New Books in National Security

After Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko defected in 1945, Canada was shocked by the revelation that its own citizens were engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union. "P.S. Burn after Reading": The Kellock-Taschereau Commission and Soviet Espionage in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2026) explores how the Canadian government used the controversial Kellock-Taschereau Commission—sometimes judiciously, sometimes not—to uncover and thwart domestic spies during the early days of the Cold War.

Drawing on a wealth of sources, including the Commission’s extensive records, GRU documents turned over by Gouzenko, American Venona decrypts, Soviet KGB archives, and newly released...

Purges: How Dictators Fight to Survive (Cornell University Press, 2026) by Dr. Edward Goldring delves into one of the key tactics that autocrats deploy to maintain power: the removal of individuals from within the regime.

From Kim Jong Un's execution of his uncle to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's removal of over a hundred Turkish generals, purges bear significant consequences for the survival and endurance of autocrats. Yet much remains unknown about why dictators use purges and whether they achieve their intended effects.

Drawing on an original global dataset on civilian and military elite purges in dictatorships in ad...

Steve Feldstein's Bytes and Bullets: Global Rivalries, Private Tech, and the New Shape of Modern Warfare (St. Martin's Press, 2026) opens with a juxtaposition: China spending vast sums to reach the far side of the moon, and Ukraine using cheap drones to blunt a far larger military. Both are stories about technology and power, but they point in opposite directions.

In our conversation, Feldstein argues that the outcome of technological competition is not predetermined. Small states, non-state actors, and private companies with the right engineers can now challenge much stronger adversaries. We discuss Iran, whose military innovation grew out...

The strategic landscape of the Cold War generated political support for a permanent US military force of unprecedented scale. Faced with the problem of managing this behemoth, leaders of the defense bureaucracy looked to private industry for inspiration: since the military now resembled a huge industrial conglomerate, they reasoned, it should be run like a business. In Pentagon Capitalism: How the Cold War US Military Modeled Itself on Private Business (Harvard UP, 2026), Dr. A. J. Murphy explores the profound consequences of translating military structures of command, logistics, and warfare into capitalist terms.
In the realm of budgeting and fi...

Asymmetric Warfare: Politics and Cultures of Violence in the Modern Era (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

The forces that fight asymmetric wars are so distinct that one side avoids direct military confrontation in favor of political, social, or otherwise unorthodox means of resistance. These conflicts have been a mainstay of modern times, though scholars have often separated them into various designations by era. Observers have referred, in chronological order, to Indian warfare, petite guerre (small war), guerrilla warfare, irregular or revolutionary war, and terrorism. The proliferation of labels over time has obscured the continuity of asymmetric wars throughout modernity...

Counterrevolution in Egypt: Sisi's New Republic (Verso Books, 2026) is a rare and comprehensive examination of the structures, hierarchies, and methods of the military, police, and intelligence agencies. Drawing on meticulous research, it reveals the strategies deployed to suppress the revolutionary wave, from propaganda and surveillance to mass arrests, torture, and extrajudicial killings. El-Hamalawy traces the power dynamics within these institutions to show how their uneasy unity was both a response to the revolution and a determinant of its eventual fate.

Hossam el-Hamalawy is a journalist and socialist from Cairo, who was among the organisers of the 2011 uprising. He has...

In A Post-Liberal Peace: How Emergent Powers Are Reshaping Global Conflict Management (Cornell UP, 2026), Dr. Monalisa Adhikari shows how rising powers like India and China are reshaping global peace governance. Over recent decades, both countries have deepened engagement with institutions built on liberal principles, including those related to peacebuilding. Their growing role raises critical questions about how their approaches diverge from liberal models and their impact on the domestic politics of conflict-affected states.

Focusing on India and China's involvement in peace processes in Nepal and Myanmar, Dr. Adhikari demonstrates that these powers advance distinctive, state-centered programs that pr...

The opening of Iraq's Ba'th Party archives revolutionized the study of Iraqi politics and history, offering scholars unprecedented access to the inner workings of one of the world's most impenetrable autocracies. Ba‘thist Iraq Through Archives: Reflections, Explorations, and Opportunities (Stanford University Press, 2026) edited by Dr. Lisa Blaydes and Dr. Samuel Helfont brings together leading scholars to take stock of what we have learned from over a decade of research using the Ba'thist archives, contributing to a new understanding of Iraq's history, with wider implications for understanding authoritarianism in general.

