New Books in National Security

An award-winning defense expert tells the story of today’s great power rivalry―the struggle to control artificial intelligence.A new industrial revolution has begun. Like mechanization or electricity before it, artificial intelligence will touch every aspect of our lives―and cause profound disruptions in the balance of global power, especially among the AI superpowers: China, the United States, and Europe. Autonomous weapons expert Paul Scharre takes readers inside the fierce competition to develop and implement this game-changing technology and dominate the future.Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Norton, 2023) argues that four key elements define this struggle: data, computing power, talent, and institutions. Data is a vital resource like coal or oil, but it must be collected and refined. Advanced computer chips are the essence of computing power―control over chip supply chains grants leverage over rivals. Talent is about people: which country attracts the best researchers and most advanced technology companies? The fourth “battlefield” is maybe the most critical: the ultimate global leader in AI will have institutions that effectively incorporate AI into their economy, society, and especially their military.Scharre’s account surges with futuristic technology. He explores the ways AI systems are already discovering new strategies via millions of war-game simulations, developing combat tactics better than any human, tracking billions of people using biometrics, and subtly controlling information with secret algorithms. He visits China’s “National Team” of leading AI companies to show the chilling synergy between China’s government, private sector, and surveillance state. He interviews Pentagon leadership and tours U.S. Defense Department offices in Silicon Valley, revealing deep tensions between the military and tech giants who control data, chips, and talent. Yet he concludes that those tensions, inherent to our democratic system, create resilience and resistance to autocracy in the face of overwhelmingly powerful technology.Engaging and direct, Four Battlegrounds offers a vivid picture of how AI is transforming warfare, global security, and the future of human freedom―and what it will take for democracies to remain at the forefront of the world order. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

For all the talk of China being a peaceful country with no aggressive intentions, it has behaved like most other rising powers – spending lots of money on its military. But what do we know of how that military is used? James A. Siebens is the editor of China’s Use of Armed Coercion: To Win Without Fighting (Routledge, 2023). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett-Jones.Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Why do states engage in secret statecraft and covert action? How different are these secret and covert state activities in real world settings compared to their popular culture representations? And what effect do they have on democracy both globally and in individual states? Join Rory Cormac as he talks to Petra Alderman about his book How to Stage a Coup and Ten Other Lessons from the World of Secret Statecraft (Atlantic Books UK, 2023).Rory Cormac is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Nottingham. He specialises in secret intelligence and covert action. His most recent book, How to Stage A Coup and Ten Other Lessons from the World of Secret Statecraft, was described in the CIA's in-house journal as “a valuable and thought-provoking work, the most thorough treatment of the topic to date.”Petra Alderman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics at the University of Birmingham and Research Fellow at CEDAR.The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

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 history, Cold War history, and global governance studies.Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Florence Mok's book Covert Colonialism: Governance, Surveillance and Political Culture in British Hong Kong, c.1966-97 (Manchester UP, 2023) is timely and exciting for those who are interested in colonial governance and autonomy of the colonial polity. This is a long-ignored area in which colonial historians have made major interventions. Moving away from the existing focus on theories by political scientists and sociologists, this book uses under-exploited archival and unofficial data in London and Hong Kong to construct an empirical study of colonial governance and political culture in Hong Kong during a critical period. From 1966 to 1997, while in mainland China, the Cultural Revolution broke out and caused chaos, in other British colonies beginning or having completed decolonisation, in Hong Kong, the Star Ferry riots in 1966 gave rise to the setup of Town Talk, later MOOD, and then Talking Points, which were used to monitor and construct public opinions and feedback to policy making by the colonial government, thus titled ‘Covert Colonialism’.With seven cases featuring different communities, Florence shows how Hong Kong has become a democratic polity through these strategies mobilised by the colonial government. Failing to import the Western democratic framework into Hong Kong, the colonial government implemented an indirect way to allow the public to participate in the policymaking process and gradually shift Hong Kong people’s sentiments towards both mainland China and its coloniser. This book challenges the erroneous myth of political apathy and stability in Hong Kong, which was embraced by politicians. It will also generate meaningful discussions and heated debates on comparisons between ‘colonialism’ in different spaces and time: between Hong Kong and other former British colonies; and between colonial and post-colonial Hong Kong.Florence Mok is a Nanyang Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University. She is a historian of colonial Hong Kong and modern China, with an interest in environmental history, the Cold War and state-society relations. She received her BA and MA in History from Durham University. She completed her PhD in History at the University of York in 2019. Her doctoral research examined governance and political culture in 1970s Hong Kong. Her postdoctoral project explored Chinese Communist cultural activities in colonial Hong Kong during the Cold War. She is currently studying the history of natural disasters and crisis management.Bing Wang receives her PhD at the University of Leeds in 2020. Her research interests include exploring overseas Chinese cultural identity and critical heritage studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

