40 Books Like Security and Conservation

Published 80 years ago and based on the author’s experiences hunting man-eating tigers and leopards in northern India, I read this book repeatedly. Well and sensitively written, it is not a book of boasting, hunting, and bravado but a nuanced account of efforts to protect local people from the ravages of seriously dangerous wildlife.

Corbett, part of the British occupation machinery in India, projects a love of the people of northern India and the wildlife. He is deeply committed to both and laments the need to kill tigers but accepts that protecting ordinary people is the priority.

He provides a wealth of wildlife information and always explains how and why a tiger became a man-eater–often the result of a bad encounter with a porcupine, the breaking of canines in older tigers, or injuries received hunting or being hunted.

This book is an amazing collection of stunning pictures – I loved the outstanding photographs of wildlife, landscapes, people and the vast but fragile web of nature taken by photographers and naturalists Jonathan and Angela Scott.

I found the combination of the impact of the images, the quotations about nature, and the narrative accompanying the pictures to be incredible – joyful and sombre. I was joyful as I enjoyed the entrancing pictures (such as the sunrise in the Maasai Mara) and sombre as I considered the narrative and the reality of human degradation and destruction of nature and the whole web of life of which we are far from the positive strand.

I love the academic rigor, clear writing, and balanced approach to one of the most controversial topics in wildlife conservation. I have written about hunting in relation to elephants, lions, and rhinos and found this book to be comprehensive in its coverage of the issue and its wider linkages.

Does hunting have a value–if so, what is the value, and to whom does it accrue? Do utilitarian arguments around the idea of the greatest good for the greatest number work to justify the sport/trophy hunting of animals? Can the shooting of a rhino, elephant, lion, buffalo, etc, be ethical if it contributes to conserving habitat and a wide range of species? These are all topics I have wrestled with and continue to think deeply about as I write about wildlife conservation.

I read this book after working in Malawi and carrying out my first safaris in Kenya and Zimbabwe. I saw hyenas and found them fascinating despite the generally held view that they were despicable parasites and vermin. 

Kruuk’s book opened my eyes to their success as hunters, not mere scavengers, to their complex, matriarchal social systems, and to the role, when not hunting, as what one could call the sanitary engineers of the eco-systems in which they live.  It influenced me to research them and eventually write a book on human attitudes toward hyenas.

I loved that Hamilton’s unpacking of the etymology of security led right to the notion of care.

This book had a shaping impact on how I think about care and its ties to security – a relation that continues to animate my interests. I learned that my cares (affections, attachments, worries) may mobilize me to enhance my security, which also may be done inadvertently at the expense of someone else’s. To put it another way, when we seek security, we are seeking to let go of our cares or to care less.

Security attends to the “inflated focus” on security as an instrument of control in contemporary cultural life and does so richly, drawing upon cultural forms such as fables, literature, and art in a beautiful and provocative text.

Even after Europe’s colonies became independent, this book reveals earlier political hierarchies were preserved through a surprising channel: the United Nations and its peacekeeping forces.

I loved this book for multiple reasons, but above all, because it shows how practices we consider “humanitarian,” in fact, perpetuated power imbalances between former empires and their former colonies. It also helped me to think about the United Nations and its global role in new ways. Perhaps most importantly, it changed my understanding of international peacekeeping, showing that its history was often more violent than the name might imply.

While focused on the decades after World War II, this book also helps readers understand the political challenges with global peacekeeping operations today.  

If Enloe’s book set the stage, Tickner’s 1992 book was the first to openly challenge the then-conventional verities of IR Theory in a systematic way. In her book, Tickner takes on the two major subdivisions of IR thought—Security/Conflict Studies and International Political Economy, and mounts a devastating critique of the major approaches in each. She lambasts how gendered our understandings of, say, deterrence are, and how the state is viewed in IR theory as a “masculine” entity, and how this has warped our understandings and even the very questions we ask in IR. Tickner does the same with the clearly male-focused world of microeconomic theory with its womanless world of rational utility maximizers. This book set IR back on its collective heels. 

If you haven’t read the King and Maxwell series by Baldacci, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

Michelle Maxwell is the first one to run into a burning building and take it all in stride even if she runs out with her hair on fire. Michelle is the character that brings a new twist to the opposite cops who join together to solve the case genre. 

Michelle Maxwell never holds back, does not suffer fools and she’s deadly with a gun as well as her hands. She always speaks her mind to men in authority, which I think bends some male readers out of shape, but I love her go forth and conquer spirit. Michelle lives by the edict: “Let the bridges I burn light my way,” and she is fine with that.

The world today feels like it's spinning off its axis. Practices many believed were buried in the past are making a forceful return: wars of annexation,  the redrawing of borders through violent conflict, and a resurgence of tariffs. At the same time, public discourse is becoming increasingly polarized, narrowing into black-and-white thinking.

While this may seem like something new, history tells a different story. In many ways, today’s events mirror the turbulence of the 19th century. I am convinced that major powers like the United States, Russia, and China—alongside influential regional players such as Iran and Turkey—are engaged in a deliberate effort to roll back the liberal legacy of the 19th century. If we want to understand the world in 2025, we have to understand the 19th century. 

This is a rather early effort to examine the implications of the ease of crossing national borders inherent in globalization.

It explores the ability of malicious actors–in particular terrorists, narcotraffickers, arms dealers, human smugglers, pathogens, etc.–to take advantage of a globalized world to disrupt normal life. It reminds us of the dark underbelly of globalization.