Books for understanding 21st century geopolitics
Why is this happening? How did we get here? Keeping up with current events in geopolitics is always complicated, especially with historic events happening in real-time.
With so many competing agendas and different views of history, it’s hard to find your way to an understanding of what exactly is going on-let alone why. Fortunately there are a number of recent books on topics relevant to our moment and how we arrived here. And many propose ideas about where we might be headed. Here we offer a list of such books by journalists and scholars, all of which are both readable and relevant on a variety of pertinent contemporary and historical topics.
Author Richard Haass, president of the non-profit non-partisan Council on Foreign Relations, offers a general overview of relevant histories of different regions of the world with the aim of helping the reader become literate in the issues of the day. Read it all the way through, or skip to chapters on topics you want to understand immediately.
Historian Margaret MacMillan takes a thematic approach in this book, examining how western societies have responded to war. While it seems to us that every war is an anomalous diversion away from normalcy, MacMillan argues that civilizations are fueled in part by violent conflicts carried out at a large scale.
This award-winning book from 2014 outlines one of the key internal conflicts of contemporary China: the flourishing of individuals as the rate of poverty plummets vs. a heavy-handed Communist Party that is at once responsible for this broad improvement to peoples’ lives and yet uneasy with greater expectations of freedom. Journalist Evan Osnos doesn’t set out so resolve these tensions; rather, he explores them in the stories of normal people living as their forebears just a generation ago never imagined.
Political scientist Barbara F. Walter has specialized in the study of civil wars for almost 3 decades, so she’s well-positioned to speak on the conditions that precede them-as well as the actions that can be taken to avert them. When she looks out at the world now, she sees a number of scenarios where a civil war is, from her perspective, not as unlikely as we might like to think.
In this extremely slim volume historian Timothy Snyder lays out a series of lessons he believes we can learn from the twentieth century on how to protect democracy from collapse.
Why does it seem democracy is under threat in so many different countries and in so many different ways — from occasionally violent protests against democratic institutions to outright war waged on democratic nation-states? Historian Anne Applebaum explains what’s so seductive about doing away with ballot boxes, checks and balances, and rule of law in general. And she illustrates how anti-democratic advocates act to change liberal democracies into authoritarian states.
If you’ve wondered why Russia has put such an effort into disinformation and interfering in western elections, and what Russian president Vladimir Putin stands to gain from it all, journalist Catherine Belton attempts to explain in this book. She traces the recent history of Russia along with the KGB career of Putin to show what motivates him and how he won and continues to enjoy the support of the most powerful people in Russia.
Through hundreds of interviews, New York Times reporter Nicole Perlroth assembles stories of cyberweapons employed to do everything from spying on personal devices to shutting down the Ukrainian power grid. She reveals a global arms race and a black market that threatens to wreak a kind of havoc we can barely imagine.
In this 2021 book journalist Joanna Chiu gives readers background on the protests in Hong Kong, the persecution of religious and ethnic minorities in China, the astonishing growth of the Chinese government’s surveillance apparatus, and other issues playing out in China right now.
This classic text has been relevant since it was first published in 1951. Hannah Arendt looks at Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, two governments that fit her definition of totalitarianism (despite their opposition in WWII), and explores the institutions and social mechanisms that created and supported them, including how they developed identities for different classes while perpetuating propaganda that explained away the world outside.
Originally published at https://www.kobo.com on February 27, 2022.