The contributors show how research in these uniq...

Andrew Buchanan and Ruth Lawlor, The Greater Second World War: Global Perspectives (Cornell University Press, 2025)

This ambitious edited collection encourages readers to think in bigger ways about the global Second World War. That includes a wider frame in space and time, but also a larger geopolitical perspective of the war as a world-system crisis and an expanded social perspective on who fought the war and why. A team of international scholars take on this task in chapters ranging from the global alliance system and colonial mobilization to studies of particular cities and dockyards.

In a wide-rangin...

Since the inception of the Secret Service Bureau back in 1909, women have worked at the very heart of British secret intelligence - yet their contributions have been all but written out of history. Now, drawing on private and previously-classified documents, leading historian Claire Hubbard-Hall brings their gripping true stories to life in Her Secret Service: The Forgotten Women of British Intelligence (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2024). 

From encoding orders and decrypting enemy messages to penning propaganda and infiltrating organisations, the women of British intelligence played a pivotal role in both the First and Second World Wars. Prepare to meet the true...

Fakers: A Top-Secret Tale of Phantoms and Forgeries on the Disinformation Front Line (Oxford UP, 2026) reveals the rise and fall of the mavericks running Britain's Cold War forgery empire. Their secret mission was audacious: to disrupt and discredit adversaries across the world using phantom groups, fake sources, and counterfeit documents.

The leader was a remarkable character, wrestling with personal and professional dilemmas: Hans Welser. An Austrian refugee and one-time MI5 suspect interned behind barbed wire, Welser was a great survivor who rose to become special operations adviser to the Foreign Office, working hand in glove with MI6. Hi...

Why has Russia's military struggled to adapt to the challenges of contemporary warfare? Despite years of attempts to improve its military capabilities, Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 revealed a crippling lack of skill, discipline and equipment. Non-material factors, in particular the power struggle between military and civilian leaderships, have hindered reform of its armed forces: with officers dominating defence policy, the Kremlin has struggled to implement the necessary changes. In Civil-Military Relations in Russian Defense Policymaking (Oxford UP, 2026) Kirill Shamiev explores the political reasons behind Russia's poor military preparedness for the war in Ukraine. He demonstrates how a seeming...

An in-depth examination of how the United States can build more effective partner militaries.

Military assistance has a bad reputation. Large-scale attempts to build partner militaries in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam cost the United States billions of dollars and ended ignominiously, with the collapse of local forces as American troops withdrew. Arms transfers of sophisticated, American-made weapons often appear to do more harm than good. Yet military assistance and support—operating indirectly through partners—when done right, can deliver remarkable strategic results for the United States and its partners. Working effectively with partner militaries is one of the...

How should executives position a company for growth when the geopolitical future is so uncertain? Recent events in Ukraine and the Middle East and tightening restrictions on international trade and investment are reshaping the global business environment. History shows that any such era of change presents both challenges and opportunities. The authors of Geostrategy by Design: How to Manage Geopolitical Risk in the New Era of Globalization (Disruption Books, 2024) use examples, from historical global turning points to recent political disruptions, to illustrate how geostrategy is essential to surviving and succeeding in the next era of globalization.

Le...

France is a leading intelligence power, but we know very little about its premier intelligence agency: the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE). Damien Van Puyvelde's latest book, The DGSE: A Concise History of France's Foreign Intelligence Service (Georgetown University Press, 2026), examines France's foreign intelligence service from its rebranding as the DGSE in 1982 to the present.

It covers the legacies of the Second World War, how decolonization and the Cold War shaped the organization, the organization's workforce and leadership, as well as public and (pop) cultural perceptions and representations of intelligence in France. The eme...

