Books like The Coloniality of Humanitarian Intervention — picked by fans

This book was one of the first books I read on queer International Relations (IR) during my PhD, and it convinced me – quite effortlessly – that queer IR was the intellectual home for me.

Weber articulates a vision of queer IR that does not aim to define what "queer IR" is. But I can’t help but think her contributions in the book – which foreground gender, sex, and sexuality, and the plural ways the international hinges on logics of normal/perverse – did that for me anyway. 

I love this book’s attention to the various analytical functions that queer can bring to IR: from the deconstructive methodology Weber cultivates, to the scrutinising of the simultaneously gendered, sexual, and racialised construction of the normal and/or perverse queer subject.

This book taught me about the necessity of doing queer research that not only challenges cisheteronormativity, but also colonialism and coloniality as well.

Rao’s book is a masterclass in transnational and transtemporal storytelling, narrating plural stories of the (post)colonial politics of queerness, gender, and sexuality. I was especially gripped by his chapter tracing the colonial spectres of atonement that underpin the British government’s apologies for anti-sodomy laws, which resonates with a broader homocolonial discourse Western countries have used to denounce former colonised countries as backward and queerphobic. 

Queer IR can and should attend to these imperial histories and afterlives, and how they are underpinned by and uphold particular gendered and sexual norms. This book shows how global politics is a story about (post)coloniality and queerness.

I was privileged to read this book as chair of a book prize committee, a book which we shortlisted given its fantastic contribution to queer IR and conflict research.

Hagen, Ritholtz, and Delatolla have brought together a diverse collection of chapters that “tell the stories of LGBTIQ+ people in conflict not only as victims of political violence, but also as experts and agents of change." 

I particularly enjoyed the chapters on the visual as queer method (Cooper-Cunningham) and queering the politics of knowledge in conflict research (Serrano-Amaya).

What a gift to read this carefully curated collection that not only spotlights queer lives in conflict but also amplifies the voices of queer scholars from diverse backgrounds who contributed to this important book.

This was one of the first academic books I read that centred LGBTQ people as agents and actors of global politics, and to be fair, it’s probably one of the first within IR to do so.

As someone who first learnt about queer theory from the philosophical, abstract, and (let’s be honest) sometimes dense verbosity of poststructural queer thinkers, picking up Lavinas Picq and Thiel’s collection brought queer lives, in all their diversity, plurality, and embodiment, back into the picture.

Some of my favourite chapters include those on Pride events in the Amazon and the exploration of Indigenous experiences of queerness (Lavinas Picq), and the intersections of Muslim sexualities, modernity, and (neo-)colonialism (Rahman).

This book paved the way for more queer research, challenging the disciplinary confines of IR. 

As The Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, Muggeridge exposed Stalin’s man-made famine in 1933; in the 1940s, he became one of Orwell’s closest friends. In between the two, he conducted this caustic post mortem on a catastrophic decade. Some of it still feels timely, like his observation that a cultural obsession with information perversely incentivises the manipulation and fabrication of data. All of it is deliciously quotable: he compares the human rights activists who whitewashed Stalinism to “vegetarians undertaking a pious pilgrimage to a slaughterhouse because it displayed a notice recommending nut-cutlets.”

I enjoyed reading this comprehensive and convincing account of how people voted in the Brexit referendum. It has an approach rooted in political science and makes effective use of surveys and election results to provide an understanding of the identity of people living in what later became referred to as the ‘Red Wall’ seats – former Labour areas that switched to Conservative often over Brexit. It gave insights into the attitudes and beliefs of those who really had felt left behind.

In May 1940, as Britain fought for its survival against Nazi Germany, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain resigned to be replaced by the determined and forceful Winston Churchill. Chamberlain had been the face of appeasement, negotiating peace with the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in the hope of buying him off. Many felt that he had brought Britain to the brink of disaster. Two months later three journalists—Michael Foot, Peter Howard, Frank Owen—writing anonymously as Cato, published this scathing attack on Chamberlain and the other appeasers, naming and shaming the guilty men responsible for betraying their country.

Written from a standpoint outside of Britain yet offering such great insight, this book offers a highly convincing account of the stupidity of Brexit. The author pours his wrath onto Brexit and Brexiteers and is a brilliant polemicist. It’s well-written and entertaining.

What I like about this book is that, unlike a lot of academic writing, it doesn't pull any punches and the author is rhetorically committed to a single perspective that he adheres to with great consistency.

Louis’s excellent, and now classic work, should play a far larger role in discussions of the meanings of imperialism and anti-imperialism than has been the case in recent years. Drawing on a deep grasp of British foreign policy and domestic politics, Louis examines what he calls the “grand strategy of non-intervention and conciliation” that leaned heavily towards the existing Arab regimes. Prime Minister Clement Attlee, and especially Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, and other leading officials in the British Foreign Office and Colonial Office, believed that a Jewish state in Palestine would antagonize the Arabs and lead to a decline in British influence in the Middle East. Louis draws attention to Richard Crossman and other British critics of the policy of preserving Britain’s imperial role in Palestine. It is one of those indispensable works of scholarship regarding these events.

As a former foreign correspondent based in India, Beijing, and Washington I found myself wanting to press this book by former top UK diplomatic and national security advisor Peter Ricketts into the hands of every British politician I have ever met.

Having spent more than a decade overseas reporting on the UK’s struggle to stay relevant, I was struck on my return to the UK in 2015 at just how myopic and insular British politics had become.

Brexit was the most obvious expression of this. It has left the UK piggy-in-the-middle, between the US and the EU and this book sets out, alongside a wealth of personal anecdote and experience, how the UK needs to think strategically if it is to retain a place at the global top table.