
New Books in National Security
Interviews with Scholars of National Security about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security
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Brian Masaru Hayashi, "Asian American Spies: How Asian Americans Helped Win the Allied Victory" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Spies deep behind enemy lines; double agents; a Chinese American James Bond; black propaganda radio broadcasters; guerrilla fighters; pirates; smugglers; prostitutes and dancers as spies; and Asian Americans collaborating with Axis Powers. All these colorful individuals form the story of Asian Americans in the Office o

Paul M. McGarr, "Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States, and India's Secret Cold War" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States, and India's Secret Cold War (Cambridge UP, 2024) is the first comprehensive history of India's secret Cold War. It examines interventions made by the intelligence and security services of Britain and the United States in post-colonial India and their strategic, politica

Paddy Walker, "War Without Oversight: Why We Need Humans on the Battlefield" (Howgate, 2025)
Amid the fanfare around AI and autonomous weapons, decision-makers - both military and political - are imagining an augmented future for warfare that minimises human influence and connection. But in their rush for speed and lethality, leaders have failed to understand the behavioural and technical challenges that accom
Atiya Husain’s No God but Man: On Race, Knowledge and Terrorism (Duke University Press, 2025) uses the FBI Most Wanted lists to rethink theoretical relationships between race and Islam in the United States. Husain traces the genealogy of wanted posters and how theories of the “average man” informs the use of photograph

Peder Anker, "For The Love of Bombs: The Trail of Nuclear Suffering" (Anthem Press, 2025)
The truism that history is written by its winners reflects the literature about how the bomb came about, with apologetic books most often written by U.S. scholars. The physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the nuke’s ‘father’, is repeatedly centre stage, as in the case of the recent film about him. These are elitist stories th

Rhys Machold, "Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements Across India and Palestine/Israel" (Stanford UP, 2024)
Homeland security is rarely just a matter of the homeland; it involves the circulation and multiplication of policing practices across borders. Though the term "homeland security" is closely associated with the United States, Israel is credited with first developing this all-encompassing approach to domestic surveillan