New Books in Military History

Why has Russia's military struggled to adapt to the challenges of contemporary warfare? Despite years of attempts to improve its military capabilities, Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 revealed a crippling lack of skill, discipline and equipment. Non-material factors, in particular the power struggle between military and civilian leaderships, have hindered reform of its armed forces: with officers dominating defence policy, the Kremlin has struggled to implement the necessary changes. In Civil-Military Relations in Russian Defense Policymaking (Oxford UP, 2026) Kirill Shamiev explores the political reasons behind Russia's poor military preparedness for the war in Ukraine. He demonstrates how a seemingly obedient military has frequently blocked civilian reforms, taking advantage of weak oversight mechanisms. The Kremlin's efforts to centralise control and make the armed forces personally accountable to President Vladimir Putin harmed institutional learning, cementing a conservative civil-military status quo. While this protected the military from civil society interference and ensured Putin's autocratic rule, it ultimately limited the pace and scope of change. Analysing three cases of reform between 2000 and 2021,Imperfect Equilibrium offers critical insights into the relationship between civilian control and military effectiveness in Russia. Drawing on extensive qualitative and quantitative evidence--including interviews, parliamentary speeches, media reports and surveys--it shows how unchecked autonomy can undermine military development, even in authoritarian contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Disabled Empire : The Colonial Body in First World War Britain (U Chicago Press, 2026) examines how imperial precedents and racial ideologies shaped the medical treatments that the British state offered to several million Black and brown servicemen during World War I. In recovering the voices and experiences of these soldiers, Hilary R. Buxton illustrates how they navigated the institutional culture of the imperial military and how they helped to shape health and welfare systems well beyond the interwar period. The Great War was the first time that troops and volunteers from nearly all reaches of the Empire participated in the war effort side-by-side. Despite official attempts at segregation, colonial troops met in trenches, mobile camps, casualty clearing stations, hospital ships, and convalescent homes. Just as importantly, those organizing treatment encountered men of different ethnicities, religions, and cultures from across and beyond the British Empire. For British officials, this moment offered an opportunity to remake colonial efficiency and medical knowledge. Yet, as Buxton shows, colonial servicemen were not passive subjects in a wartime laboratory: they were vocal participants who demanded a say in the therapies prescribed to them, the rations they required, the psychiatric care they received, and the prosthetics with which they were fitted. Together, these encounters profoundly remade colonial relations, reshaping imperial science, administration, and colonial understandings of subjecthood.Disabled Empire pushes literature on the war and medicine outside its national, Eurocentric focus to confront the colonial logic of global health inequity. Hilary R. Buxton is assistant professor of history at Kenyon College. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

He’s been called the man academics love to hate. One time, when the author disclosed that he worked with Pipes, the colleague responded, “I will forgive you.” Love him or hate him, Richard Pipes (1923–2018), left an indelible mark on Russian and Soviet history in his long and remarkable life. This conversation delves into Pipes’ personal and intellectual biography, scholarly contributions, the role he played in shaping late Cold War policy and a generation of American historians of the Imperial and Soviet Russia. Have a listen to get a better sense of this humanist historian—described as both polemical and preeminently polite—who cast such a long shadow on academia in and beyond the Cold War. Jonathan Daly is Professor of History at University of Illinois Chicago. In addition to The Man Who Knew Russia: Richard Pipes, Humanist and Cold Warrior (Stanford University Press, 2025), he is the author of several monographs on Russian and Soviet history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Jeffrey Whyte's book The Birth of Psychological War: Propaganda, Espionage, and Military Violence from WWII to the Vietnam War (Oxford UP, 2023) explores the history, politics, and geography of United States psychological warfare in the 20th century against the backdrop of the contemporary 'post-truth era'. From its origins in the Second World War, to the United States' counterinsurgency campaigns in Vietnam, Whyte traces how the theory and practice of psychological warfare transformed the relationship between the home front and theatres of war. Whyte interrogates the broader political mythologies that animate popular conceptions of psychological war, such as its claim to make war more humane and less violent. On the contrary, The Birth of Psychological War demonstrates the role of psychological warfare in expanding the scope and scale of military violence amidst ostensible efforts to 'win hearts and minds'. While casting a critical eye on psychological warfare, Whyte establishes its continued significance for the contemporary student of international relations. Dr. Whyte earned his Ph.D. with the Department of Geography, University of British Columbia and before that a MA with School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, also in beautiful British Columbia. He is currently Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion, Lancaster University. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In this unique “history from below,” Destination Elsewhere: Displaced Persons and Their Quest to Leave Postwar Europe (Cornell University Press, 2021) chronicles encounters between displaced persons in Europe and the Allied agencies who were tasked with caring for them after the Second World War. The struggle to define who was a displaced person and who was not was a subject of intense debate and deliberation among humanitarians, international law experts, immigration planners, and governments. What has not adequately been recognized is that displaced persons also actively participated in this emerging refugee conversation. Displaced persons endured war, displacement, and resettlement, but these experiences were not defined by passivity and speechlessness. Instead, they spoke back, creating a dialogue that in turn helped shape the modern idea of the refugee. As Ruth Balint shows, what made a good or convincing story at the time tells us much about the circulation of ideas about the war, the Holocaust, and the Jews. Those stories depict the emerging moral and legal distinction between economic migrants and political refugees. They tell us about the experiences of women and children in the face of new psychological and political interventions into the family. Stories from displaced persons also tell us something about the enduring myth of the new world for people who longed to leave the old. Balint focuses on those persons whose storytelling skills became a major strategy for survival and escape out of the displaced persons’ camps and out of the Europe. Their stories are brought to life in Destination Elsewhere, alongside a new history of immigration, statelessness, and the institution of the postwar family. Ruth Balint is Professor of History at the University of New South Wales. She is the author of When Migrants Fail to Stay (Bloomsbury, 2023), Smuggled: An Illegal History of Migration (NewSouth, 2021), and Troubled Waters: Borders, Boundaries and Possession in the Timor Sea (Allen & Unwin, 2008). Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In October 1943, the Gripsholm—a Swedish ocean liner—and the Teia Maru—a Japanese troop ship—sat in Mormugao, a port in Portuguese India. There, the two ships exchanged their passengers: Allied civilians stuck in Japanese territory after Pearl Harbor , and an assortment of Japanese, Japanese-American, and other Japanese-ethnic people from the Americas. The trade capped a long and fraught diplomatic exchange between the U.S. and Japan, two countries at war. Evelyn Iritani’s book Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians by Sea During World War II (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026) tells the story of how this exchange came about: How U.S. civilians tried to survive in Japan or occupied Hong Kong, or how the U.S. government pressured Japanese Americans, housed in internment camps, to accept repatriation to Japan, a country many had never known. Evelyn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Her previous book, An Ocean Between Us: The Changing Relationship of Japan and the United States Told in Four Stories From the Life of An American Town (William Morrow and Company: 1994), won a Washington Governor’s Writers Day Award. Evelyn began her career at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and moved to the Los Angeles Times in 1995 to cover international economics. Her reporting garnered numerous awards, including the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting and the George Polk Award for Economics Reporting for a series she co-authored on Wal-Mart. She can be found on her website, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Safe Passage. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In Writing Wars: Authorship and American War Fiction, WWI to Present (U Iowa Press, 2022) David Eisler looks at how American literary fiction about war has changed as the nature of civil-military relations has changed. For much of the 20th century the people who wrote novels about war were men who went to war. And for some authors and critics, being a war veteran was a requirement for being authorized to write about war. But Eisler shows that after the end of conscription there was a "dispersal of authority" to write about wars which made room for more authors to write about war as well as more stories to be told about war. By examining the development of the war novel over the past century (1918-2018) Eisler shows how war writing, in particular notions of "authority" and "authenticity," reflect the social/political environments and changes in civil-military relations. You can find a transcript of our interview here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

North Korea has survived wars, sanctions, and isolation—to the point where it now seems that the continuation of the Kim dynasty, and a starkly divided Korea, is assured. But history is filled with events where some change might have drastically altered how a country’s development might have gone. North Korea is no different, at least according to Fyodor Tertititsky, author of Pyongyang on the Brink: Sixteen Crises That Shaped North Korea (Hurst, 2026). In his book, he posits sixteen different points where things might have gone differently. Maybe Japan falls too quickly in the Second World War, denying the Soviet Union the opportunity to occupy the north. Maybe Kim Il-Sung gets outcompeted, and someone else becomes head of North Korea. Maybe China never intervenes in the Korean War, or maybe one of several coups against Kim Il-Sung succeeds. Fyodor joins us today to talk about some of these scenarios, as well as the unlikely inspiration for the book: Alternate history mods for Paradox Studio games. Fyodor researches North Korean political, social and military history from South Korea, where he has been living for more than a decade. He has authored several books in English and Korean, including Accidental Tyrant: The Life of Kim Il-sung (Oxford University Press: 2025), and The North Korean Army (Routledge: 2022) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Pyongyang on the Brink. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history