New Books in Diplomatic History

East Central Europe Since 1989 (Routledge, 2025)  examines politics, economics, media, religious institutions, transitional justice, gender inequality, and literature, highlighting the overt functions, latent functions, and side effects associated with each sphere. Communism in East Central Europe had cracks from the beginning, as uprisings in East Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956 demonstrated. But with the establishment of the Independent Trade Union Solidarity in Poland in the Summer of 1980, communism went into steady decline and, between 1988 and 1991, crumbled. What followed has been an unsteady transition to various forms of often corrupt pluralism with democracy doing best in the Czech Republic (with the exception of the years 2017-2021) and Slovenia, and worst in Hungary, Albania, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. This volume will be of interest not only to specialists in East Central Europe but also to graduate and undergraduate students, members of the diplomatic corps, and general readers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kishore Mahbubani, longtime Singaporean diplomat and academic, opens his new memoir with a provocative line: “Blame it on the damn British.” Kishore, who later served as Singapore’s ambassador to the UN and founding dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, was born to poor migrants in Singapore, studied philosophy on a government scholarship—and from there, somehow got roped into the foreign service.Kishore was one of the first guests on the show when he joined to speak on Has China Won?: The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy (PublicAffiars: 2020) all the way back in October 2020—and he joins us again to talk about his latest book, Living the Asian Century: An Undiplomatic Memoir (PublicAffairs: 2024)Kishore Mahbubani is a veteran diplomat, student of philosophy, and celebrated author, he is currently a Distinguished Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute. His careers in diplomacy and academia have taken him from Singapore’s Chargé d’Affaires to wartime Cambodia and President of the UN Security Council (Jan 2001, May 2002) to the Founding Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (2004-2017).You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Living in the Asian Century. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The decades following World War I were a period of political, social, and economic transformation for Central and Eastern Europe. Foreign Aid and State Building in Interwar Romania (Stanford UP, 2025) considers the role of foreign aid in Romania between 1918 and 1940, offering a new history of the interrelation between state building and nongovernmental humanitarianism and philanthropy in the interwar period. Doina Anca Cretu argues that Romania was a laboratory for transnational intervention, as various state builders actively pursued, accessed, and often instrumentalized American assistance in order to accelerate reconstructive and modernizing projects after World War I.At its core, this is a study of how local views, ambitions, and practical agendas framed trajectories of humanitarian and philanthropic endeavors in postimperial Central and Eastern Europe. Conversely, it is a reflection on the ways that architects and practitioners of foreign aid sought to transfer notions of democracy, civilization, and modernity within shifting local and national contexts in the aftermath of the war and after the collapse of European empires. At the intersection of the history of interwar Europe and international philanthropy and humanitarianism, this book's innovative and explicitly transnational approach provides a new framework for understanding the contours of European nationalism in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Impartiality is a guiding principle in United Nations peace operations that has helped legitimize multilateral intervention in dozens of armed conflicts around the world. In practice, it has long been associated with passive monitoring of cease-fires and peace agreements. In the twenty-first century, however, its meaning has been stretched to allow for a range of forceful, intrusive, and ideologically prescriptive practices, all in the name of building durable peace.In Intrusive Impartiality: Learning, Contestation, and Practice Change in United Nations Peace Operations (Oxford University Press, 2024), Dr. Marion Laurence explains how these new ways of being "impartial" emerge, how they spread within and across missions, and how they become institutionalized across UN peace operations. Dr. Laurence argues that new peacekeeping practices are not only products of top-down pressures from member states or instructions from the UN Secretariat; they often emerge from tacit knowledge and unconscious decisions about how to follow orders or comply with social rules. By foregrounding the creativity and agency of the field staff who are responsible for translating mandates into action, Dr. Laurence shows that new definitions and practices of impartiality are products of contestation, learning, and the interplay between top-down pressures and bottom-up drivers of change in UN peace operations.Drawing on original data gathered through extensive fieldwork, Dr. Laurence uses evidence from UN missions in Sierra Leone, Côte d'Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and from UN headquarters in New York, to provide an innovative framework for studying authority and change in global governance. In doing so, Intrusive Impartiality sheds light on controversial changes in peacekeeping practice and yields valuable insights about the practical and ethical dilemmas that confront UN peacekeepers.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elsa Stamatopoulou’s Indigenous Peoples in the International Arena: The Global Movement for Self-Determination (Routledge 2025) provides a definitive account of the creation and rise of the international Indigenous Peoples’ movement.In the late 1970s, motivated by their dire situation and local struggles, and inspired by worldwide movements for social justice and decolonization, including the American civil rights movement, Indigenous Peoples around the world got together and began to organize at the international level. Although each defined itself by its relation to a unique land, culture, and often language, Indigenous Peoples from around the world made an extraordinary leap, using a common conceptual vocabulary and addressing international bodies that until then had barely recognized their existence. At the intersection of politics, law, and culture, this book documents the visionary emergence of the international Indigenous movement, detailing its challenges and achievements, including the historic recognition of Indigenous rights through the adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. The winning by Indigenous Peoples of an unprecedented kind and degree of international participation – especially at the United Nations, an institution centered on states – meant overcoming enormous institutional and political resistance. The book shows how this participation became an increasingly assertive self-expression and even an exercise of self-determination by which Indigenous Peoples could both benefit from and contribute to the international community overall – now, crucially, by sharing their knowledge about climate change, their approaches to development and well-being, and their struggles against the impact of extractive industries on their lands and resources.Written by the former Chief of the Secretariat of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, this book will be of interest to researchers, teachers, students, advocates, practitioners, and others with interests in Indigenous legal and political issues.Elsa Stamatopoulou is Director of the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Program and Adjunct Professor in the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, the Department of Anthropology, and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University, USA. Elsa is also Former (the first) Chief of the Secretariat of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (among other functions at the UN).Tim Wyman-McCarthy is a Lecturer in the discipline of Human Rights and Associate Director of Graduate Studies at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. He can be reached at tw2468@columbia.