New Books Network
National Security
Politics & Polemics September 22, 2021

Western Jihadism

A Thirty Year History

Jytte Klausen

Hosted by Kirk Meighoo
Western Jihadism: A Thirty Year History (Oxford University Press, 2021) tells the story of how Al Qaeda grew in the West.In forensic and compelling detail, Jytte Klausen traces how Islamist revolutionaries …

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General History September 10, 2021

The Cosmopolites

The Coming of the Global Citizen

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

Hosted by Dexter Fergie
What does citizenship—an institution that has historically linked identity to place—mean in an age of globalization? This is the question that Atossa Araxia Abrahamian investigates in her planet-sprawling book The …
General History August 30, 2021

Organizing the 20th-Century World

International Organizations and the Emergence of International Public Administration, 1920-1960s

Karen Gram-Skjoldager, Haakon Andreas Ikonomou, and Torsten Kahlert

Hosted by Dexter Fergie
The history of international organizations has been an exciting area of research in recent years, with such landmark studies as Stephen Wertheim’s Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global …
General History August 30, 2021

Making the Forever War

Marilyn Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism

Mark Philip Bradley and Mary L. Dudziak

Hosted by Catriona Gold
Making the Forever War: Marilyn Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021) is a timely collection of articles and essays by Marilyn B Young, edited by Mark P. Bradley …
National Security August 27, 2021

Nonstate Warfare

The Military Methods of Guerillas, Warlords, and Militias

Stephen Biddle

Hosted by John Sakellariadis
From the Taliban to Hezbollah, armed nonstate actors and civil warfare have dominated the US national security debate for much of the last 20 years. Yet, most analysis shares a …
National Security August 27, 2021

Your Sons Are at Your Service

Tunisia's Missionaries of Jihad

Aaron Y. Zelin

Hosted by Beth Windisch
Tunisia became one of the largest sources of foreign fighters for the Islamic State—even though the country stands out as a democratic bright spot of the Arab uprisings and despite …
Economics August 25, 2021

The Economics of Violence

How Behavioral Science Can Transform our View of Crime, Insurgency, and Terrorism

Gary Shiffman

Hosted by Sidney Michelini
Dr. Gary Shiffman’s book The Economics of Violence: How Behavioral Science Can Transform our View of Crime, Insurgency, and Terrorism (Cambridge UP, 2020) serves as a fantastic introduction to anyone interested …
Political Science August 23, 2021

Crossing

How We Label and React to People on the Move

Rebecca Hamlin

Hosted by Susan Liebell
When we talk about people crossing borders, policy makers, advocates, journalists, and academics often distinguish between “refugees” and “migrants.” Is this a useful legal fiction? Shorthand for an important distinction …
General History August 18, 2021

Rough Draft

Cold War Military Manpower Policy and the Origins of Vietnam-Era Draft Resistance

Amy J. Rutenberg

Hosted by Catriona Gold
Rough Draft: Cold War Military Manpower Policy and the Origins of Vietnam-Era Draft Resistance (Cornell University Press, 2019) draws the curtain on the race and class inequities of the Selective Service during …
Ideas Roadshow Podcast August 9, 2021

Cryptoreality

Artur Ekert

Hosted by Howard Burton
Cryptoreality is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Artur Ekert, Professor of Quantum Physics at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford and Director of …
Military History August 3, 2021

Asian American Spies

How Asian Americans Helped Win the Allied Victory

Brian Masaru Hayashi

Hosted by Jess Moloughney
Spies deep behind enemy lines; double agents; a Chinese American James Bond; black propaganda radio broadcasters; guerrilla fighters; pirates; smugglers; prostitutes and dancers as spies; and Asian Americans collaborating with …
Southeast Asian Studies August 2, 2021

Uneasy Military Encounters

The Imperial Politics of Counterinsurgency in Southern Thailand

Ruth Streicher

Hosted by Patrick Jory
Since 2004 the Malay-Muslim majority provinces in the border region of southern Thailand have been wracked by a violent insurgency. Over 7000 people have been killed and many thousands more …
National Security July 26, 2021

Pastels and Pedophiles

Inside the Mind of QAnon

Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko

Hosted by Beth Windisch
Two experts of extremist radicalization take us down the QAnon rabbit hole, exposing how the conspiracy theory ensnared countless Americans, and show us a way back to sanity. In January …
National Security July 21, 2021

Power and Complacency

American Survival in an Age of International Competition

Phillip T. Lohaus

Hosted by John Sakellariadis
Why has the United States, the world’s premier military and economic power, struggled recently to achieve its foreign policy desiderata? How might America’s leaders reconsider the application of power for …
Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work July 16, 2021

The Borders of AIDS

Race, Quarantine, and Resistance

Karma R. Chávez

Hosted by Rachel Stuart
As soon as US media and politicians became aware of AIDS in the early 1980s, fingers were pointed not only at the gay community but also at other countries and …
Critical Theory July 13, 2021

State Secrecy and Security

Refiguring the Covert Imaginary

William Walters

Hosted by Catriona Gold
In State Secrecy and Security: Refiguring the Covert Imaginary (Routledge, 2021), William Walters calls for secrecy to be given a more central place in critical security studies and elevated to become …
Russian and Eurasian Studies July 13, 2021

Weak Strongman

The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia

Timothy Frye

Hosted by Daniel Peris
Putin is not the unconstrained, all-powerful boogeyman he is made out to be in the popular Western media. So says Timothy Frye, Professor of Political Science at Columbia University in …
Biography July 5, 2021

How Ike Led

The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions

Susan Eisenhower

Hosted by Colin Miller
Few people have made decisions as momentous as Eisenhower, nor has one person had to make such a varied range of them. From D-Day to Little Rock, from the Korean …
Philosophy July 1, 2021

Immigration and Freedom

Chandran Kukathas

Hosted by Robert Talisse
Discussions of the ethics and politics of immigration tend to focus on those seeking entry into a new society. We ask whether a country has the “right to exclude” those …
National Security June 30, 2021

The Primacy of Resistance

Power, Opposition and Becoming

Marco Checchi

Hosted by Kyle Beadle
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 …