Vappala Balachandran, "India and China at Odds in the Asian Century: A Diplomatic and Strategic History" (Hurst, 2025)
China and India have had a tense relationship, disagreeing over territory, support for each other’s rivals, and even, at times, leadership of the “Global South.” But there were periods where things se...
5 Jun 202541min
Talin Suciyan, "Armenians in Turkey after the Second World War: An Archival Reader of USSR Consular Documents" (I. B. Tauris & Company, 2025)
This reader brings to light newly discovered archival material compiled by the Soviet Consulate in Istanbul. The book reveals the lives and experience of Armenians in Turkey in the 1940s, with a parti...
4 Jun 202548min
Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War" (Princeton UP, 2024)
When World War II ended, about one million people whom the Soviet Union claimed as its citizens were outside the borders of the USSR, mostly in the Western-occupied zones of Germany and Austria. These...
4 Jun 20251h 2min
Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt, "The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq" (Stanford UP, 2021)
A new history of Middle East oil and the deep roots of American violence in Iraq. Iraq has been the site of some of the United States' longest and most sustained military campaigns since the Vietnam W...
3 Jun 20251h 21min
Helen Thompson on Disorder and the Analysis of Contemporary Geopolitics
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Helen Thompson, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University and co-host of the great podcast, These Times, about her approach to geopolitical a...
20 Mai 20251h 13min
Alan Strathern, "Converting Rulers: Global Patterns, 1450-1850" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Why did so many rulers throughout history risk converting to a new religion brought by outsiders? In his award-winning Unearthly Powers (2019), Dr. Alan Strathern set out a theoretical framework for u...
19 Mai 20251h 18min
Dennis Ross, "Statecraft 2.0: What America Needs to Survive in a Multipolar World" (Oxford UP, 2025)
In a multipolar world where America wields less relative power, the United States can no longer get away with poor statecraft. To understand how the US can approach future national security challenges...
18 Mai 202552min
Lines of Control: India’s Foreign Policy and China
This podcast episode, hosted by Kikee Doma Bhutia from the University of Tartu, features journalist and analyst Aadil Brar discussing India's foreign policy amidst rising global tensions. The conversa...
17 Mai 202538min
