New Books In National Security

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 very much a gangster’s CV.The Vory traces the development of the Russian underworld  from the horse bandits and bank robbers of the nineteenth century, through the chaos of the Revolution and the Civil, when, as Galeotti says, “… the Bolsheviks won the war but lost their souls.”  Galeotti’s scholarship shines through the section on the vast sea change that takes place when during The Terror as the gangsters are co-opted by the State to help regulate the Gulag system.  The resulting “turf war” creates a new post-war type of gangster, the “avtorityet,” who adapt to service the needs of a society in chao

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 History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost (Oxford University Press, 2019), victory in major wars usually has been determined in other ways. Even the most legendarily lopsided of battles did not necessarily decide their outcomes. Nolan also challenges the hoary concept of the military "genius," even of the Great Captains--from Alexander to Frederick and Napoleon--mapping instead the decent into total war. The Allure of Battle systematically recreates and analyzes the major campaigns among the Great Powers, from the Middle Ages through the 20th century, from the fall of Byzantium to the defeat of the Axis powers, tracing

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 enforcement means to address the threat of terrorism.The authors (Brian A. Jackson, Ashley L. Rhoades, Jordan R. Reimer, Natasha Lander, Katherine Costello, and Sina Beaghley) found that current terrorism prevention capabilities are relatively limited. Most initiatives are implemented locally or outside government, and only a subset receive federal support. Among interviewees in law enforcement, government, and some community organizations, there is a perceived need for a variety of federal efforts to help strengthen and broaden local and nongovernmental capacity. However, doing so will be challenging, since concerns ab

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 Entanglements: Intimate Development, Geopolitics, and the Currency of Gender and Grief (University of Georgia Press, 2017). The Carpetbaggers of Kabul takes us on the ground with more than a decade of ethnographic research, and offers a critical perspective that highlights the ways in which post-conflict development works to further American power and not, necessarily, respond to the people it should be accountable to. In documenting the coercive power of white saviors, they show how the discourses of geopolitics have real, material effects for people on the ground. At the same time, they show how development projects i

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 Order (Cornell University Press, 2019), examines the history of NATO from its founding in the late 1940s through to its expansion in the post-Cold War era. Sayle shows how NATO wasn’t just any organization; it was, he writes, “an instrument of great-power politics and the basis for a Pax Atlantica.” Taking his readers deep into the decision-making of NATO and its member states from the 1940s to the 1990s, Sayle provides a new, innovative international history of the second half of the twentieth century. Enduring Alliance should interest historians and scholars from across subfields—military history, U.S. foreign policy

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 conflict. Though such suffering has been a part of warfare since time immemorial, as Crossland explains the emergence of the popular press in the early 19th century brought awareness of the battlefield experience to a greater part of the population. In response, several motivated volunteers embarked upon a variety of activities to address the effects of war, from providing better treatment for wounded soldiers to spearheading efforts to establish mutually-agreed-upon limits on the conduct of warfare. Within a decade, organizations such as the United States Sanitary Commission and the Red Cross emerged to coordinate and regu

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 human culture to the present day, War and its Causes argues for an important new typology of conflict between and within civilisations, cultures and states, and, while addressing the limitations of commentary and analysis, observes patterns across history that make sense of recent conflicts – and those that may be about to begin. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Vis

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 diplomacy and in particular with China, the USSR, Vietnam, and the Middle East, helping to lay the foundations for geopolitics of the past fifty years, as well as we know them today. In a series of questions and answers with his friend and long-time associate Winston Lord, himself a well-know and celebrated figure--Ambassador to China, Director of the Policy Planning staff, Assistant Secretary of State and head of the Council on Foreign Relations--these conversations provide unique insights into the mind of one of the most celebrated figures in 20th-century American history. Kissinger on Kissinger: Reflections on Diplo

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 of the opposed parties are to a significant extent shaped by the evolution of information and cyber warfare. It also highlights the rise of nationalism in Gulf states that fundamentally changes the role of tribes and the nature of the Gulf state in the 21st century. The book argues that at the core of the Gulf struggle are fundamentally different visions of Saudi Arabia and the UAE on the one hand and Qatar on the other on how to ensure regime survival in an era of social and economic change in which autocratic governments increasingly have to efficiently deliver public goods and services. It projects the Gulf crisi

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 increasingly important. But what do we know about Thailand’s “strategic culture”? How does the country’s security elite, including the military, think about “war, force, and security”? This is the subject of Greg Raymond’s timely new book, Thai Military Power: A Culture of Strategic Accommodation (NIAS Press, 2018). At a time when the Thai military, and in particular, its controversial relationship with Thailand’s monarchy, are under great scrutiny, the subject of this book has implications not only for Thailand, but for the broader region.Listeners to this episode may also enjoy listening to Lee Morgenbesser, Behind the Fac

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 his new book, Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy (Public Affairs, 2019), Mazarr reviews the key faulty assumptions that hampered the war planning process, including assuming the intelligence was sufficient that weapons of mass destruction existed, assuming that Iraq had a middle-class technocratic elite just waiting to take over after liberation, assuming that the U.S. could intervene with only a “light footprint,” without any need for prolonged occupation, and failing to plan for the security situation in the aftermath of the war.  In addition to providing a

The Taiwan Strait Crises of 1954-55 and 1958 occurred at the height of the Cold War. Mao’s China bombarded Nationalist-controlled islands, and U.S. President Eisenhower threatened the use of nuclear weapons. These were dramatic events, and it can be a difficult to disentangle military and political posturing from the real concerns of the three involved powers. Using newly available sources, Pang Yang Huei reexamines the Taiwan Strait Crises and concludes that China, Taiwan, and the United States were much more aware of each other’s concerns than previous studies have indicated. Strait Rituals: China, Taiwan, and the United States in the Taiwan Strait Crises, 1954-1958(Hong Kong University Press, 2019) traces the role of ritual, symbols, and gestures in the tacit communication between Beijing, Taipei, and Washington. Ultimately, this detailed history contributes to a better understanding of the history of the Asia-Pacific region during the Cold War.Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angel

In the post–Cold War era, states increasingly find themselves in conflicts with nonstate actors. Finding it difficult to fight these opponents directly, many governments instead target states that harbor or aid nonstate actors, using threats and punishment to coerce host states into stopping those groups.In their book Triadic Coercion: Israel’s Targeting of States That Host Nonstate Actors (Columbia UP, 2018), Wendy Pearlman and Boaz Atzili investigate this strategy, which they term triadic coercion. They explain why states pursue triadic coercion, evaluate the conditions under which it succeeds, and demonstrate their arguments across seventy years of Israeli history. This rich analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict, supplemented with insights from India and Turkey, yields surprising findings. Traditional discussions of interstate conflict assume that the greater a state’s power compared to its opponent, the more successful its coercion. Turning that logic on its head, Pearlman and Atzili show that this strate

Since 2011, civil wars and state failure have wracked the Arab world, underlying the misalignment between national identity and political borders. In Break all the Borders: Separatism and the Resshaping of the Middle East (Oxford UP, 2019), Ariel I. Ahram examines the separatist movements that aimed to remake those borders and create new independent states. With detailed studies of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the federalists in eastern Libya, the southern resistance in Yemen, and Kurdish nationalist parties, Ahram explains how separatists captured territory and handled the tasks of rebel governance, including managing oil exports, electricity grids, and irrigation networks. Ahram emphasizes that the separatism arose not just as an opportunistic response to state collapse. Rather, separatists drew inspiration from the legacy of Woodrow Wilson and ideal of self-determination. They sought to reinstate political autonomy that had been lost during the early and mid-twentieth century. Speaking to the inter

In recent years, the concept of a ‘Cold War’ has been revived to describe the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the two most influential states occupying positions of geopolitical importance in the Persian Gulf, who lay claim to leadership over the Islamic world. In the years after the 1979 revolution in Iran, the two states became embroiled in a rivalry that risked consuming the region, dividing it along religious lines. Although latent for a good number of years, the rivalry has erupted in Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain, Syria and Yemen, since the Second Gulf War. With devastating consequences in the region as a whole. As a consequence of its escalation, a number of scholars have begun to explore this increasingly fractious rivalry. The latest piece of work has been undertaken by the prolific Indian émigré journalist Dilip Hiro, a long-time expert on Near & Middle East politics and the author of a large number of books and opinion pieces on the topic, among others. In Cold War in the Islamic World: Saudi A

