Outstanding Academic Titles 2025: International Relations

Enjoy this week's Outstanding Academic Titles list snippet: Five titles pertaining to international relations

Posted on January 22, 2026 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2025 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week, we highlight Outstanding Academic Titles focused on international relations. A hearty congratulations to the winning authors, editors, and publishers!

1. Technology and the rise of great powers: how diffusion shapes economic competition
Ding, Jeffrey. Princeton, 2024

This brilliant book makes two landmark contributions to scholarship in international relations. First, it is one of the first major works to consider how the rise of “general purpose technologies,” including artificial intelligence (AI), could contribute to the rise of major powers. Second, it revises the traditional view of how “leading sectors” contributed to the rise of major powers. To take the most famous example, the prevailing view is that the steam engine in the Industrial Revolution contributed to the rise of Great Britain by launching the iron and textile industries. But Ding (George Washington Univ.) argues that the diffusion of technologies into “general purpose technologies” is a far more influential process. Following an introduction and a theoretical chapter are chapters on the First, Second, and Third Industrial Revolutions. A sixth chapter engages in a statistical analysis of the diffusion of software engineering skills and computerization, followed by a seventh chapter on US–China competition and the role of AI (interestingly, it predicts potential US dominance). A brief conclusion pulls together the argument nicely. This is one of the most important books in international relations to be published in years. View on Amazon

2. Youth and sustainable peacebuilding
by Helen Berents, Catherine Bolten, and Siobhan McEvoy-Levy Manchester University Press, 2024

The study of conflict and its resolution inevitably must contend with, if not focus on, the multifaceted roles of youth as disenchanted activists, rebels, combatants, victims, peacemakers, or other lesser-known categories of agency. Fortunately, the editors and contributors to this volume have served up a remarkably comprehensive overview and critical assessment of this ubiquitous and vexing problem. Youth categories are heterogeneous and fluid, and individuals may transition between and among them throughout the conflict spectrum. This volume’s 14 chapters are arranged in three parts, focusing on states and “youth problems,” institutional contexts of engagement with young people, and several case studies of youth-led, peace-building efforts. The editors call on scholars and practitioners to rethink their conceptualizations and operations to better align with the nuances, complexities, and possibilities for youth to participate constructively and meaningfully in sustainable peace building. They conclude with nine recommendations to achieve these goals. Recommended for academic and practicing professionals in the war/peace space and for university libraries and collections supporting international affairs programs. An outstanding contribution to the literature. View on Amazon

3. Landing the Paris Climate Agreement: how it happened, why it matters, and what comes next
Stern, Todd. MIT, 2024

Stern (Brookings Institution) served as special envoy for climate change at the Department of State from January 2009 to April 2016. This case study details the seven years of negotiations that concluded with 195 nations agreeing to a framework for addressing climate change. The tale includes shifting alliances, a secret agreement with China, and last-minute deals that produced an international agreement to set renewable targets for meeting the challenge of climate change. The book concludes with a chapter explaining the ongoing importance of the Paris Agreement, despite the willful ignorance of political leaders, such as Donald Trump, of the scientific findings regarding climate change. Stern’s book is a remarkable achievement for being both an entertaining story of how diplomacy actually works and a scholarly tome that embodies the highest standards of scholarship. Stern does not exaggerate the stakes of the struggle to address climate change but calmly recounts how diplomats integrated the geological threats from climate change (which make international action necessary) with political challenges (which make international action difficult). An important book. View on Amazon

4. Illusions of control: dilemmas in managing U.S. proxy forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria
Gaston, Erica L. Columbia, 2024

This wonderfully written book asks an incredibly important question that does not get enough academic, diplomatic, and military scrutiny: Is it possible to regulate irregular forces? This starting point, from an author who has spent time in the field embedded with the relevant actors involved in this delicate and extremely complex process, could very well be the entirety of future conflict in international relations. So many modern wars today—at least the ones fought by the great world powers and contenders to hegemony—are organized, constructed, and ultimately executed in de facto proxy formats. The West prefers to avoid scrutiny of its own activities in this format. With expressive writing and hard-earned field experience and data, this work investigates not only how this state of affairs has developed (looking in detail at Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria) but also at the more important “problem area” innate to the endeavor. Namely, are we really successful in keeping checks and balances and accountability on informal groups conducting formal war maneuvers in our name? As one might expect, the results are uneven. Investigating why and wondering how to improve it makes this work essential. View on Amazon.

5. Analog superpowers: how twentieth-century technology theft built the national security state
Epstein, Katherine C. Chicago, 2024

In this extraordinary book, Epstein (Rutgers Univ.) details the nexus between liberal capitalism and national security in both Britain and the United States through the analytical lens of two British inventors, Arthur Pollen and Harold Isherwood, their pioneering contribution to naval fire control, and the subsequent efforts to control this pivotal invention. Along the way, Epstein reveals much about a myriad of interconnected matters, including naval technology, legal doctrine, state power, business law, networked warfare, intellectual property, patent secrecy, and the free market. Deeply researched, meticulously documented, and vividly written, Analog Superpowers is a remarkable achievement of modern history. Epstein uses cogent analysis of specifics to deliver vital insights about broad themes of great import. In today’s age of great power competition and rapid technological change related to machine learning, artificial intelligence, and cyber security, it is enlightening to consider previous epochs wherein technology presented challenges and opportunities among the nations vying for the innovation capable of producing military advantage. Epstein has done a valuable service to the profession by delivering such a relevant and instructive history. A wide range of readers—including those interested in military, technology, and international history, among many others—will greatly benefit from reading this important work.  View on Amazon.

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