New Books in World Affairs

Dr. Jon Mills, has had an impressive career as practicing professional, researcher, educator and writer in the psychology and psychoanalytic field. His work bounds the world of philosophy and psychology, focusing upon both individual human behavior and the manifestation of the collective behavior in the social context. He is the author and/or editor of over 30 books in psychoanalysis, philosophy, psychology, and cultural studies He is Emeritus Professor of Psychology & Psychoanalysis at the Adler Graduate Professional School in Toronto, Canada and has had appointments as Honorary Professor, Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, Colchester, UK; Faculty member in the Postgraduate Programs in Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy, Gordon F. Derner School of Psychology, Adelphi University, NY and the New School for Existential Psychoanalysis, CA Jon has received numerous awards for his scholarship including 4 Gradiva Awards, for his work that advances the field of psychoanalysis. And in 2015 he was given the Otto Weininger Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Canadian Psychological Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In 2007, Tim Weiner published the book Legacy of Ashes. It was a history of the CIA from its founding to the early 2000s. As a university student in Italy, I bought the book as soon as it came out. The second non-fiction book I ever bought in English. The book was riveting. It kickstarted my interest in the CIA and covert operations. Now, Tim Weiner has published a sequel to Legacy of Ashes. His new book is called The Mission: the CIA in the 21st Century (Mariner Books, 2025). It is a gripping and revelatory history of the from the late 1990s to the present. It ranges from 9/11 through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to today's battles with Russia and China--and with the President of the United States.  At the turn of the century, the Central Intelligence Agency was in crisis. The end of the Cold War had robbed the agency of its mission. More than thirty overseas stations and bases had been shuttered, and scores that remained had been severely cut back. Many countries where surveillance was once deemed crucial went uncovered. Essential intelligence wasn't being collected. At the dawn of the information age, the CIA's officers and analysts worked with outmoded technology, struggling to distinguish the clear signals of significant facts from the cacophony of background noise.  Then came September 11th, 2001. After the attacks, the CIA transformed itself into a lethal paramilitary force, running secret prisons and brutal interrogations, mounting deadly drone attacks, and all but abandoning its core missions of espionage and counterespionage. The consequences were grave: the deaths of scores of its recruited foreign agents, the theft of its personnel files by Chinese spies, the penetration of its computer networks by Russian intelligence and American hackers, and the tragedies of Afghanistan and Iraq. A new generation of spies now must fight the hardest targets--Moscow, Beijing, Tehran--while confronting a president who has attacked the CIA as a subversive force.  The book reveals how the agency fought to rebuild the espionage powers it lost during the war on terror--and finally succeeded in penetrating the Kremlin. The key message of the book is that the CIA must reclaim its original mission: know thy enemies. This is made even more difficult by the attacks on the intelligence community deployed by the second Trump presidency, from unqualified senior officials to loyalty tests. The fate of the free world hangs in the balance. The Mission includes exclusive on-the-record interviews with six former CIA directors, the top spymaster, thirteen station chiefs, and scores of top operations officers who served undercover for decades and have never spoken to a journalist before. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Offering Southern feminist assessments of detailed case studies from 12 countries, this open access book Pandemic Policies and Resistance: Southern Feminist Critiques in Times of Covid-19 (Bloomsbury, 2025) provides crucial insights into the gendered repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic on macroeconomics, labour, migration and human mobilities, and care and social protection throughout the Global South. Using DAWN's interlinkages approach, the chapters provide a comprehensive and intersectional perspective on how the pandemic affected, and continues to affect people, especially women and girls of different ages, gender identity and sexual orientation, class, race, ethnicity, citizenship and migration status. Written by Southern feminist academics, activists and thinkers across Asia, Africa, the Carribbean, Latin America, and the Pacific, the volume highlights how the pandemic was often used as an opportunity to create periods of exception that compromised democratic processes. Contributors pay special attention to the opportunities for transformative practices that emerged during the pandemic, highlighting the role of resistance and social mobilization. By bringing to light important new forms of resistance the chapters make important interventions into critical debates on the role of the state, the market, civil society, and grassroots organizing in addressing pandemics, other complex crises, and their aftermaths. This volume ultimately challenges dominant narratives that overlook the gendered implications of crises, and in doing so provides an original, feminist analytical framework for understanding policy trends shaping realities the world over - one that offers concrete policy and practice recommendations for fostering southern-based feminist and social justice. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN). Open access book here Southern Feminist Toolkit for Activism here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Causal Inquiry in International Relations (Oxford UP, 2024) by Adam R. C. Humphreys and Hidemi Suganami defends a new, philosophically informed account of the principles which must underpin any causal research in a discipline such as International Relations. Its central claim is that there is an underlying logic to all causal inquiry, at the core of which is the search for empirical evidence capable of ruling out competing accounts of how specific events were brought about. Although this crucial fact is obscured by the ‘culture of generalization’ which predominates in contemporary social science, all causal knowledge ultimately depends on the provision of empirical support for concrete claims about specific events, located in space and time.  