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 their nuclear status to be presented to the world, and powerful states like the US, either recognize or reject these formulations.

By analysing key diplomatic junctures in Indian, Israeli, Iranian, and North Korean nuclear history, this book presents a theory of when and how states contest their nuclear status which has key policy implications for negotiating with ostensible “rogues” such as Iran and North Korea.

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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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 risks, by their perception of credibility, and by the timing of their decision. 

Donaghy explains why the Cold War intensified so quickly and how - contrary to all expectations - US-Soviet relations were repaired. Drawing on recently declassified archival material, The Second Cold War: Carter, Reagan, and the Politics of Foreign Policy (Cambridge UP, 2021) traces how each administration evolved in response to crises and events at home and abroad. This compelling and controversial account challenges the accepted notion of how the end of the Cold War began.

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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 precision strike overreach, rising attrition warfare, and the enduring need for land forces. With rigorous policy and PME recommendations, Fox and Gady offer a vital roadmap for rethinking military doctrine. Essential reading for defense leaders, scholars, and warfighters alike, this book reshapes how we must think about future battlefields.
Dr. Amos C. Fox is a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University’s Future Security Initiative. Amos also works as a lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Houston where he teaches strategy and international relations, and hosts the Revolution in Military Affairs podcast, which focuses on war, strategy, international affairs, and the impact of technology on warfare. His latest book is Conflict Realism. Amos is a retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel. He is also Managing Editor of Small Wars Journal.
Franz-Stefan Gady has advised US and European militaries on structural reform and the future of high-intensity warfare. An adjunct senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security, Washington, DC, he has conducted field research in Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine. His latest books are The Return of War and How the US Would Fight China: The Risks of Pursuing a Rapid Victory.

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. He served as the editor of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations (ISCSC) newsletter from 2016 to 2018 and is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review.

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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, former mistress of Congressman William C. P. Breckinridge, whom she had sued for breach of promise when he failed to marry her. Exploring the intricacies of this trial and a scandal that captivated the nation, author Elizabeth A. DeWolfe demonstrates that a shared lack of power did not always lead to alliances among women. DeWolfe uncovers the strategies women used to make their way in the world, drawing parallels between the previously forgotten and incomplete tales of Tucker, Pollard, and the women who testified in the trial―from formerly enslaved persons, to white socialites, to single government clerks, to divorced physicians.
Written in engaging prose with all the intrigue and suspense of a detective tale, Alias Agnes chronicles the lives of women at the cusp of the twentieth century―the opportunities that beckoned them and the challenges that thwarted their dreams.

New Books in Women’s History Podcast

Jane Scimeca, Professor of History at Brookdale Community College

Website here

@janescimeca.bsky.social 

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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 started in the late nineteenth century, and included important episode like the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the Punitive Expedition in Mexico, modern American intelligence emerged during World War I. The War was foundational in the establishment of a self-conscious profession of intelligence. Virtually everything that followed was maturation, reorganization, reinvigoration, or reinvention. 

World War I ushered in a period of rapid changes. Never again would the War Department be without an intelligence component. Never again would a senior American commander lead a force to war without intelligence personnel on their staff. Never again would the United States government be without a signals intelligence agency or aerial reconnaissance capability. Stout examines the breadth of American intelligence in the war, not just in France, not just at home, but around the world and across the army, navy, and State Department, and demonstrates how these far-flung efforts endured after the Armistice in 1918. For the first time, there came to be a group of intelligence practitioners who viewed themselves as different from other soldiers, sailors, and diplomats. Upon entering World War II, the United States had a solid foundation from which to expand to meet the needs of another global hot war and the Cold War that followed.

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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 analysis, Dr. Hand traces how Clinton, Bush, and Obama each wove international religious freedom into their foreign policy visions while navigating competing priorities and evolving strategic interests. Through case studies in China, Vietnam, and Saudi Arabia, Dr. Hand reveals the inner workings and persistent challenges of American religious freedom policy on the global stage.
Timely, insightful, and deeply researched, Prioritizing Faith offers an incisive assessment of the United States’ efforts to promote religious freedom abroad, highlighting the enduring tensions between normative aspirations and the complexities of foreign policy practice.

