Here are 100 books that The Making of Global International Relations fans have personally recommended if you like
The Making of Global International Relations.
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I became an academic because I believe knowledge should serve the world. I'm driven by a commitment to responsibility, realism, and social good, even when it's uncomfortable. This list reflects my frustration with how often Western governments act confidently but without the right philosophies, systems, and knowledge in place. They lack imagination, organisation, and the ability to deal with crises, which populist movements are now exploiting. I've spent years researching failed interventions because I believe we owe it to others to do better. These books helped me understand the world more clearly, but also reminded me of our limitations and how hard it is to grasp the contexts we shape.
I’ve always known that IR theory is terrible at helping us predict anything. This book confirmed that instinct—and then gave me something better.
The book doesn't offer a grand theory of the world; it shows how careful, humble, context-driven thinking beats big ideas almost every time. I loved how it dismantled the myth of expert authority with one brutal line: "Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world…are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys."
It taught me to think in probabilities, to temper my overconfidence, and to focus on the details, not broad generality. In many ways, this has made me a worse “IR scholar”, but demonstrably much better at predicting events. This book is indispensable if you care about understanding policy outcomes, rather than just sounding clever. It sharpened the way I think about the future.
'A manual for thinking clearly in an uncertain world. Read it.' Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow _________________________ What if we could improve our ability to predict the future?
Everything we do involves forecasts about how the future will unfold. Whether buying a new house or changing job, designing a new product or getting married, our decisions are governed by implicit predictions of how things are likely to turn out. The problem is, we're not very good at it.
In a landmark, twenty-year study, Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed that the average expert was only…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
I became an academic because I believe knowledge should serve the world. I'm driven by a commitment to responsibility, realism, and social good, even when it's uncomfortable. This list reflects my frustration with how often Western governments act confidently but without the right philosophies, systems, and knowledge in place. They lack imagination, organisation, and the ability to deal with crises, which populist movements are now exploiting. I've spent years researching failed interventions because I believe we owe it to others to do better. These books helped me understand the world more clearly, but also reminded me of our limitations and how hard it is to grasp the contexts we shape.
This book helped me see how much damage is done when treating the world as simple.
Escobar never mentions complexity theory, but that's precisely what animates his critique—a sense that development thinking flattens difference, reduces context, and imposes order where none exists. I'd long been uneasy with how the West 'solves' problems it helped create. This book gave me the conceptual tools to see why: it exposed development as a discourse that makes the world legible in Western terms, only to intervene on that basis.
What I love about this book is its refusal to accept those terms. It shows how we get the world wrong by insisting it should resemble us in the West, and why the costs of that are always borne elsewhere.
How did the industrialized nations of North America and Europe come to be seen as the appropriate models for post-World War II societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America? How did the postwar discourse on development actually create the so-called Third World? And what will happen when development ideology collapses? To answer these questions, Arturo Escobar shows how development policies became mechanisms of control that were just as pervasive and effective as their colonial counterparts. The development apparatus generated categories powerful enough to shape the thinking even of its occasional critics while poverty and hunger became widespread. "Development" was not…
I became an academic because I believe knowledge should serve the world. I'm driven by a commitment to responsibility, realism, and social good, even when it's uncomfortable. This list reflects my frustration with how often Western governments act confidently but without the right philosophies, systems, and knowledge in place. They lack imagination, organisation, and the ability to deal with crises, which populist movements are now exploiting. I've spent years researching failed interventions because I believe we owe it to others to do better. These books helped me understand the world more clearly, but also reminded me of our limitations and how hard it is to grasp the contexts we shape.
This book blew open a question I’d been circling for years: how do we know what’s real in the social world, and who decides?
I first read the philosopher John Searle (who the book starts with) as a student, and it lit a fire, but this book turned that spark into something much more powerful. It showed me that reality isn't just "out there," waiting to be described—it's built through language, norms, and belief, and yet that doesn't make it any less real.
I loved how this book made space for complexity without sliding into postmodern fog. It gave me sharper tools to think with and helped me see how our shared world gets made—and how it could be made differently. I've never thought the same way since. The book outlines what we get philosophically wrong about the world in a way that is useful.
'Social construction' is a central metaphor in contemporary social science, yet it is used and understood in widely divergent and indeed conflicting ways by different thinkers. Most commonly, it is seen as radically opposed to realist social theory. Dave Elder-Vass argues that social scientists should be both realists and social constructionists and that coherent versions of these ways of thinking are entirely compatible with each other. This book seeks to transform prevailing understandings of the relationship between realism and constructionism. It offers a thorough ontological analysis of the phenomena of language, discourse, culture and knowledge, and shows how this justifies…
The Guardian of the Palace is the first novel in a modern fantasy series set in a New York City where magic is real—but hidden, suppressed, and dangerous when exposed.
