New Books in National Security

States of Justice: The Politics of the International Criminal Court (Cambridge University Press, 2020) theorizes the ways in which states that are presumed to be weaker in the international system use the International Criminal Court (ICC) to advance their security and political interests. Ultimately, the book contends that African states have managed to instrumentally and strategically use the international justice system to their advantage, a theoretical framework that challenges the “justice cascade” argument. The empirical work of this study focuses on four major themes around the intersection of power, states’ interests, and the global governance of atrocity crimes: first, the strategic use of self-referrals to the ICC; second, complementarity between the national and the international justice systems; third, the limits of state cooperation with international courts; and fourth, the use of international courts in domestic political conflicts.Oumar Ba is an assistant professor of political science at Morehouse College. The draft manuscript on which his book was based was the 2019 International Studies Association (ISA) Northeast Scholars’ Circle honoree. In 2020, Opinio Juris hosted a symposium on States of Justice, and Africa is a Country hosted a discussion on race and international relations with Oumar Ba and Samar al-Bulushi.Madina Thiam is a PhD candidate in history at UCLA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Over the past six decades, Henry Kissinger has been America's most consistently praised--and reviled--public figure. He was hailed as a "miracle worker" for his peacemaking in the Middle East, pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union, negotiation of an end to the Vietnam War, and secret plan to open the United States to China. He was assailed from the left and from the right for his indifference to human rights, complicity in the pointless sacrifice of American and Vietnamese lives, and reliance on deception and intrigue. Was he a brilliant master strategist--"the 20th century's greatest 19th century statesman"--or a cold-blooded monster who eroded America's moral standing for the sake of self-promotion?In Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography (Hill and Wang, 2020), the renowned diplomatic historian Thomas A. Schwartz  offers an authoritative, and fair-minded, answer to this question. While other biographers have engaged in hagiography or demonology, Schwartz takes a measured view of his subject. He recognizes Kissinger's successes and acknowledges that Kissinger thought seriously and with great insight about the foreign policy issues of his time, while also recognizing his failures, his penchant for backbiting, and his reliance on ingratiating and fawning praise of the president as a source of power. Throughout, Schwartz stresses Kissinger's artful invention of himself as a celebrity diplomat and his domination of the medium of television news. He also notes Kissinger's sensitivity to domestic and partisan politics, complicating--and undermining--the image of the far-seeing statesman who stands above the squabbles of popular strife.Rounded and textured, and rich with new insights into key dilemmas of American power, Henry Kissinger and American Power stands as an essential guide to a man whose legacy is as complex as the last sixty years of US history itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Anwar al-Awlaki was, according to one of his followers, “the main man who translated jihad into English.” By the time he was killed by an American drone strike in 2011, he had become a spiritual leader for thousands of extremists, especially in the United States and Britain, where he aimed to make violent Islamism “as American as apple pie and as British as afternoon tea.”In Incitement: Anwar al-Awlaki’s Western Jihad (Harvard UP, 2020), Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens draws on extensive research among al-Awlaki’s former colleagues, friends, and followers, including interviews with convicted terrorists, to explain how he established his network and why his message resonated with disaffected Muslims in the West.A native of New Mexico, al-Awlaki rose to prominence in 2001 as the imam of a Virginia mosque attended by three of the 9/11 hijackers. After leaving for Britain in 2002, he began delivering popular lectures and sermons that were increasingly radical and anti-Western. In 2004 he moved to Yemen, where he eventually joined al-Qaeda and oversaw numerous major international terrorist plots. Through live video broadcasts to Western mosques and universities, YouTube, magazines, and other media, he soon became the world’s foremost English-speaking recruiter for violent Islamism. One measure of his success is that he has been linked to about a quarter of Islamists convicted of terrorism-related offenses in the United States since 2007.Despite the extreme nature of these activities, Meleagrou-Hitchens argues that al-Awlaki’s strategy and tactics are best understood through traditional social-movement theory. With clarity and verve, he shows how violent fundamentalists are born.Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

