New Books in Diplomatic History
Episodes
Swati Srivastava, "Hybrid Sovereignty in World Politics" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
09 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The idea of “hybrid sovereignty” describes overlapping relations between public and private actors in important areas of global power, such as con...
The Future of Superstates: A Discussion with Alasdair Roberts
09 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Empires are supposed to be a thing of the past but very big countries with global reach are becoming more entrenched. By 2050, almost 40 per cent o...
Stephenie Foster and Susan A. Markham, "Feminist Foreign Policy in Theory and in Practice" (Routledge, 2023)
07 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 2014, Sweden announced the world’s first “feminist foreign policy,” an approach more than two dozen other nations have since adopted. But dif...
India, Asia, and the Global South
06 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How should we understand the emergence of the Global South as a political actor? What is the role of India within this framework? Which challenges and...
Benjamin Savill, "England and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages: Papal Privileges in European Perspective, C. 680-1073" (Oxford UP, 2023)
06 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
England and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages: Papal Privileges in European Perspective, c. 680-1073 (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Benjami...
Angelina Chin, "Unsettling Exiles: Chinese Migrants in Hong Kong and the Southern Periphery During the Cold War" (Columbia UP, 2023)
05 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The conventional story of Hong Kong celebrates the people who fled the mainland in the wake of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China i...
Robert P. Watson, "When Washington Burned: The British Invasion of the Capital and a Nation's Rise from the Ashes" (Georgetown UP, 2023)
05 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Perhaps no other single day in US history was as threatening to the survival of the nation as August 24, 1814, when British forces captured Washington...
Should We Be Optimistic About Global Governance?
02 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This week on International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviewed Richard Gowan, UN director of the International Crisis Group. Gowan discusse...
Isaac McKean Scarborough, "Moscow's Heavy Shadow: The Violent Collapse of the USSR" (Cornell UP, 2023)
01 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Moscow's Heavy Shadow: The Violent Collapse of the USSR (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. Isaac Mckean Scarborough tells the story of the colla...
Gwendolyn Sasse, "Russia's War Against Ukraine" (Polity, 2023)
29 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Nineteen months since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the books are coming thick and fast. Fortunately, each tells a different and compell...
Alex J. Bellamy, "Warmonger: Vladimir Putin's Imperial Wars" (Agenda Publishing, 2023)
28 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"War was always central to Putin's project," writes Alex J. Bellamy in Warmonger: Vladimir Putin's Imperial Wars (Agenda, 2023). Not just the second...
The Future of Ukraine: A Discussion with Christopher Miller
24 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has already changed the world. Why did it happen? Who is winning? How will it end? Christopher Miller is the author of...
Kerry Brown, "China Incorporated: The Politics of a World Where China is Number One" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
21 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How do we talk about China? It’s a question every analyst, academic, policymaker, and reporter probably needs to ask themselves. Is China, as some o...
Rachel Chrastil, "Bismarck's War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe" (Basic Book, 2023)
17 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Among the conflicts that convulsed Europe during the nineteenth century, none was more startling and consequential than the Franco-Prussian War of 187...
Joshua Ehrlich, "The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
16 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The East India Company is remembered as the world's most powerful, not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from the 1770s to ...
A Better Way to Buy Books
12 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has alre...
India, a Non-Aligned Member of the International System?
11 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We kick off our Fall 2023 season of International Horizons with Upendra Choudhury from Aligarh Muslim University discussing the role of India in the c...
Peter Foster, "What Went Wrong with Brexit? And What We Can Do about It" (Canongate, 2023)
07 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
It’s been over three years since the UK withdrew from the EU and no one – not even the most ardent Brexiter – thinks it has gone well so far. De...
Suzy Kim, "Among Women Across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2023)
04 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2023), Suzy Kim follows Korean women’s engagement in a...
Zachary Jacobson, "On Nixon's Madness: An Emotional History" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
03 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
When Richard Nixon battled for the presidency in 1968, he did so with the knowledge that, should he win, he would face the looming question of how to ...
Sarah R. Coleman, "The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America" (Princeton UP, 2023)
31 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sarah Coleman, an historian at Texas State University, is the author of an important and topical book about immigration policy in the United States. ...
On “Henry Kissinger and His World” with author Barry Gewen
29 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In my talk with Barry Gewen on his 2020 book, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World (W. W. Norton, 2020), we explore the disp...