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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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 clandestine organizations and vulnerable institutions. Through cases spanning codebreaking at Bletchley Park during WWII to the weaponization of pagers by Israel in 2024, he traces both continuity and change in secret statecraft. Along the way, he explains why popular assumptions about cyber warfare are profoundly misleading. Offense does not simply dominate defense, for example, because the same digital complexity that expands opportunities for deception also creates potential for self-deception and counter-deception.

Provocative and persuasive, Age of Deception offers crucial insights into the future of secret statecraft in cyberspace and beyond.

Our guest is Jon R. Lindsay, an Associate Professor at the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech.

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 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 closely examines and turns loose this disquieting mark of state power, aiming to trouble the liberal imaginaries that configure the political as a left-right spectrum, as populism and nationalism versus global and transnational cosmopolitanism, as east versus west, authoritarianism versus democracy, good versus evil, or the state versus the people—age-old coordinates that no longer make sense. Because we know from the upheavals of the past decade that these relations are being reconfigured in novel, recursive, and unrecognizable ways, the consequences of which are perplexing and ever evolving.

This book takes up redaction as a vital form in this new political reality. Contributors both critically engage with statist redaction practices and also explore its alluring and ambivalent forms, as experimental practices that open up new dialogic possibilities in navigating and conveying the stakes of political encounters.

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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 Western imperialism or battle capitalism; a few simply sought adventure or power. Among them were the unflappable young Leila Khaled, sporting jewelry made from AK-47 ammunition; the maverick Carlos the Jackal with his taste for cigars, fine dining, and designer suits; and the radical leftists of the Baader-Meinhof Gang or the Japanese Red Army. Their attacks forged a lawless new battlefield thirty thousand feet in the air, evading the reach of security agencies, policymakers, and spies alike. Their operations rallied activist and networks in places where few had suspected their existence, leaving a trail of chaos from Bangkok to Paris to London to Washington, D.C. Veteran foreign correspondent Jason Burke provides a thrilling account of this era of spectacular violence. Drawing on decades of research, recently declassified government files, still secret documents, and original interviews with hijackers, double agents, and victims still grieving their loved ones, The Revolutionists provides an unprecedented account of a period which definitively shaped today’s world and probes the complex relationship between violence, terrorism, and revolution. From the deserts of Jordan and the Munich Olympics to the Iranian Embassy Siege in London and the Beirut bombings of the early 1980s, Burke invites us into the lives and minds of the perpetrators of these attacks, as well as the government agents and top officials who sought to foil them. Charting, too, such shattering events as the Iranian Revolution and the Lebanese civil war, he shows how, by the early 1980s, a campaign for radical change led by secular, leftist revolutionaries had given way to a far more lethal movement of conservative religious fanaticism that would dominate the decades to come. Driven by an indelible cast of characters moving at a breakneck pace, full of detail and drama, The Revolutionists is the definitive account of a dark and seismic decade.

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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 in the 1970s. In doing so, Bateman reveals the largely secret role of military space technologies in late–Cold War US defense strategy and foreign relations.
In contrast to existing narratives, Weapons in Space shows how tension over the role of military space technologies in American statecraft was a central source of SDI's controversy, even more so than questions of technical feasibility. By detailing the participation of Western European countries in SDI research and development, Bateman reframes the militarization of space in the 1970s and 1980s as an international phenomenon. He further reveals that even though SDI did not come to fruition, it obstructed diplomatic efforts to create new arms control limits in space. Consequently, Weapons in Space carries the legacy of SDI into the post–Cold War era and shows how this controversial program continues to shape the global discourse about instability in space—and the growing anxieties about a twenty-first-century space arms race.

Our guest is Aaron Bateman, an Assistant Professor of History and International Affairs at GWU.

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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