Causal Inquiry in International Relations not only explores existing philosophical debates around causation; it also provides a detailed study of some of the most fundamental methodological questions which arise in the course of causal inquiry. Using examples drawn from philosophy and from the study of international relations, it demonstrates what is problematic about established ways of thinking, brings new clarity to both philosophical and methodological questions, and seeks to enhance collective understanding of the contribution that causal inquiry can make to empirically rich and critically aware scholarship about world politics. It concludes by situating ‘causal inquiry’ in relation to other forms of inquiry employed in the study of world politics, emphasizing especially the often unnoticed dependence of causal inquiry on precisely the kind of knowledge of specific events which historians are well placed to provide. Adam Humphreys is Associate Professor and Head of Department in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Reading. He joined the University of Reading in 2013, having previously been a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford (2007-10) and Fellow in Politics at Brasenose College, Oxford (2010-13). His principal research interests are in International Relations theory and meta-theory, especially causation and causal explanation, realism and neo-realism, the English School, and the relationship between theory and history. He also has research interests in British foreign and defence policy, strategy, and the ethics of war.Hidemi Suganami studied International Relations at Tokyo, Aberystwyth, and London Universities. His first academic appointment was at Keele in 1975, where he later became Professor of the Philosophy of International Relations. In 2004, he moved to Aberystwyth, where currently he is Emeritus Professor of International Politics. His publications include: The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals (1989); On the Causes of War (1996); and, with Andrew Linklater, The English School of International Relations (2006). Over a number of years, he has been studying philosophical issues surrounding causation and explanation in International Relations. Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and 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/world-affairs

Dani Belo's Russian Warfare in the 21st Century: An Incentive-Opportunity Intervention Model (Routledge, 2025) provides a comprehensive analysis of Russia's foreign policy in gray zone conflicts, with a particular focus on its interventions in Ukraine. Challenging conventional views, the book contends that Russia's use of varied gray zone tactics is influenced by both system-level incentives and domestic-level opportunities, which are integrated here into the Incentive-Opportunity Intervention (IOI) Model. The book examines case studies including Abkhazia, Crimea, Odesa, Kharkiv, and the Donbas, demonstrating how local ethnic-based movements and perceptions of regional retreat shape Moscow's coercive strategies. It highlights the reactive nature of Russia's tactics, driven by perceived threats to its protector role, and the significant role of ethnic and political dynamics in the region. The study underscores the importance of understanding these motivations for effective conflict resolution and suggests that protecting minority rights could mitigate such interventions. Policy recommendations emphasize the need for nuanced approaches that address both geopolitical and local dynamics. Ultimately, the book calls for future research to apply the IOI Model to other great powers, enhance the generalizability and applicability of the findings, and highlight the potential for multilateral coordination in promoting minority rights as a strategy for conflict prevention. This book will be of much interest to students and policy practitioners working on Russian foreign policy, international security, Eastern European politics, and International Relations.  Dani Belo is an Assistant Professor of International Relations and Security and Director of the Global Policy Horizons Research Lab, Webster University in St. Louis, USA. Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and 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/world-affairs

The need for collective action has never been greater, but geopolitics, structural changes and diverging preferences mean that existing global governance arrangements, devised at Bretton Woods in the 1940s, are either unravelling or outmoded. Reconciling this contradiction is today's pressing global policy challenge.In New World New Rules: Global Cooperation in a World of Geopolitical Rivalries (Agenda, 2024), two of Europe's most-experienced policymakers and analysts outline a new agenda for global governance. They examine governance practices across several key policy areas - climate, health, trade and competition, banking and finance, taxation, migration and the digital economy - and consider what works and what doesn't, and why. The global governance solutions they put forward are ambitious but pragmatic. They require complexity, flexibility and compromise. Attributes that global governments are demonstrably short of, but today's global crises urgently demand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In the wake of World War II, the United States leveraged its hegemonic position in the international political system to gradually build a new global order centered around democracy, the expansion of free market capitalism, and the containment of communism. Named in retrospect the "liberal international order" (LIO), the system took decades to build and is still largely with us today even as the US's relative power within it has diminished. In Great Power, Great Responsibility: How the Liberal International Order Shapes US Foreign Policy (Oxford UP, 2025), Michael Poznansky explores how the LIO has influenced US foreign policy from its founding to the present. Proponents argue that its impact has been profound, producing a system that has been more rule-bound and beneficial than any previous order. Critics charge that it has failed to prevent the US itself from consistently violating rules and norms. Poznansky contends that the answer lies in between. While rule-breaking has been a constant feature of the postwar order, the nature of violations varies in surprising and poorly understood ways. America's approach to compliance with the LIO, including whether leaders feel the need to conceal rule violations at all, is a function of two primary factors: the intensity of competition over international order, and the burden of complying with the liberal order's core tenets in a given case. Drawing on nine case studies, including the Korean War and Iraq War, Great Power, Great Responsibility sheds important light on the future of US foreign policy in an era where American unipolarity has ended and great power rivalry has returned. Our guest is Michael Poznansky, an Associate Professor in the Strategic and Operational Research Department and a core faculty member in the Cyber & Innovation Policy Institute at the U.S. Naval War College. Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Fluid Russia: Between the Global and the National in the Post-Soviet Era (Cornell UP, 2021) offers a new framework for understanding Russian national identity by focusing on the impact of globalization on its formation, something which has been largely overlooked. This approach sheds new light on the Russian case, revealing a dynamic Russian identity that is developing along the lines of other countries exposed to globalization. Vera Michlin-Shapir shows how along with the freedoms afforded when Russia joined the globalizing world in the 1990s came globalization's disruptions. Michlin-Shapir describes Putin's rise to power and his project to reaffirm a stronger identity not as a uniquely Russian diversion from liberal democracy, but as part of a broader phenomenon of challenges to globalization. She underlines the limits of Putin's regime to shape Russian politics and society, which is still very much impacted by global trends. As well, Michlin-Shapir questions a prevalent approach in Russia studies that views Russia's experience with national identity as abnormal or defective, either being too weak or too aggressive. What is offered is a novel explanation for the so-called Russian identity crisis. As the liberal postwar order faces growing challenges, Russia's experience can be an instructive example of how these processes unfold. This study ties Russia's authoritarian politics and nationalist rallying to the shortcomings of globalization and neoliberal economics, potentially making Russia "patient zero" of the anti-globalist populist wave and rise of neo-authoritarian regimes. In this way, Fluid Russia contributes to the broader understanding of national identity in the current age and the complexities of identity formation in the global world. Guest: Vera Michlin-Shapir (she/her), is a Visiting Research Fellow at King's Russia Institute, King's College London. Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke here Linktree here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The concentration of terrorists, political suspects, ethnic minorities, prisoners of war, enemy aliens, and other potentially “dangerous” populations spans the modern era. From Konzentrationslager in colonial Africa to strategic villages in Southeast Asia, from slave plantations in America to Uyghur sweatshops in Xinjiang, and from civilian internment in World War II to extraordinary rendition at Guantanamo Bay, mass detention is as diverse as it is ubiquitous. Camps: A Global History of Mass Confinement (University of Toronto Press, 2024) offers a short but compelling guide to the varied manifestations of concentration camps in the last two centuries, while tracing provocative transnational connections with related institutions such as workhouses, migrant detention centers, and residential schools. Aidan Forth is an associate professor of British, imperial, and global history at MacEwan University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Crusading for Globalization: US Multinationals and Their Opponents Since 1945 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) tells the story of an extraordinarily influential group of business executives at the helms of the largest US multinational corporations and their quest to drive globalization forward over the last eight decades. Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl argues that the spectacular expansion of international investment, trade, and production after 1945 cannot be understood without considering the role played by these corporate globalizers and the organization they created, the US Council (today’s United States Council for International Business). By shaping governmental policy through their congressional lobbying and close connections to successive presidential administrations, US Council members, including executives from General Electric, Coca Cola, and IBM, among others, consistently fought for ever more market deregulation, culminating in the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995. Crusading for Globalization is also a book about those who opposed the growing might of multinationals. In the years immediately after World War II, resistance came from business protectionists, before labor and policymakers from the Global South joined the effort in the early 1970s. Schaufelbuehl breaks new ground by offering a panorama of this early anti-globalization movement, and by showing how the leaders of multinationals organized to limit its political influence. She also examines continuities between this early movement and the opposition to globalization that emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century from the left and the populist right and discusses how business responded by promoting corporate social responsibility and voluntary guidelines.The first book to shed light on what caused corporate executives to pursue a pro-globalization agenda and to examine their methods for dealing with their opponents, Crusading for Globalization reveals the historical roots of today’s disparities in wealth and income distribution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs