sending country. At the domestic level policymakers consider political competition among ethnic groups. When these international and domestic incentives conflict, shifting responsibility to the UN allows policymakers to placate both refugee-sending countries and domestic constituencies. In short, foreign policy and ethnic identity shapes

An elected politician is assassinated in the street by a terrorist associated with extreme political groups, and the national response is to encourage picnics. Thousands of people are held in prison-like conditions without judicial oversight or any time-limit on their sentence. An attempt to re-assert national sovereignty and borders leads thousands of citizens to register for dual citizenship with other countries, some overcoming family associations with genocide in their second country of nationality to do so. This is life in the UK today. How then are things still continuing as 'normal'? How can we confront these phenomena and why do we so often refuse to? What are the practices that help us to accommodate the unconscionable? How might we contend with the horrors that meet us each day, rather than becoming desensitized to them? Violent Ignorance: Confronting Racism and Migration Control (Zed Books, 2021) sets out to examine these questions through an understanding of how the past persists in the present, h

Bringing strategy, foreign policy, domestic and imperial politics together, this book challenges the conventional understanding as to why the British Empire, at perhaps the height of its power, lost control of its American colonies. Critiquing the traditional emphasis on the value of alliance during the Seven Years' War, and the consequences of British isolation during the War of American Independence, Professor of History Emeritus Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian writing in the Anglophone world to-day, shows that this rests on a misleading understanding of the relationship between policy and strategy. Encompassing both the Seven Years' War and the American War of Independence and grounded in archival research, this book considers a violent and contentious period which was crucial to the making of Second British Empire and its role in the wider world. Offering a reinterpretation of British strategy and foreign policy throughout the period, To Lose an Empire: British Strategy and Foreign Policy, 1758-

Political Theorist Joel Alden Schlosser has turned his attention to Herodotus, an historian and political thinker from classical Greece, to learn how we might better think about and consider solutions to significant contemporary problems, especially those that contribute to global climate change. Schlosser explains that we are currently living in a new geologic and climatic age, the Anthropocene, which is defined as the current period where humans have had a direct effect on the geology and climate of the earth and the surrounding atmosphere. In finding ourselves in this new and potentially catastrophic period, we need to consider how to stop or solve this ongoing and evolving environmental crisis. Schlosser encourages us to turn out attention to Herodotus and his Histories, and he argues that these works, which dive into thinking about community and collective engagement, may provide guidance for contemporary politics and society. This is a fascinating structuring of reading Herodotus as an historian, examin

The American atomic bomb was born in secrecy. From the moment scientists first conceived of its possibility to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and beyond, there were efforts to control the spread of nuclear information and the newly discovered scientific facts that made such powerful weapons possible. The totalizing scientific secrecy that the atomic bomb appeared to demand was new, unusual, and very nearly unprecedented. It was foreign to American science and American democracy--and potentially incompatible with both. From the beginning, this secrecy was controversial, and it was always contested. The atomic bomb was not merely the application of science to war, but the result of decades of investment in scientific education, infrastructure, and global collaboration. If secrecy became the norm, how would science survive? Drawing on troves of declassified files, including records released by the government for the first time through the author's efforts, Alex Wellerstein's book Restricted Data: The His

After twenty-six years of unprecedented revolutionary upheavals and endless fighting, the victorious powers craved stability after Napoleon's defeat in 1815. With the threat of war and revolutionary terror still looming large, the coalition launched an unprecedented experiment to re-establish European security. With over one million troops remaining in France, they established the Allied Council to mitigate the threat of war and terror and to design and consolidate a system of deterrence. The Council transformed the norm of interstate relations into the first, modern system of collective security in Europe. Drawing on the records of the Council and the correspondence of key figures such as Metternich, Castlereagh, Wellington and Alexander I, Beatrice de Graaf tells the story of Europe's transition from concluding a war to consolidating a new order.  In her new book Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815 (Cambridge UP, 2020), she reveals how, long before commercial interest and eco

Today I talked to Joseph McQuade about his book A Genealogy of Terrorism: Colonial Law and the Origins of an Idea (Cambridge University Press, 2020).  Using India as a case study, Joseph McQuade demonstrates how the modern concept of terrorism was shaped by colonial emergency laws dating back into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with the 'thugs', 'pirates', and 'fanatics' of the nineteenth century, McQuade traces the emerging and novel legal category of 'the terrorist' in early twentieth-century colonial law, ending with an examination of the first international law to target global terrorism in the 1930s. Drawing on a wide range of archival research and a detailed empirical study of evolving emergency laws in British India, he argues that the idea of terrorism emerged as a deliberate strategy by officials seeking to depoliticize the actions of anti-colonial revolutionaries, and that many of the ideas embedded in this colonial legislation continue to shape contemporary understandings o

What does it mean to be resilient in a societal or in an international context? Where does resilience come from? From which discipline was it 'imported' into international relations? If a particular government employs the meaning of resilience to its own benefit, should scholars reject the analytical purchase of the concept of resilience as a whole? Does a government have the monopoly of understanding how resilience is defined and applied? Philippe Bourbeau's book On Resilience: Genealogy, Logics, and World Politics (Cambridge UP, 2021) addresses these questions. Even though resilience in global politics is not new, a major shift is currently happening in how we understand and apply resilience in world politics. Resilience is indeed increasingly theorized, rather than simply employed as a noun; it has left the realm of vocabulary and entered the terrain of concept. This book demonstrates the multiple origins of resilience, traces the diverse expressions of resilience in IR to various historical markers, and p

The "decline of the West" is once again a frequent topic of speculation. Often cited as one element of the alleged decline is the succession of prolonged and unsuccessful wars--most notably those waged in recent decades by the United States. This book by three Danish military experts examines not only the validity of the speculation but also asks why the West, particularly its military effectiveness, might be perceived as in decline.  Temporality is the central concept linking a series of structural fractures that leave the West seemingly muscle-bound: overwhelmingly powerful in technology and military might but strategically fragile. This temporality, the authors say, is composed of three interrelated dimensions: trajectories, perceptions, and pace. First, Western societies to tend view time as a linear trajectory, focusing mostly on recent and current events and leading to the framing of history as a story of rise and decline. The authors examine whether the inevitable fall already has happened, is underway

Western media accounts often suggest that China is rising inexorably as a global economic and political powerhouse. A new book by Luke Patey offers a more nuanced picture, focusing on the growing backlash against Chinese aspirations. Author Luke Patey, a senior researcher from the Danish Institute for International Studies, discusses his new book How China Loses: The Pushback against Chinese Global Ambitions (Oxford University Press, 2021) with Andreas Bøje Forsby from NIAS. Their conversation covers a wide range of topical issues in the current debate about the rise of China, including China’s economic coercion, the dependency myth and specific manifestations of pushback against China. How China Loses is a critical look at how the world is responding to China's rise, and what this means for America and the world. China is advancing its own interests with increasing aggression. From its Belt and Road Initiative linking Asia and Europe, to its "Made in China 2025" strategy to dominate high-tech industries, to

Genocide is not only a problem of mass death, but also of how, as a relatively new idea and law, it organizes and distorts thinking about civilian destruction. Taking the normative perspective of civilian immunity from military attack, A. Dirk Moses argues that the implicit hierarchy of international criminal law, atop which sits genocide as the 'crime of crimes', blinds us to other types of humanly caused civilian death, like bombing cities, and the 'collateral damage' of missile and drone strikes. Talk of genocide, then, can function ideologically to detract from systematic violence against civilians perpetrated by governments of all types. The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge UP, 2021) contends that this violence is the consequence of 'permanent security' imperatives: the striving of states, and armed groups seeking to found states, to make themselves invulnerable to threats. Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School

Why do liberal great powers like the United States struggle to defeat insurgencies across the globe? In her new book, Bullets Not Ballots: Success in Counterinsurgency Warfare (Cornell University Press, 2021), Professor Jacqueline Hazelton argues that they are bringing the wrong conceptual models to the conflict. As a result, they are not just fighting the wrong war. They underestimate the costs of intervention. An Assistant Professor in the Department of Strategy and Policy at the U.S. Naval War College, Hazelton challenges the conventional wisdom that the “good governance model” of counterinsurgency warfare offers the surest path to defeating insurgencies. She shows that effective counterinsurgency campaigns instead share three common ingredients: elite accommodation, the threat or use of force against civilian populations, and brute force against the insurgency itself. Her findings represent a far-cry from the “hearts and minds” philosophy that has dominated Western military thinking for decades. On the ep

Today I talked to Ora Szekely about Insurgent Women: Female Combatants in Civil Wars (Georgetown UP, 2019), which she co-edited with Jessica Trisko Darden and Alexis Henshaw. Why do women go to war in non-state armed groups? Despite the reality that female combatants exist the world over, we still know relatively little about who these women are, what motivates them to take up arms, how they are utilized by armed groups, and what happens to them when war ends. Through a comparative analysis of women's participation in different non-state armed groups, Insurgent Women addresses women's involvement in civil war at three different points in the conflict lifecycle: recruitment, conflict participation, and conflict resolution. By examining the ongoing civil war in Ukraine, the conflicts in the Kurdish regions of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, and the civil war in Colombia, the authors find that there is no single profile of a female combatant. Rather, women's roles in and motivations for joining insurgent groups vary. T

“It is no secret that European studies has suffered a setback in the academy”, write William Collins Donahue and Martin Kagel in their contribution to European Studies: Past, Present and Future (Agenda Publishing, 2020). In the US, area studies have waned, funding streams have dried up and students are questioning what job being a “Europeanist” will get them. In the UK, as Professor Helen Drake has written, “European Studies has all but disappeared from British university curricula”. Why? What can be done? Does the setback in the discipline mirror the EU’s own crises over the past decade? For this first book in the Council for European Studies’ Understanding Europe series, Erik Jones assembled 55 Europeanists to write 45 answers to these questions and to think aloud about the future of the discipline and the continent. Erik Jones is the Director of European and Eurasian Studies and Professor of European Studies and International Political Economy at the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of t

Being arguably each side’s most enduring international bond, the China-Korea relationship has long been of great practical and symbolic importance to both. Moreover, as Odd Arne Westad observes in his new book, this has in many ways also been a paradigmatic kind of tie between a large ‘empire’ and smaller (though by no means small) ‘nation’, and thus has much to teach us about past and present international relationships in East Asia and beyond. Westad’s Empire and Righteous Nation: 600 Years of China-Korea Relations (Harvard UP, 2021) is both a highly readable survey of a special dynamic between polities and cultures, and an argument for the important continuities and trends running throughout six centuries of tumultuous Ming, Choson, Qing, Japanese, Soviet, American, Republican, Nationalist and Communist history. As this book convincingly shows, in all its mutual admiration, suspicion, hierarchy and compromise, this has been a deeply revealing relationship and one which – as scholars in both countries would