When an ancient magic begins to leak into the world, a small group of unlikely allies is forced to act…
I became an academic because I believe knowledge should serve the world. I'm driven by a commitment to responsibility, realism, and social good, even when it's uncomfortable. This list reflects my frustration with how often Western governments act confidently but without the right philosophies, systems, and knowledge in place. They lack imagination, organisation, and the ability to deal with crises, which populist movements are now exploiting. I've spent years researching failed interventions because I believe we owe it to others to do better. These books helped me understand the world more clearly, but also reminded me of our limitations and how hard it is to grasp the contexts we shape.
This book made me stop and think—not about theory but institutional machinery. It captures the strange truth that international organisations often fail not because they don't care but because they are built in ways that make failure inevitable.
I've spent years trying to understand why international interventions so often feel disconnected from the realities they're meant to address. This book didn't just confirm that suspicion—it opened up the system and showed me why they get things wrong. The book is about more than country offices; it is really about systems and their blind spots.
My copy still has whole paragraphs underlined, and every time I have read it, it gives me something new. It gave me a different vocabulary for thinking about dysfunction—not as an accident but as a product of design.
Why do international peacebuilding organizations sometimes succeed and sometimes fail, even within the same country? Bridging the gaps between the peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and global governance scholarship, this book argues that international peacebuilding organizations repeatedly fail because they are accountable to global actors, not to local institutions or people. International peacebuilding organizations can succeed only when country-based staff bypass existing accountability structures and empower local stakeholders to hold their global organizations accountable for achieving local-level peacebuilding outcomes. In other words, the innovative, if seemingly wayward, actions of individual country-office staff are necessary to improve peacebuilding performance. Using in-depth studies of organizations…
My interest in global issues developed when I was a student. What was my conviction already then became more obvious every year since then. In order to solve our most urgent problems, we need to have a strong and legitimate global governance system. Global governance, therefore, became the core of my research. I am Michael Zürn, the Director of the Research Unit Global Governance at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and a Professor of International Relations at Free University of Berlin. I have also been the co-spokesperson for the Cluster of Excellence "Contestations of the Liberal Script" (SCRIPTS) since 2019.
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…
Global governance has come under increasing pressure since the end of the Cold War. In some issue areas, these pressures have led to significant changes in the architecture of governance institutions. In others, institutions have resisted pressures for change. This volume explores what accounts for this divergence in architecture by identifying three modes of governance: hierarchies, networks, and markets. The authors apply these ideal types to different issue areas in order to assess how global governance has changed and why. In most issue areas, hierarchical modes of governance, established after World War II, have given way to alternative forms of…
My interest in global issues developed when I was a student. What was my conviction already then became more obvious every year since then. In order to solve our most urgent problems, we need to have a strong and legitimate global governance system. Global governance, therefore, became the core of my research. I am Michael Zürn, the Director of the Research Unit Global Governance at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and a Professor of International Relations at Free University of Berlin. I have also been the co-spokesperson for the Cluster of Excellence "Contestations of the Liberal Script" (SCRIPTS) since 2019.
This book is a must-read for everyone who wants to attain a better understanding of global politics and how the current thinking about global governance has evolved.
Keohane and Nye teach us how to analyze interstate affairs through a theoretical lens that is reflective of both interstate competition and interdependence. States compete on their levels of welfare. At the same time, they can benefit from cooperation because the increasing number of cross-border transactions (e.g., flows of money, goods, or people) are often connected to reciprocal costs each state wants to reduce. Embedded in formalized sets of rules and norms, one could think of the GATS agreement supervised by the WTO; these interdependencies must be seen as a dominant structure in an increasingly globalized world.
Though written in the seventies, this book remains a seminal work in the field of international relations, and its relevance to the contemporary world still holds…
A landmark work of international relations theory, Power and Interdependence first published in 1977 and posited a radically comprehensive explanation of the mechanics driving world affairs-"power politics" on one hand and "complex interdependence" on the other hand.
This widely influential book reexamined the military and economic interests of state and non-state actors, and in an argument made before the end of the Cold War, the authors broadened the prevailing realist worldview of the time and anticipated many of the developments in our modern era of globalization. With a new preface by the authors and a foreword by Fareed Zakaria that…
Aury and Scott travel to the Finger Lakes in New York’s wine country to get to the bottom of the mysterious happenings at the Songscape Winery. Disturbed furniture and curious noises are one thing, but when a customer winds up dead, it’s time to dig into the details and see…
I've been interested in U.S.-Latin American relations ever since my junior year in college when I studied abroad in Chile, a country that had only two years prior been run by dictator Augusto Pinochet. Often referred to as America’s “backyard,” Latin America has often been on the receiving end of U.S. machinations and expansions. In terms of the history of American foreign policy, it's never a dull moment in U.S. involvement in its own hemisphere. I have now had the privilege to work inside the executive branch of the U.S. government on Latin America policy, stints which have forced me to reconsider some of what I had assumed about U.S. abilities and outcomes.