Jeffrey Whyte's book The Birth of Psychological War: Propaganda, Espionage, and Military Violence from WWII to the Vietnam War (Oxford UP, 2023) explores the history, politics, and geography of United States psychological warfare in the 20th century against the backdrop of the contemporary 'post-truth era'. From its origins in the Second World War, to the United States' counterinsurgency campaigns in Vietnam, Whyte traces how the theory and practice of psychological warfare transformed the relationship between the home front and theatres of war. Whyte interrogates the broader political mythologies that animate popular conceptions of psychological war, such as its claim to ma...

In Retrench, Defend, Compete: Securing America's Future Against a Rising China (Cornell UP, 2025), Charles L. Glaser advances a thought-provoking strategy for securing vital US interests in the face of China's rise.

Many believe China's ascent will drive it to war with the United States. Yet this is far from inevitable; geography and nuclear weapons should ensure US security. The real danger, Glaser contends, lies in East Asia's territorial disputes, especially over Taiwan. To reduce the risk of war, Glaser makes a bold case for ending US security commitments to Taiwan and carefully calibrating its policies on protecting Sou...

The field of Strategic Studies, which studies the use and threat of force for political purposes, has seen the repeated rise of concepts to dominate discourses and research agendas, only to eventually fall to the margins again. What explains this cyclical pattern? What are the consequences for our understanding of war?
Reconceptualizing War: The Rise and Fall of Fashionable Concepts in Strategic Studies (Oxford UP, 2026) by Dr. Chiara Libiseller examines these questions by likening the coming and going of theories to fashions. While in vogue, fashionable concepts are used widely, becoming broader and vaguer until essentially stripped of m...

From a renowned Yale historian comes a chilling look at the looming threat of the next Great Power war and the urgent interventions necessary to avoid it in the twenty-first century.
The vast majority of people alive today have come of age in a world of remarkable stability, presided over by either one or two Superpowers. This is not to say the world has been peaceful; but it has, to a great extent, been predictable. As an increasing number of Great Powers jostle for regional supremacy, as well as competitive advantage in nuclear technology, artificial intelligence, space exploration, a...

Based on a decade of research and writing, enriched by eyewitness interviews and revealing documents obtained through dozens of freedom of information requests, Kennedy’s Coup vividly recreates the Kennedy Administration’s secret encouragement of the fatal 1963 military coup against South Vietnam’s president Ngo Dinh Diem.
The brutal assassination of Diem by his own generals—which capped weeks of bitter White House infighting—led to dreadful consequences for the United States, opening the door to nine years of costly and futile warfare in Vietnam. Jack Cheevers provides unforgettable portraits of the people behind this fascinating drama: the kindly, phil...

Stephen Sims’ New Atlantis essay examines how emerging technologies are reshaping the structure and authority of the modern nation-state. He argues that innovations such as artificial intelligence, drones, and networked warfare are weakening the traditional link between territorial control and the projection of power, enabling smaller actors to operate with unprecedented reach. At the same time, advanced states are enhancing their internal capabilities through data-driven governance and automation, increasing their ability to monitor and manage populations. This dynamic creates a paradox in which states grow more powerful domestically while becoming more vulnerable externally. Sims contends that sovereignty is fragmenting, with...

Frank Wisner was one of the most powerful men in 1950s Washington, though few knew it. Reporting directly to senior U.S. officials--his work largely hidden from Congress and the public-- Wisner masterminded some of the CIA’s most daring and controversial operations in the early years of the Cold War, commanding thousands of clandestine agents around the world.
Following an early career marked by exciting escapades as a key World War II spy under General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Wisner quickly rose through the postwar intelligence ranks to lead a newly created top-secret unit tasked--under little oversight--with overse...

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, US officials identified the so-called battle for hearts and minds as the “second front” in the war on terror. A wave of funding flowed into public diplomacy in the Middle East, seeking to change views of the United States through Arabic-language communications—often while hiding the traces of American origins. To what extent did this vast propaganda apparatus sway Arab public opinion? Which ideas and actors shaped American public diplomacy in this period? What are the lessons for information strategy today?

The Long War of Ideas: American Public Diplomacy in Arabic...

Why do adversaries sometimes cooperate to restrain their military competition? Why do they design arms control agreements with intrusive verification in some cases but rely on minimal transparency in others? Amidst ongoing international competition, arms control remains rare despite potential mutual benefits, and agreements vary dramatically in their approaches to monitoring. Enemies in Agreement: Political Volatility and the Design of Arms Control (Cambridge UP, 2026) reveals how uncertainty from domestic political changes, such as leadership transitions or social unrest, can enable arms control.

