New Books in National Security

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Ruth Streicher, "Uneasy Military Encounters: The Imperial Politics of Counterinsurgency in Southern Thailand" (Cornell UP, 2020) Aug 02, 2021

Show notes

Since 2004 the Malay-Muslim majority provinces in the border region of southern Thailand have been wracked by a violent insurgency. Over 7000 people have been killed and many thousands more injured. Currently 60,000 Thai security personnel are stationed in the region to conduct counter-insurgency operations. Another 80,000 people have been organized into a “volunteer defense force”. Ruth Streicher spent time researching this troubled region talking to local civilians, activists, journalists, academics, as well as military conscripts and senior officers. The result is Uneasy Military Encounters: The Imperial Politics of Counterinsurgency in Southern Thailand (Cornell UP, 2020). The book is a theoretically adventurous exploration of the conflict in Thailand’s deep south in which the author weaves the themes of empire, policing, gender, history, and religion.

Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au.

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Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko, "Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon" (Redwood Press, 2021) Jul 26, 2021

Show notes

Two experts of extremist radicalization take us down the QAnon rabbit hole, exposing how the conspiracy theory ensnared countless Americans, and show us a way back to sanity.

In January 2021, thousands descended on the U.S. Capitol to aid President Donald Trump in combating a shadowy cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Two women were among those who died that day. They, like millions of Americans, believed that a mysterious insider known as "Q" is exposing a vast deep-state conspiracy. The QAnon conspiracy theory has ensnared many women, who identify as members of "pastel QAnon," answering the call to "save the children."

With Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon(Redwood Press, 2021), Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko explain why the rise of QAnon should not surprise us: believers have been manipulated to follow the baseless conspiracy. The authors track QAnon's unexpected leap from the darkest corners of the Internet to the filtered glow of yogi-mama Instagram, a frenzy fed by the COVID-19 pandemic that supercharged conspiracy theories and spurred a fresh wave of Q-inspired violence.

Pastels and Pedophiles connects the dots for readers, showing how a conspiracy theory with its roots in centuries-old anti-Semitic hate has adapted to encompass local grievances and has metastasized around the globe—appealing to a wide range of alienated people who feel that something is not quite right in the world around them. While QAnon claims to hate Hollywood, the book demonstrates how much of Q's mythology is ripped from movie and television plot lines.

Finally, Pastels and Pedophiles lays out what can be done about QAnon's corrosive effect on society, to bring Q followers out of the rabbit hole and back into the light.

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner.

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Phillip T. Lohaus, "Power and Complacency: American Survival in an Age of International Competition" (U Nebraska Press, 2021) Jul 21, 2021

Show notes

Why has the United States, the world’s premier military and economic power, struggled recently to achieve its foreign policy desiderata? How might America’s leaders reconsider the application of power for a world of asymmetric and unconventional threats? In his new book,Power and Complacency: American Survival in an Age of International Competition(Potomac Books, 2021), American Enterprise Institute Visiting Fellow Philip Lohaus explores the roots of America’s “efficacy deficit” and offers recommendations for how the United States can ensure a favorable place on an increasingly crowded global stage.

Lohaus argues that the American way of competition, rooted in a black-and-white approach to conflict and an overreliance on technology, impedes effectiveness in the amorphous landscape of the 21st-century conflict. By tracing the geographic and historical development of the United States, China, Russia, and Iran, Lohaus shows that America’s principal competitors have developed more dynamic approaches to competition and conflict outside of warfare. Unless the United States adapts, Lohaus writes, it will find itself on the path to decline.

Before joining the American Enterprise Institute, Lohus previously served as an Intelligence Analyst in the US Department of Defense, where he deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. He is currently a Reserve Officer in the US Navy.

John Sakellariadis is a 2021-2022 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a Master’s degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University.

