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A selection of recent books by scholars associated with the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
By Michael Radu
Europe's Ghost. Tolerance, Jihadism, and the Crisis of the West (Jan 12, 2010)
The entire Muslim world is going through a process of radicalization which, in the case of Europe, is blindly tolerated, and indeed magnified, by multiculturalism and a severe identity crisis among the native Europeans themselves. In Europe’s Ghost, Michael Radu reveals that Europe’s identity crisis does not lie in past or present racism or in a variety of largely invented or anachronistic crimes, but in self-inflicted renunciation of national traditions in favor of multiculturalism. In fact, most European elites see jihadism as nothing but a peculiar form of criminality, due to the social and economic problems inside Europe, rather than what it is: a peculiar form of warfare rooted in cultural developments imported from the Muslim world.
The truth, Radu offers, is that most Muslims in most European countries, see themselves as visitors, rather than as citizens of Europe. Thus, the British media’s outcry over the phenomenon of British-born Muslim terrorists murdering “fellow Britons” is dangerously misplaced. The terrorists did what they did precisely because they did not see themselves as Britons but as true Muslims at war with the infidel country in which they lived. For the United States, the fact that European territories now export and organize Islamist terrorism should be a wake-up call. European ghosts tend to cross the ocean, and if the European Islamic ghost has substance it is because the Europeans gave it to it.
By Jeremy Black (ed.)
Great Military Leaders and their Campaigns (Oct 27, 2008), edited by FPRI Senior Fellow Jeremy Black, is described by History Book Club as “a visually stunning survey of war — through the eyes of the top players.”
This large-format 2,500-year history of warfare is truly global in scope. Distinguished international historians and military experts provide an enthralling overview of the careers and leadership of the world’s greatest commanders on land, at sea and in the air, from Cyrus the Great in ancient Persia to Vo Nguyen Giap in twentieth-century Vietnam. Uniquely, the story is told from the viewpoint of the leading protagonists and shot through with informed insights about changes in the nature of war, tactics and strategies over time and the varied issues of command.
[more about Great Military Leaders and their Campaigns at Thames & Hudson]
The Headline Series on U.S.-Mexican drug relations will examine the background of this issue, analyze the laws of both countries with respect to narcotics, provide an overview of the major Mexican cartels, discuss current bilateral cooperation and evaluate the prospects for impeding the flow of illegal substances into the United States.
[more about Mexico’s Struggle at the Foreign Policy Association]
The War on Terrorism: A collection of FPRI essays, 2001-2007 (Harvey Sicherman, Stephen Gale and Michael Radu, eds.) was released on September 11, 2007; it was reissued in September 2008 by Transaction Publishers as The War on Terrorism: 21st-Century Perspectives ($34.95).
FPRI Senior Fellow Gilbert Rozman co-edited (with In-Taek Hyun and Shin-wha Lee) South Korean Strategic Thought toward Asia (Palgrave, April 29, 2008)
[more about South Korean Strategic Thought toward Asia from Palgrave Macmillan]
This eagerly awaited sequel to Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585–1828 carries the saga of the American people’s continuous self-reinvention from the inauguration of President Andrew Jackson through the eras of Manifest Destiny, Civil War, and Reconstruction, America’s first failed crusade to put “freedom on the march” through regime change and nation building.
By Marc Sageman
Building on his previous groundbreaking work on the Al Qaeda network, forensic psychiatrist and FPRI Senior Fellow Marc Sageman has greatly expanded his research to explain how Islamic terrorism emerges and operates in the twenty-first century.
[review of Leaderless Jihad in the January 31, 2008 issue of The Economist]
[more about China’s Political System from the University of Pennsylvania Press]
We are pleased to announce the release of three volumes by FPRI authors by Mason Crest Publishers, part of its new series for middle school and high school students on “The Making of the Modern Middle East”:
To order, visit www.masoncrest.com/series_view.php?seriesID=77.
FPRI has served as Editorial Consultant on two previous Mason Crest series, “The Rise of Islam in Asia” and “Modern Middle East Nations”. FPRI began working to enrich education at the high school level in the 1980s, when we were approached by the School District of Philadelphia to mount a seminar series geared for high school teachers. We went on to establish the Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education in 1990 in honor of Dr. Wachman, who had just retired from the presidency of FPRI. Today, we sponsor the History Institute for Teachers, a series of intensive weekends for teachers on selected topics in world history and politics. Teachers from 43 states have participated. A series of bulletins called Footnotes, based on the lectures at the history weekends, are regularly circulated to high school teachers around the country.