The book identifies two paths to agreement: during periods of uncertainty, states that previously relied on...

Nowhere is the dual threat of climate change and geopolitical contest felt more strongly than in the Arctic. Sea ice is declining rapidly, wildfires are burning, and permafrost is thawing. All the while, global interest is gathering apace as the region transforms from being a frozen desert into an international waterway. In this episode, Mia Bennett—co-author with Kalus Dodds of Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic (Yale UP, 2025)—discusses the state of the Arctic today, highlighting the twin dangers of climate change and geopolitical competition, as well as how the region is becoming a space for expe...

Sustaining Peace After Civil War: Insights from 48 Recent Cases (Springer, 2026) examines one of the most important questions in peace research: What leads to enduring peace after civil wars, and what leads to the resurgence of violence? For decades, intrastate conflicts have been the predominant form of armed conflict, and most recent civil wars were conflicts that recurred. The research presented in this book focuses on influenceable factors, first and foremost on the type of civil war termination and on the post-civil war order that is shaped by the distribution of military power between the former warring parties and the sca...

Fifty years ago, a government investigation led by US senator Frank Church uncovered some of the darkest state secrets of the twentieth century. The Church Committee confirmed the nation's worst fears about the unchecked power of its intelligence agencies: at the FBI, surveillance campaigns against civil rights leaders and clandestine attempts to disrupt antiwar protests; at the CIA, assassination plots against foreign heads of state, experiments with toxic substances and illegal drugs, and covert partnerships with the Mafia. The Church Committee's findings were so explosive that key members found themselves on the watch lists of the very government agencies...

Since the end of the Cold War and the resurgence of great power competition on the world stage, NATO has been in a period of transition to adapting to the new international security environment that is mark by great instability and violations of international law. These types of situation have in recent years have been labelled "grey-zone" style threats that can be dangerous but may avoid the official legal definition of warlike activity. 
To combat this concerning situation has arisen the concept of "Stability Policing" that helps ensure that the rule of law is established and preserved in th...

In his new book, The Political Economy of Security (Princeton University Press, 2026), Stephen Brooks provides a systematic empirical and theoretical examination of how economic factors influence security affairs. Empirically, he analyzes how various economic variables affect interstate war, terrorism, and civil war; in total, sixteen pathways are examined. 

Brooks shows that the relationship between economic factors and conflict is complex and multifaceted; discrete economic factors—such as international trade, economic development, and globalized manufacturing, to name a few—are sometimes helpful for promoting peace and stability, but at other times are detrimental. Brooks also develops a stronger theoreti...

Nuclear status is typically treated as a stable feature of a state's capacity to possess, use, or build nuclear weapons. Challenging this view, After Fission: Recognition and Contestation in the Atomic Age (Cambridge University Press, 2026) by Dr. Sidra Hamidi reveals how states contest their nuclear status in the atomic age. By examining the legal structure of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, technical ambiguities surrounding nuclear testing, and debates over rights and responsibilities in the global nuclear regime, Dr. Hamidi argues that a state's nuclear status is not simply a function of technical capability. Instead, states actively contest the way they want th...

Towards the end of the Cold War, the last great struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union marked the end of détente, and escalated into the most dangerous phase of the conflict since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Aaron Donaghy examines the complex history of America's largest peacetime military buildup, which was in turn challenged by the largest peacetime peace movement. Focusing on the critical period between 1977 and 1985, Donaghy shows how domestic politics shaped dramatic foreign policy reversals by Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. These reversals, the book argues, were influenced by president's willingness to take ri...

In Multidomain Operations: The Pursuit of Battlefield Dominance in the 21st Century (Howgate Publishing Limited, 2026), Amos Fox and Franz-Stefan Gady challenge one of modern war’s most influential doctrines: MDO. Is it the right framework for 21st-century conflict—or a concept rushed into service without sufficient grounding? Through the lenses of origin, field application, academic critique, and international perspectives, the authors examine MDO’s theoretical and practical shortcomings. They argue that MDO is a solution in search of a problem—strategically narrow, tactically vague, and ill-suited for America’s allies. This book calls for a doctrinal reset: one that addresses pr...