In Disordered Violence: How Gender, Race and Heteronormativity Structure Terrorism (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), Caron Gentry looks at how gender, race, and heteronormative expectations of public life shape Western understandings of terrorism as irrational, immoral and illegitimate. Gentry examines the profiles of 8 well-known terrorist actors. Gentry identifies the gendered, racial, and sexualized assumptions in how their stories are told. Additionally, she interrogates how the current counterterrorism focus upon radicalization is another way of constructing terrorists outside of the Western ideal. Finally, the book argues that mainstream Terrorism Studies must contend with the growing misogynist and racialized violence against women.Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Today’s begins a new set of podcasts from New Books in Political Science called POST-SCRIPT. Lilly Goren and I invite authors back to the podcast to react to contemporary political developments that engage their scholarship.In a podcast devoted to the concerning political developments in China, four scholars -- from political science, history, and particle physics(!) -- provide insights into the devastating effects of new security laws in Hong Kong, the nuances of China’s censorship and surveillance, the essential connection between science and politics, distinguishing racism and geo-political threat, resisting self-censorship, and genocidal atrocities against the Uighurs in Xinjiang.Recorded on July 30, 2020, the podcast provides a primer for those who have not had the bandwidth to follow the developments in China but also a chance for specialists to hear an interdisciplinary panel of top scholars bring their research expertise to contemporary events that evolve each day. All of these scholars have recent articles in outlets that we commonly access like The Guardian and the New York Times. Links to both their popular public and scholarly work are provided below for all readers (and students!) -- and also their generous recommendations of other great sources of insights on Chinese politics and U.S.-China relations.Dr. Yangyang Cheng is an accomplished particle physicist, postdoctoral research associate at Cornell University, and member of the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Dr. James Millward is Professor of Inter-societal History in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.Margaret Roberts is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Jeffrey Wasserstrom is the Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. Benjamin Warren assisted with this podcast.Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (August 2020). Follow her on Twitter, @SusanLiebell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, American nuclear policy continues to be influenced by the legacies of the Cold War. Nuclear policies remain focused on easily identifiable threats, including China or Russia, and how the United States would respond in the event of a first strike against the homeland. In their new book, The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump (BenBella Books, 2020), Tom Z. Collina, Policy Director at Ploughshares Fund, and former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry argue that American nuclear policy overemphasizes the first-strike threat, while ignoring other, more likely nuclear scenarios. The Button outlines the hazards in current American nuclear policy and argues for realistic improvements in nuclear defense policy and processes.Collina and Perry identify two main problems of American nuclear defense policy. First, American policy incorrectly focuses on a first strike by China or Russia as the major threat. The two authors refute this and describe such a scenario as unlikely because China and Russia know that any nuclear attack by them will be met with retaliation from the United States. A nuclear attack and response would undoubtedly cripple both sides and provide little if any benefit to anyone. The second problem defined in The Button is that in the United States, since the advent of nuclear weapons, has placed sole authority to use the weapons in this first-strike capacity in the hands of the president and the president alone. This process and structure continue to be based in a holdover of Cold War mentality and have always been at odds with the constitutional requirements around war declarations. Drawing on historical examples and Secretary Perry’s own experiences in a number of positions within the national security structure in the United States, The Button describes instances of false alarms, moments where presidents had faulty intelligence, and times when presidents were not necessarily thinking clearly. In each of these examples, the president could mistakenly or accidently launch a nuclear attack and set off World War III.Recognizing these gaps in nuclear defense policy, Collina and Perry recommend a number of changes that start with changing the thrust of the policy itself and moving away from the first-strike capability. Instead, they advocate for policy that is more clearly focused on cyber attacks, noting that in the 21st century, cyber warfare is a more clear and present threat than is nuclear war. Additionally, Collina and Perry argue that the president should not have sole authority over the capacity to launch the U.S. nuclear arsenal. While there have been recent congressional hearings on this dimension of American national security, The Button sketches out how various approaches that will maintain national security while also minimizing the potential for accidental use of nuclear weapons. Collina and Perry advocate for a rethinking of the structure of nuclear defense policy in the United States and for installing greater protections against nuclear war.Adam Liebell-McLean assisted with this podcastLilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Despite the devastation caused by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 60-foot tsunami that struck Japan in 2011, some 96% of those living and working in the most disaster-stricken region of Tōhoku made it through. Smaller earthquakes and tsunamis have killed far more people in nearby China and India. What accounts for the exceptionally high survival rate? And why is it that some towns and cities in the Tōhoku region have built back more quickly