Katherine Chandler's Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare (Rutgers UP, 2020) studies the conditions that create unmanned platforms in the United States through a genealogy of experimental, pilotless planes flown between 1936 and 1992. Characteristics often attributed to the drone--including machine-like control, enmity and remoteness--are achieved by displacements between humans and machines that shape a mediated theater of war. Rather than primarily treating the drone as a result of the war on terror, this book examines contemporary targeted killing through a series of failed experiments to develop unmanned flight in the twentieth century. The human, machine and media parts of drone aircraft are organized to make an ostensibly not human framework for war that disavows its political underpinnings as technological advance. These experiments are tied to histories of global control, cybernetics, racism and colonialism. Drone crashes and failures call attention to the significance of human action in making technopolitics that comes to be opposed to "man" and the paradoxes at their basis. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

New Books in National Security

Katherine Chandler, "Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare" (Rutgers UP, 2020)

Interpreting International Politics (Routledge, 2014) is a short and lively account of how international relations was founded and developed as an interpretivist discipline, and why it matters that it was. Its author, Cecelia Lynch, joins this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science to discuss the interplay between interpretivist philosophies and realist, critical and feminist traditions in studies of international politics; the epistemological stakes for IR scholars embarking on new projects; and, the book’s location at a nexus between substantive questions, conceptual articulations, and ethical reflections about the role of the researcher in the study of international politics. Rather than a guide for how to interpret international politics and relations, this is a book that encourages researchers who feel a kinship or have an aesthetic inclination towards interpretive methods to identify and work with the rich materials that their discipline offers for robust and trustworthy interpretive social science. This episode is the fourth featuring books in the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods. The others are Interviewing in Social Science Research (Fujii), Elucidating Social Science Concepts (Schaffer), and Interpretive Research Design (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow). Listeners to this episode might be interested to check out the Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa blog, which Cecelia Lynch co-edits. To download or stream episodes in this series, please subscribe to our host channel: New Books in Political Science. Nick Cheesman is a fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, and a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group and convenor of the Interpretation, Method, Critique network. He co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Cecelia Lynch, "Interpreting International Politics" (Routledge, 2014)

With an estimated 250,000 people killed in 15 years, the Mexican drug war is the most violent conflict in the Western world. It shows no sign of abating. In Mexican Drug Violence: Hybrid Warfare, Predatory Capitalism and the Logic of Cruelty (2020), Dr Teun A. Voeten analyzes the dynamics of the violence. He argues it is a new type of war called hybrid warfare: multidimensional, elusive and unpredictable, fought at different levels, with different intensities with multiple goals. The war ISIS has declared against the West is another example of hybrid warfare. Voeten interprets drug cartels as ultra-capitalist predatory corporations thriving in a neoliberal, globalized economy. They use similar branding and marketing strategies as legitimate business. He also looks at the anthropological, individual level and explains how people can become killers. Voeten compares Mexican sicarios, West African child soldiers and Western jihadis and sees the same logic of cruelty that facilitates perpetrating 'inhumane' acts that are in fact very human. Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Teun Voeten, "Mexican Drug Violence: Hybrid Warfare, Predatory Capitalism and the Logic of Cruelty" (2020)

These days, anyone paying close attention to Peru is awash in déjà vu: the ghosts of Peru’s once-brutal war with the Maoist insurgent group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) have resurfaced time and again following the surprise victory of the country’s new left-leaning president. To understand how and why that conflict continues to shape Peruvian society, we invited Dr. Jo-Marie Burt onto the podcast to discuss her (not so) new book, Political Violence and the Authoritarian State in Peru: Silencing Civil Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). An Associate Professor of Political Science at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, Dr. Burt first traveled to Peru in the 1980s during the height of the civil conflict. The research she conducted across Peru and in Lima’s shantytowns led her to two major conclusions about the conflict. Despite its brutality, Sendero Luminoso had made inroads with Peru’s disaffected because it was able to provide a form of stability in areas the Peruvian state had overlooked. Second, the violence of the war debilitated Peru’s once-thriving civil society. The war thus set the stage for the authoritarian state that emerged in its aftermath. On the episode, I talk with Professor Burt about the origins, course, and resolution of the war; some of the mythologizing around Alberto Fujimori’s defeat of the insurgency; the legacy of the war in Peruvian society today; and whether her research has implications beyond Peru. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Jo-Marie Burt, "Political Violence and the Authoritarian State in Peru: Silencing Civil Society" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)

Western Jihadism: A Thirty Year History (Oxford University Press, 2021) tells the story of how Al Qaeda grew in the West. In forensic and compelling detail, Jytte Klausen traces how Islamist revolutionaries exiled in Europe and North America in the 1990s helped create and control one of the world's most impactful terrorist movements--and how, after the near-obliteration of the organization during the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, they helped build it again. She shows how the diffusion of Islamist terrorism to Europe and North America has been driven, not by local grievances of Western Muslims, but by the strategic priorities of the international Salafi-jihadist revolutionary movement. That movement has adapted to Western repertoires of protest: agitating for armed insurrection and religious revivalism in the name of a warped version of Islam. The jihadists-Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, and their many affiliates and associates--also proved to be amazingly resilient. Again and again, the movement recovered from major setbacks. Appealing to disaffected Muslims of immigrant origin and alienated converts to Islam, Jihadist groups continue to recruit new adherents in Europe and North America, street-side in neighborhoods, in jails, and online through increasingly clandestine platforms. Taking a comparative and historical approach, deploying cutting-edge analytical tools, and drawing on her unparalleled database of up to 6,500 Western jihadist extremists and their networks, Klausen has produced the most comprehensive account yet of the origins of Western jihadism and its role in the global movement. Jytte Klausen is the Lawrence A. Wien Professor of International Cooperation at Brandeis University and an Affiliate at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. Kirk Meighoo is Public Relations Officer for the United National Congress, the Official Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. His career has spanned media, academia, and politics for three decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Jytte Klausen, "Western Jihadism: A Thirty Year History" (Oxford UP, 2021)

What does citizenship—an institution that has historically linked identity to place—mean in an age of globalization? This is the question that Atossa Araxia Abrahamian investigates in her planet-sprawling book The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen (Columbia Global Reports, 2015). One way Abrahamian answers that question is by examining elites shopping for passports in a global marketplace. But the question also pulls her deep into a grim passports-in-bulk scheme that offloaded stateless people in the oil-rich Persian Gulf to an impoverished island-state off the coast of East Africa (not every cosmopolite was so by choice). Abrahamian also finds an answer in the various ways activists have chipped away at the exclusions of citizenship and have striven for a more egalitarian, connected world. The Cosmopolites is an astute inquiry into how the rules of the interstate system—the assignment of citizenship by place of birth; border regimes that restrict the movement of people—produce strange, sometimes Kafkaesque realities and how different actors have tried to bend those rules. And Abrahamian, a journalist and senior editor at The Nation whose beat is truly global, is well-suited for this endeavor. We talk about the book, her case for studying small states as a way to understanding the world order, and her methodology. I hope you enjoy our interview! Dexter Fergie is a doctoral student in US and global history at Northwestern University. His research examines the history of ideas, infrastructure, and international organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, "The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen" (Columbia Global Reports, 2015)

The history of international organizations has been an exciting area of research in recent years, with such landmark studies as Stephen Wertheim’s Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy and Adom Getachew's Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. From this scholarship, we’ve learned a lot about, say, the politics of creating new intergovernmental organizations or how they became arenas for interstate competition. But the international bureaucracies themselves remain mysterious, even black-boxed. That’s where Organizing the 20th-Century World: International Organizations and the Emergence of International Public Administration, 1920-1960s (Bloomsbury, 2020) comes in. Edited by Karen Gram-Skjoldager (an associate professor at Aarhus University), Haakon Ikonomou (an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen), and Torsten Kahlert (a postdoctoral fellow at the Herzog August Bibliothek), Organizing the 20th-Century World tells the history of international public administration, documenting the arrival of “an entirely new professional figure on the international stage: the international civil servant.” The edited collection’s contributors also introduce tools that could aid in study of international administration, including biography (what Haakon Ikonomou calls an “institutional can opener”), prosopography, and relevant datasets. Thanks to both its methodological and historical contributions, this volume will serve as a useful compass for future scholars of international public administration. Dexter Fergie is a doctoral student in US and global history at Northwestern University. His research examines the history of ideas, infrastructure, and international organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Karen Gram-Skjoldager et al., "Organizing the 20th-Century World: International Organizations and the Emergence of International Public Administration, 1920-1960s" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Tunisia became one of the largest sources of foreign fighters for the Islamic State—even though the country stands out as a democratic bright spot of the Arab uprisings and despite the fact that it had very little history of terrorist violence within its borders prior to 2011. In Your Sons Are at Your Service: Tunisia's Missionaries of Jihad (Columbia UP, 2020), Aaron Y. Zelin uncovers the longer history of Tunisian involvement in the jihadi movement and offers an in-depth examination of the reasons why so many Tunisians became drawn to jihadism following the 2011 revolution. Zelin highlights the longer-term causes that affected jihadi recruitment in Tunisia, including the prior history of Tunisians joining jihadi organizations and playing key roles in far-flung parts of the world over the past four decades. He contends that the jihadi group Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia was able to take advantage of the universal prisoner amnesty, increased openness, and the lack of governmental policy toward it after the revolution. In turn, this provided space for greater recruitment and subsequent mobilization to fight abroad once the Tunisian government cracked down on the group in 2013. Zelin marshals cutting-edge empirical findings, extensive primary source research, and on-the-ground fieldwork, including a variety of documents in Arabic going as far back as the 1980s and interviews with Ansar al-Sharia members and Tunisian fighters returning from Syria. The first book on the history of the Tunisian jihadi movement, Your Sons Are at Your Service is a meticulously researched account that challenges simplified views of jihadism’s appeal and success. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Aaron Y. Zelin, "Your Sons Are at Your Service: Tunisia's Missionaries of Jihad" (Columbia UP, 2020)

Dr. Gary Shiffman’s book The Economics of Violence: How Behavioral Science Can Transform our View of Crime, Insurgency, and Terrorism (Cambridge UP, 2020) serves as a fantastic introduction to anyone interested in thinking critically about terrorist, insurgency, and criminal groups of all sorts. Using case studies from multiple continents, ideological contexts, and political situations, Dr. Shiffman shows how the language and tools familiar to economists can assist policy makers and security personnel to combat rival ‘firms,’ as he classifies them. Arguing strongly against essentialist labels and stories about why these groups act the way that they do, Dr. Shiffman offers us an approach to understanding ‘illicit’ groups that would be recognizable to leaders of many ‘legitimate’ organizations. Dr. Gary Shiffman is a Professor at Georgetown University, the CEO of two software companies, a former Naval Officer and Border Patrol leader, a former Fortune 200 executive, and an engaging writer. His is the author of one other book on the Economic Instruments of Security Policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Gary Shiffman, "The Economics of Violence: How Behavioral Science Can Transform our View of Crime, Insurgency, and Terrorism" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

When we talk about people crossing borders, policy makers, advocates, journalists, and academics often distinguish between “refugees” and “migrants.” Is this a useful legal fiction? Shorthand for an important distinction? Dr. Rebecca Hamlin argues that employing this binary limits protection for vulnerable people who are not protected by the rarified category of “refugee.”  In Crossing: How We Label and React to People on the Move (Stanford UP, 2021), Dr. Hamlin confronts the binary -- and the effect it has on our study, policy-making, and conversations about border crossers. Her book traces the emergence of the concept of refugee in the context of sovereignty and colonialism, pushing back on notions of essentialism in favor of a constructed binary. The logic of the migrant/refugee binary obscure power imbalances by focusing on internal explanations for why people are leaving countries in the Global South (corruption, war, poverty) rather than externalist forces such as globalization, postcolonialism, and neoliberalism. Using varied data and methods, she provides insight into the scholarly fault lines and the historical and current role of the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees) in perpetuating the binary. Her rich case studies reveal differences in how the binary is deployed in the Global North and South. Beautifully written and carefully argued, Dr. Hamlin challenges scholars and advocates for vulnerable border crossers to move beyond the binary, despite perceived risks. In the podcast (recorded days after the fall of the Afghan government), Dr. Hamlin reflects on the continuing effects of the binary in contemporary events -- and how it limits creative scholarship, policy-making, journalism, and conversation about vulnerable border crossers. She mentions Claudio Saunt’s Norton book, Unworthy Republic and also the Hamlin-Abdelaaty Migrants or Refugees? It's the Wrong Question published in the Monkey Cage. New Books in Political Science welcomes Dr. Lamis E. Abdelaaty as a part of this dynamic conversation and we look forward to new podcasts from Dr. Abdelaaty in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Rebecca Hamlin, "Crossing: How We Label and React to People on the Move" (Stanford UP, 2021)