This episode, which is co-hosted with Tandee Wang, features a conversation with Dr. Wendy Cheng, author of Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism. Published in November 2023 by the University of Washington Press, Island X delves into the compelling political lives of Taiwanese migrants who came to the United States as students from the 1960s through the 1980s.Often depicted as compliant model minorities, Island X reveals that many Taiwanese students were deeply political, shaped by Taiwan's colonial history, and influenced by the global social movements of their times. As activists, they fought to make Taiwanese people visible as subjects of injustice and deserving of self-determination. Under the distorting shadows of Cold War geopolitics, the Kuomintang regime and collaborators across US campuses attempted to control Taiwanese in the diaspora through extralegal surveillance and violence, including harassment, blacklisting, imprisonment, and even murder. Drawing on interviews with student activists and extensive archival research, Cheng documents how Taiwanese Americans developed tight-knit social networks as infrastructures for identity formation, consciousness development, and anticolonial activism. They fought for Taiwanese independence, opposed state persecution and oppression, and participated in global political movements.Raising questions about historical memory and Cold War circuits of power, Island X is a testament to the lives and advocacy of a generation of Taiwanese American activists. Our conversation today focuses on contextualizing Taiwanese student activism during the Cold War to provide greater nuance to existing frameworks of Asian American activism within Asian American studies.Donna Doan Anderson (she/her) is a PhD candidate in History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Tandee Wang (he/him) is a PhD student in History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

What makes a person want to become a terrorist? Who becomes involved in terrorism, and why? In what ways does participating in violent extremism change someone? And how can people become deradicalized?John Horgan―one of the world’s leading experts on the psychology of terrorism―takes readers on a globe-spanning journey into the terrorist mindset. Drawing on groundbreaking personal interviews as well as decades of research from psychologists and others, he traces the pathways that lead people into violent extremism and explores what happens to them as their involvement deepens. Horgan provides an up-to-date, evidence-based understanding of the patterns, motives, and mentalities of violent extremists from the Islamic State and al-Shabaab to white supremacists and incels. He argues that there is not a straightforward psychological profile of a terrorist, in part because of the great variety of today’s extremists, who are able to attract a more diverse pool of recruits than ever before. But even though there is no one-size-fits-all profile, psychological study can provide crucial insight into why and how people become terrorists.Accessible and nuanced, Terrorist Minds: The Psychology of Violent Extremism from Al-Qaeda to the Far Right (Columbia UP, 2023) is an essential book for readers interested in what psychology can explain about extremist behavior. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

War is often thought of mainly the concern of professional soldiers and maybe politicians as well. However, philosophers and theorists of varying types have addressed the issue of war in its many aspects. This is because war has numerous political, ethical, philosophical, and even legal elements. When is the right time to go to war? What is a legitimate reason to go to war? Who has the proper authority to declare war? Who should serve and fight in war? These and other questions have been debated since the times of Antiquity to the present day. Greek philosophy, Roman law, and the Jewish and Christian religious traditions have formed the foundations for the majority of Western thinking concerning the nature of war. In her book War: A Genealogy of Western Ideas and Practices (Oxford University Press, 2022), Beatrice Hesuer traces the nearly 2,500 year history of how these ideas have shaped Western conceptions of war.Beatrice Heuser holds the Chair in International Relations at Glasgow University. From 1991-2003 she taught at the Department of War Studies, King's College London, ultimately as Chair of International and Strategic Studies. She has also taught at Sciences Po' and the Universities Paris I, IV (Sorbonne), and VIII (St Denis), and at two German universities. From 1997-1998, she worked in the International Staff at NATO headquarters in Brussels. Between 2003-2007 she was Director for Research at the Military History Research Office of the Bundeswehr in Potsdam. She is also the host of the Talking Strategy podcast for the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Naval forces exist to control the seas and project power, often through the use of violence. This does not, however, include everything they have done or can do. Navies have always spent much of their time and resources engaged in operations that fall outside the traditional definitions of sea power. These activities have at times contributed far more to their respective nations' security and prosperity than kinetic actions but receive far less attention than their benefits merit. In J. Overton's edited volume Seapower by Other Means: Naval Contributions to National Objectives Beyond Sea Control, Power Projection, and Traditional Service Missions (Nomos, 2023), an international collection of historians and strategists share new, or re-learned, perspectives to serve as inspiration for further study and to broaden the discussion on what naval forces can do and be. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

The on-going war in Ukraine continues to highlight the distinct differences between how Russia operates large-scale military operations from the usual manner NATO military forces often engage themselves. What accounts for the Russian way of war? A common term used to describe Russian military strategy in the 21st century is "hybrid warfare" that seeks to subvert an enemy force in manners other than direct confrontation. Curtis L. Fox argues in his book Hybrid Warfare: The Russian Approach to Strategic Competition & Conventional Military Conflict (30 Press Publishing, 2023) that this approach to warfare is rooted in Russian history and explains much of Russia's conduct in the war in Ukraine thus far.Curtis L. Fox is a former Green Beret and served as a demolitions and combat engineering expert on a Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha, as well as other operational duties and missions. He separated from the Army in 2016 to attend the MBA program at Georgetown before re-entering public service in the Department of Defense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security