Books

The riveting, secret story of the hundred-year intelligence war between Russia and the West with lessons for our new superpower conflict with China.

The Nuremberg Tribunals, like the Tokyo Trials, were landmarks in implementing international justice because they documented genocide and countless atrocities that Axis forces committed against millions of humans worldwide. Reflecting on the importance of the Nuremberg Tribunals, it is also worthwhile to remember the challenges journalists encountered after World War II as they assessed changes to international law. Finding clear and succinct ways to present complex legal proceedings for readers across the globe was a formidable task. The tribunals were also historically momentous because of the evidence the tribunals revealed used to prosecute those responsible for perpetrating mass violence.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left its nearly 30,000 nuclear weapons spread over the territories of four newly sovereign states: Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine. This collapse cast a shadow of profound ambiguity over the fate of the world's largest arsenal of the deadliest weapons ever created. In Inheriting the Bomb, Mariana Budjeryn reexamines the history of nuclear predicament caused by the Soviet collapse and the subsequent nuclear disarmament of the non-Russian Soviet successor states.

Although Belarus and Kazakhstan renounced their claim to Soviet nuclear weapons, Ukraine proved to be a difficult case: with its demand for recognition as a lawful successor state of the USSR, a nuclear superpower, the country became a major proliferation concern. And yet by 1994, Ukraine had acceded to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as a non-nuclear-weapon state and proceeded to transfer its nuclear warheads to Russia, which emerged as the sole nuclear successor of the USSR.

How was this international proliferation crisis averted? Drawing on extensive archival research in the former Soviet Union and the United States, Budjeryn uncovers a fuller and more nuanced narrative of post-Soviet denuclearization. She reconstructs Ukraine's path to nuclear disarmament to understand how its leaders made sense of the nuclear armaments their country inherited. Among the various factors that contributed to Ukraine's nuclear renunciation, including diplomatic pressure from the United States and Russia and domestic economic woes, the NPT stands out as a salient force that provided an international framework for managing the Soviet nuclear collapse.

Capital Choices analyzes the creation of different SWFs from a comparative political economy perspective, arguing that different state-society structures at the sectoral level are the drivers for SWF variation. Juergen Braunstein focuses on the early formation period of SWFs, a critical but little understood area given the high levels of political sensitivity and lack of transparency that surround SWF creation. Braunstein’s novel analytical framework provides practical lessons for the business and finance organizations and policymakers of countries that have created, or are planning to create, SWFs.

In Bullets Not Ballots, Jacqueline L. Hazelton challenges the claim that winning "hearts and minds" is critical to successful counterinsurgency campaigns. Good governance, this conventional wisdom holds, gains the besieged government popular support, denies support to the insurgency, and enables military and political victory. Hazelton argues that major counterinsurgent successes since World War II have resulted not through democratic reforms but rather through the use of military force against civilians and the co-optation of rival elites.

The Memorandum on Security Assurances in Connection with Ukraine’s Accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), signed in 1994 by Ukraine, and the three NPT depositary states, the United States, United Kingdom and Russian Federation, is not a ratified, legally binding treaty, but a set of high-level political commitments. Its significance is in explicitly linking Ukraine’s sovereignty and security to the NPT, and the basic bargains enshrined in it. The NPT’s depositary states gave Ukraine security assurances in exchange for Kyiv’s renunciation of the world’s third largest nuclear weapons arsenal. Moscow’s manifest violation of this deal when it invaded Ukraine in 2014 not only eroded European security. It has also undermined the rationale of the international nonproliferation regime. While not directly related to the question of the North-Atlantic Alliance’s enlargement, Russia’s disregard for the NPT’s logic has, since 2014, escalated Ukrainian critique of NATO’s insufficient engagement in Eastern Europe, during the last quarter of a century.

The opening of the British archives has seen historians uncover the secrets of the UK's nuclear weapons programme since the 1990s. While a growing number have sought to expose these former secrets, there has been less effort to consider government secrecy itself. What was kept a secret, when and why? And how and why, notably from the 1980s, did the British government decide to officially disclose greater information about the British nuclear weapons programme to Members of Parliament, journalists, defence academics and the tax-paying general public. 

A new book edited by Erica Chenoweth, Deborah Avant, Marie Berry, Rachel Epstein, Cullen Hendrix, Oliver Kaplan, and Timothy Sisk, Civil Action and the Dynamics of Violence, looks at recent conflicts in Syria, Peru, Kenya, Northern Ireland, Mexico, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Spain, and Colombia to explore the role that civil action played.

Capital Choices analyzes the creation of different SWFs from a comparative political economy perspective, arguing that different state-society structures at the sectoral level are the drivers for SWF variation. Juergen Braunstein focuses on the early formation period of SWFs, a critical but little understood area given the high levels of political sensitivity and lack of transparency that surround SWF creation. Braunstein’s novel analytical framework provides practical lessons for the business and finance organizations and policymakers of countries that have created, or are planning to create, SWFs.