Rough Draft: Cold War Military Manpower Policy and the Origins of Vietnam-Era Draft Resistance (Cornell University Press, 2019) draws the curtain on the race and class inequities of the Selective Service during the Vietnam War. Amy J. Rutenberg argues that policy makers' idealized conceptions of Cold War middle-class masculinity directly affected whom they targeted for conscription and also for deferment. Federal officials believed that college educated men could protect the nation from the threat of communism more effectively as civilians than as soldiers. The availability of deferments for this group mushroomed between 1945 and 1965, making it less and less likely that middle-class white men would serve in the Cold War army. Meanwhile, officials used the War on Poverty to target poorer and racialized men for conscription in the hopes that military service would offer them skills they could use in civilian life. As Rutenberg shows, manpower policies between World War II and the Vietnam War had unintended consequences. While some men resisted military service in Vietnam for reasons of political conscience, most did so because manpower polices made it possible. By shielding middle-class breadwinners in the name of national security, policymakers militarized certain civilian roles—a move that, ironically, separated military service from the obligations of masculine citizenship and, ultimately, helped kill the draft in the United States. Amy J Rutenberg is Associate Professor of History and Co-Coordinator of the Social Studies Education Program at Iowa State University. Her work has appeared in Cold War History, The New York Times, and TheAtlantic.com. Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. Her current work concerns the politics of travel in Cold War US; she has previously published on US military intervention in the 2013-16 Ebola epidemic. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Amy J. Rutenberg, "Rough Draft: Cold War Military Manpower Policy and the Origins of Vietnam-Era Draft Resistance" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Cryptoreality is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Artur Ekert, Professor of Quantum Physics at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford and Director of the Centre for Quantum Technologies and Lee Kong Chian Centennial Professor at the National University of Singapore. Artur Ekert is one of the pioneers of quantum cryptography. This wide-ranging conversation provides detailed insights into his research and covers many fascinating topics such as mathematical and physical intuition, a detailed history of cryptography from antiquity to the present day and how it works in practice, the development of quantum information science, the nature of reality, and more. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Artur Ekert, “Cryptoreality” (Open Agenda, 2021)

Spies deep behind enemy lines; double agents; a Chinese American James Bond; black propaganda radio broadcasters; guerrilla fighters; pirates; smugglers; prostitutes and dancers as spies; and Asian Americans collaborating with Axis Powers. All these colorful individuals form the story of Asian Americans in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of today's CIA. Brian Masaru Hayashi brings to light for the first time the role played by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Americans in America's first centralized intelligence agency in its fight against the Imperial Japanese forces in east Asia during World War II. They served deep behind enemy lines gathering intelligence for American and Chinese troops locked in a desperate struggle against Imperial Japanese forces on the Asian continent. Other Asian Americans produced and disseminated statements by bogus peace groups inside the Japanese empire to weaken the fighting resolve of the Japanese. Still others served with guerrilla forces attacking enemy supply and communication lines behind enemy lines. Engaged in this deadly conflict, these Asian Americans agents encountered pirates, smugglers, prostitutes, and dancers serving as the enemy's spies, all the while being subverted from within the OSS by a double agent and without by co-ethnic collaborators in wartime Shanghai. Drawing on recently declassified documents, Asian American Spies: How Asian Americans Helped Win the Allied Victory (Oxford UP, 2021) challenges the romanticized and stereotyped image of these Chinese, Japanese, and Korean American agents--the Model Minority-while offering a fresh perspective on the Allied victory in the Pacific Theater of World War II. Jessica Moloughney is a public librarian in New York and a recent graduate of Queens College with a Master’s Degree in History and Library Science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Brian Masaru Hayashi, "Asian American Spies: How Asian Americans Helped Win the Allied Victory" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Interviews with Scholars of National Security about their New Books