BOOK REVIEW
Book Review: Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval
A great upheaval is coming. It will change us, and our planet. In the global south, extreme climate change will push vast numbers of people from their homes, with large regions becoming uninhabitable; in the planet’s more comfortable north, economies will struggle to...
Book Review: The Dictator’s Learning Curve
Dobson's (2012) book takes on a somewhat different task to provide us with insights from dictatorships. While the works of political scientists on this subject, such as Levitsky & Ziblatt's How Democracies Die (2019), or John Keane's The New Despotism (2020),...
Book Review: Blockchain Revolution
In 2008, the world was in financial turmoil. To solve this problem, a person named Satoshi Nakamoto came up with an idea that would soon spread like wildfire among computer scientists, banks, and anyone who had ever tried to establish trust on the Internet. We don’t...
Book Review: Factfulness – Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World – and Why Things are Better than You Think
This book is about “getting the big picture right”. Hans Rosling, the author of the book, advocates a fact-based worldview and struggles with ignorance. Rosling was a medical doctor, professor of international health, and public educator. He was an adviser to the...
Book Review: The New Despotism, John Keane (2020)
As someone who has been following John Keane for a while, it would be accurate to say that The New Despotism (2020) is the accumulation of his ideas and writings in the last four years or so. To briefly describe the book, it is a book that examines how countries like...
Book Review: Russia’s Border Wars and Frozen Conflicts
James J. Coyle’s book “Russia’s Border Wars and Frozen Conflicts”[1] focuses on four conflicts on the periphery of the former Soviet Union, namely Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and Nagorno-Karabagh. Coyle examines origins and execution of Russian military and political...
Regional Security in the Middle East**
“Regional Security in the Middle East” by Pinar Bilgin is an amalgamation of efforts to depict and understand the interactive dynamics of security and security agenda in / for the Middle East. Even though Regions and Powers by Buzan and Waewer succeeds in giving an...
Polarisation: Understanding the dynamics of Us versus Them**
Bart Brandsma’s book at hand is a timely and precious contribution considering the time we live in. The book opens up the debate on how to manage divergent voices and preserve public order while respecting the democratic right of free speech and free articulation of...
Rethinking Security Governance**
The term security governance has become a buzzword in the realm of security studies, especially after 9/11 attacks. Yet, there are few empirical works on the unintended consequences of security governance and no work on conceptualizing and theorizing the concept....
Book Review: When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter: Rethinking Democracy in China*
‘When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter: Rethinking Democracy in China’ is an important book that tackles a timely and depressing issue of our times, the emergence of new types of regimes. John Keane, the author of the book, is renowned for his imaginative thinking about...
Book Review: Energy Kingdoms
“Energy Kingdoms” is written by Jim Krane, an expert who spent considerable time actually living in the Gulf. The book analyzes; the drivers behind the Gulf States’ domestic energy policies, the internal consumption problem that came out as a result of these policies...
How NATO Adapts – Strategy and the Organization in the Atlantic Alliance since 1950
Dr. Seth A. Johnston, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2017, ISBN 9781421421988 (pbk.: alk. paper) Dr. Seth Johnston’s “How NATO Adapts” is first and foremost a book about NATO’s history. It explains changes in NATO’s strategy and organisation – terms...
How Democracies Die
Democracy doesn’t always die with military coups, starts Levitsky and Ziblat, it also dies in the hands of the elected leaders. The subject is not new; after a staggering expansion of democracy after cold war, there were already signs of...
“FASCISM – A WARNING” BY MADELEINE ALBRIGHT
Watching Madeleine Albright introducing her latest book “Fascism – A Warning” in Georgetown University, her passion on the subject was unmistakable. As a victim of fascism, she spoke about her experiences as a small child in her native land Czechoslovakia, first...
The Maritime Turn in EU Foreign and Security Policies (Riddervold, Marianne)
Marianne Riddervold, an eminent scholar of “EU Maritime Security Policies,” is currently an Associate Professor at the Norway University of the Applied Sciences and a Researcher at The Norwegian Institute of Foreign Affairs in Norway. In 2013, she was awarded...
Kaufman, Stuart J. Nationalist Passions
“…when we think about people’s behavior, our first question should not be about the person’s “rational” interests, but about his or her biases.” (p.237) Stuart J. Kaufman, a prominent scholar of “Ethnicity and Ethnic Conflicts," is currently a professor at the...
Regions and Powers
Buzan, Barry., & Waever, Ole. (2003). Regions and Powers. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Barry Buzan and Ole Weawer’s work “Regions and Powers” can be cited as an important book attempting to lay the foundations of regional security dynamics in a given...
A Critique on How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns
The aim of this paper is to critically analyze the 2011 book ‘How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns’ by Audrey Kurth Cronin. The Author is a professor at the School of International Service at American University in...
Book Review: The United States of Europe
The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy* As European Union is currently having a hard time with several internal problems, such as BREXIT and the rise of national populist parties against the union, it is worth reviewing the famous book “The United States...
