Barbara Emerson, "The First Cold War: Anglo-Russian Relations in the 19th Century" (Hurst, 2024)

In Ordinary Rebels: Rank-And-File Militants Between War and Peace (Oxford University Press, 2025), Kolby Hanson argues that these periods of state toleration do not simply change armed groups' behavior, but fundamentally transform the organizations themselves by shaping who takes up arms and which leaders they follow. This book draws on a set of innovative experimental surveys and 75 in-depth interviews tracing four armed movements over time in Northeast India and Sri Lanka. A powerful new theory of how conditions shape the trajectory of non-state armed groups, this book reshapes our understanding of why such organizations become more moderate over time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

28 Sep 42min

Landscapes of Warfare: Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle East (University Press of Colorado, 2025) offers an in-depth exploration of the Urartian empire, which occupied the highlands of present-day Turkey, Armenia, and Iran in the early first millennium BCE. Lesser known than its rival, the Neo-Assyrian empire, Urartu presents a unique case of imperial power distributed among mountain fortresses rather than centralized in cities. Through spatial analysis, the book demonstrates how systematic warfare, driven by imperial ambitions, shaped Urartian and Assyrian territories, creating symbolically and materially powerful landscapes. Tiffany Earley-Spadoni challenges traditional views by emphasizing warfare’s role in organizing ancient landscapes, suggesting that Urartu’s strength lay in its strategic optimization of terrain through fortified regional networks. Using an interdisciplinary approach that includes GIS-enabled studies and integrates archaeological, historical, and art-historical evidence, she illustrates how warfare was a generative force in structuring space and society in the ancient Middle East. Landscapes of Warfare situates Urartu’s developments within the broader context of regional empires, providing insights into the mechanisms of warfare, governance, and cultural identity formation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

28 Sep 39min

Shedding light on the origins of the Second World War in Europe, Stalin's Gamble: The Search for Allies Against Hitler, 1930-1936 (University of Toronto Press, 2023) aims to create a historical narrative of the relations of the USSR with Britain, France, the United States, Poland, Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Romania during the 1930s. The book explores the Soviet Union's efforts to organize a defensive alliance against Nazi Germany, in effect rebuilding the anti-German Entente of the First World War. Drawing on extensive research in Soviet as well as Western archives, Michael Jabara Carley offers an in-depth account of the diplomatic manoeuvrings which surrounded the rise of Hitler and Soviet efforts to construct an alliance against future German aggression. Paying close attention to the beliefs and interactions of senior politicians and diplomats, the book seeks to replace one-sided Western histories with records from both sides. The book also offers an inside look at Soviet foreign policy making, with a focus on Stalin as a foreign policy maker as well as his interactions with his colleagues. Told in a fascinating narrative style, Stalin's Gamble attempts to see the European crisis of the 1930s through Soviet eyes. Michael Jabara Carley is a professor of history at the Université de Montréal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

26 Sep 1h 25min

Making Antifascist War: The International Brigades' Transnational Encounters with Civil-War Spain, 1936-1939 (Cambridge UP, 2025) is a study of the 35,000 antifascists who joined the International Brigades in order to defend the Second Spanish Republic and of their encounters with civil-war Spain. Dr. Adrian Pole offers the first in-depth history of the rich array of cross-cultural encounters which emerged between the multinational soldiers of all five International Brigades and the people, places, politics and culture of the country which accommodated them for almost three years of civil war. He sets out to recover the place of these encounters within the making, imagining and running of a transnational fighting force, showing how they influenced the volunteers' experiences and emotions, underlined their ideas and identities, informed their motivations and actions, and ultimately underpinned their ability to imagine, wage and justify the war. In doing so, he demonstrates how they enabled thousands of transnational actors to define a deeply contentious conflict in their own very particular terms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