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Simon Miles, "Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2020) Jul 16, 2021

Show notes

In a narrative-redefining approach, Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War(Cornell UP, 2020) dramatically alters how we look at the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Tracking key events in US-Soviet relations across the years between 1980 and 1985, Simon Miles shows that covert engagement gave way to overt conversation as both superpowers determined that open diplomacy was the best means of furthering their own, primarily competitive, goals. Miles narrates the history of these dramatic years, as President Ronald Reagan consistently applied a disciplined carrot-and-stick approach, reaching out to Moscow while at the same time excoriating the Soviet system and building up US military capabilities.

The received wisdom in diplomatic circles is that the beginning of the end of the Cold War came from changing policy preferences and that President Reagan in particular opted for a more conciliatory and less bellicose diplomatic approach. In reality, as Miles vividly demonstrates, Reagan and ranking officials in the National Security Council had determined that the United States enjoyed a strategic margin of error that permitted it to engage Moscow overtly.

As US grand strategy developed, so did that of the Soviet Union. Engaging the Evil Empire covers five critical years of Cold War history when Soviet leaders tried to reduce tensions between the two nations in order to gain economic breathing room and, to ensure domestic political stability, prioritize expenditures on butter over those on guns. Written with style and verve, Miles's bold narrative shifts the focus of Cold War historians away from exclusive attention on Washington by focusing on the years of back-channel communiqués and internal strategy debates in Moscow as well as Budapest, Prague, and East Berlin.

Grant Golub is a PhD candidate in U.S. and international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His research examines the politics of American grand strategy during World War II. Follow him on Twitter @ghgolub.

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Karma R. Chávez, "The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance" (U Washington Press, 2021) Jul 16, 2021

Show notes

As soon as US media and politicians became aware of AIDS in the early 1980s, fingers were pointed not only at the gay community but also at other countries and migrant communities, particularly Haitians, as responsible for spreading the virus. Evangelical leaders, public health officials, and the Reagan administration quickly capitalized on widespread fear of the new disease to call for quarantines, immigration bans, and deportations, scapegoating and blaming HIV-positive migrants--even as the rest of the world regarded the US as the primary exporter of the virus.

In The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance(U Washington Press, 2021), Karma Chávez demonstrates how such calls proliferated and how failure to impose a quarantine for HIV-positive citizens morphed into the successful enactment of a complete ban on the regularization of HIV-positive migrants--which lasted more than twenty years. News reports, congressional records, and AIDS activist archives reveal how queer groups and migrant communities built fragile coalitions to fight against the alienation of themselves and others, asserting their capacity for resistance and resiliency. Building on existing histories of HIV/AIDS, public health, citizenship, and immigration, Chávez establishes how politicians and public health officials treated different communities with HIV/AIDS and highlights the work these communities did to resist alienation.

You can get 30% off the cost of the book using the code WST30 when you are purchasing from the publishers University of Washington Press.

Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers.

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William Walters, "State Secrecy and Security: Refiguring the Covert Imaginary" (Routledge, 2021) Jul 13, 2021

Show notes

In State Secrecy and Security: Refiguring the Covert Imaginary(Routledge, 2021), William Walters calls for secrecy to be given a more central place in critical security studies and elevated to become a core concept when theorising power in liberal democracies.

Through investigations into such themes as the mobility of cryptographic secrets, the power of public inquiries, the connection between secrecy and place-making, and the aesthetics of secrecy within immigration enforcement, Walters challenges commonplace understandings of the covert and develops new concepts, methods and themes for secrecy and security research. Walters identifies the covert imaginary as both a limit on our ability to think politics differently and a ground to develop a richer understanding of power.

State Secrecy and Security offers readers a set of thinking tools to better understand the strange powers that hiding, revealing, lying, confessing, professing ignorance and many other operations of secrecy put in motion. It will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of security, secrecy and politics more broadly.

William Walters is Professor of Politics and Faculty of Public Affairs Research Excellence Chair at Carleton University, Ottawa. His current research concerns secrecy, migration and deportation infrastructures. He has published widely in the areas of political sociology, political geography, citizenship studies, security and insecurity, and Foucault studies.

Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security, subjectivity and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office; she has previously published on US Africa Command and the 2013-16 Ebola epidemic. She can be reached by email or on Twitter.

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Timothy Frye, "Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia" (Princeton UP, 2021) Jul 13, 2021

Show notes

Putin is not the unconstrained, all-powerful boogeyman he is made out to be in the popular Western media. So says Timothy Frye, Professor of Political Science at Columbia University in his new book,

Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia (Princeton UP, 2021). Drawing on more than three decades of research, and reams of data from within Russia itself, Frye depicts a "personal autocrat", but one subject to numerous constraints and trade offs. And the shows of force we have seen in recent years, from his treatment of opposition figures to the planning for the upcoming election, highlight those weaknesses. Regardless of your view of Putin, you will want to hear about and understand the challenges that he faces.

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinves...

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Susan Eisenhower, "How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions" (Thomas Dunne, 2020) Jul 05, 2021

Show notes

Few people have made decisions as momentous as Eisenhower, nor has one person had to make such a varied range of them. From D-Day to Little Rock, from the Korean War to Cold War crises, from the Red Scare to the Missile Gap controversies, Ike was able to give our country eight years of peace and prosperity by relying on a core set of principles. These were informed by his heritage and upbringing, as well as his strong character and his personal discipline, but he also avoided making himself the center of things. He was a man of judgment, and steadying force. He sought national unity, by pursuing a course he called the Middle Way that tried to make winners on both sides of any issue.

Ike was a strategic, not an operational leader, who relied on a rigorous pursuit of the facts for decision-making. His talent for envisioning a whole, especially in the context of the long game, and his ability to see causes and various consequences, explains his success as Allied Commander and as President. After making a decision, he made himself accountable for it, recognizing that personal responsibility is the bedrock of sound principles.

Susan Eisenhower's How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions(Thomas Dunne, 2020) shows us not just what a great American did, but why--and what we can learn from him today.

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Chandran Kukathas, "Immigration and Freedom" (Princeton UP, 2021) Jul 01, 2021

Show notes

Discussions of the ethics and politics of immigration tend to focus on those seeking entry into a new society. We ask whether a country has the “right to exclude” those who want to relocate within it. We explore the moral implications of more-or-less restrictive immigration policies, often with a view towards the plight of immigrants and refugees.

These are of course important questions, but in his new book, Immigration and Freedom (Princeton University Press, 2021) Chandran Kukathas argues that a state’s immigration policies also exert control over its domestic population. He asks whether this exercise of power is justifiable.

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Marco Checchi, "The Primacy of Resistance: Power, Opposition and Becoming" (Bloomsbury, 2021) Jun 30, 2021

Show notes

What is at the heart of political resistance? Whilst traditional accounts often conceptualise it as a reaction to power, this volume (prioritising remarks by Michel Foucault) invites us to think of resistance as primary. The author proposes a strategic analysis that highlights how our efforts need to be redirected towards a horizon of creation and change.

In The Primacy of Resistance: Power, Opposition and Becoming (Bloomsbury, 2021), Checchi first establishes a genealogy of two main trajectories of the history of our present: the liberal subject of rights and the neoliberal ideas of human capital and bio-financialisation. The former emerges as a reactive closure of Etienne de la Boétie's discourse on human nature and natural companionship. The other forecloses the creative potential of Autonomist Marxist conceptions of labour, first elaborated by Mario Tronti. The focus of this text then shifts towards contemporary openings. Initially, Checchi proposes an inverted reading of Jacques Rancière's concept of politics as interruption that resonates with Antonio Negri's emphasis on Baruch Spinoza's potential qua resistance. Finally, the author stages a virtual encounter between Gilles Deleuze's ontology of matter and Foucault's account of the primacy of resistance with which the text begins.

Through this series of explorations, The Primacy of Resistance traces a conceptual trajectory with and beyond Foucault by affirming the affinity between resistance and creation.

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