Jane Armstrong Tucker was a Boston stenographer scrabbling to get by as a single woman in the Gilded Age, until she was offered a once-in-a-lifetime chance. Madeleine Pollard was a Kentuckian with humble roots who had used charisma to work her way into the parlors of the Washington, DC, elite. Tucker hid behind an alias―Agnes Parker―but Pollard had a secret, too.

Alias Agnes: The Notorious Tale of a Gilded Age Spy (UP of Kentucky, 2025) details the story of Jane Tucker, who took a job as an undercover detective with a ten-week mission. Her target: Madeleine Pollard...

Ask an American intelligence officer to tell you when the country started doing modern intelligence and you will probably hear something about the Office of Strategic Services in World War II or the National Security Act of 1947 and the formation of the Central Intelligence Agency. What you almost certainly will not hear is anything about World War I. 

In World War I and the Foundations of American Intelligence (UP of Kansas, 2023), Mark Stout establishes that, in fact, World War I led to the realization that intelligence was indispensable in both wartime and peacetime. After a lengthy gestation that...

The International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 formally established the promotion of religious freedom as a U.S. foreign policy and national security priority. Tracing its origins and passage, Prioritizing Faith: International Religious Freedom and U.S. Foreign Policy (NYU Press, 2025) by Dr. Ashlyn Hand shows how the legislation was made possible by the convergence of growing evangelical and Jewish advocacy, the expanding international human rights movement, and a broader search for post–Cold War purpose. Yet implementation across administrations has been uneven, shaped by shifting geopolitical dynamics and internal institutional constraints.
Relying on expert interviews and rich archival anal...

At the heart of cybersecurity lies a paradox: Cooperation makes conflict possible. In Age of Deception (Cornell University Press 2025), Jon R. Lindsay shows that widespread trust in cyberspace enables espionage and subversion. While such acts of secret statecraft have long been part of global politics, digital systems have dramatically expanded their scope and scale. Yet success in secret statecraft hinges less on sophisticated technology than on political context.

To make sense of this, Lindsay offers a general theory of intelligence performance—the analogue to military performance in battle—that explains why spies and hackers alike depend on clandes...

When it comes to the political, acts of redaction, erasure, and blacking out sit in awkward tension with the myth of transparent governance, borderless access, and frictionless communication. But should there be more than this brute juxtaposition of truth and secrecy?

Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State (punctum books, 2024) brings together essays, poems, artwork, and memes—a bricolage of media that conveys the experience of living in state-inflected worlds in flux. Critically and poetically engaging with redaction in politically charged contexts (from the United States and Denmark to Russia, China, and North Korea), the volume...

Jason Burke's The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s (Knopf, 2026) is an epic, authoritative, gripping account of the years when a new wave of revolutionaries seized the skies and the streets to hold the world for ransom In the 1970s, an unprecedented wave of international terrorism broke out around the world. More ambitious, networked and far-reaching than ever before, new armed groups terrorized the West with intricately planned plane hijackings and hostage missions, leaving governments scrambling to cope. Their motives were as diverse as their methods. Some sought to champion Palestinian liberation, others to topple West...

A new and provocative take on the formerly classified history of accelerating superpower military competition in space in the late Cold War and beyond.

In March 1983, President Ronald Reagan shocked the world when he announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), derisively known as “Star Wars,” a space-based missile defense program aimed at protecting the US from nuclear attack. In Weapons in Space, Aaron Bateman draws on recently declassified American, European, and Soviet documents to provide an insightful account of SDI, situating it within a new phase in the militarization of space following the collapse of superpower détente...

Across the globe, democracy is in crisis - in the UK alone, it has been rocked by Brexit, the pandemic and successive attempts by governments to bypass legal norms.

But how did this happen, and where might we go from here?

Jonathan Sumption cuts through the political noise with acute analysis of the state of democracy today - from the vulnerabilities of international law to the deepening suppression of democracy activism in Hong Kong, and from the complexities of human rights legislation to the defence of freedom of speech.

Timely...