The latest in IR - summer book round up
Welcome to our quarterly book round up. Each quarter we bring you updates on the latest International Studies releases by BISA members. To be included in the next update contact Marketing and Communications Director Chrissie Duxson: Chrissie.Duxson@bisa.ac.uk
Chatham House
The First Hundred Years
Michael Cox, Christopher Hill, Alex May, and Caroline Soper
Michael Cox is Emeritus Professor of International Relations and Founding Director of LSE IDEAS, London School of Economics. Christopher Hill is Emeritus Professor of International Relations, University of Cambridge. Alex May is Senior Research Editor, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Caroline Soper is Former Editor of International Affairs, Chatham House.
Blurb
This book is the first comprehensive treatment of the history and impact of Chatham House, also known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs, which was founded in 1920 and has been based in St. James's Square, central London, since 1923. Chatham House soon acquired a reputation as one of the world's leading think tanks on international affairs and has maintained this ever since, despite increasing competition at home and abroad. It has been a base for high-quality research as well as important meetings, including those held under the famous 'Chatham House rule', meaning that information disclosed may be used publicly but without attribution.
Chatham House covers the first 100 years of the Institute's history in three sections: between the two World Wars; the period from 1945 until the end of the Cold War; and the time from the fall of the Berlin Wall up to 2020. Using the Institute's archives as well as public documents, secondary works, and interviews where possible, the contributors have explored the main themes of Chatham House's work over the last century: empire, economic crisis and appeasement between the wars, post-war reconstruction, decolonisation, Europe and strategy after 1945, climate, identity politics, and the foreign policies of the UK and USA after 1989. The internal life of Chatham House, especially in terms of its directors and other key personalities, has also been given full attention.
Find out more and purchase the book via the Oxford University Press website. There will also be a book launch on 2 November 2026, 6-7.30pm at Chatham House.
Geopolitical Union
Europe's Attempt to Take Back Control of Technology Regulation
Benjamin Farrand
Benjamin Farrand is a Professor in Law & Emerging Technologies at Newcastle University. He is also a convener of the BISA International Studies and Emerging Technologies (ISET) Working Group.
Blurb
From the rise of China as a technological superpower, to wars on its eastern borders, to the belief that the US is no longer a reliable ally, the European Commission sees the world as more unstable than at any other time in recent history. As such, the Commission has become the Geopolitical Commission, working to serve the interests of the Geopolitical Union. Central to many of these conflicts is technology – who produces it, where it is produced, and who controls it. These questions are central to the Commission's pursuit of digital/technological sovereignty, Europe's attempt to regain control of technology regulation. Focusing on topics such as setting technological standards, ensuring access to microchips, reining in online platforms, and securing rules for industrial data and AI, this book explores the EU's approach to lawmaking in this field; increased regulatory oversight and promotion of industrial policy at home, while exporting its rules abroad.
Find out more and purchase the book via the Cambridge University Press website.
Statelessness and Citizenship Revocation in Europe
Rethinking Politics, Law, Security, and Human Rights
Edited by Salvador Santino Regilme
Salvador Santino Regilme is Associate Professor of International Relations at Leiden University, where he also serves as Program Chair of International Relations. He is the author of United States and Chinese Foreign Assistance and Diplomacy (2026) and Aid Imperium: United States Foreign Policy and Human Rights in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia (2021) and editor of Children Rights in Crisis (2024) and The United States and China in the Era of Global Transformations (2023). He is also co-editor of Human Rights at Risk (2022) and American Hegemony and the Rise of Emerging Powers (2017).
Blurb
Statelessness often results from discriminatory policies or legal gaps, while citizenship revocation is typically used as a counterterrorism measure. Both processes strip individuals – particularly from minoritized groups – of legal status and access to essential social services, leaving them vulnerable to exclusion, exploitation, and human rights abuses.
With contributions from scholars in political science, international law, and sociology, this unique collection presents case studies of policies that reinforce statelessness; it connects legal doctrines with real-world impacts and critically balances the tensions between security imperatives and human dignity. Statelessness and Citizenship Revocation in Europe calls for policy changes that position citizenship as an essential human right. Offering both rigorous multidisciplinary academic analysis and practical recommendations to address statelessness in contemporary Europe, this book is an essential resource for scholars, policymakers, and advocates.
Find out more and purchase the book via the De Gruyter Brill website.
Nonviolent Encounters
Unarmed Civilian Protection through Bodies, Spaces and Times
Louise Ridden
Louise Ridden is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Tampere University, Finland.
Blurb
This book takes the emerging practice of Unarmed Civilian Protection as a case study of nonviolence to interrogate the roles of violence and nonviolence in conflict knowledge production. By focusing on nonviolent actors using UCP, it decentres violence, which is often so prominent in peace research. This approach creates space to fundamentally reimagine how the world might be when imagined and enacted through nonviolence.
Drawing together feminist theorising from critical military studies, peace and conflict studies and international relations, Nonviolent Encounters argues that decentring violence in conflict knowledge production upsets the simple binaries of protector/protected and war/peace, underpinned by the ‘one-world’ onto-epistemology of much Western conflict knowledge. Instead, space is created to reconsider nonviolence, not as the binary opposite of violence, but as a way of knowing, doing and being – as a way of producing alternative ontological worlds.
Find out more and purchase the book via the Edinburgh University Press website.
Easting the West
Theorizing the Postliberal Conjuncture from China
Chenchen Zhang
Chenchen Zhang is Associate Professor in International Relations at Durham University, where she also directs the Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies. Her current research focuses on digital narratives, the global right, and transnational solidarities. She is a co-host of the Shicha podcast.
Blurb
From intellectual history to the dazzling, chaotic, and jargon-laden world of digital culture, this book explores how ideas of 'the West' and articulations of China/West difference are produced and mobilized in Chinese political discourse. It foregrounds not only the co-construction and appropriation of civilizational binaries from the 'peripheries' of the international social order, but also the entanglement between ostensibly 'pro-Western' and 'anti-Western' narratives in Chinese nationalism.
The book offers an in-depth study of digital reactionary discourse on Chinese social media, analysed within globally interconnected and locally embedded reinvigorations of racial nationalism, authoritarianism, and backlash against social justice movements. Theorizing the postliberal conjuncture from digital China, Zhang delineates how postliberal political sensibilities converge across conventional geopolitical and ideological fault lines. Employing identity markers such as 'East' and 'West' as flexible transnational codes, geopolitically opposed actors capitalize on structurally similar narratives to justify oppression at home and perpetuate logics of civilizational rivalry through mutual othering. As the legitimacy of liberal orders erodes, the political valence of critique is unstable. The anticolonial language may be mobilized not for emancipatory ends, but to consolidate authoritarian control and legitimate violence against racialized and marginalized groups.
This book makes an original contribution to the international cultural politics of reaction by centring Chinese digital narratives as a constitutive site of ideological production in our shared global present. It deepens understanding of transversal alignment and the repurposing of critique in the postliberal conjuncture and in digital reactionary formations.
Find out more and purchase the book via the Oxford University Press website.
If you're a BISA member and you'd like your book included in next quarter's round up, email Marketing and Communications Director Chrissie Duxson: Chrissie.Duxson@bisa.ac.uk. Please include the title, blurb and a link to where the book can be purchased. If you are able, you can also include details of any discount available, but of course this is not required. The book should have been published a maximum of six months prior to your email.
Top photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash