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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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 -
Out of the Blue and into the Black?
PDF version A review of Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Fred Kaplan (Simon & Schuster 2016) -
Popularizing the History of International Criminal Law
PDF VERSION A review of Phillippe Sands' East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity" (Knopf, 2016). -
Chalked Spikes and Bush-Era Intelligence
PDF version A Review of Michael V. Hayden, Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (Penguin 2016). -
Here Be Dragons
PDF version A Review of Adam Segal's The Hacked World Order (PublicAffairs, 2016). -
Originalism and the Executive
PDF version A review of Saikrishna Prakash's Imperial from the Beginning: The Constitution of the Original Executive (Yale, 2015). -
Book Review: Cully Stimson Takes on Power Wars
“Governing had turned out to be more complicated than criticizing from the private sector or campaigning.” –a senior Obama administration official.
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