In Quagmire in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020) Dr. Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl provides the first treatment of quagmire in civil war, moving beyond the notion that quagmire is intrinsic to certain countries or wars. In a rigorous but accessible analysis, he explains how quagmire can emerge from domestic-international interactions and strategic choices. To support the argument, Dr. Schulhofer-Wohl draws upon field research on Lebanon's sixteen-year civil war, structured comparisons with ci...
Jan 19, 2022•45 min•Ep. 1129
In mid-November, Washington and Beijing mutually agreed to start granting journalist visas again, putting an end to months of reciprocal visa rejections and denials. A perhaps minor, yet still important, thawing among grander narratives of decoupling and worsening relations between the two countries. Cheng Li’s Middle Class Shanghai: Reshaping U.S.-China Engagement (Brookings, 2021) plots out a new way to understand the U.S.-China relationship. Cheng Li’s book attempts to show the importance of ...
Jan 06, 2022•58 min•Ep. 64
The Deportation Express: A History of America Through Forced Removal (University of California Press, 2021) details the history of the United States' systematic expulsion of "undesirables" and immigrants, told through the lives of the passengers who travelled from around the world, only to be locked up and forced out aboard America's first deportation trains. The United States, celebrated as a nation of immigrants and the land of the free, has developed the most extensive system of imprisonment ...
Dec 23, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 1124
Since 1945, America has spent more resources on nuclear technology than any other national project. Although it requires a massive infrastructure that touches society on myriad levels, nuclear technology has typically been discussed in a limited, top-down fashion that clusters around powerful men. In Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex (U Minnesota Press, 2020), Jessica Hurley turns this conventional wisdom on its head, offering a new approach that focuses ...
Dec 20, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 134
In International Intervention and the Problem of Legitimacy (Cornell UP, 2020) Andrew C. Gilbert, who is assistant professor in anthropology at the University of Toronto-Mississauga, argues for an ethnographic analysis of international intervention as a series of encounters, focusing on the relations of difference and inequality, and the question of legitimacy that permeate such encounters. He discusses the transformations that happen in everyday engagements between intervention agents and their...
Dec 17, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 142
Over the last 20 years the world's most advanced militaries have invited a small number of military legal professionals into the heart of their targeting operations, spaces which had previously been exclusively for generals and commanders. These professionals, trained and hired to give legal advice on an array of military operations, have become known as war lawyers. In The War Lawyers: The United States, Israel, and Juridical Warfare (Oxford University Press, 2021), Craig Jones examines the law...
Dec 14, 2021•55 min•Ep. 145
Why do some armies fare better than others on the battlefield? In Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War (Princeton UP, 2020), Jason Lyall argues that a state's prewar treatment of ethnic groups within its population determine subsequent battlefield performance. Treating certain ethnic groups as second-class citizens, either by subjecting them to state-sanctioned discrimination or, worse, violence, undermines interethnic trust, fuels grievances, and leads victimized...
Dec 14, 2021•52 min•Ep. 567
How has “cybersecurity” become a catch-all for everything that touches our digital world? In his new book, The Politics of Cybersecurity in the Middle East (Hurst, 2021), Dr. James Shires shows how myriad actors have exploited the prominent yet esoteric nature of the field, appropriating its symbolic power to serve their own interests. In the process, cybersecurity has grown to incorporate a series of seemingly distinct practices. An Assistant Professor at the Institute of Security and Global Af...
Dec 09, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 96
Today's guest is former US Army general, Stanley McChrystal. A retired four-star general with 34 years of service, Stanley was the commander of all US and coalition forces in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010. Previously, he served as commander of JSOC or the Joint Special Operations Command, overseeing the US military’s most elite units including Delta Force and SEAL Team 6. According to journalist Sean Naylor, in his Book, Relentless Strike, McChrystal was, “the general whose vision and intensity ...
Dec 08, 2021•56 min•Ep. 139
Suspect Communities: Anti-Muslim Racism and the Domestic War on Terror (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) is a powerful reassessment of the U.S. government’s “countering violent extremism” (CVE) program that has arisen in major cities across the United States since 2011. Drawing on an interpretive qualitative study, Nicole Nguyen , Associate Professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, examines how the concept behind CVE—aimed at combating homegrown terrorism by engaging Muslim community ...
Dec 03, 2021•50 min•Ep. 253
In this interview, I speak with Till F. Paasche and James D. Sidaway about their new book, Transecting Securityscapes: Dispatches from Cambodia, Iraq, and Mozambique (University of Georgia Press, 2021). In addition to the book's methodological and theoretical contributions, we also discussed the extensive field research and important personal experiences informing this project. This is an innovative book on the everyday life of security, told via an examination of three sites: Cambodia, the Kurd...
Dec 02, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 49
The next world war is 13 years away—that is, if you live in the world envisioned by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis , 2034: A Novel of the Next World War (Penguin, 2021). When writing about the intersection of combat and diplomacy, the co-authors draw from experience. Ackerman has worked in the White House and served five tours of duty as a Marine in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. Stavridis, a retired United States Na...
Nov 26, 2021•32 min•Ep. 134
In 1850 Charles Dickens wrote that Great Britain had “no political police,” adding that “the most rabid demagogue” could speak out “without the terror of an organised spy system.” In his book State Surveillance, Political Policing, and Counter-Terrorism in Britain: 1880-1914 (Boydell Press, 2021), Vlad Solomon describes how Britain gradually developed a system of “high policing” during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras that contradicted Britons’ popular belief in their tolerant society. As S...
Nov 22, 2021•53 min•Ep. 1102
What does America’s growing dependence on modern information technology systems mean for the management of its nuclear weapons? In his new book, Cyber Threats and Nuclear Weapons (Stanford University Press, 2021), Dr. Herb Lin explores the promise and peril of managing the bomb in the digital age. A Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, Dr. Lin cautions that management of the future nuclear enterprise will require a series of dif...
Nov 22, 2021•54 min•Ep. 95
Did you know that you're more likely to die from a catastrophe than in a car crash? The odds that a typical US resident will die from a catastrophic event—for example, nuclear war, bioterrorism, or out-of-control artificial intelligence—have been estimated at 1 in 6. That's fifteen times more likely than a fatal car crash and thirty-on e times more likely than being murdered. In What's the Worst That Could Happen?: Existential Risk and Extreme Politics (MIT Press, 2021), Andrew Leigh looks at ca...
Nov 10, 2021•40 min•Ep. 99
Geographic and temporal limits have typically contained modern wars—rulers can ask their populace to risk lives and treasure for so long before losing legitimacy. But wars have also been horrifyingly unlimited in cruelty. Over the course of the past two decades, American activists and government officials have sought to make war less cruel and more humane. The consequence of this, Samuel Moyn argues in his well-reasoned and polemical book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinven...
Nov 10, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 1095
Katherine Chandler's Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare (Rutgers UP, 2020) studies the conditions that create unmanned platforms in the United States through a genealogy of experimental, pilotless planes flown between 1936 and 1992. Characteristics often attributed to the drone--including machine-like control, enmity and remoteness--are achieved by displacements between humans and machines that shape a mediated theater of war. Rather than primarily treating the drone...
Oct 19, 2021•56 min•Ep. 94
Interpreting International Politics (Routledge, 2014) is a short and lively account of how international relations was founded and developed as an interpretivist discipline, and why it matters that it was. Its author, Cecelia Lynch , joins this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science to discuss the interplay between interpretivist philosophies and realist, critical and feminist traditions in studies of international politics; the epistemological stakes for IR scholars e...
Oct 14, 2021•49 min•Ep. 9
With an estimated 250,000 people killed in 15 years, the Mexican drug war is the most violent conflict in the Western world. It shows no sign of abating. In Mexican Drug Violence: Hybrid Warfare, Predatory Capitalism and the Logic of Cruelty (2020), Dr Teun A. Voeten analyzes the dynamics of the violence. He argues it is a new type of war called hybrid warfare: multidimensional, elusive and unpredictable, fought at different levels, with different intensities with multiple goals. The war ISIS ha...
Oct 08, 2021•43 min•Ep. 34
These days, anyone paying close attention to Peru is awash in déjà vu: the ghosts of Peru’s once-brutal war with the Maoist insurgent group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) have resurfaced time and again following the surprise victory of the country’s new left-leaning president. To understand how and why that conflict continues to shape Peruvian society, we invited Dr. Jo-Marie Burt onto the podcast to discuss her (not so) new book, Political Violence and the Authoritarian State in Peru: Silencin...
Sep 29, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 94
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 exiled in Europe and North America in the 1990s helped create and control one of the world's most impactful terrorist movements--and how, after the near-obliteration of the organization during the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, they helped build it again. She shows how the diffusion of Islami...
Sep 22, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 124
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 Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen (Columbia Global Reports, 2015). One way Abrahamian answers that question is by examining elites shopping for passports in a global marketplace. But the question also pulls her deep into a grim passports-in-bulk scheme that offloaded state...
Sep 10, 2021•52 min•Ep. 1067
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 Supremacy and Adom Getachew's Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination . From this scholarship, we’ve learned a lot about, say, the politics of creating new intergovernmental organizations or how they became arenas for interstate competition. But the international bureaucracies thems...
Aug 30, 2021•59 min•Ep. 1062
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 and Mary L. Dudziak. In this interview, Mark Bradley joined me to discuss Marilyn Young's life and legacy, the impetus for assembling the book, and the relevance of her work in the present moment. The late historian Marilyn B. Young, a preeminent voice on the history of U.S. m...
Aug 30, 2021•50 min•Ep. 1060
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 the fact that it had very little history of terrorist violence within its borders prior to 2011. In Your Sons Are at Your Service: Tunisia's Missionaries of Jihad (Columbia UP, 2020), Aaron Y. Zelin uncovers the longer history of Tunisian involvement in the jihadi movement and offers an in-depth examination of the rea...
Aug 27, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 92
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 critical underlying assumption: that non-state actors fight very differently than states do. In Nonstate Warfare: The Military Methods of Guerillas, Warlords and Militias (Princeton UP, 2021), Dr. Stephen Biddle argues that those ideas are not just misleading but dangerous. Through a careful review of five nonstate actors...
Aug 27, 2021•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 92
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 in thinking critically about terrorist, insurgency, and criminal groups of all sorts. Using case studies from multiple continents, ideological contexts, and political situations, Dr. Shiffman shows how the language and tools familiar to economists can assist policy makers and security per...
Aug 25, 2021•57 min•Ep. 75
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? Dr. Rebecca Hamlin argues that employing this binary limits protection for vulnerable people who are not protected by the rarified category of “refugee.” In Crossing: How We Label and React to People on the Move (Stanford UP, 2021), Dr. Hamlin confronts the binary -- and the ef...
Aug 23, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 546
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 the Vietnam War. Amy J. Rutenberg argues that policy makers' idealized conceptions of Cold War middle-class masculinity directly affected whom they targeted for conscription and also for deferment. Federal officials believed that college educated men could protect the nation from the thre...
Aug 18, 2021•54 min•Ep. 1056
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 the Centre for Quantum Technologies and Lee Kong Chian Centennial Professor at the National University of Singapore. Artur Ekert is one of the pioneers of quantum cryptography. This wide-ranging conversation provides detailed insights into his research and covers many fascinating topics such as math...
Aug 09, 2021•2 hr 56 min•Ep. 21
