Geopolitics Books

Eighteen years have passed since ten countries from Central & Eastern Europe joined the European Union and more than three decades since the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989 - but ignorance about what is popularly still called Eastern Europe is as...

A harrowing journey through the past, present, and future of mining, this expertly-researched account ends on a vision for how industry can better serve the needs of humanity.A race is on to exploit the last bonanzas of gold, silver, and industrial...

An eye-opening look at the source of the current wave of Saudi Arabian-sponsored terrorism, how it spread, and why the West did nothing. Here is the truth about ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, and more. Lifting the mask of international terrorism, Terence...

Xi Jinping wants to become the world's most powerful leader. To succeed, he must balance Mao's Little Red Book with the Analects of Confucius, and more.For Xi, the task ahead of China is to preserve the guiding ideology of Marxism, while challenging...

When South Sudan's war began, the Beatles were playing their first hits and reaching the moon was an astronaut's dream. Half a century later, with millions massacred in Africa's longest war, the continent's biggest country split in two.It was an...

Recep Tayyip Erdoan, Turkey's pugnacious president, is now the country's longest-serving leader. On his way to the top, he has fought many wars. This book tells the story of those battles against domestic enemies through the lens of the Syrian conflict,...

'These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world,' said Charlie Wilson of America's role in supporting the mujahideen against the Soviet Union. 'And then we fucked up the endgame.' The...

What does liberal order actually amount to outside the West, where it has been most institutionalised? Contrary to the Atlantic or Pacific, liberal hegemony is thin in the Indian Ocean World; there are no equivalents of NATO, the EU or the US-Japan...

China's Belt and Road strategy is acknowledged to be the most ambitious geopolitical initiative of the age. Covering almost seventy countries by land and sea, it will affect every element of global society, from shipping to agriculture, digital economy...

Why is the Middle East a crisis factory, and how can it be fixed? What does the future look like for its 500 million people? And what role should the West play?Iyad El-Baghdadi and Ahmed Gatnash tell the story of the modern Middle East as a series of...

As a Cabinet minister attending meetings of the UK's National Security Council, Oliver Letwin took a profound interest in our relationship with China. So much of the discussion of world events inevitably turns into a debate about the attitudes...

Palestine, 1850: a backwater of the Ottoman Empire, but soon to become the focus of intense jealousies. Locally Arabs and Jews became increasingly polarised, internationally the vacuum left by the demise of the Ottoman Empire was filled with the...

The last four decades have been shaped by the rise of Islamist politics across significant swathes of the globe. Whether by gun or by ballot box, various Islamist movements - from as far and wide as the Malian desert and Indonesia's archipelagos - have...

The Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 was the result of declining active support for the government, and of waste and inefficiency in aid delivery. Yet, while corrosive, these problems were not in themselves sufficient to have brought about a...

How does the Taliban wage war? How has its war changed over time? Firstly, the movement's extraordinary military operation relies on financial backing. This volume analyses such funding. The Taliban's external sources of support include foreign...

During the June 2020 territorial dispute over Kalapani, India blamed tensions on a newly assertive Nepal's deepening relations with China. But beyond the accusations and grandstanding, this reflects a new reality: the power equations in South Asia have...

Between South and Central Asia, in the high mountains and cold deserts, India, Pakistan and China have fought brutal wars over barren, uninhabited territory in a bid for control over their national peripheries, including Xinjiang and Tibet in China, and...

By 2014, the world had grown weary of Iraq and its troubles. The Americans had all but gone and the media had switched its gaze towards Syria, but Iraq's problems were far from over. That same year, ISIS put Iraq back on the map as they crossed the...

Ukraine is the subject of a tug of war between the west and Russia and has been terribly let down by both, albeit in very different ways, in the months and years leading up to war.Russia has brought bloodshed and suffering to Ukraine at the behest of...