By Jeremy Black
This timely book provides a general overview of Great Power politics and world order from 1500 to the present. Jeremy Black provides several historical case-studies, each of which throws light on both the power in question and the international system of the period, and how it had developed from the preceding period.
Western interpretations of the Cold War—both realist and neoconservative—have erred by exaggerating either the Kremlin’s pragmatism or its aggressiveness, argues Vladislav Zubok. Explaining the interests, aspirations, illusions, fears, and misperceptions of the Kremlin leaders and Soviet elites, Zubok offers a Soviet perspective on the greatest standoff of the twentieth century.
[more about A Failed Empire from University of North Carolina Press]
China’s Political System examines how the government of China is affected by ongoing efforts to harmonize its unique culture with external influences and ideas. Highly respected area specialist June Teufel Dreyer offers expert analysis of historical context and current trends to show how this transition is challenging China’ economic, legal, military, social, and cultural institutions. Throughout the text, Dreyer challenges students to think about the broader problem of governance in China by comprehensively showing how past and present impact leaders, citizens, ethnic minorities, and policies and by incisively considering the different futures for China’s political system.
[more about China’s Political System from Longman/Pearson Educational]
The emergence of populist Latin American firebrands has changed the landscape of the Americas in dramatic ways. This will be the first biography to appear in English about one of these charismatic figures, who is known in his country by his adopted nickname of “Little Ray of Hope.”
[Mexican Messiah brochure from Penn State University Press] (443K PDF)
By Marc Sageman
Building on his previous groundbreaking research on the Al Qaeda network, forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman has greatly expanded his research to explain how Islamic terrorism emerges and operates in the twenty-first century. 176 pages | 5½ × 8½ Cloth Dec 2007
[more about Leaderless Jihad from the University of Pennsylvania Press]
Fall 2007 sees the publication of Alan Luxenberg’s The Palestine Mandate and the Creation of Israel, 1920–1949 (Mason Crest). It is part of a 10-volume series for the secondary school audience on The Making of the Modern Middle East. The series also includes volumes by FPRI Senior Fellow Barry Rubin on The Iranian Revolution and the Resurgence of Islam and The Middle East in the Age of Uncertainty, 1991–present, and by former FPRI Hooper Fellow J. E. Peterson on Tensions in the Gulf, 1978–1991.
Robert Kaplan, one of the nation’s leading foreign affairs journalists, is contributing editor to the Atlantic Monthly and a long-time FPRI Associate.
His latest is Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground.
Expanding on his acclaimed Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground, Kaplan lets readers experience up close the American military worldwide in the air, at sea, and on the ground: flying in a B-2 bomber, living on a nuclear submarine, and traveling with a Stryker brigade on missions around the world. Provided unprecedented access, Kaplan moves from destroyers off the coast of Indonesia to submarines in the central Pacific, from simulated Iraqi training grounds in Alaska to technology bases in Las Vegas, from army and marine land forces in the heart of the Sahara Desert, to air bases in Guam and Thailand and beyond.
Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts provides not only a riveting ground-level portrait of the Global War on Terrorism on several continents, but also a gritty firsthand account of how U.S. soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen are protecting sea-lanes, providing disaster relief, contending with the military rise of China, fighting the war in Iraq, and crafting contingency plans for war with North Korea and Iran.
Edited with an Introduction by William Anthony Hay and Harvey Sicherman
The international response to the attacks of 9/11 promised a new sense of unity between the United States and its European allies, but subsequent disagreements over Iraq have made the Western alliance seem tentative at best. Is There Still a West? looks beyond recent events to put disagreements within NATO into historical perspective, exploring how cultural, demographic, economic, and military factors since the 1940s have affected future prospects for security cooperation.
[more about Is There Still a West? from the University of Missouri Press]
China Under Hu Jintao: Opportunities, Dangers, and Dilemmas, edited by Tun-jen Cheng, Jacques deLisle, and Deborah Brown. Jacques deLisle is Director of FPRI’s Asia Program and Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. The volume includes his essay “China and the WTO: Evolving Agendas of Economic Openness, Domestic Reform, and International Status, and Challenges of the Post-Accession Era.” Deborah Brown is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at Seton Hall University and an Associate Scholar of FPRI. The book offers a guide to the issues facing China’s leadership, the likely approaches the regime might take, and the prospects for success andfailure.
Comparative Think Tanks, Politics, and Public Policy, by James McGann, with Erik Johnson. Dr. McGann is FPRI Senior Fellow and director of our project on Think Tanks and Civil Societies. McGann and Johnson use case studies of 20 countries across 5 regions of the world to explore the world of think tanks.