Hans-Lukas Kieser, "When Democracy Died: The Middle East's Enduring Peace of Lausanne" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
28 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Treaty of Lausanne, signed in Switzerland in July 1923, officially settled the conflict between the Ottoman Empire and the Allied forces. Not only...
Kalyani Ramnath, "Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942-1962" (Stanford UP, 2023)
27 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For more than a century before World War II, traders, merchants, financiers, and laborers steadily moved between places on the Indian Ocean, trading g...
Samuel Ramani, "Putin's War on Ukraine: Russia’s Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution" (Hurst, 2023)
17 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Eight years after annexing Crimea, Russia embarked on a full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine in February 2022. For Vladimir Putin, this was a le...
Martin Plaut and Sarah Vaughan, "Understanding Ethiopia's Tigray War" (Oxford UP, 2023)
14 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Martin Plaut and Sarah Vaughan about their new book Understanding Ethiopia's Tigray War (Oxford UP, 2023) The ongoing war and con...
Toward a More Expansive View of Medieval Europe: Kyivan Rus and Norman Salerno in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries
14 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Focusing on gender relations, family formation, and marriage patterns in areas peripheral to the England, France, and the Holy Roman Empire, Christia...
Mark Edele, "Russia's War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story" (Melbourne University, 2023)
13 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"That Russia and Ukraine have diverged politically so radically since 1991 is partially due to their position vis-à-vis the imploded empire they emer...
Yiwen Li, "Networks of Faith and Profit: Monks, Merchants, and Exchanges Between China and Japan, 839-1403 CE" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
13 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In her book, Networks of Faith and Profit: Monks, Merchants, and Exchanges Between China and Japan, 839-1403 CE (Cambridge UP, 2023), associate prof...
Simon Mills, "A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship Between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1600-1760" (Oxford UP, 2020)
13 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Simon Mills' book A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship Between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1600-1760 (Oxford UP, 2020) tell...
Michael Broers, "Napoleon: The Decline and Fall of an Empire, 1811-1821" (Pegasus Books, 2023)
12 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 1811, Napoleon stood at his zenith. He had defeated all his continental rivals, come to an entente with Russia, and his blockade of Britain seemed,...
The Future of Underground/Sea Cables: A Discussion with Henry Farrell
12 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How much of US power is underground? We hear a lot about the US military assets used on land, on the sea, and in the air - but not much about what’s...
Christine Keiner, "Deep Cut: Science, Power, and the Unbuilt Interoceanic Canal" (U Georgia Press, 2020)
05 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Atlantic-Pacific Central American sea-level canal is generally regarded as a spectacular failure. However, Deep Cut: Science, Power, and the Unbu...
James B. Conroy, "The Devils Will Get No Rest: FDR, Churchill, and the Plan That Won the War" (Simon and Schuster, 2023)
02 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Devils Will Get No Rest: FDR, Churchill, and the Plan That Won the War (Simon and Schuster, 2023) is a character-driven account of the Casablanca...
Nick Bunker, "In the Shadow of Fear: America and the World In 1950" (Basic Books, 2023)
01 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Halfway through the twentieth century, the United States towered over the world in industrial might. After winning the 1948 election, Harry Truman hop...
Dynamics Among Nations: The Evolution of Legitimacy and Development in Modern States
31 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Liberal internationalism has been the West's foreign policy agenda since the Cold War, and the West has long occupied the top rung of a hierarchical s...
Ian Buruma on "Year Zero: A History of 1945"
29 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ian Buruma is the author, co-author and editor of over a dozen books. He has been an editor at the Far Eastern Economic Review and The New York Rev...
India's Development Diplomacy and Soft Power in Africa
28 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Kenneth King (University of Edinburgh) & Meera Venkatachalam (University of Mumbai), discuss their recently co-edited volume, India'...
Michael J. Seth, "Korea at War: Conflicts That Shaped the World" (Tuttle Publishing, 2023)
27 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Korean War “ended” exactly fifty years ago at Panmunjom. On July 27, 1953, United States and United Nations commanders on one side, and the No...
Sheila Miyoshi Jager, "The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia" (Harvard UP, 2023)
23 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Sheila Miyoshi Jager presents dramatic new telling of the dawn of modern East Asia, placing Korea at the center of a transformed world order wroug...
Penny M. Von Eschen, "Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder Since 1989" (Duke UP, 2022)
19 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder since 1989 (Duke University Press, 2022) Dr. Penny M. Von Eschen offers a sweep...
