The Dispensable Nation

In The Dispensable Nation, international relations academic and former State Department advisor Vali Nasr tackles one of the wickedest problems in the world with aplomb, producing a sharp and lucid summary which deserves to be required reading for anyone wishing to have an opinion on the modern Middle East. In…

Syria

First things first - this is not a book on the Syrian Civil War. In an age where the highest editorial virtue appears to be velocity rather than depth, even avid news consumers could be understood for failing to remember that Syria has played a vital role in world history…

Theories of International Politics and Zombies

Obvious as it may seem once stated, it's easy to forget a simple fact about professional academics: They're mostly nerds[1]. Dan Drezner, professor of international politics at Tufts and member of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, demonstrates this plainly in his witty tutorial Theories of International Politics and…

Condemned to Crisis?

Another Lowy Institute monograph from the publishing initiative that gave us The Embarrassed Colonialist, Condemned to Crisis seeks to explain the fractious relationship between Australia and Indonesia, as seen through the eyes of foreign policy veteran, Ken Ward. Despite the forward-looking subtitle, Condemned is mostly diagnostic, with little in the…

Command and Control

It took me a long time to get around to reading this book. Over and over I'd pick it up in bookstores, only to sigh and place it back on the shelf. A history of nuclear weapons seemed interesting to be sure, but it was too distant, too academic, too…

The Tyranny of Experts

In the words of Nobel laureate and fellow development scholar Amartya Sen, Bill Easterly is "The Man Without a Plan". If there's one thing you need to know about Easterly, it's that he considers this a great compliment. Bill Easterly burst out of academia and onto the broader…