New Books in National Security

The War on Terror remained an enduring feature of American foreign policy for over two decades. The War on Terror(Agenda Publishing, 2025), by Professors Andrew Thomson and Rubrick Biegon, positions the War on Terror within the broader context of Cold War interventionism and the rise of various transnational threats to American (and global) security during the late twentieth century. It introduces readers to the main concepts, debates and theories which have been used to understand and make sense of the War on Terror. These include approaches that frame it as a disparate set of policies aimed at reducing the risk of terrorist attacks against American citizens at both home and aboard; as part of a project aimed at helping maintain the United States' dominant position within international politics; and as an idea intimately bound up with perceptions of American national identity and America's place in the world. In this way, the book aims to show how the War on Terror has changed global politics, as well as why it has been fought and proven so difficult to end despite multiple failed attempts at course correction. The book, published in 2025 and now available from University of Edinburgh Press, is ideally suited for courses on international security, American foreign policy and contemporary world politics.

Rubrick Biegon is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Kent. Co-author Andrew Thomson, reader in peace and conflict studies at Queens University Belfast, joined historian and U.S. army veteran Jacob Hagstrom in a discussion about the book's major themes, sources, and theoretical underpinnings.  

Jacob Hagstrom is a military historian and author of America's Favorite Warlord (Pen and Sword, 2026)

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Wartime leaders should understand the link between violent means and political ends. They should also have a sense of how strategic decisions will affect the post-war peace. Yet they often fail to make these connections. Mistaking strategy for grand strategy, or misunderstanding the relationship between them, can frustrate soldiers and statesmen alike. Sometimes it can lead to national ruin. In this Adelphi book Strategy and Grand Strategy (Routledge, 2025), Joshua Rovner offers a lucid analysis of strategy (a theory of victory) and grand strategy (a theory of security). He demonstrates vividly how these concepts interact in case studies from antiquity to the present, and he describes the implications for war and peace at a time of extraordinary technological change. Rovner’s work will prove indispensable to policymakers, scholars and anyone seeking to grasp these essential but often misunderstood concepts.

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In Disaster Nationalism: Tsunami and Civil War in Sri Lanka (Duke UP, 2025), Vivian Y. Choi examines how the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami fostered new forms of governance and militarization during Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war that led to enduring forms of precarity and insecurity. Tracing the development of disaster management projects following the tsunami, Choi demonstrates how these projects rest on a logic that treats natural disasters and terrorism as inevitable risks in need of management. The tsunami’s destruction foreclosed the possibility of political resolution to the war, as the state leveraged these projects to justify its militarized aggression in the war against the Tamil Tigers and a new construction of the Sri Lankan nation. Choi reveals how, paradoxically, state-sponsored disaster management projects—from new buffer and border zones to early warning systems—created more insecurity. Choi amplifies the experiences of those affected by the tsunami, particularly Tamil and Muslim communities. In so doing, Choi shows how life perseveres against perpetual uncertainty and danger—caused by natural disasters and state-sanctioned violence alike.

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In this episode, I spoke with Jacob Ware, co-author, with Bruce Hoffman, of God, Guns and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, published in 2024 by Columbia University Press, and winner of the 2025 Airey Neave Memorial Book Prize.

Shocking acts of terrorism have erupted from violent American far-right extremists in recent years, including the 2015 mass murder at a historic Black church in Charleston and the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. These incidents, however, are neither novel nor unprecedented. They are the latest flashpoints in a process that has been unfolding for decades, in which vast conspiracy theories and radical ideologies such as white supremacism, racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, and hostility to government converge into a deadly threat to democracy. God, Guns, and Sedition offers the definitive account of the rise of far-right terrorism in the United States—and how to counter it. 

Jacob Ware is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and at DeSales University. He is a recipient of the 2026 National Security and Counterterrorism Fellowship from the McCain Institute, and also currently serves as a Survivor Fellow at Everytown for Gun Safety. Jacob serves on the editorial boards for the academic journal Studies in Conflict & Terrorism and the Irregular Warfare Initiative, and holds an MA in security studies from Georgetown and an MA (Hons) in international relations and modern history from the University of St Andrews.

Chris Millington is Professor of Modern European History and lead of the Histories and Cultures of Conflict research group at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He is the author of eight books including Murder in Marseille: Right-Wing Terrorism in 1930s Europe ((Manchester University Press, 2025), The Invention of Terrorism in France, 1904-1939 (Stanford University press, 2023), and France in the Second World War Collaboration, Resistance, Holocaust, Empire (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

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From the dawn of the modern era to the end of the Cold War, global history was defined by rivalries between Great Powers. In the West, this meant the struggle for supremacy in Europe and the Americas, while in the East, it encompassed those vying for control over the successor states to Genghis Khan’s empire. Between 1989 and the year 2000, Great Power rivalry temporarily gave way to globalization, with liberal democracy on the march and national chauvinism seemingly in retreat. But events of the past decade have made one thing abundantly clear: The Great Powers are back. 

In The Return of the Great Powers (Basic Books, 2026), renowned historian Brendan Simms offers a new history of the rise, fall, and return of the Great Powers in our time.  He shows that over the past ten years or so, the major global actors have already resumed making decisions based on geopolitical rather than global economic considerations.