Hassan S. Khalilieh, "Islamic Law of the Sea: Freedom of Navigation and Passage Rights in Islamic Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
12 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The doctrine of the modern law of the sea is commonly believed to have developed in Renaissance Europe. The role of Islamic law of the sea and customa...
Serhii Plokhy, "The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History" (Norton, 2023)
11 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Despite repeated warnings from the White House, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. Why did Putin start the war--and why ...
Rotem Kowner, "Tsushima" (Oxford UP, 2022)
07 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Rotem Kowner about Tsushima (Oxford UP, 2022), which is part of the great battle series in Oxford University press. The Battle of...
Samuel Helfont, "Iraq Against the World: Saddam, America, and the Post-Cold War Order" (Oxford UP, 2023)
30 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The move away from post-Cold War unipolarity and the rise of revisionist states like Russia and China pose a rapidly escalating and confounding threat...
Edward Kissi, "Africans and the Holocaust: Perceptions and Responses of Colonized and Sovereign Peoples" (Routledge, 2021)
29 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This book is an original and comparative study of reactions in West and East Africa to the persecution and attempted annihilation of Jews in Europe an...
Philip J. Stern, "Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism" (Harvard UP, 2023)
26 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Philip Stern places the corporation―more than the Crown―at the heart of British colonialism, arguing that companies built and governed global empi...
Giulia Pecorella, "The United States of America and the Crime of Aggression" (Routledge, 2021)
21 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Giulia Pecorella's The United States of America and the Crime of Aggression (Routledge, 2021) traces the position of the United States of America o...
Frank Costigliola, "Kennan: A Life Between Worlds" (Princeton UP, 2023)
19 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The diplomat and historian George F. Kennan (1904-2005) ranks as one of the most important figures in American foreign policy--and one of its most com...
Nicole Wegner, "Martialling Peace: How the Peacekeeper Myth Legitimises Warfare" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
18 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Martialling Peace: How the Peacekeeper Myth Legitimises Warfare (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) by Dr. Nicole Wegner is not a book about peacekeep...
Margot Tudor, "Blue Helmet Bureaucrats: United Nations Peacekeeping and the Reinvention of Colonialism, 1945–1971" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
17 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Blue Helmet Bureaucrats: United Nations Peacekeeping and the Reinvention of Colonialism, 1945–1971 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Margot...
Susan McCall Perlman, "Contesting France: Intelligence and US Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
16 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
With the defeat of France in 1940 by the Germans during World War II, its status as a world power was deeply shaken. It wasn't until the liberation by...
Allan E. S. Lumba, "Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines" (Duke UP, 2022)
15 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines (Duke UP, 2022) investigates the ways in which racial and c...
Simon Sharpe, "Five Times Faster: Rethinking the Science, Economics, and Diplomacy of Climate Change" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
14 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We need to act five times faster to avoid dangerous climate change. As Greenland melts, Australia burns, and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise...
Nicholas W. S. Smith, "Colonial Chaos in the Southern Red Sea" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
12 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today, the countries bordering the Red Sea are riven with instability. Why are the region's contemporary problems so persistent and interlinked? Throu...
Tobias Ide, "Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints: How Disasters Shape the Dynamics of Armed Conflicts" (MIT Press, 2023)
07 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Armed conflict and natural disasters have plagued the twenty-first century. Not since the end of World War II has the number of armed conflicts been h...
Chris Suh, "The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion" (Oxford UP, 2023)
03 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion (Oxford UP, 2023) traces how American ideas ...
Adrian Masters, "We, the King: Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish New World" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
03 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We, the King: Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish New World (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Adrian Masters challeng...
Brantly Womack, "Recentering Pacific Asia: Regional China and World Order" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
02 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Pacific Rim of Asia – Pacific Asia – is now the world's largest and most cohesive economic region, and China has returned to its center. In th...
Hilary Frances Aked, "Friends of Israel: The Backlash Against Palestine Solidarity" (Verso, 2023)
30 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Is there such a thing as “the Israel lobby,” and how powerful is it really? Hilary Frances Aked's book Friends of Israel: The Backlash Against P...
Arthur Snell, "How Britain Broke the World: War, Greed and Blunders from Kosovo to Afghanistan (1997-2021)" (Canbury Press, 2022)
29 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Arthur Snell's book How Britain Broke the World: War, Greed and Blunders from Kosovo to Afghanistan (1997-2021) (Canbury Press, 2022) critically as...
Neither Friend nor Enemy: Sweden-North Korea Relations
26 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the fourth NIAS-Korea episode. We invite Dr. Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein to discuss Sweden-North Korea relations. It may seem odd that amo...
Robert F. Trager and Joslyn N. Barnhart, "The Suffragist Peace: How Women's Votes Lead to Fewer Wars" (Oxford UP, 2022)
25 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the modern age, some parts of the world are experiencing a long peace. Nuclear weapons, capitalism and the widespread adoption of democratic instit...
Suzanne Sutherland, "The Rise of the Military Entrepreneur: War, Diplomacy, and Knowledge in Habsburg Europe" (Cornell UP, 2022)
24 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In The Rise of the Military Entrepreneur: War, Diplomacy, and Knowledge in Habsburg Europe (Cornell UP, 2022), Suzanne Sutherland explores the role ...
Adrian R. Bazbauers and Susan Engel, "The Global Architecture of Multilateral Development Banks: A System of Debt or Development?" (Routledge, 2023)
24 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Adrian Bazbauers and Susan Engel’s 2021 book The Global Architecture of Multilateral Development Banks: A System of Debt or Development? (Routledg...
Algeria and France: Grievances and the Effects of Decolonialism
18 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of International Horizons, RBI's director, John Torpey interviewed Laetitia Bucaille about the factors that explain variation in resen...
Philip Snow, "China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord" (Yale UP, 2023)
18 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
If there’s a starting point to the relationship between Russia and China, it’s likely the 1650s—when Manchu and Cossack forces clash near Khabar...
Andrew I. Port, "Never Again: Germans and Genocide After the Holocaust" (Harvard UP, 2023)
17 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
As reports of mass killings in Bosnia spread in the middle of 1995, Germans faced a dilemma. Should the Federal Republic deploy its military to the Ba...
Thom Shanker and Andrew Hoehn, "Age of Danger: Keeping America Safe in an Era of New Superpowers, New Weapons, and New Threats" (Hachette Books, 2023)
17 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Again and again, American taxpayers are asked to open their wallets and pay for a national security machine that costs $1 trillion operate. Yet time...
Claire Provost and Matt Kennard, "Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
17 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
As European empires crumbled in the 20th century, the power structures that had dominated the world for centuries were up for renegotiation. Yet inste...
China and the New Cold War: A Conversation with Matt Pottinger
16 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What does Xi Jinping want, and what is he afraid of? What is the future of China's relationship with Russia? What should the United States be doing to...
Aarie Glas, "Practicing Peace: Conflict Management in Southeast Asia and South America" (Oxford UP, 2022)
15 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Southeast Asia and South America are regions made up of largely illiberal states lacking stabilizing great powers or collective identities. But despit...
Matthew Jagel, "Khmer Nationalist: Sơn Ngc Thành, the CIA, and the Transformation of Cambodia" (Northern Illinois UP, 2023)
15 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Khmer Nationalist: Sơn Ngc Thành, the CIA, and the Transformation of Cambodia (Northern Illinois UP, 2023) is a political history of Cambodia from ...
Theodor Tudoroiu and Anna Kuteleva, "China in the Global South: Impact and Perceptions" (Springer, 2023)
13 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Using a multidisciplinary approach and case studies based on fieldwork in nine countries scattered across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, ...
Serhii Plokhy, "The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History" (Norton, 2023)
12 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"The Ukrainian nation will emerge from this war more united and certain of its identity than at any other point in its modern history," writes Serhii ...
James M. Zimmerman, "The Peking Express: The Bandits Who Stole a Train, Stunned the West, and Broke the Republic of China" (PublicAffairs, 2023)
11 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Lucy Aldrich, sister-in-law to John D. Rockefeller Jr. and daughter of Rhode Island Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, joked in a letter to her sister that sh...
Nina Hall, "Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era: Think Global, Act Local" (Oxford UP, 2022)
08 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era (Oxford UP, 2022) explores the role of digital advocacy organizations, a major new addition to the interna...
Ewelina U. Ochab and David Alton, "State Responses to Crimes of Genocide: What Went Wrong and How to Change It" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
08 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In State Responses to Crimes of Genocide: What Went Wrong and How to Change it (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) Dr Ewelina U. Ochab and Lord Alton of ...
Elisabeth B. Armstrong, "Bury the Corpse of Colonialism: The Revolutionary Feminist Conference of 1949" (U California Press, 2023)
06 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 1949, women from across the world traveled to Beijing for the Asian Women’s Conference to discuss how to combat the dual threats of colonial rule...
Stephen Roach, "Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives" (Yale UP, 2022)
06 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Denial is a classic symptom of codependency ... Lacking a sense of self, codependent partners tend to be hypersensitive to criticism or negative feedb...
Andrew Small, "No Limits: The Inside Story of China's War with the West" (Melville House, 2022)
04 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Andrew Small about his book No Limits: The Inside Story of China's War with the West (Melville House, 2022). Winston Churchill fam...
Jan Ke-Schutte, "Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations" (U California Press, 2023)
03 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today I had the pleasure of talking to Jay Ke-Schutte on his just released book, Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations (U ...
Graveyard of Empires: A Conversation with Ambassador Nathan Sales
02 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What went wrong in Afghanistan, and who is to blame? Is America safer today than on September 10, 2001? What lessons should the leaders of America's f...
Stéfanie von Hlatky, "Deploying Feminism: The Role of Gender in NATO Military Operations" (Oxford UP, 2022)
01 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 1995, the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing launched the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. Successive UN Security Council resoluti...
Scott Carney and Jason Miklian, "The Vortex: A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation" (Ecco Press, 2022)
29 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In November 1970, a storm set a collision course with the most densely populated coastline on Earth. Over the course of just a few hours, the Great Bh...
Robin Prior, "Conquer We Must: A Military History of Britain, 1914-1945" (Yale UP, 2022)
28 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The First and Second World Wars were separated by a mere two decades, making the period 1914-1945 an unprecedentedly intense and violent era of histor...
Why do we Still Need Statesmanship?
24 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In an era of broad disappointment in the integrity of political figures, Dr. Daniel J. Mahoney, author of The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Grea...
Why do Transatlantic Relations Matter?
24 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This week on International Horizons, we present RBI's director John Torpey's interview with David Gill, General Consul of Germany, in New York to cele...
Imprisoned in Iran: A Conversation with Wang Xiyue
23 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For 40 months, Wang Xiyue was imprisoned in Iran on false charges of espionage. A doctoral candidate in history at Princeton University, Wang Xiyue jo...
The Future of Eastern Europe: A Discussion with Zsuzsanna Szelényi
22 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been met with a range of responses in Eastern Europe – with some leaders offering muted solace to Vladimir Putin...
Paul Hansbury, "Belarus in Crisis: From Domestic Unrest to the Russia-Ukraine War" (Hurst, 2023)
21 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The war in Ukraine is entering what could well be its decisive phase as Kyiv prepares a counter-offensive and Russia announces plans to deploy tactica...
Cao Yin, "Chinese Sojourners in Wartime Raj, 1942-45" (Oxford UP, 2022)
19 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Since the outbreak of the Pacific War, British India had been taken as the main logistic base for China's war against the Japanese. Chinese soldiers, ...
Unalienable Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy: A Conversation with Secretary Pompeo and Ambassador Glendon
16 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What is the relationship between America's Founding principles and her foreign policy? What are unalienable rights and how do we know they exist? How ...
Samuel Ramani, "Putin's War on Ukraine: Russia's Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution" (Hurst, 2023)
14 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Even as Vladimir Putin massed close to 200,000 troops on Ukraine's border in February 2022, many experts claimed it was a bluff. At worst he would tak...
Lachlan McNamee, "Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop" (Princeton UP, 2023)
12 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past few centuries, vast areas of the world have been violently colonized by settlers. But why did states like Australia and the United State...
Kate Cronin-Furman, "Hypocrisy and Human Rights: Resisting Accountability for Mass Atrocities" (Cornell UP, 2022)
11 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Hypocrisy and Human Rights: Resisting Accountability for Mass Atrocities (Cornell University Press, 2022) examines what human rights pressure does wh...
Susan Allen and Amy Yuen, "Bargaining in the UN Security Council: Setting the Global Agenda" (Oxford UP, 2022)
10 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Even after seventy-five years, the UN Security Council meets nearly every day. They respond to a range of threats to international peace and security,...
Laura Hobson Faure, "A 'Jewish Marshall Plan': The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France" (Indiana UP, 2022)
10 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
While the role the United States played in France’s liberation from Nazi Germany is widely celebrated, it is less well known that American Jewish in...
Steve Kemper, "Our Man in Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbor" (Mariner Books, 2022)
08 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Our Man in Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbor (Mariner Books, 2022) is a riveting, behind-the-scenes account of the per...
David I. Kertzer, "The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler" (Random House, 2022)
06 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, his papers were sealed in the Vatican Secret Archives, leaving unanswered questions about what he knew and did during...