24 Sep 55min

A stunning collection of stoic portraits and intimate ephemera from the lives of Black Civil War soldiers Though both the Union and Confederate armies excluded African American men from their initial calls to arms, many of the men who eventually served were black. Simultaneously, photography culture blossomed--marking the Civil War as the first conflict to be extensively documented through photographs. In The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (NYU Press, 2025), Deb Willis explores the crucial role of photography in (re)telling and shaping African American narratives of the Civil War, pulling from a dynamic visual archive that has largely gone unacknowledged. With over seventy images, The Black Civil War Soldier contains a huge breadth of primary and archival materials, many of which are rarely reproduced. The photographs are supplemented with handwritten captions, letters, and other personal materials; Willis not only dives into the lives of black Union soldiers, but also includes stories of other African Americans involved with the struggle--from left-behind family members to female spies. Willis thus compiles a captivating memoir of photographs and words and examines them together to address themes of love and longing; responsibility and fear; commitment and patriotism; and--most predominantly--African American resilience. The Black Civil War Soldier offers a kaleidoscopic yet intimate portrait of the African American experience, from the beginning of the Civil War to 1900. Through her multimedia analysis, Willis acutely pinpoints the importance of African American communities in the development and prosecution of the war. The book shows how photography helped construct a national vision of blackness, war, and bondage, while unearthing the hidden histories of these black Civil War soldiers. In combating the erasure of this often overlooked history, Willis asks how these images might offer a more nuanced memory of African-American participation in the Civil War, and in doing so, points to individual and collective struggles for citizenship and remembrance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

24 Sep 35min

The compulsory service for young men in the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) created bonds across ethnic, religious, and social lines. These bonds persisted even after the horrific violence of the 1990s, in which many of these men found themselves on opposite sides of the front lines. In Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People's Army (Duke UP, 2024), Tanja Petrović draws on memories and material effects of dozens of JNA conscripts to show how their experience of military service points to futures, forms of collectivity, and relations between the state and the individual different from those that prevailed in the post-Yugoslav reality. Petrović argues that the power of repetitive, ritualized, and performative practices that constituted military service in the JNA provided a framework for drastically different men to live together and befriend each other. While Petrović and her interlocutors do not idealize the JNA, they acknowledge its capacity to create interpersonal relationships and affective bonds that brought the key political ideas of collectivity, solidarity, egalitarianism, education, and comradeship into being. Dragana Prvulović is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Ottawa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

21 Sep 43min

The need for collective action has never been greater, but geopolitics, structural changes and diverging preferences mean that existing global governance arrangements, devised at Bretton Woods in the 1940s, are either unravelling or outmoded. Reconciling this contradiction is today's pressing global policy challenge.In New World New Rules: Global Cooperation in a World of Geopolitical Rivalries (Agenda, 2024), two of Europe's most-experienced policymakers and analysts outline a new agenda for global governance. They examine governance practices across several key policy areas - climate, health, trade and competition, banking and finance, taxation, migration and the digital economy - and consider what works and what doesn't, and why. The global governance solutions they put forward are ambitious but pragmatic. They require complexity, flexibility and compromise. Attributes that global governments are demonstrably short of, but today's global crises urgently demand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

17 Sep 43min

Dani Belo's Russian Warfare in the 21st Century: An Incentive-Opportunity Intervention Model (Routledge, 2025) provides a comprehensive analysis of Russia's foreign policy in gray zone conflicts, with a particular focus on its interventions in Ukraine. Challenging conventional views, the book contends that Russia's use of varied gray zone tactics is influenced by both system-level incentives and domestic-level opportunities, which are integrated here into the Incentive-Opportunity Intervention (IOI) Model. The book examines case studies including Abkhazia, Crimea, Odesa, Kharkiv, and the Donbas, demonstrating how local ethnic-based movements and perceptions of regional retreat shape Moscow's coercive strategies. It highlights the reactive nature of Russia's tactics, driven by perceived threats to its protector role, and the significant role of ethnic and political dynamics in the region. The study underscores the importance of understanding these motivations for effective conflict resolution and suggests that protecting minority rights could mitigate such interventions. Policy recommendations emphasize the need for nuanced approaches that address both geopolitical and local dynamics. Ultimately, the book calls for future research to apply the IOI Model to other great powers, enhance the generalizability and applicability of the findings, and highlight the potential for multilateral coordination in promoting minority rights as a strategy for conflict prevention. This book will be of much interest to students and policy practitioners working on Russian foreign policy, international security, Eastern European politics, and International Relations.  Dani Belo is an Assistant Professor of International Relations and Security and Director of the Global Policy Horizons Research Lab, Webster University in St. Louis, USA. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

17 Sep 1h 3min