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of International Horizons, John Torpey talks with Heribert Adam, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, to unpack the global ripple effects of Donald Trump's return to power. From his startling proposal to make Canada the 51st state to his controversial foreign aid cuts targeting South Africa, Trump's policies are reshaping international dynamics. Meanwhile, Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance have stirred political tensions in Germany by supporting the far-right AfD party. How are these developments impacting global democracy, migration, and racial politics? Adam, a distinguished expert on South Africa and race relations, provides historical context and critical analysis on these pressing issues. Tune in for a deep dive into the international consequences of Trump’s second term. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ordering Customs: Ethnographic Thought in Early Modern Venice (University of Delaware Press, 2023) explores how Renaissance Venetians sought to make sense of human difference in a period characterized by increasing global contact and a rapid acceleration of the circulation of information. Venice was at the center of both these developments. The book traces the emergence of a distinctive tradition of ethnographic writing that served as the basis for defining religious and cultural difference in new ways. Taylor draws on a trove of unpublished sources-diplomatic correspondence, court records, diaries, and inventories-to show that the study of customs, rituals, and ways of life not only became central in how Venetians sought to apprehend other peoples, but also had a very real impact at the level of policy, shaping how the Venetian state governed minority populations in the city and its empire. In contrast with the familiar image of ethnography as the product of overseas imperial and missionary encounters, the book points to a more complicated set of origins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since Kenya's invasion of Somalia in 2011, the Kenyan state has been engaged in direct combat with the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab, conducting airstrikes in southern Somalia and deploying heavy-handed police tactics at home. As the hunt for suspects has expanded within Kenya, Kenyan Muslims have been subject to disappearances and extrajudicial killings at the hands of U.S.-trained Kenyan police.War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror (Stanford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Samar Al-Bulushi explores the entanglement of militarism, imperialism, and liberal-democratic governance in East Africa today. Dr. Al-Bulushi argues that Kenya's emergence as a key player in the "War on Terror" is closely linked—but not reducible to—the U.S. military's growing proclivity to outsource the labor of war. Attending to the cultural politics of security, Dr. Al-Bulushi illustrates that the war against Al-Shabaab has become a means to produce new fantasies, emotions, and subjectivities about Kenya's place in the world. Meanwhile, Kenya's alignment with the U.S. provides cover for the criminalization and policing of the country's Muslim minority population.How is life lived in a place that is not understood to be a site of war, yet is often experienced as such by its targets? This book weaves together multiple scales of analysis, asking what a view from East Africa can tell us about the shifting configurations and expansive geographies of post-9/11 imperial warfare.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The academic field of international relations presents its own history as largely a project of elite white men. And yet women played a prominent role in the creation of this new cross-disciplinary field. In Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men (Princeton University Press, 2025), Professor Patricia Owens shows that, since its beginnings in the early twentieth century, international relations relied on the intellectual labour of women and their expertise on such subjects as empire and colonial administration, anticolonial organising, non-Western powers, and international organisations. Indeed, women were among the leading international thinkers of the era, shaping the development of the field as scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals—and as heterosexual spouses and intimate same-sex partners.Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, and weaving together personal, institutional, and intellectual narratives, Dr. Owens documents key moments and locations in the effort to forge international relations as a separate academic discipline in Britain. She finds that women’s ideas and influence were first marginalised and later devalued, ignored, and erased. Examining the roles played by some of the most important women thinkers in the field, including Margery Perham, Merze Tate, Eileen Power, Margaret Cleeve, Coral Bell, and Susan Strange, Dr. Owens traces the intellectual and institutional legacies of misogyny and racism. She argues that the creation of international relations was a highly gendered and racialised project that failed to understand plurality on a worldwide scale. Acknowledging this intellectual failure, and recovering the history of women in the field, points to possible sources for its renewal.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At a moment when the nuclear nonproliferation regime is under duress, Rebecca Davis Gibbons provides a trenchant analysis of the international system that has, for more than fifty years, controlled the spread of these catastrophic weapons. The Hegemon's Tool Kit: US Leadership and the Politics of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime (Cornell UP, 2022) details how that regime works and how, disastrously, it might falter.Experts anticipated that all technologically capable states would build these powerful devices in the early nuclear age. That did not happen. Widespread development of nuclear arms did not occur, in large part, because a global nuclear nonproliferation regime was created. By the late 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union had drafted the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Across decades, the regime has expanded, with more agreements and more nations participating. As a result, in 2022, only nine states possess nuclear weapons.Why do most international states adhere to the nuclear nonproliferation regime? The answer lies, Gibbons asserts, in decades of painstaking efforts undertaken by the US government. As the most powerful state during the nuclear age, the United States had many tools with which to persuade other states to join or otherwise support nonproliferation agreements.The waning of US global influence, Gibbons shows in The Hegemon's Tool Kit, is a key threat to the nonproliferation regime. So, too, is the deepening global divide over progress on nuclear disarmament. To date, the Chinese government is not taking significant steps to support the nuclear nonproliferation regime, and as a result, the regime may face a harmful leadership gap.Our guest is Rebecca Gibbons, an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern Maine.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), winner of the 2025 ISA-ISSS best book award. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices