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 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 British MI5 and MI6 files, authors Dr. Reinhold Kramer and Dr. Tom Mitchell provide a comprehensive account of the crisis. They reveal that, despite some civil liberties missteps, the government’s suspicions were largely justified.

The book weaves together the evidence against the spies, the tradecraft of Soviet espionage, complex legal challenges faced by the state, and the political fallout. With access to hundreds of newly released British intelligence files, P.S. Burn After Reading offers both specialists and general readers fresh insights into the espionage crisis of 1945–46 and the pivotal role it played in exposing Canada’s postwar security and intelligence vulnerabilities.

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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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 have been in power for a long time, prompting pushback. In the face of an increasing global shift toward authoritarian norms, Purges offers critical insight into how autocrats maintain—and sometimes lose—power.

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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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 changed. But this book is also candid about what cannot be predicted: as machines take on decisions humans once made, who, if anyone, will set the limits?

Our guest is Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program.

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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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 finance, defense reformers refashioned the supply process as a buy-and-sell transaction between units, requiring officers to express their need for equipment and labor in dollar terms. Bureaucrats embraced Taylorist work measurement to supervise everything from clerical filing to the production of massive weapons systems. The services even engaged management consultants to establish officer-training academies modeled on the Harvard Business School.
After the Vietnam War, many military leaders pushed back, questioning “managerialism” and calling for a return to traditional concepts of command. Civilian critics also chimed in, protesting the callousness of the business-minded secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, who famously measured success and failure in body counts. By this time, however, the language and values of management had thoroughly infiltrated the military’s institutional structure and daily operations. As Pentagon Capitalism makes clear, the reorganization of the defense bureaucracy along the lines of a for-profit firm durably altered the experience of military work and facilitated the lasting privatization of US national security.

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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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. Stark distinctions in resources and capabilities have shaped the reasons why states and societies have decided to fight, and the manner in which they have fought. Across the modern era, mismatches arose in the domains of technology, intelligence production, and law. But in recent decades, so-called weak powers have neutralized many of the typical advantages of strong military states.

Jacob Hagstrom is an army veteran and historian. He earned a PhD in history from Indiana University, Bloomington, and taught courses at the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina.

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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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 been involved in the labour movement and the fight against police brutality in Egypt. He holds a PhD in political science from Freie Universität Berlin and is the recipient of the 2011 Anna Politkovskaya Journalism Award. He publishes a weekly newsletter on Egyptian politics at 3arabawy.substack.com.

Alec Fiorini is a PhD student at Queen Mary University London's Centre for Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) researching the political economy of nitrogen fertilizer supply chains.

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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 international engagement enables domestic elites to resist external pressures, producing hybrid peace orders that incorporate some liberal elements yet remain largely at the status quo—and often illiberal.

Rich with archival and interview evidence, A Post-Liberal Peace sheds light on alternative forms of peacebuilding and their on-the-ground effects in an increasingly multipolar world.

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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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 unique archives challenges previous assumptions about Ba'thist Iraq and the workings of authoritarian regimes. Their chapters provide fresh insights into how Saddam Hussein's regime functioned both at the elite level and through everyday bureaucratic practices, shedding light on state power, social relations, and international politics of the Middle East. The volume also critically reflects on the ethical questions posed by the archives, including their origins, the impact of their removal from Iraq, and access barriers for local scholars. Rich in empirical detail yet framed by cutting-edge theoretical questions, this book demonstrates how the Iraqi archives have reshaped debates about authoritarianism, governance, repression, and state-society relations well beyond the Iraqi case.

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. 

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

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