The Book Review delves into the many books on national security and related fields published each year. It offers reviews that range widely across subjects and disciplines, from domestic and international law to history, strategic and military studies, from national security journalism to terrorism and counterterrorism, ethics, and technology. Contributors include scholars, serving or former government officials or military personnel, journalists, experts of many kinds, and students in law school or university.
Latest in Book Reviews
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How Did Participation in the First World War Help Shape Modern America?
PDF version A review of Michael S. Neiberg's The Path to War: How the First World War Changed America (Oxford University Press 2016). *** -
American Military Culture and Civil-Military Relations Today
PDF version A review of Rosa Brooks' How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon (Simon and Schuster 2016). *** -
The Evolving Law of Global Killing
PDF version A review of Theoretical Boundaries of Armed Conflict and Human Rights, edited by Jens David Ohlin (Cambridge University Press, 2016). *** -
The Military at Home
PDF version A review of William C. Banks and Stephen Dycus's Soldiers on the Home Front: The Domestic Role of the American Military (Harvard, 2016). *** -
A Dissertation on the Strategic Logic of Military Coups
In light of the coup attempt in Turkey (still apparently underway at this writing), I want to note a fairly recent book on coup d'etats from a political science perspective . -
The Center of the Jihadist Universe
PDF version A review of Charles Lister's The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency (Oxford, 2015). *** -
Culture War or Common Heritage? On Recent Critics of Global Religious Freedom
PDF version A review of Elizabeth Shakman Hurd's Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton, 2015) and Saba Mahmood's Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Repo... -
An American (Diplomat Not) in Paris
PDF version A review of To the Secretary: Leaked Embassy Cables and America's Foreign Policy Disconnect by Mary Thompson-Jones (W.W. Norton 2016) *** -
Endless War Watch, Summer 2016
This Sunday the New York Times Book Review prints my all-too-brief rundown of Mark Danner’s new Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War. Danner’s book is not a work of academic analysis or journalistic report... -
Perennial Issues in the International Law of the Use of Force
The Oxford Handbook of the Use of Force in International Law (edited by the highly distinguished Cambridge University international law scholar Marc Weller) labors under two handicaps before ever reachin... -
The History of Do-It-Yourself Weapons and Explosives Manuals in America
Ann Larabee's 2015 book, The Wrong Hands: Popular Weapons Manuals and Their Historic Challenges to a Democratic Society (Oxford UP 2015), is a history of what Larabee terms "popular weapons manuals." -
Congressional Oversight of US Foreign Relations
Watchdogs on the Hill: The Decline of Congressional Oversight of U.S. Foreign Relations
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