Lucidly written and soberly considered, Latin America’s Cold War is one top-five pick for a host of reasons, not least of which is that it forces us to consider that the usually potent Uncle Sam did mean that Latin American actors did not have influence, for good or ill. Rightist Latin American militaries, for a searing case, had their reasons for combatting leftist guerrillas, not just serving Washington’s bidding.
For Latin America, the Cold War was anything but cold. Nor was it the so-called "long peace" afforded the world's superpowers by their nuclear standoff. In this book, the first to take an international perspective on the postwar decades in the region, Hal Brands sets out to explain what exactly happened in Latin America during the Cold War, and why it was so traumatic.
Tracing the tumultuous course of regional affairs from the late 1940s through the early 1990s, Latin America's Cold War delves into the myriad crises and turning points of the period-the Cuban revolution and its aftermath; the…
Hi, my name is Nick, and I’m a recovering rockist. I’ve collected records and vintage gear; I’ve owned Ray Coleman biographies. I’ve played in garage bands that did terrible punk-rock covers of songs like Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love.” I even used to subscribe to Rolling Stone magazine. And most embarrassingly, I believed in the power of rock – to effect political change, to free people’s bodies and minds. But if once I was a true believer, today I’ve become a rock ’n’ roll skeptic. And I hope that this list might help you rethink everything you thought you knew about rock, too.
During the first decades of the Cold War, the export of American popular culture – and in particular, music – played an important role in projecting soft power abroad.
Fosler-Lussier’s deeply researched and beautifully written book tells the story of the musicians who travelled abroad as part of State Department programs, and how they negotiated an image of the United States in – and through – the musical encounters they had worldwide. An essential Cold War history of how certain sounds became American.
During the Cold War, thousands of musicians from the United States traveled the world, sponsored by the U.S. State Department's Cultural Presentations program. Performances of music in many styles classical, rock 'n' roll, folk, blues, and jazz competed with those by traveling Soviet and mainland Chinese artists, enhancing the prestige of American culture. These concerts offered audiences around the world evidence of America's improving race relations, excellent musicianship, and generosity toward other peoples. Through personal contacts and the media, musical diplomacy also created subtle musical, social, and political relationships on a global scale. Although born of state-sponsored tours often conceived…
I take great pride in having somehow turned a passion for visiting presidential libraries into an academic career. I’ve now conducted extensive research at eight of them, and have future projects lined up to get me to the rest. This experience means I can and frequently do ruin family gatherings by challenging distant relations to quizzes about obscure details involving presidential pets. But it has also left me well-placed to write a number of articles and books exploring how domestic politics shapes the development and execution of U.S. foreign policy. I’ve done this while affiliated with the University of Oxford and, more recently, at City, University of London.
This was the book that got me hooked on the study of U.S. foreign policy.
I vividly remember debating the grammatical merits of the word “intermestic” with my undergraduate adviser. (Full disclosure: he was a skeptic; I was in favour.) But we both agreed that the term it introduced to describe the connection between the international and domestic dimensions of policy was fundamentally apt.
This remains my go-to book to get up to speed on the domestic politics of any major foreign policy challenge of the Cold War period. And it should be yours, too.
"A creative, carefully researched, and incisive analysis of U.S. strategy during the long struggle against the Soviet Union." -Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy
"Craig and Logevall remind us that American foreign policy is decided as much by domestic pressures as external threats. America's Cold War is history at its provocative best." -Mark Atwood Lawrence, author of The Vietnam War
The Cold War dominated world affairs during the half century following World War II. America prevailed, but only after fifty years of grim international struggle, costly wars in Korea and Vietnam, trillions of dollars in military spending, and decades of nuclear…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
Growing up during the Cold War, I wondered how the United States and the Soviet Union became locked into an existential struggle that threatened to vaporize the planet. So, I studied Russian, Chinese, and Japanese (along with French, Spanish, and German) to learn more. At issue was the global order and the outcome of this struggle depended on the balance of power—not only military power that consumed Soviet attention but also economic power and standards of living that Western voters emphasized. Yet it was Japan that had the workable development model as proven by the Four Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan) during the 1960s to 1990s.
Shakespeare commented that brevity is the soul of wit. No wasted words in this short book that provides a whirlwind tour of Japanese foreign policy from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1980s. Iriye starts with Japan’s emergence as a great power and takes the story through the end of the Cold War.
Akira Iriye assesses Japan's international relations, from a Japanese perspective, in the century and a half since she ended her self-imposed isolation and resumed her place in the international community. The book is the author's own adaptation of two highly successful short studies, up to and after 1945, that he wrote for Japan. It ends with a consideration of Japan's international relations since the end of the Cold War, and her place in the world today. This is history written from within - and there could be no better interpreter of Japan to the West than this most distinguished of…
