A Comprehensive Guide to Home Security Systems:

POLITICS BOOKS

This list contains some suggestions for readers who want to work in the field of international relations (IR). Our selection was based on three criteria: readability, non-paradigmatic texts, and breadth. First and foremost, we have prioritised readable books in order to avoid the Scylla of narrow academic concerns and the Charybdis of overpopulation. Second, we believe that the traditional (American) view of international relations as a series of debates between the paradigms of realism, liberalism, and constructivism is suffocating. As a result, we've abandoned many of the so-called "classics" of international relations in favour of books that don't easily fit into neat boxes but deserve to be read more broadly. Third, we have prioritised breadth, with coverage of a diverse range of IR subfield topics.

Hopefully, some of the books on this list will change your perspective on global politics!

1.  While technically a sociology or anthropology work rather than an IR work, Steven Pinker's (The Better Angels of Our Nature) is a solid effort to document the long-term downward trends in our species' use of violence. Pinker attributes the decline in warfare to several key ideas in international relations: the rise of the modern nation-state, the pacifying effects of trade, the rise of global civil society, and the growing emphasis on human rights. While some of its claims remain controversial, Better Angels serves as an important macro-historical backdrop for the other books listed below.

2.  In his book (The Great Transformation), Karl Polyani asserts that markets do not exist in a vacuum, but are embedded in social and cultural structures. Polanyi contends that the rise of market societies and the birth of the nation-state should not be viewed as separate events, but rather as inextricably linked. As powerful central governments rose, they brought with them markets that had previously not intruded into lives characterised by more local reciprocity. What we call "the free market" was planned. As the market absorbs labour and money, it must elicit a response from those seeking to protect themselves from massive social dislocations. In a world where global financial movements appear overwhelming and beyond our ability to change, Polyani reminds us that man created this world and can change it again. Elizabeth Warren and those who want economic power to be subject to popular law would be pleased.

3. After the Great Recession, Charles Kindleberger's (Manias, Panics, and Crashes) became required reading. Kindleberger claims that common processes underpin the recurring speculation over elusive profits in his comprehensive history of financial bubbles and their aftermath. Kindleberger, a "literary economist" of the old school, offers a cautionary guide to human foolishness and its devastating economic consequences.

4. What exactly do international organisations do? And why would sovereign nations ever pay attention to them? In (Rules for the World), Martha Finnemore and Michael Barnett do a great job of answering these questions, concentrating on both the benefits and drawbacks of IOs' bureaucratic authority. The risks include IOs succumbing to "bureaucratic pathologies," such as the UN's stunning inactivity during the Rwandan massacre.

Given that Barnett was a member of the US delegation to the UN at the time and was so shocked by what he saw that he began a scholarly career to help process it all, he is well-positioned to write a case study on the hazards of modern international bureaucracy.

5. It is uncommon for academics to have both the keen insight to change a discipline and a gift for beautiful prose that entices you to finish reading their works (for examples of the former without the latter, cf. Kenneth Waltz, Alexander Wendt). Cynthia Enloe possesses both. As a pioneering feminist IR academic, she challenged the discipline to address its entire aversion to gender in the 1990s by experimentally asking, "Where are the women in IR?" (Bananas, Beaches and Bases). She is still at it after more than two decades. She critically investigates the 2004 Iraq War in Nimo's War, Emma's War, assessing both its causes and repercussions in an evenhanded and sympathetic manner.

6. It is quite rare for a work of political analysis to be lauded to the heavens in (The Daily Telegraph and The London Review of Books, The National Review and The New Left Project), but such a work is the late Peter Mair's (Ruling the Void). What began as a magazine piece in New Left Review evolved into a widely distributed book-length critique for individuals who have long recognised that the political malaise affecting discourse in their country is part of a larger phenomena. With summary, Mair's argument is that something is wrong (even) in Denmark: political party membership is decreasing, election participation is declining, and political elites are selected from smaller and shallower pools of ambitious party types. We live in a zombie political era, dominated by a cartel of too identical parties and leaders, while citizens increasingly prefer to stay out of politics rather than fight for it.

7. Do governments make sensible decisions? And can the actual content of global politics—the officials, secretaries, paperwork, and bureaucratic procedures—be abstracted away so that we may talk about "states" doing this or that without hesitation? Graham Allison emphatically says no to both of these topics in (Essence of Decision). On one level, the book is a well-executed case study of the Cuban Missile Crisis, using declassified archives to explain both Soviet and American actions in October 1962. On another level, it's a blow against the growth of rational actor theories in international relations. Allison convincingly demonstrates that bureaucratic over-reliance on standard operating procedures and intra-governmental political jockeying explains much more of what happened during the crisis than pretending actors rank-ordered their preferences as the crisis unfolded.

8. The study of nationalism is as important a lens in understanding the world today as it has ever been. Ernst Gellner's (Nations and Nationalism) is an essential primer for understanding where nationalism came from and how it maintains its allure. Nationalism emerges from industrialization and popular education processes, and it may become muffled as we transition to post-industrial modes of production. Should nationalism be redesigned to combat the political grammar of religious identity? Should identity be reconstructed in a more pluralistic manner to reflect the complexity of 21st-century societies? Gellner is an excellent starting point.

9. Is international development ever successful? Discerning readers will avoid the histrionics of the perennial Sachs-Easterly debate in favour of fantastic ethnographic studies of how international development actually works, with all of the intended and unintended consequences that entails. In the late 1980s, James Ferguson spent over a year observing USAID projects in Lesotho in order to write (the Anti-Politics Machine), and the importance of his observations has not faded in the least. Ferguson will persuade you that the word "expert" is a dirty word, and that the only way any community can ever improve things is to have open, honest discussions about the politics that underpin every aspect of social life.

10. In recent years, IR has become more self-aware and has begun to consider its own role as an academic discipline that contributes to the shaping of global politics. What elites say and don't say about the world, as well as what academics write and don't write about international relations, can have an impact (for example, G.W. Bush's embrace of democratic peace theory and the spread of the Clash of Civilizations narrative). Several excellent books provide historical analyses of IR's political impacts, but perhaps the most readable is Ido Oren's (Our Enemies and Us), which fundamentally challenges IR's perception of itself as an objective, progressive social science. Oren's well-chosen historical examples show American political scientists willingly embracing the wrong side of history (such as the reviewer who praised Mein Kampf in the pages of the American Political Science Review), only to furiously whitewash the entire discipline a decade or so later.