Since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, conspiratorial thinking has taken deep root in contemporary Russia, moving from the margins to the forefront of cultural, historical, and political discourse and fueled by centuries-long prejudices and new paranoias. In his characteristically witty, irreverent style, Eliot Borenstein (Professor of Russian & Slavic Studies, Collegiate Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Acting Chair of East Asian Studies, and Senior Academic Convenor for the Global Network at New York University), draws on popular fiction, television, internet, public political pronouncements, religious literature, and other materials to trace the origins, history, and modern manifestations of Russian konspirologiia in Plots Against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism (Cornell University Press, 2019). We discuss popular conspiracy theories such as the Harvard Project and the Dulles Plan, why and how conspiratorial thinking has flourished in post-Soviet Russia, the dynamics

Of all the blank spots in the mental maps of many Americans, Africa is one of the largest. Informed by a number of misconceptions and popular myths, knowledge of the continent’s complexity is poorly understood not just by ordinary citizens but by policymakers as well. This ignorance informs foreign relations with African states: as Maxine Waters once put it, when it came to the Rwandan Genocide, she couldn’t tell whether the Hutus or the Tutsis were right, and because of that she couldn’t tell anybody else what to do. Consequently, the drivers of foreign intervention in Africa are often ill-informed about local contexts, and this has driven a number of disastrous foreign interventions that have rarely fixed the problems they set out to resolve.In Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War: Sovereignty, Responsibility, and the War on Terror (Ohio UP, 2018), Elizabeth Schmidt picks up where she left off in an earlier book and examines several different foreign interventions in Africa. Using a variety of

Tonight we are talking with Federico Varese about his new book Mafias on the Move: How Organized Crime Conquers New Territories (Princeton University Press, 2011). Whenever you read a book about transnational crime one of the themes will be about how globalisation has made it easier for organized crime groups to operate. You will also see another chapter about how large mafia style groups are spreading outside their traditional domains. But there have been very few studies, other than individual case studies, of how this occurs and what circumstances help or hinder this expansion of operation. Federico takes a rigorous approach to try and answer these questions. He not only looks at how groups expand but also compares successful expansion to unsuccessful cases. He asks what features of the social environment allowed one group to succeed and another to fail. His answers are surprising and they reveal some cumbersome characteristics of large, structured organised crime groups which make it difficult for them to

In his new book, Apartheid Guns and Money: A Tale of Profit(Hurst, 2019), Hennie van Vuuren examines the final decades of the apartheid regime in South Africa. He weaves together archival material, interviews and newly declassified documents to expose some of the darkest secrets of apartheid’s economic crimes and their murderous consequences. Those who profited from sustaining white power in South Africa included heads of state, arms dealers, aristocrats, bankers, spies, journalists and secret lobbyists. Whistleblowers were assassinated and ordinary people suffered. This war machine, as van Vuuren describes it, remains a largely hidden aspect of South Africa’s past – until now. Van Vuuren explains how shades of apartheid continue to threaten democracy; inequality, poverty, insecurity, state surveillance, excessive police force, selective prosecutions, and threats to media freedom from a good part of the post-apartheid political experience. The book attempts to piece together the secret global network that pro

To mobilize America’s intellectual resources to meet the security challenges of the post–9/11 world, US Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates observed that “we must again embrace eggheads and ideas.” But the gap between national security policymakers and international relations scholars has become a chasm. In Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security (Princeton University Press, 2019), Michael Desch traces the history of the relationship between the Beltway and the Ivory Tower from World War I to the present day. Recounting key Golden Age academic strategists such as Thomas Schelling and Walt Rostow, Desch’s narrative shows that social science research became most oriented toward practical problem-solving during times of war and that scholars returned to less relevant work during peacetime. Social science disciplines like political science rewarded work that was methodologically sophisticated over scholarship that engaged with the messy realities of national security p