New Research Publications and Media

Highlights of recent publications, press interviews, and other media from ISS researchers and scholars

U.S. Worker Movements and Direct Links Against Apartheid

Black Perspectives
April 26, 2024
Mattie Christine Webb

Webb highlights the ways in which U.S. workers and unions advocated for Black freedom and human rights beyond the workplace and across borders, challenging apartheid in South Africa.

Henry Kissinger and the Angel of Applied History

H-Diplo | RJISSF Commentary
April 10, 2024
Sean Case

Case reflects on one of Henry Kissinger’s most enduring policy legacies: his self-perception as a historian. Kissinger is thoroughly woven into the warp and weft of how applied history is understood and taught.

Hamilton Fish Armstrong and Yugoslavia: How an Internationalist's Idea of a New State Made Interwar-Era Foreign Affairs—and Foreign Affairs

Modern American History
March 20, 2024
Madelyn Lugli

Lugli explores how the future editor of Foreign Affairs magazine found his way to internationalism by treading through the corners of the newly made Yugoslavia.

Rethinking U.S. World Power

Palgrave Macmillan
March 7, 2024
Michael Brenes and Daniel Bessner

The edited volume assembles a diverse group of historians to explore the impact of the U.S. and its domestic history on U.S. foreign relations and world affairs.

Bread Not Bullets: Mobilizing American Farmers for the Postwar World

Palgrave Macmillan
March 7, 2024
Kaete O’Connell

O’Connell’s chapter in Rethinking U.S. World Power examines the relationship between farm policy and foreign policy in the middle of the 20th century. Seeking to advance American interests abroad during and immediately after World War II, U.S. policymakers tapped into the nation’s food power.

Too Sweet a Deal: American “Candy Men” and International Cocoa Negotiations in the 1960s

Palgrave Macmillan
March 7, 2024
Vivien Chang

Chang explores the rise of cocoa commodity policy amid the G-77 countries’ movement for economic sovereignty and the resistance they encountered from the U.S., the leading consumer of cocoa.

Abandoning the Peace Dividend: Bill Clinton and the Political Economy of Defense Conversion, 1989–2000

Palgrave Macmillan
March 7, 2024
Michael Brenes

Brenes posits that the post-Cold War “peace dividend” — the federal monies to be redirected from national defense toward social welfare — failed to materialize due to President Bill Clinton’s domestic agenda.

How to Make Russia Pay to Rebuild Ukraine

Just Security
February 20, 2024
Oona Hathaway

The authors argue that using on legitimate, collective countermeasures to continue to freeze Russian central bank assets until Russia meets its obligation to pay reparations is the way forward.

Uncommon Sense

Yale University Press
February 13, 2024
Ian Shapiro

In his new book, Shapiro lays out a spirited defense of the Enlightenment against assaults from both the left and the right that explains its urgent implications for our contemporary politics.

Saving African Women’s Lives

Wilson Center
January 31, 2024
Bisa Williams

In the Africa Year in Review 2023, Williams argues that deployment of an inexpensive, low-tech strategy to mitigate postpartum hemorrhage should incentivize the U.S. government to recalibrate how it directs resources to support maternal health in Africa.

Coparenting, mental health, and the pursuit of dignity: A systems-level analysis of refugee father-mother narratives

Social Science & Medicine
January 2024
Catherine Panter-Brick

The authors lay the groundwork for developing a relational, agentic model of family caregiving systems among refugees.

Chardell on Lingamfelter, 'Yanks in Blue Berets: American UN Peacekeepers in the Middle East'

H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews
January 2024
Daniel Chardell

Chardell praises L. Scott Lingamfelter’s work for taking seriously the perspectives of peacekeepers in conflict zones.

Navies in the second nuclear age

Orbis
December 2024
Paul Bracken

The growing nuclear context shapes how—and even whether—new nuclear technologies will be used in peace, crisis, or war.  Bracken argues the U.S. must avoid a situation where it faces a choice of capitulation or nuclear war.