New Books In World Affairs

In a matter of decades, a spectacular cold-water paradise thirty million years in the making is succumbing to warming oceans. Kelp forests are largely out of sight, hidden under the ocean’s surface, yet they are one of Earth’s most wondrous and underappreciated marine habitats. It’s an ethereal light-infused realm of sharks, otters, eels, sea stars, crabs, rockfish, and myriad other species vital to a functioning ocean and the countless coastal communities that make their living from the sea. Unlike coral reefs, whose similar plight plays out in tropical waters highly visible to vacationing tourists, kelp forests thrive along cold-water coastlines far from tourist centers. What will it take to stop the decline before these underwater playgrounds bursting with colorful life become vast fields of lifeless urchin barrens? For readers who know kelp only as tangles on the ocean surface or smelly mounds of seaweed littering beaches, Forest of the Sea: The Remarkable Life and Imperiled Future of Kelp (Pr

With commentary on the emergence of a ‘multipolar’ world, of transatlantic rifts and the rise of ‘middle powers’ ubiquitous, tales of the decline of something called ‘the West’ seem to be everywhere. Yet the meanings the idea of ‘the West’ acquires in spaces beyond it tell us at least as much about the state of the world as portents of its demise. Based on a combination of cultural analysis of historical writings and—most strikingly—deep immersion in often very spicy Chinese social media fora, Chenchen Zhang’s new book Easting the West: Theorizing the Postliberal Conjuncture from China (Oxford University Press, 2026) theorises the shifting significations ascribed to ‘the West’ in China since the late-imperial collision with European empires. Whether imagined as a source of modernity, a colonial exploiter, geopolitical rival or—most recently—a civilisation sunk into decadence and decay, ‘the West’—Zhang shows—is a foil for China-based worldviews which, whatever their anticolonial or anti-Western

Russian leader Vladimir Putin, at 73 years old, is still very much alive, yet the “After Putin” conversation is an active one inside and outside of Russia. What could come next and how to think about that question? My guest is Julian G. Waller, a political scientist at George Washington University and author of a recent Foreign Affairs article “After Putin: Russia’s Coming Succession Crisis.” In our discussion, Waller anchors the “After Putin” question in historical context, as to how succession played out after Stalin’s death in the 1953. And we talk about how the current political environment in Moscow, shaped by Putin’s protracted war in Ukraine, is informing the “After Putin” discussion. Could a revolutionary scenario play out? How bodily safe is Putin? Waller is author of Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want: State Institutions and Autonomy under Authoritarianism (University of Michigan Press, 2024).Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affair

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 addition to case studies spanning North and South Korea as well as Turkey, Dr. Goldring examines the logic behind purges and their consequences. He shows that dictators purge to consolidate power, punish disloyalty, and scapegoat elites to alleviate popular threats. But even as purges help dictators consolidate power early in their tenure, purges actually weaken their position when they

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 of decades of sanctions rather than in spite of them, and why Western analysts dismissed what was in plain sight. We then turn to China and Feldstein's concern that the United States is making unforced errors, hollowing out the basic research on which its edge depends. Bytes and Bullets resists both technological determinism and the claim that nothing has c

"Expansive visions. Universal institutions. Ideas of progress. It was on the back of these that the West surged ahead and built a global order. I was born into that world. But my children have entered a world of Un-order." We live in an explosive world. Trump is blowing up political order. Xi Jinping is scrambling the economy. And Putin is redrawing the map of Europe. At a time when every crisis bleeds into the next — from pandemics and wars to climate shocks and AI revolutions — the old rules of global order are collapsing. Mark Leonard reveals how geopolitics is being rewritten in an age of "Un-Order," where no one agrees on the rules, and even the concept of order itself is up for debate. Drawing on years of conversations with leaders and thinkers from Beijing to Washington, Leonard argues that we are witnessing a new divide in international politics between the grand "architects" who try to build a stable global system and the nimble "artisans" who adapt, improvise, and survive amidst disrup

Nuclear Archipelago: Secrets, Power and the Biggest Atomic Blast in Australia (NewSouth, 2026) tells the shocking story of the two British atomic weapons test series held at Western Australia's Monte Bello Islands in 1952 and 1956. Operation Hurricane and Operation Mosaic took place at a rugged archipelago 100 kilometres off the Pilbara coast, and each of the three bombs sent fallout over vast distances across the country. One of the tests, Mosaic G2 in June 1956, the largest nuclear weapon test ever held in Australia, sparked panic at the time that it had been a nuclear accident. In both the Mosaic tests, the crew of a British ship was deliberately positioned in the path of fallout. The biodiverse natural environment of the islands was left contaminated and has never been cleaned up. The book explores the politics, the secrecy and the controversies, including the true nature of Mosaic G2 and its role in the clandestine development of the British hydrogen bomb. Elizabeth Tynan is professor in

Shadow Negotiators: How UN Organizations Shape the Rules of World Trade for Food Security (Stanford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Matias E. Margulis is the first book to demonstrate that United Nations (UN) organizations have intervened to influence the discourse, agenda, and outcomes of international trade lawmaking at the World Trade Organization (WTO). While UN organizations lack a seat at the bargaining table at the WTO, Dr. Margulis argues that these organizations have acted as "shadow negotiators" engaged in political actions intended to alter the trajectory and results of multilateral trade negotiations. He draws on analysis of one of the most contested issues in global trade politics, agricultural trade liberalization, to demonstrate interventions by four different UN organizations—the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP), the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), and the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (SRRTF). By identif

A sweeping history of humanity’s most fundamental creation―the home―and its effects on the land, cities, and people themselves. Americans spend, on average, 90 percent of their lives indoors, with two-thirds of that time spent in their homes. Globally, the construction and maintenance of residential buildings account for a staggering portion of carbon emissions. In this timely and fascinating work, architect and urban-planning scholar Stefan Al deftly weaves together archaeology, engineering, social history, and environmental science to explain how our homes have developed through the ages and in turn shaped civilization and the planet itself. From tiny pit-houses in the Levant and Mesoamerica thousands of years ago to soaring skyscrapers in Dubai, New York, and Shanghai today, Dwelling on Earth: The Past and Future of the Places We Call Home (W. W. Norton & Company, 2026) takes readers on a swift and absorbing tour of the evolution of human habitation. Whisking readers from ancient Pompeii

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 privilege regional stakeholders, stability, development, and pragmatism. Operating under conditions of "negotiated coexistence" with liberal peacebuilders, their initiatives neither fully align with nor openly contest existing actors, limiting cooperation while avoiding confrontation. This pluralized form of inte

How the nuclear guardrails were dismantled. What arms control actually did (risk management, predictability, geography), how it unravelled from the 2000s onward, and why its collapse matters more now as we see a resurgence of strategic instability and armed conflict.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolutions (Oxford University Press, 2026), Christopher Hodson and Brett Rushforth reveal the vast and complex world of France's Atlantic enterprises in the premodern era. Drawing upon years of archival work, Hodson and Rushforth demonstrate how France's overseas activities created its empire, intentionally or not, and how these distant places built the French state and used it for their own ends. Beyond the Ocean covers an impressive sweep of history, from the late eleventh century through the early nineteenth, and yet the authors manage to retain a human element. Their judicious inclusion of micro-histories and primary-source quotation, as well as their lively prose, helps the reader enter into what it may have felt like to live through these developments, to participate in the era when "France became France, and the Atlantic became a world." Crucially, their attention to the non-European actors in this story an

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-ranging conversation with both editors, we discuss questions of imperialism, the rise and limits of US global hegemony, the 'ragged ends' of the war, and the social movements of a window of global possibility in 1945–46. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information abou

The September, 2022 attack on the Nord Stream pipelines transporting Russian gas to Germany was perhaps the greatest single act of sabotage in modern history. In The Nord Stream Conspiracy: The Inside Story of the Explosions that Shook the World (Henry Holt, 2026), Bojan Pancevski makes a compelling case that the culprit was an intrepid team of Ukrainian intelligence agents, military personnel and civilian divers. In our conversation, he explains how he came to this conclusion. And we touch on the wider issue of what Pancevski calls the “Cossack spirit,” at the heart of the determination of courageous and resourceful Ukrainians to resist, by all means available, Moscow’s efforts to subdue Ukraine. Pancevski is the chief European political correspondent of The Wall Street Journal and has considerable experience covering Ukraine.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information abou