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When an election turns violent and neither side will concede, why is the usual answer to put both sides in the same government?

Alex Noyes has spent nearly two decades asking whether that reflex works. Compromised Coalitions: The Paradox of Post-Conflict Power Sharing in Africa out in 2026 from the University of Pennsylvania Press, draws on more than 120 interviews with senior politicians and stakeholders in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Togo to give an unsettling answer. 

Power sharing can advance democratic reform, but only when two conditions hold: inclusive politics among the parties, and outside enforcers willing to hold them to the deal. Both are rare. And even where the deal ends the killing, it rewards a losing incumbent with unearned power and sets a precedent.

In our conversation, Noyes explains why more than 600 such pacts have been struck since the Cold War, what the neglected Togo case reveals, and why he argues these arrangements should almost never be used after election violence. 

Against the scholarly consensus, Noyes finds these pacts can deliver real democratic reform, but only under conditions that rarely hold, and always at the cost of a compromised start. The costs outweigh the gains, and policymakers should stop defaulting to the model.

Our guest is Alex Noyes, a fellow at the Brookings Institution's Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology.

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). 

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When powerful states go to war, why do they bother asking permission? In Strategies for Approval: Building Support for Military Intervention at the UN Security Council (Yale University Press, 2025), Stefano Recchia argues that the answer reveals something surprising about how power actually works. 

Drawing on hundreds of declassified documents and more than fifty interviews with senior diplomats, among them Andrei Kozyrev, Brent Scowcroft, and Colin Powell, Recchia shows that money and muscle are rarely enough to move a reluctant Security Council. States that succeed also reassure: they accept time limits, geographic restrictions, and multilateral oversight written directly into the resolutions they seek.

Our conversation traces that logic through France's controversial 1994 intervention in Rwanda, the six-week "pause for peace" the United States conceded to Gorbachev and Mitterrand before the First Gulf War, and the very different failure of 2003. Recchia also discusses what his interviews revealed about the real aims behind the 2011 intervention in Libya.

The more powerful a state becomes, this book shows, the more its power frightens others, and the more it must bind itself to get anything done.

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In Operation Condor: The Pact That Terrorized a Continent (Storia, 2025), Francesca Lessa uncovers the shadowy machinery behind one of the most chilling transnational terror campaigns of the twentieth century. What began as a secret pact among South America's military dictatorships quickly grew into a coordinated system of surveillance, kidnappings, torture, and disappearances that reached across borders and oceans. Through meticulous research and newly unearthed documents, Lessa reveals how those in power built a network designed to eliminate dissent wherever it dared to surface, turning exile into a false refuge and entire nations into hunting grounds.

This book is not simply a reconstruction of clandestine meetings and sealed orders, though it excels at that. It is a deeply human story that follows the lives interrupted and the families who refused to surrender to silence. Lessa brings to light parents who never stopped searching, survivors who fought to be heard, and investigators who chipped away at decades of denial. Their voices and struggles give this history its pulse, reminding us that truth is often preserved not by institutions but by ordinary people who refuse to forget.

Translated with clarity and grace by Alejandro Reyes, and enriched by Sebastián Santana Camargo's haunting illustrations, this authorized English edition of the acclaimed Plan Cóndor: Viejos secretos y nuevos hallazgos is both a work of history and an act of witness. It confronts a past many hoped would remain in the shadows and insists on remembering, not out of vengeance, but as a defense of democracy and dignity. The result is a gripping, sobering, and ultimately hopeful testament to the enduring power of memory and justice.

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Since the beginning of the twentieth century, governments around the world have expelled, en masse, more than 30 million people. Yet despite its prevalence, mass expulsion remains an understudied phenomenon as scholarly attention has been directed toward the gravest atrocities—genocide and mass killing—or toward forced migration more broadly.

Mass Expulsion: The Politics of Forced Population Removal (Oxford UP, 2026) by Dr. Meghan Garrity examines why and how governments expel, providing a systematic, cross-regional account of mass expulsion over the longue durée. Using the original Government-Sponsored Mass Expulsion (GSME) dataset, the book explains when and where expulsion occurs, who is targeted, and what regimes are most likely to expel. The book identifies two overarching categories of mass expulsion—security and economic—and develops a typology of four corresponding types: counter-irredentist, counter-subversive, reprisal, and nativist. It advances a theory of mass expulsion that traces the decision-making process, showing how key structural, proximate, precipitating, and intervening factors combine to shape the conditions under which governments expel or are restrained. Evidence is drawn from archival research conducted at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the League of Nations archives in Geneva, Switzerland.
This research contributes to the fields of international peace and security, political violence, and forced migration. Conceptually, it fills a gap in the literature by systematically examining mass expulsion as a distinct eliminationist policy aimed at the intentional removal of ethnic groups. Theoretically, it extends existing explanations beyond war and security threats, highlighting an entire class of expulsions targeting perceived economic threats. The book deepens our understanding of critical atrocity restraints, demonstrating the importance of alliances, the “homeland” state of the target group, and international organizations. These restraints generate core policy recommendations that seek to spur greater attention to deterring mass expulsion as a priority for atrocity prevention.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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After

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This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book

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