Books & Ideas

Diplomacy & Politics / Books & Ideas

Books & Ideas

Books, arguments and ideas that shape how we understand international affairs.

Truth as a Casualty

Cristiano et al. have produced a rigorous examination of AI-enabled cyber conflict. The DiploPolis review finds the attribution paradox at its centre — and argues that AI will not merely transform cyber conflict, but reveal the hierarchy already built into the digital world.

5 min read

Books & Ideas

The Art of Not Processing

Don Kilburg's AI Use Cases for Diplomats is honest about limits and serious about practice. The DiploPolis review applies the silence test — and asks what this guide looks like from the side of the asymmetry where the diplomat doesn't own the tools.

5 min read

Books & Ideas

A Map Drawn After the Explosion

Brasioli et al. have mapped AI and international relations after the explosion. The DiploPolis review asks whether the field is genuinely renovating IR theory or applying old categories to new machines — and finds the answer is uncomfortably both.

5 min read

Books & Ideas

Before the Explosion

Valerie M. Hudson's 1991 edited volume captures what AI meant to IR scholars before generative AI arrived. The DiploPolis review reads it as a time capsule and asks what the field got right, what it missed — including humiliation as a political force — and why the gap still matters.

5 min read

Books & Ideas

The Discipline of Resistance

Malchow argues history and IR need better dialogue. The DiploPolis review goes further: history should not decorate theory but interrupt it. It is a discipline of resistance — against false analogy, premature pattern and the theorist's desire for simplification.

5 min read

Books & Ideas

The Battlefield Is Here

Armin Krishnan argues the civilian mind is no longer collateral to conflict — it is the battlespace. The DiploPolis review carries that argument home and asks whether the battlefield he describes is already the political environment most of us live inside.

5 min read

Books & Ideas

When the Enemy Becomes Necessary

Rachel Myrick argues polarisation reshapes how democracies conduct foreign policy. The DiploPolis review tests that argument against India's Operation Sindoor, Israel's war aims and Pakistan's civil-military imbalance — and finds it travels further than expected, but not everywhere.

5 min read

Books & Ideas

The Grammar Has Not Changed

The Amarna Letters are 3,400 years old. Eric H. Cline's Love, War, and Diplomacy shows why they read like diplomatic cables from last week. The grammar of international politics, the anxiety, the flattery, the fear of abandonment, has not changed.

5 min read

Books & Ideas

The Politics Beneath the Promise

Jessica F. Green argues climate failure is political, not technical. Existential Politics is powerful and necessary. The DiploPolis review asks whether defeating fossil assets is enough — or whether the green transition risks becoming another name for an old hierarchy.

5 min read

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