A one-volume history of the most consequential political movements of our time - populism, nationalism, socialism - and how they are influencing the twenty-first century.The distinguished political analyst John Judis has brought out a book with Columbia...

Russia's brutal February 2022 invasion of Ukraine has attracted widespread condemnation across the West. Government and media circles present the conflict as a simple dichotomy between an evil empire and an innocent victim. In this concise, accessible...

On Shedding an Obsolete Pastprovides a much-needed and comprehensive critique of recent US national security policies in both the Trump and Biden administrations. These policy decisions have produced a series of costly disappointments and outright...

It is often remarked that critical - and especially Marxist - state theory began to lose its central place in the study of comparative politics in the 1980s. Ironically, this shift occurred just as neoliberal policies were transforming the social form...

John Quincy Adams is widely recognized as America's most distinguished diplomat, taking into account the length and breadth of his public service and his influence on American foreign policy. In the course of this remarkable journey, John Quincy...

A bold call for the American Left to extend their politics to the issues of Israel-Palestine argues that progressives and liberals who oppose regressive policies on immigration, racial justice, gender equality, LGBTQ rights, and other issues must extend...

Named a Best Book of the Year by The EconomistA chilling work of true crime about the midair murder of a human rights activist, set against a riveting political drama in the world's fourth-largest nationOn a warm Jakarta night in September 2004, Munir...

In Global Political Economy and the Modern State System Tobias ten Brink contributes to an understanding of the modern state system, its conflicts, and its transformation. In contrast to the political attractiveness of optimistic theoretical approaches...

The Story of How Russia Becomes a Democracy after Losing to Ukraine.To understand the significance of this book, Does Putin Have to Die?, you must first understand the significance of the author: Ilya Ponomarev was a member of the Russian Parliament, or...

Why Is the Middle East Entering a "New Era?" Is It a New Dawn? Is It a Setting Sun?In the third decade of the twenty-first century, the Middle East is entering a new era. A multifaceted and intricate equilibrium will write the next chapter of this region...

The exclusive-and explosive-account of the politics of one of the most controversial nations in the world. According to Aviva Klompas, representing Israel at the United Nations is like volunteering to sell Red Sox paraphernalia outside Yankee Stadium...

A startling spotlight on the darkest corners of America's "War on Terror," where nothing is quite what it seems. The Convenient Terrorist is the definitive inside account of the capture, torture, and detention of Abu Zubaydah, the first...

Neoliberals thought capitalism would bring about democracy, civil liberties, and human rights everywhere. But that is fast becoming an illusion, particularly in the East, where traditionalist and nationalist leaders are attracting religious, rural, or...

Do political cartoons predict violence? To answer this question Ilan Danjoux examined over 1200 Israeli and Palestinian editorial cartoons to explore whether changes in their content anticipated the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in October of 2000...

This book interrogates the widespread claim that contemporary globalization has ended the centrality of the state in world affairs and is effectively irreversible. It offers discriminating definitions of globalization, internationalization and...

How foreign lending weakens emerging nations.In the nineteenth century, many developing countries turned to the credit houses of Europe for sovereign loans to balance their books and weather major fiscal shocks such as war. This reliance on external...

How decolonization and the cold war influenced literature from Africa, Asia, and the CaribbeanHow did superpower competition and the cold war affect writers in the decolonizing world? In The Aesthetic Cold War, Peter Kalliney explores the various ways...

A new theoretical framework for understanding how social, economic, and political conflicts influence international institutions and their place in the global order Today's liberal international institutional order is being challenged by the...

The Habsburg Empire's grand strategy for outmaneuvering and outlasting stronger rivals in a complicated geopolitical worldThe Empire of Habsburg Austria faced more enemies than any other European great power. Flanked on four sides by rivals, it possessed...

Despite official declarations, the war in Afghanistan is far from over; in fact, it's escalating. Seven years after 9/11, the Taliban continue to regroup, attack, and claim influence over most of the region. This book presents a fresh, comprehensive...