100 Books Like Globalization and Sovereignty

Focusing on the financial crisis of 2008 Adam Tooze’s book shows the transition from a geopolitical to a geo-economic world order in which the political destiny of old nation states is determined by the needs of international financial industry – including the rearrangement of global governance and the erosion of democracies.

I admire the way in which Adam Tooze demonstrates the entanglement between financial capitalism, crises, and the rise of populist and right-wing movements in Europe and the US.

A brilliant book that succeeded in snapping the contrastive manacles that had hitherto hobbled our understanding of European integration. These conceptual manacles bound us either to over-emphasizing supranationalism on the one hand, or on the other, to claiming that European integration was nothing but an adornment for nation-states. Bickerton shows not only that supranationalism grows out of dynamics that are internal to European states, but that this out-growth involves a profound transformation of the structure of states themselves – the shift, as described in the sub-title, from nation-states to member-states. This brilliant insight illuminates so much politics today, from domestic struggles between liberals and populists to geopolitical rivalries. 

The book that has come closest to making me think it may really all be about oil after all! Or energy at least. Although written before the all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine, Thompson shows that the origins of the war go back far beyond 2014 or even 1991, but rather lie in the 1950s – when Anglo-French power in the MENA region was broken, first by the 1956 Suez War and then by Algeria’s secession from France in 1962, which in turn would lead to West Germany becoming dependent on the USSR for energy – a dependence that lasts to this day. Her account of the geopolitical consequences of the US fracking revolution is superb – prompting me to think that the Ukraine war can be seen as a battle over who will supply the European energy market. Once the LNG terminals in northern Europe are built, the US has… show more.

Despite having been maligned for so long in the British academy, in this book Porter shows the continuing vitality of the intellectual tradition of classical realism for understanding power politics today. He gratifyingly sweeps away the dewy-eyed nostalgia for the so-called ‘rules-based order’ that supposedly crumbled on Trump’s election to the White House in 2016. In addition to usefully reminding us of all the hypocrisy bound up with liberal internationalism, Porter also forces us to reckon with the core question of all politics – how far power is needed to underpin political order. Although I demur from some of his conclusions, Porter scrapes the tablet clean, offering the possibility of a more forthright and meaningful debate. 

This is a gem. It is the story of a discreet legal mechanism by which Britain hoped to check the Irish desire for independence even after the foundation of the Irish state.

Mohr’s close reliance on verifiable sources stands in marked contrast to what has been seen since its publication in 1935 as the standard authority on Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations (Peace by Ordeal by Frank Pakenham, later Britain’s Lord Longford, a work that I have come to see as deeply unsatisfactory if not deliberately propagandist).

Anyone with any degree of acquaintance with ancient history knows that the Greeks were often at war with one another. This book explores the rules that governed their interactions. Was there any kind of international law? If so, was any of it actually written down, or did it exist at the level of “unwritten law” – a live issue even today? How was it enforced, and by whom? There was no United Nations in those days. Did it succeed in reducing belligerence among the Greeks? Or was the only principle that might is right, so that stronger cities had the right to subdue their weaker neighbours? These are all critically important questions for understanding the Greeks and the course of their history. Overall, the book argues that the Greeks were more moral and restrained in their dealings with one another than one might have guessed.

This work is motivated by the two critical questions concerning the present state and the trajectories of the global governance system. Barnett, Pavehouse, and Raustiala’s responses are developed within a new analytical framework that elevates this book to a modern classic. Their argument extends beyond a mere focus on actors of global politics to emphasize the relations between them. This approach allows them to identify three different modes of global governance: hierarchy, markets, and networks.

Based on this concept and supported by case studies on various political issues ranging from climate change to “fragile states,” the authors show that the dynamic of the global governance system is one of simultaneity. On the one hand, the mode of governance in some policy areas seems rather stable: the prevailing mode of governance here is hierarchy. However, there are areas of change in which hierarchy is more and more replaced by a market… show more.

In the build-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, a flurry of books were produced on the ‘new imperialism.’ One of the best was by the Canadian Marxist scholar, the late Ellen Meiksins Wood. What distinguishes capitalist imperialism from its predecessors, Wood argues, “is the predominance of the economic, as distinct from direct ‘extra-economic’—political, military, judicial— coercion.”

By relying on the imperatives of the market, capitalist imperialism has been able to shed most of the visible trappings of older forms of empire, including its network of territorially based colonies overseen by regionally based armies and administrators: “Capitalism has extended the reach of imperial domination far beyond the capacities of direct political rule or colonial occupation, simply by imposing and manipulating the operations of the capitalist market.”

Even though capitalist imperialism relies primarily on market-based coercion rather than the direct use of force to police its interests, Wood is… show more.

Barkawi speaks of war as a form of “interconnection” among peoples and wisely reasons that we have to talk about war from a global perspective if we are truly to understand it. War may be an extension of politics, to quote a certain Prussian, but it’s also a social activity. And that activity has been globalized for far longer than many of us might think.

I really enjoy the way Barkawi weaves together a global story of war, culture, and identity. His case study on the Indian Army—he argues it was at “once a tool and an object of imperial control”—is superbly fascinating and highlights how localities can be affected by martial activities from faraway, distant places.

I loved this book because it finally explained something I’d felt for years but couldn’t quite articulate: that International Relations theory, as I was taught it, never really made sense of the world I knew. I remember reading it and thinking—yes, this is why so much of what passes for "global" thinking felt alien to my own experience of politics, power, and history. I’d always recognised that IR was speaking a language of empire without realising it.

What I value most is how the authors expose the discipline’s deep entanglement with Western historical assumptions—something I’d long mistrusted as universally applicable—but have never seen mapped so clearly. It helped me understand not just what IR is but also what it gets wrong about the world.