Dilemmas of Democracy and Dictatorship: Place, Time and Ideology in Global Perspective, by Michael Radu, co-chair of FPRI’s Center on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism, and Homeland Security. This collection of essays covers political violence in the Balkans, Turkey, Subsaharan Africa, Latin America, and Western and Eastern Europe.
Religion and Religiosity in the Philippines and Indonesia: Essays on State, Society and Public Creeds, edited by FPRI Senior Fellow Theodore Friend (Brookings Institution for the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, 2006).
The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East, by FPRI Senior Fellow Barry Rubin (John Wiley and Sons, 2005)
China’s Political System: Modernization and Tradition, by FPRI Senior Fellow June Teufel Dreyer (Pearson, 2006, 5th edition)
The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq, edited by Garen Rosen (Cambridge University Press, 2005), withcontributions by FPRI Senior Fellow James Kurth, plus Fouad Ajami, Eliot Cohen, Francis Fukuyama, Henry A. Kissinger, William Kristol, George F.Will, Fareed Zakaria, and others.
A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, edited by FPRI Member Thomas Cushman (University of California Press, 2005), with contributions by Paul Berman, Ian Buruma, Roger Scruton, and others.
The Education of a University President, Temple University Press (2005), by Marvin Wachman, trustee and former president of FPRI. Although the book deals largely with Dr. Wachman’s presidencies of Lincoln University and Temple University, it also mentions his work at FPRI in building outreach programs to thecommunity, which culminated in FPRI’s establishing the Marvin Wachman Fund for International Fund in 1990.
Rising to the Challenge: China’s Grand Strategy and International Security (2005), by FPRI Senior Fellow Avery Goldstein.Stanford University Press.
The fully revised and updated edition of World History Atlas: Mapping the Human Journey, edited by FPRI Senior Fellow Jeremy Black, is this month’s History Book Club selection.
As part of a 17-volume series for the secondary school audience on The Growth and Influence of Islam in Asia, Mason Crest Publishers in 2006 published two volumes in that series by FPRI associates: Islamism and Terrorist Groups in Asia, by Michael Radu and Azerbaijan, by Gerald Robbins. FPRI is Editorial Consultant for the series, as it was for an earlier Mason Crest series of 25 volumes on Modern Middle East Nations. For book series info: www.masoncrest.com. For reviews of the Middle East series, see www.ottnpublishing.com/mideast.htm.
Palgrave Macmillan published The Whig Revival, 1808-1830, by William Anthony Hay, FPRI Senior Fellow.
FPRI alumnus Gerald T. West co-authored with Theodore Moran a volume published by the World Bank: International Political Risk Management, Vol. 3: Looking to the Future.
By Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin
Widespread hatred for the United States seems to be stronger now than ever before. In the wake of our response to the 9/11 attacks and our invasion of Iraq, even our oldest allies seem ready, or at least wanting, to turn their backs on the United States. Some say our democracy, liberty, and economy provoke hatred, while others say our policies have the same effect. Both responses, argue Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin in Hating America: A History fail to explain why anti-Americanism has been a pervasive and persistent force since before the founding of the United States.
“The creation of the United States of America is the central event of the past four hundred years.” With this statement, Walter A. McDougall begins Freedom Just Around the Corner, a grand narrative rich with new details and insights about colonial and early national history. McDougall marshals the latest scholarship and writes in a style redolent of passion, pathos, and humor in pursuit of truths often obscured in books burdened with political slants.
Edited by John Lehman and Harvey Sicherman
This volume— the culmination of four years of work and three conferences conducted by FPRI’s Defense Task Force— contains essays by the most respected strategic thinkers in the United States, including Donald Kagan, John Hillen, Eliot Cohen, Williamsom Murray, Don Snider, Sam Sarkesian, Keith Payne, Andrew Bacevich, Henry Sokolski, Winn Schwartau, Richard H. Harknett, Andrew P.N. Erdmann, and the late Harry G. Summers, Jr. It is edited by John Lehman and Harvey Sicherman.
[download, purchase, or learn more about America the Vulnerable]
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On November 15th at the FPRI annual dinner Fouad Ajami was presented with the Seventh Annual Benjamin Franklin Public Service Award. The event was attended by over 360 people.
Dr. John M. Templeton, Jr. was dinner chairman.
Video of keynote address
Reflections on the Arab Spring
Fouad Ajami
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Al Qaeda and Jihadi Movements After Bin Laden
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The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al Qaeda
Peter Bergen
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