Matthew Mason (Professor of History at Brigham Young University) chatted with Richard Bell (Professor of History at the University of Maryland) about his new book The American Revolution and the Fate of the World (Penguin, 2025). They had a wide-ranging conversation about this wide-ranging book, including how and why there hasn’t been a book quite like it written before, and how Bell illuminates both the “greatest hits” of American Revolutionary legend and some “deep cuts” that readers probably haven’t encountered before. For instance, they discussed how Bell recasts iconic events like the Boston Tea Party as having a much bigger context and impact than the provincial setting for most tellings. But also they mused over why certain events and participants, such as American privateers captured and turned into prisoners of war suffering for their country just as much as the soldiers at Valley Forge, have not been part of the central mythology of the Revolution. This and more make up this conversation about this

America’s money is global money—nearly every nation in the world writes international contracts in dollars, and in 2023, central banks around the world held nearly $6.7 trillion in dollar reserves, three times any other currency. Today, the United States’ global hegemony rests largely on its ability to produce unlimited treasury bonds that are sold around the world, dollars that supported America’s explosive growth in the twentieth century and funded its massive wars in the twenty-first. American power and the American dollar have become synonymous.Yet in this brilliant 500-year history The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money (Crown, 2026), Brendan Greeley argues that America’s sovereignty over the dollar is an illusion—that the dollar had already empowered and destroyed nations long before it washed up on colonial shores, and that no country or king has or can ever truly control it. Reaching back to the dollar’s birth as the taler in the 15th-century silver mines of St. Joachimstha

It's a shadowy, ornate world of cover-ups and hidden motives. In Flirting with Evil: The Catholic Church in the Age of Total War and Globalisation (Apollo, 2026), Ambrogio Caiani lifts back the heavy velvet curtains of thechancel and peers behind the locked mahogany doors of the Vatican to reveal the shocking truths that make up a century of Catholic corruption. For many, Catholicism's flirtation with evil has become impossible to ignore: a pope courting Nazi officials and, horribly, turning a blind eye to the Holocaust; the Vatican becoming embroiled in a series of dodgy financial dealings; the child abuse continuously perpetrated by members of the clergy. Time and time again, Catholic figures have made terrible choices in private and preached in public about goodness and morality. This is the first history that focuses exclusively on Catholicism throughout the twentieth century, sketching not only scandalous stories of corruption but also lively portrayals of Catholicism's key charact

Heritage in the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030) and Beyond (U Edinburgh Press, 2025) outlines the need to embed Ocean Heritage into ocean science, sustainable development, and marine conservation to meet the goals of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030) and beyond. Ocean Heritage—spanning tangible sites, such as shipwrecks or submerged harbours, and intangible connections such as traditional practices and knowledge systems—remains underrepresented in ocean governance. Yet it offers critical insights for more effective policy and research. Its inclusion is essential to ensuring science is informed by human–ocean relationships and responsive to the needs of communities. Led by the Cultural Heritage Framework Programme (CHFP), the Ocean Decade’s only programme focused on Ocean Heritage, this text demonstrates how heritage supports all 10 Ocean Decade Challenges. Ocean Heritage strengthens climate adaptation, improves spatial planning, and

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. His second in command was an eccentric, hard drinking, and high-flying journalist-turned-propagandist called John Rayner. Brought out of semi-retirement, for one final posting. Their team of bowler-hatted refugees, voluble ex-journalists, trailblazing women, and licentious literary sorts navigated loyalty and betrayal — both professionally and romantically — from the diplom

In Both Your Houses: Iran, America, and the Wages of Unchecked Power (Wisdom Editions, 2026), Massoud Amin confronts the war between Iran, Israel, and the United States, and the civilians caught beneath it. Writing from a dual vantage as an Iranian-born American trained to see how systems break, Amin traces the chain that led to catastrophe. Iran's thwarted democracies. The 1953 coup. The architecture of sanctions was designed to inflict economic pain rather than produce diplomacy—the destruction of the JCPOA while the IAEA was certifying Iranian compliance.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.