than others?Black Wave: How Networks and Governance Shaped Japan’s 3/11 Disasters (University of Chicago Press) illuminates two critical factors that had a direct influence on why survival rates varied so much across the Tōhoku region following the 3/11 disasters and why the rebuilding process has also not moved in lockstep across the region. Individuals and communities with stronger networks and better governance, Daniel P. Aldrich shows, had higher survival rates and accelerated recoveries. Less-connected communities with fewer such ties faced harder recovery processes and lower survival rates.Beyond the individual and neighborhood levels of survival and recovery, the rebuilding process has varied greatly, as some towns and cities have sought to work independently on rebuilding plans, ignoring recommendations from the national government and moving quickly to institute their own visions, while others have followed the guidelines offered by Tokyo-based bureaucrats for economic development and rebuilding.The datasets Daniel mentions in the podcast are available here.Daniel P. Aldrich is director of the Security and Resilience Studies Program and professor of political science and public policy at Northeastern University. You can find him on twitter @DanielPAldrichBeth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

In Peace, Reconciliation and Social Justice Leadership in the 21st Century: The Role of Leaders and Followers (Emerald, 2019) co-edited by Dr. H. Eric Schockman, Vanessa Alexandra Hernandez Soto, and Aldo Boitano de Moras, expert contributors explore ways that leaders and followers can bring forth pacifism, peace building, nonviolence, forgiveness, and social cooperation. Chapters focus on the role of positive public policies on the national and international order and leadership and followership in harmonizing differences and personifying space. It includes lessons learned from post-conflict societies in Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Chile, and others to remind us all that peace is a collective endeavour where no one can take a back seat.Dr. H. Eric Schockman a Professor of Politics and International Relations and Coordinator of Humanities and the Center for Leadership at Woodbury University. He also teaches in the MPA program at CSU Northridge, and the PhD program in Global Leadership and Change at Pepperdine University. A public policy expert, Dr. Schockman previously served as Associate Dean and Associate Adjunct Professor at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. He is the President and the founder of the Global Hunger Foundation, which funds sustainable development and organic farming projects to assist women in the developing world break the chains of poverty. (The Global Hunger Foundation’s site is here: https://globalhungerfoundation.org/.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Gulf scholar Sigurd Neubauer’s The Gulf Region and Israel: Old Struggles, New Alliances makes a significant contribution to our understanding of what drives shifting alliances in the Middle East, an ever more volatile part of the world.Shunned by Arab states for much of its existence, Israel has become in recent years a key factor in efforts by Gulf states to punch above their weight, shape the greater Middle East in their mould, box in countries like Iran and Turkey, and manage their reputations in Washington and ties to the United States.A keen student of the region, Neubauer clearly lays out the limitations of burgeoning alliances in the absence of the resolution of the Middle East’s myriad conflicts among which are the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians and the rift between Gulf states.In doing so, he has written an easily accessible book that is must read for anyone, even those with only a cursory interest in a part of the world that too often impacts the lives of those far beyond its boundaries.Sigurd Neubauer is an internationally recognized authority on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Persian Gulf Security, U.S.-Arab relations, Middle East politics, Arab-Israeli relations, Afghanistan, and U.S. defense industry. His expertise also includes NATO, Norwegian defense policy and transatlantic relations.James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, adjunct senior fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and the author of the globally syndicated column and blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

The ways in which states and empires spy on and study one another has changed a great deal over time in line with shifting political priorities, written traditions and technologies. Even on this highly diverse global background, however, the long process of licit and illicit familiarization between Russia and China as Eurasian neighbours is a particularly compelling story, one told in engrossing detail in Gregory Afinogenov’s Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power (Harvard University Press).Moving from the first engagements between seventeenth-century Muscovy and the Qing imperium, through the reformist era of Peter the Great, and up to nineteenth-century Russian annexation of late-Qing territory, the author tells dozens of richly-sourced tales of envoys, agents and missionaries and the worlds of information they wove.As well as making us look in new ways at how knowledge is authored and acted upon politically, Spies and Scholars is a trove of insights into the centuries-long entanglements which have shaped Sino-Russian relationships up to the present.Gregory Afinogenov is Assistant Professor of Imperial Russian History at Georgetown University and Associate Editor at Kritika, the leading journal of Russian and Eurasian history.Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security